‘Old Order Refuses to Give In’ : U.S. Quest for Moderation in Salvador Faces Snarls

Agrarian Reform Diluted

Unlike the U.S. Congress, El Salvador’s rightist-dominated National Assembly has been anything but cooperative. It has diluted the agrarian reform, and appointed right-wingers to the attorney general’s office, where they may be useful in delaying death squad cases.

The latest fight in the Assembly involves an attempt to bar Duarte’s son from running for a full term as mayor of San Salvador, the traditional stronghold of the Christian Democrats, the party of both father and son.

More than four years after the start of land reform, landowners continue to take peasants to court and get redistribution decisions overturned. According to peasant union officials, former landlords sometimes send armed henchmen to frighten farmers off their newly acquired land.

“The old order refuses to give in to the new,” said Cristobal Aleman, the leader of a peasant union coalition. “The problem is that they accept changes only under threat of force--either the guerrillas’ or the United States’. They do nothing willingly.”

The most striking indication of the military’s resistance to change was reflected in the controversy over a cease-fire for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Duarte’s aides embraced the guerrillas’ plan for two 72-hour periods of peace, but the military was less enthusiastic. The chief of staff, Col. Adolfo Blandon, said only that the army would function “as usual” during the cease-fire periods, the first of which ended with few incidents. As of late Monday the New Year’s cease-fire also appeared to be holding.

Duarte has promised to resume peace talks with the rebels, but his military representative in the talks says the rebels must come up with new proposals first.

Other influential officers have been more openly rebellious. Col. Sigifredo Ochoa, commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade, said, “The president of course, rules on global matters, but no one can tell me to keep my soldiers in the barracks.

The military has been the object of intensive U.S. tinkering. New officers, many trained in the United States, command police agencies and combat formations. The U.S. Army has trained about 1,400 young Salvadoran officers at Ft. Benning, Ga. and whole units of Salvadoran troops in Honduras. The training is aimed at professionalizing an army that was once no more than a security agency for rich landowners.

“What we would like to achieve, or see achieved by the Salvadorans with respect to our policy objective,” Ambassador Pickering said, “is obviously to have the military focus on security and defense measures and stay out of political life. I’ve seen that evolve.”

Still, the Salvadoran army continues to be a closed clique, beyond the law. Promotions are based on the year that the officer graduated from military school, not the officer’s merit.

Meanwhile, human rights abuses continue to go unpunished. Corruption, even when it endangers the lives of soldiers in the field, attracts scant attention. The purchase of $4 million in faulty ammunition went forward even after an inquiry from the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington raised questions about the reliability of the supplier.

Judiciary Questioned

It is perhaps the judicial system where contradictions are most consistent. The United States is investing more than $9 million in an effort to strengthen the system so that cases are brought to trial that in the past would have been ignored. The money is supplied under that part of the aid program known as “democratization.”

As part of this program, a special investigative unit has been trained by the FBI in Puerto Rico. Presumably, the unit will specialize in techniques not commonly practiced here: fingerprinting, ballistics and the like.

Salvadoran law depends heavily on testimony from witnesses, and so long as vengeance can be bought for a few dollars, willing witnesses are hard to find. Thus about 60 marshals have been trained to protect witnesses, judges, prosecutors and jurors.

“We hope to build sufficient confidence in the courts so that witnesses will step forward,” said Carlos Correa, a U.S. prosecutor on loan to the State Department to shepherd cases involving American victims through Salvadoran courts.

Successful Prosecution

Embassy officials point to the successful prosecution of the killers of four American churchwomen as proof that the use of sophisticated techniques can help. And the prosecution’s success in that trial has been credited with helping to persuade the U.S. Congress to approve aid to El Salvador.

El Salvador’s judicial system is not incapable of prosecuting people in connection with major crimes. The jails here are crowded with suspects; some have been held for several years. On the other hand several spectacular assassinations have gone unpunished, some for reasons that have nothing to do with police procedure.

The most notorious recent failure of the system was the dropping of charges against Lt. Rodolfo Lopez Sibrian for ordering the slaying of two U.S. labor advisers and a Salvadoran land reform official.

Military officers contacted judges in the case and told them to drop it. Last November, the Salvadoran Supreme Court formally ended the prosecution of Lopez Sibrian when it upheld a lower court’s ruling that the statute of limitations had expired in the case.

“I think we get back to the fact that respect for the independence of the judiciary in this country is not high,” Pickering said.

“I think it means, in (terms of) problems of the military, that they themselves haven’t abandoned a lot of their old habits.”

But shortly after the charges against Lopez Sibrian were thrown out, Duarte succeeded in getting him dismissed from the army.

And there is the case of Antonio Roeder, a former National Guard major accused of running a kidnaping ring. His people were reported to have kidnaped wealthy businessmen, and Roeder was said to have urged the victims’ relatives to pay whatever ransom the abductors demanded. Last March, a jury acquitted Roeder.

“I’m the last guy to take up the cudgels to defend the Salvadoran justice system,” Pickering said. “The judicial reform process is not moving with such rapidity that we have bright lights on the horizon--clearly not.

“(Death squad) statistics have gone down. Obviously, few if any of the people who have been involved in this have been brought to justice. Obviously, there is no guarantee that those people could not at some point, because they are not behind bars, return to the activities they conducted before.”

Temporary Setbacks

Still, Pickering sees as temporary the setbacks in civilian rule and recuperation of human rights.

“There is no question in my mind that Duarte speaks for the whole of the government,” he said. “Individual military officers obviously have been expressing their views around town. In any society you got grumblers, you got people who are saying things to the press that they are unhappy about.

“The military has seen very clearly that Duarte is a valuable asset to them. After all, right after his election (last spring) he went to the States two times and came back with $130 million in additional U.S. assistance. He has not hesitated to back up the military,” Pickering said.

The ambassador said the important thing is to develop a view that the success of the democratic system is more important than that of the individual or the party.

“I think that it’s the central view that the country has more to gain in the democratic system than it has either sliding back toward autocracy on the one hand or to a new form of totalitarianism on the other,” Pickering said.