News In Brief
| San Salvador
Salvadorean chief says Army is fighting better
El Salvador's Army is reacting faster and more effectively to guerrilla challenges and is winning the four-year-old civil war, but increased US military aid is necessary to end the conflict, the Army chief of staff, Col. Adolfo Blandon, sid Tuesday.
But other military sources said the guerrillas were moving equally freely and had set the Army back with attacks at the beginning of the year on a military base and an important bridge. Diplomat consider the war stalemated.
Meanwhile, Salvadorean presidential candidate Jose Napoleon Duarte called for an inquiry into the 1980 murder of Roman Catholic rchibishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
A former US ambssador to El Salvador, Robert White, has said that Mr. Duarte's main rival in next month's presidential elections, Roberto d'Aubuisson of the extreme right-wing National Republican Alliance Party, had "planned and ordered" the killing. Major d'Aibuisson has denied the charges.
