World Notes El Salvador

The turmoil in El Salvador took an especially ugly turn last week when Ines Guadelupe Duarte Duran, the 35-year-old daughter of President Jose Napoleon Duarte, was kidnaped by several armed assailants in downtown San Salvador, the capital. Duarte Duran, a divorced mother of three and the oldest of the President's six children, was seized outside the New San Salvador University, where she has been studying public relations. Ana Cecilia Villeda, a 23-year- old student and Duarte Duran's former secretary, was also abducted. One of Duarte Duran's two bodyguards was killed by gunfire; the other was severely wounded.

Following the abduction, President Duarte received messages of sympathy from President Reagan and other world leaders. But the people he most wanted to hear from, the kidnapers, remained silent. Suspicion centered on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the leftist rebel organization that in recent months has threatened to take its struggle against the Duarte government into El Salvador's cities. That campaign got under way last June when an F.M.L.N. terrorist squad gunned down 13 people, including four off-duty U.S. Marines, in a San Salvador outdoor cafe.