BY CHRIS NORTON
Norton is a free-lance writer who has covered El Salvador for seven years for a number of publications, including Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Examiner.

On April 22, 1990, 60 Minutes aired a program charging that the U.S. embassy in El Salvador had bungled its role in the investigation of the November 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, allegedly by Salvadoran soldiers, and that top officers suspected of ordering the murders had never been seriously investigated.

Just a week later the small San Salvador daily Diario Latino published a translated transcript of the 60 Minutes show, breaking the taboo against criticizing the powerful Salvadoran military.

Then, over six weeks in May, the paper published in its entirety the U.S. Congress's Moakley Commission report on the killings, which also raised questions of a coverup by the Salvadoran military. "We had to publish it," says Francisco Valencia, the newspaper's young director. "The other local papers wouldn't report the charges against the army completely."

In June, Diario Latino ran an even harder-hitting document -- a report by the congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus charging that the Salvadoran army's top commanders had tolerated significant human rights abuses. That series ran for a month.

The paper's critical coverage is not always aimed at the right. Later that summer, Diario Latino ran a lengthy Americas Watch report that was highly critical of the leftist rebels in El Salvador, in particular of their denial of due process to people whom they accuse of crimes and sometimes execute. In February of this year, Diario Latino carried the Moakley Commission's update on the investigation into the killing of the Jesuits. Just a week later, Valencia was surveying the charred ruins of his newspaper.

Arsonists had broken into the paper's office in the early morning hours of Saturday, February 9. By the time the fire was put out the newspaper's roof had been damaged and much of its equipment, including two new IBM computers the typesetters were just learning to use, destroyed. The only good news was that the printing press, a durable 1964 Goss, was salvageable.

Who does Valencia think burned the paper? "The armed forces. All groups that do this sort of thing report to them."

When Diario Latino's employees took over management of the paper two years ago, it became the only oppositioning voice in El Salvador. (Death squads allegedly linked to the military had earlier silenced the country's only two independent papers, in 1980 and 1981, by bombing the press of one and hacking to death the editor and chief photographer of the other.) The country's two morning papers, for example, never print revel statements and Diario Latino's afternoon competitor does so only rarely; Diario Latino, on the other hand, not only prints these communiques but sometimes runs interviews with guerrilla comandantes, as well. It also covers opposition political parties, unions, and church groups -- the so-called "popular movement" -- all ignored by Salvador's conservative print media. (Paid ads by these groups, often denouncing army repression, help the paper pay its bills.)

Despite the destruction of its facilities, Diario Latino is not dead. Three days after the fire, a four-page edition, printed on a small press at the National University, appeared on the streets; a week later, the paper had expanded to eight pages. Meanwhile, teams of engineering students from the university were rewiring the damaged press, and the first $ 10,000 installment of $ 25,000 in aid from a Belgian humanitarian organization was earmarked for a new roof.

The newspaper has other problems to overcome, however. A wheeler-dealer majority stockholder, Julio Adolpho Rey Prendes, ran up a $ 700,000 debt to state-run banks when he was an official in Jose Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democratic government. As if the threat of violence from the military were not enough, that debt adds to the uncertainty about Diario Latino's survival.

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