282 Americans Fly Out of Danger in Salvador : Latin America: The unprecedented airlift follows a 24-hour rebel takeover of suburbs around the capital.

SAN SALVADOR — The U.S. government evacuated 282 Americans from El Salvador on two chartered jets Thursday after a 24-hour guerrilla takeover of the once-tranquil suburbs where most of them lived.

Some of the Americans joined other foreigners and wealthy Salvadorans fleeing the neighborhoods after the leftist rebels, who had seized dozens of mansions, retreated before dawn up the slope of a volcano.

“I’m not coming back,” said Kate Lewis, a teacher at the American School, after carrying her 8-month-old daughter past a burned-out army tank and two dead soldiers in front of her house to a U.S. Embassy van down the block.

Her barefoot husband, William Lewis, said about 30 guerrillas blasted their way into their brick home in the suburb of Escalon at 4 a.m. Wednesday, camped there overnight and left it a shambles, taking all his shoes.

“We hid in the closet for 36 hours,” said Shari McKibbon, another American teacher. “As soon as it was daybreak, we hadn’t heard anybody for a while, so we crept out.”

The organized airlift of Americans was unprecedented here and added to the atmosphere of crisis wrought by a 19-day-old urban guerrilla offensive. El Salvador’s rightist government is backed by the largest U.S. counterinsurgency effort since the Vietnam War and receives about $1.4 million in American aid per day.

U.S. officials said 234 Americans boarded a chartered jet for Washington. They included U.S. Embassy employees and dependents who were encouraged to leave voluntarily, government contract workers who were ordered out and private citizens who paid $500 per seat.

A second jet left for Miami with 48 Americans, most of them private citizens charged the same fare.

U.S. Ambassador William Walker and three embassy security vans escorted the first group of evacuees on the 35-mile trip to Comalapa International Airport as a helicopter flew overhead. He gave a farewell handshake to each man and kissed each woman before departure.

At least two embassy officials, a retired U.S. Army colonel and about 20 other Americans were trapped in their homes during the siege. One official was on the radio to the embassy when rebels burst in Wednesday afternoon, and the radio went dead. He slept in a back bathroom and awoke to find the intruders gone.

About 125 Americans moved into the embassy and the U.S. Agency for International Development mission Wednesday and slept on cots.

Tense and anxious, some cursed American reporters covering their evacuation Thursday in a bus caravan and shielded their faces from cameras. Others flashed V-for-victory signs and shouted “We’ll be back after Christmas!”

A woman accompanying a U.S. Marine on one bus held a pet Schnauzer on a leash in one hand and an Uzi automatic weapon in the other. One little boy shouldered a toy rifle.

Walker said he recommended the evacuation because “I just had too many people scattered all over. With the (rebels’) willingness to smash doors down, occupy homes, torch homes, it was too much to have to worry about.”

More than 5,000 Americans live in El Salvador and at least 450 work for the embassy.

The U.S. government sent “very strongly worded demarches” to Salvadoran rebel representatives in other countries to warn against harming American government personnel, a diplomat said. “I don’t know if it made a difference, but the message was delivered.”

Foreign diplomats said the West German, Spanish, French and Dutch governments were also evacuating some of their citizens.

“The guerrillas’ offensive, if anything, is forcing Salvadorans and foreigners to leave El Salvador,” said a non-American diplomat. “The great drama of the American evacuation is going to accelerate this. It will raise the level of insecurity and tension. It will push the country into the hands of the militarists on both extremes.”

The rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front seized six upper- and middle-class suburbs west of the capital Wednesday in its most daring operation since the initial push of a Nov. 11 offensive that focused on the capital’s northern slums.

Fears of deadlier fighting mounted last week when the Salvadoran military detected two planes said to be carrying Soviet-made SAM-7 missiles to the guerrillas.

The FMLN confirmed Thursday that it has the weapons. Western diplomatic sources said one was fired Wednesday at a Salvadoran air force A-37 Dragonfly bomber near Zacatecoluca in the first such attack by the rebels. The bomber swerved and was not hit, the sources said.

In the Escalon neighborhood, as many as 100 rebels held off a daylong government ground assault Wednesday, then settled into mansions for the night. Late that evening, their radio announced a 6 a.m.-to-noon truce Thursday so that trapped residents could be evacuated. The broadcast threatened new fighting in the afternoon.

By daybreak, however, the rebels had all but retreated, leaving a few snipers in hilltop homes to pin down cautiously advancing government troops. The army was in full control of the neighborhood by mid-afternoon.

But Escalon looked like a ghost town. Houses were deserted, their front doors and iron gates ajar, food still on stoves and packed suitcases left behind in the hasty departures. Blankets and pillows lay on living room floors where frightened homeowners had slept.

A cocker spaniel, a poodle and a dachshund wandered the streets, apparently abandoned by fleeing owners.

Reporters who arrived at 7 a.m. saw wealthy residents with servants in tow speeding away in luxury sedans and late-model Jeep Cherokees, waving white-linen kerchiefs as flags of protection.

“The guerrillas said they were coming back,” explained Eduardo Lopez, a 47-year-old Salvadoran lawyer whose house took a volley of assault-rifle fire before he yielded his red Mercedes-Benz to the intruders. They used it as a roadblock.

The bodies of nine government soldiers lay in the streets. One dead guerrilla, a woman clutching her U.S.-made M-16 rifle, lay near the ashes of files, tapes and computer terminals in the National Information Center, a government propaganda and intelligence office that was burned to the ground.

Five other bodies unrecognizable as soldiers, guerrillas or civilians were burned on a driveway. Relief workers said they knew of no confirmed civilian casualties.

Blood-soaked gauze, syringes and bloodied guerrilla uniforms were found on the marble floor of the ranch-style home of a German businessman that apparently had been used by the guerrillas for emergency medical treatment.

The guerrillas said in repeated broadcasts--and one phone call to a foreign diplomat--that they had no intention of holding hostages or hurting anyone. More than a dozen people interviewed in Escalon said the rebels had treated them with respect.

One of those was Manuel Vides, a 48-year-old businessman who used his 9-millimeter pistol to try to keep the rebels out of his home. He surrendered when they blasted away his door with a light anti-tank weapon.

“They treated us kindly after that,” Vides said. “They could have killed me, so I must be grateful.”

“They didn’t steal anything, but they ate what they wanted,” he added. “When 40 people come into your house with AK-47s, they don’t have to ask.”

Maureen Dugan, a U.S. AID employee living in Escalon, left on the evacuation flight with two hastily packed suitcases and a tennis racket after awakening to find three dead bodies on her doorstep.

“I’m not so concerned about my personal security,” she said. “I just think the whole violence is disgusting, absolutely disgusting.”

Other Americans made difficult choices. With commercial flights heavily booked, the charters offered a quick way out.

David Wiesenfeld, 29, of Monterey, California, was offered a free seat on a charter by friends in the embassy. But even after having watched guerrilla snipers on his neighbor’s roof, he decided to stay and continue his work teaching job skills to disabled war veterans.

“I think this will pass,” he said. “The government is in no danger of crumbling. Besides, the FMLN has gone out of its way to say this offensive is not against American citizens.”

Early in the rebel offensive, many wealthy Salvadorans abandoned their mansions but left the servants behind. Thursday, the servants joined the exodus.

“The guerrillas locked us up in a bedroom and took food, clothes and weapons that belonged to my patron,” said Maria del Carmen Delgado, a maid leaving Escalon with a duffel bag balanced on her head.

The Marxist-led rebels appear to be trying in this phase of their offensive to make El Salvador’s elite, their enemy in a class struggle, feel the sting of a war that has been fought on rural battlegrounds among the sons of the poor.

Despite the guerrillas’ effort to spare lives, their intrusion was traumatic. “You could sense their hatred,” said a doctor repairing the grenade-damaged gate to his home.

A rich coffee grower, wearing blue sweat pants and a T-shirt with “U.S.A.” emblazoned across the chest, said the guerrillas seized his Escalon home and gave him and his family a political lecture.

“They were trying to convince me that their fight was a good one,” he said. “What could I say? I said anything they wanted.”

The coffee grower and other residents complained at how easily the guerrillas penetrated their neighborhood during an overnight shoot-to-kill curfew. Some said the Salvadoran army responded with too little, too late.

“One day, there were soldiers right down this street,” said a 23-year-old university student. “The next day, this was practically a liberated zone. The fact that the guerrillas can do this is a major psychological blow to the government.”

Just as embarrassing to the government was the ease with which the guerrillas slipped out of Escalon.

At 10 p.m. Wednesday, residents said, army soldiers were heard shouting over megaphones to the guerrillas to kill their commanders and turn in their rifles for $150 in reward money.

Hours later, the rebels tunneled through holes they had blasted in the walls surrounding the mansions to move from back yard to back yard before the soldiers moved in for door-to-door searches. An army officer said other guerrillas shed their boots and camouflage uniforms, donned fashionable sports clothes pulled from closets and walked out with their unwilling hosts.

Thursday night, the chartered plane carrying the U.S. Embassy dependents landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Md.

“I was scared to death,” Gail Porter told reporters. “They didn’t have to ask me twice if I wanted to come back.”

Porter, the wife of Lt. Col. Lanning Porter, an intelligence officer in the military advisory group attached to the embassy, returned with three children. -She said she is willing to go back if conditions return to normal.

Her son Jay, 11, said the family spent Tuesday night under the kitchen table with the lights out as government troops and guerrillas exchanged fire around their walled house in Escalon.

Red-haired Kelly Herion, 15, another military dependent and also a resident of Escalon, said the Tuesday night fighting was the worst she had experienced. “ . . . But you know you’re going to make it,” she said, “because you’re an American.”

She said she was distressed by the number of people killed by government forces in the urban battle against the FMLN.

“But they’re not there just to kill people, they’re fighting for freedom,” she said. “I have a lot of Salvadoran friends in school, and they’re for the United States and not for the FMLN.”

Times staff writer Don Shannon, in Washington, contributed to this article.