Home Again

The white helicopter dropped out of a darkening sky, veered around a thick tree and sank its runners into the lush grass in the middle of a soccer field at El Salvador's leading military academy. A chubby figure dressed in blue jeans and a wind-breaker bolted from the chopper, dashed across the pitch and threw herself into the arms of her weeping mother. A moment later, Ines Guadalupe Duarte Duran was swept into the embrace of her tear-choked father, President Jose Napoleon Duarte, for whom the nation's civil war had lately become an agonizing personal ordeal.

The President's eldest daughter, a 35-year-old mother of three, and a companion, Ana Cecilia Villeda, 23, were released last week, badly disoriented but in good physical health, 44 days after they were kidnaped outside New San Salvador University by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.), the left-wing antigovernment guerrilla group. In the sweet first moment of reunion, no words were needed. "There was only crying," reported Communications Minister Adolfo Rey Prendes, whose face was also streaked with tears. As he led the former captives away, Duarte showed the strain of both a worried father and a politician who knew that striking a deal with the F.M.L.N. could very well make him appear weak.

In negotiations mediated by San Salvador's Roman Catholic Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, the Duarte administration agreed to the kidnapers' demand that 22 political prisoners be freed. The government also granted safe conduct out of El Salvador to 101 wounded guerrillas in need of medical treatment. In return, the F.M.L.N. handed over Duarte Duran and Villeda to intermediaries in the bombed-out town of Tenancingo, north of San Salvador. The rebels also began releasing 33 mayors and municipal officials abducted during the past six months.

The political price of the trade was not lost on Duarte, who held a press conference barely three hours after being reunited with his daughter. Duarte insisted he had the overall support of the armed forces. His detractors, he said, "don't have a leg to stand on when they criticize an attitude which is evidently humane, because it's not just the liberation of Ines and the mayors, it's the concept of humanism, which goes beyond that of a father's." Invoking a Latin courtliness--and coining a few new words--Duarte said, "I never thought the subversives would go against a woman, a mother, a lady who had no involvement in the process ... The kidnaping of my daughter and of the mayors is part of the 'Beirutization' or the 'Lebanization' of the conflict."

That measured rationale won no sympathy from the right-wing opposition party ARENA, which sharply criticized Duarte for capitulating to the kidnapers. Even before the exchange of prisoners, an advertisement in the national newspaper El Diario de Hoy asked, "How will it be explained to the soldiers who in the field of battle captured these freed insurrectionists?" Of more immediate concern to the President was the reaction of the Salvadoran armed forces, which lately have had a hard time combatting the guerrillas' hit-and-run attacks. One field commander circulated a petition objecting to the negotiations with the guerrillas. Duarte did not have much time to ponder the consequences of his actions. Just one day after his daughter's release, edgy soldiers guarding the presidential palace opened fire on several vehicles in the vicinity. Two people were killed. At week's end came another kidnaping, this time of a military man, Air Force Colonel Omar Napleon Avalos. "This signifies an escalation of the war," said Duarte.