Washington Is Hypocritical and Naive on El Salvador

In the steady stream of tragic news coming out of Central America it is easy to forget pivotal events that took place there not so long ago--even shocking occurrences like the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero five years ago this month.

A forthright spokesman for peace and justice in a troubled nation, Romero was gunned down in cold blood while celebrating Mass. His murder not only traumatized El Salvador, it also focused international attention on the civil war just starting.

Romero’s murder is still unsolved. Not even the government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte, so admired by the Reagan Administration and others in Washington for bringing reform and moderation to El Salvador’s political system, has made any progress on the case.

It’s not that there have been no leads. Within a few days investigators came up with circumstantial evidence pointing to a conspiracy of right-wing vigilantes--including an obscure army intelligence officer, Roberto D’Aubuisson.

What was lacking was the will to pursue prosecution. The government consisted of an unstable coalition of moderate civilians and midlevel military officers that did not have the leverage or authority to face down El Salvador’s powerful military establishment, an old-boy network that protected officers like D’Aubuisson.

These days the Reagan Administration would have us believe that things have changed in El Salvador. Duarte was freely elected to be the country’s chief executive last year, and now claims to have the military under control. The enlisted men arrested on suspicion of killing four American churchwomen were convicted, the first time that Salvadoran soldiers accused of harming civilians were brought to justice.

But no army officer has yet been convicted of a major crime in El Salvador. Even the young lieutenant identified by witnesses as having been involved with the murder of two U.S. labor advisers in 1981 was merely drummed out of the corps.

The most egregious example of how entrenched El Salvador’s military caste remains is D’Aubuisson. He is a downright respectable political leader these days. And, in one of the saddest ironies of the civil war, his ARENA party is on the verge of winning more political power in elections to be held March 31, one week after the anniversary of Romero’s death.

Lately D’Aubuisson has been talking seriously about becoming president of El Salvador someday, which could happen more easily than U.S. officials might care to admit. Ever since Duarte beat D’Aubuisson in last year’s presidential election, ARENA and the other right-wing parties that control the National Assembly have made life miserable for Duarte’s Christian Democrats. They have methodically dismantled the reforms that U.S. officials boast about. And, by drafting election laws advantageous to ARENA, the rightists have laid the groundwork for eliminating Duarte--constitutionally.

Some of those new laws, enacted despite Duarte’s vetoes, will be tested when Salvadorans go to the polls March 31 to elect new assembly members. The most important allows political coalitions, like the one formed by the right-wing parties, to run the same list of candidates under the different party symbols. Those are important in a country with so many illiterate voters, and analysts expect the tactic to help ARENA and other rightist parties maintain control of the assembly, and possibly even gain some seats.

Christian Democrats are trying to discredit ARENA by making a campaign issue of an incident that was big news in El Salvador but got little attention in this country: the arrest of a D’Aubuisson associate, Francisco Guirola, in Texas last month.

Guirola, one of the original financiers of ARENA when it was founded three years ago, was arrested Feb. 6 by U.S. Customs agents on suspicion of trying to smuggle $5.8 million in cash out of the United States. U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the case since then. Guirola’s links to D’Aubuisson were not mentioned at all until they were revealed by my Times colleague Laurie Becklund and Craig Pyes of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

When seized, Guirola was preparing to fly to El Salvador in an executive jet with eight suitcases filled with 58,000 well-worn $100 bills. That is not the kind of money raised at bake sales, and within days of the arrest a State Department official told National Public Radio that he was “90% certain” that Guirola was carrying drug money. Guirola is now being held in lieu of $2 million bail, and is due to appear in federal court in Corpus Christi on April 1.

Modern political campaigns are expensive, and El Salvador is poor. So we should not be surprised if some Salvadoran politicians, like officials in under-developed nations all over the world, try to make money any way they can--possibly even through drugs. To assume anything else is naive.

But the Reagan Administration compounds naivete with hypocrisy. For at a time when it is trying to persuade Americans that El Salvador’s government is moderate and reformist, D’Aubuisson and his ilk are living proof that the Salvadoran political system has a long way to go before we can forget the corrupt, right-wing dictatorships of the recent past. And their brutish reputation won’t fade away as long as the memory of Archbishop Romero is alive.