July 11, 1983

The United States special envoy to Central America, unable to meet with Salvadoran rebels, today cut short his trip to the area and returned to Washington without explanation. The special envoy, Richard B. Stone, returned to El Salvador this afternoon from Costa Rica, where he had arrived Friday. He had been expected to meet with the rebels. After his return to San Salvador today, he met briefly with President Alvaro Magana and then left for Washington. (In San Jose, Costa Rica, Salvadoran rebel organizations said a meeting between the guerrillas' political leaders and Mr. Stone had been prevented over matters of procedure.)

Winthrop Rockefeller migrated to Arkansas 30 years ago, and soon afterward a correspondent advised him, ''Take your carpetbags and your bank accounts and go back to New York.'' Opinion of the millionaire hillbilly has fluctuated since 1953. Now the historians are ready to enter the judging. The official papers of Mr. Rockefeller, who served as Governor of his adopted state from 1967 to 1971, were opened for scholars with a four-day celebration last week at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The current consensus in Arkansas is that Mr. Rockefeller, who died 10 years ago, was considerably more than a playboy carpetbagger. He is seen now as a catalyst and a paver of the way toward political progressivism in this reluctant, ragged, alluring backwater.

A Congressional committee staked out its claim today to take the lead over the White House and the Justice Department in the investigation of how the Reagan Presidential campaign obtained Carter White House documents. The committee moved to secure the original copies of all of such documents found in the Reagan archives at Stanford University. Representative Donald J. Albosta, chairman of the House committee that has been investigating the matter, said the committee acted after former aides to President Carter suggested that the documents might be vulnerable to tampering. Representative Albosta, a Michigan Democrat, said the committee had written to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, where the Reagan papers are stored, asking that originals of any Carter document found in the files be sent to the committee rather than to the White House or the Justice Department.

After an eight-month respite, one of the main culprits in the international debt crisis - interest rates - are on the rise again. Since late May, the six-month London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, which determines the size of interest payments on at least two-thirds of the $600 billion debt owed by developing countries to foreign creditors, has risen about a percentage point, to the 10.3 percent level. Morgan Guaranty put the rate as high as 10.5 percent on Friday. With so much debt tied to fluctuations in that short-term rate, the increase that has occurred in the last six weeks would, if sustained over the course of a year, add $4 billion or more to the interest payments of debtor nations, according to financial experts.

The Baldwin-United Corporation, now technically bankrupt as the result of the $617 million first-quarter loss it reported last week, will resist filing for protection from its creditors to avoid the legal wrangling that would be likely to result, the company's president and chief executive, Victor H. Palmieri, said over the weekend. Mr. Palmieri, outlining his immediate plans for the company in an interview Saturday at his Manhattan home, said he wanted to avoid ''all the adversarial fighting that goes on in a court proceeding when you get lawyers in control.'' ''It's a bankrupt company and I'm just saying, 'Why not reorganize it out of court?' '' he said. On Friday, against widespread estimates that it would report a loss of about $100 million for the first quarter, the diversified financial services concern reported that it lost $617 million. Of the total, however, $567 million was attributed to write-offs and $50 million to operating losses.