World Notes El Salvador

For 28 days the general hospital of the Social Security Institute in San Salvador had been controlled by striking hospital employees demanding higher wages and better working conditions. In the view of Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, the strike was part of a wave of Communist-inspired labor unrest. Last week helicopter-borne police commandos were ordered to retake the hospital. The result was mayhem.

As the commandos moved through the building, four gun-toting plainclothes officers entered the emergency ward, ordering patients, doctors and nurses to lie facedown on the floor. When the commandos broke into the ward, they shot and killed the plainclothesmen, apparently mistaking them for armed unionists. A fifth death came when a female patient in the intensive-care unit died of a heart attack. The strikers claimed that she had been left unattended when doctors and nurses were rounded up by the commandos. Asked one union member: ! "If this is the democracy that we workers voted for, why are they treating us this way?" Far from ending the strike, the assault led the workers to add new demands to their list of grievances.