CIFUENTES, Honduras -- The killings of two American journalists on a lonely stretch of dirt road in Honduras was a dramatic illustration of the daily dangers of warfront reporting from Central America.
Covering the civil tumult and raging insurgencies in the poverty-stricken region has been a high-risk occupation since the first days of the Sandinista rebellion in Nicaragua.
Reporters and photographers are forced to get as near to the front lines as possible -- and even more dangerously, to cross them -- to verify the conflicting claims of victory, defeat and massacres issued by opposing sides.
To many Americans, Nicaragua's 1978-79 civil war flared into consciousness in its waning weeks when a young national guardsman serving dictator Anastasio Somoza killed ABC-TV newsman Bill Stewart.
An ABC crew videotaped the gruesome event as the young soldier stood over the kneeling Stewart, the tape capturing the reporter's last moments as he begged for mercy before he was ordered to lie flat and summarily shot in the head.
The tape was shown scores of times by all three U.S. networks and probably did more to cut the last threads of U.S. support for Somoza than any other single event in the long war.
The Sandinistas have since made a folk hero of Stewart and erected a statue in his honor on the spot where he died in Managua.
But now, under siege by rebels who charge them with building a Marxist dictatorship, the Sandinistas are accused of killing the two Americans -- Dial Torgerson, 55, Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Mexico City, and Richard Cross, 33, a photographer on assignment for U.S. News and World Report.
They died Tuesday when a rocket-propelled grenade blew their car apart just yards from the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. Their deaths brought to 12 the number of foreign newsmen killed in Central America in the past four years. Four of the victims were Americans.
More reporters have been killed and wounded in El Salvador since that country's civil war erupted in full force at the end of 1979.
The first, in the summer of 1980, was a young reporter named Ignacio Martinez of the Uno Mas Uno newspaper of Mexico City who was killed covering a police shootout with suspected leftists in downtown San Salvador.
Six months later, a New Jersey resident named John Sullivan, on a freelance assignment with Hustler magazine, 'disappeared' from his San Salvador hotel on the same day he arrived in the country, never to be seen alive again. His remains were finally identified earlier this year.
During the rebels' bloody 'final offensive' in January 1981, TV cameraman Ian Mates of South Africa was killed when a leftist land mine blew his car apart. Two U.S. photographers were injured in the blast.
Two days later, Newsweek photographer Olivier Rebbot of France was shot while walking with an army patrol. He died within a month of complications.
Just weeks before El Salvador's March 1982 elections, a four-member Dutch TV crew was shot to death in an open field while making contact with leftist guerrillas. The army said they were casualties of combat.
A Chilean TV cameraman was shot to death election day, March 28, while hanging off the side of a vehicle to film a polling place under attack by guerrillas trying to torpedo the elections.
The foreign press press club issues T-shirts with the grim slogan on the back, written in Spanish, which translates: 'Journalist -- Don't shoot.'
Nicaragua, with its growing conflict between the Marxist-led Sandinistas and the rightist guerrillas, is the latest danger zone for the press.
In the past month, there have been two other groups of journalists, from the Washington Post, Time and NBC-TV, who have narrowly escaped attacks by one side or the other in northern Nicaragua's combat zone.
'We're like a pack of dogs sometimes,' said one TV soundman based in Managua.
'In other professions, a colleague dies and you stop and reflect and think about his work, his character. But for us, we only have time to race about and cover the event and hope we make deadline.'
Another TV journalist confided, 'My wife, she worries constantly when I'm down here.
'We've got two kids now and she thinks I'm crazy. Maybe she's right. I'm getting tired of covering things like this.'
The journalist, who is based in the United States but travels frequently to Central America, was riding in a jostling jeep toward the Honduran-Nicaraguan border to film the shattered wreckage of the car that Torgerson and Cross were riding in.
His jeep bore a taped 'TV' logo and had a big white flag sticking out a window.
Torgerson and Gross were warned by an Honduran army captain, only moments before their death, of the dangers ahead of them on the road.
'They told me they had to go on from here to gather information,' the captain said. 'They insisted they had to go.'
