Ex-Contra Linked to Slaying of Salvador Bishop

The former chief of El Salvador’s intelligence agency charged Thursday that a Nicaraguan rebel officer trained some of his country’s rightist “death squads” and helped organize the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

The Salvadoran, Col. Roberto Santivanez, identified the Nicaraguan as Col. Ricardo Lau, who until recently was chief of intelligence for the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, a U.S.-backed rebel group.

“Lau was in charge of the Nicaraguans who were helping the death squads in 1980,” Santivanez charged at a press conference here. “He was in Guatemala when the Romero assassination was being planned there. There is evidence that he received payment for the murder of Msgr. Romero . . . for himself and two other (Nicaraguans) who took part in the murder. The payment came to a total of $120,000.”

Santivanez said later in an interview that he knew of Lau’s link with the death squads firsthand because he, too, was involved in the Salvadoran rightist groups that produced them. He said his knowledge of Lau’s alleged involvement in the Romero assassination came from sources in El Salvador’s security services. Those allegations could not be independently confirmed.

U.S. officials confirmed that Lau, a former officer in the National Guard of deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, associated with several death squad figures and was suspected of participating in political murders. They said the CIA considered Lau “a bad egg” and pressured the Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras, into relieving him as their intelligence chief last year, although contra officials say they still consider him a friend and ally.

But the U.S. officials said they were unable to confirm or deny any link between Lau and the Romero assassination. “Parts of Santivanez’s story don’t track with what we know,” a State Department official said. “We don’t believe Nicaraguans were the trigger men in the Romero case.”

The charges that Lau and other Nicaraguan exiles participated in the death squads--which the Reagan Administration has repeatedly condemned--came as the President was urging Congress to renew CIA funding for the contras, whom he has called “moral equals of our Founding Fathers.”

Santivanez, a former associate of Salvadoran rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, also charged that El Salvador’s current defense minister and national police chief were members of a secret military council that approved the Romero assassination and other murders.

Santivanez, the first Salvadoran officer of his rank who has publicly discussed the armed forces’ role in death squads, said the panel, called the Military Security Committee, approved the participation of National Guard troops in death squads led by D’Aubuisson.

He said the committee, which included current Defense Minister Carlos Vides Casanova and Col. Carlos Reynaldo Lopez Nuila, vice minister of defense, approved the use of the death squads in early 1980 to undermine a reformist government and “eliminate people they considered the enemies of the armed forces.”

Lau and other members of the Nicaraguan National Guard fled their country after its Sandinista revolution in 1979 and made their way to Guatemala and El Salvador, where some of them were employed as bodyguards by sympathetic rightists.

Santivanez charged that Lau eventually made contact with a Guatemalan rightist leader, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, who was helping D’Aubuisson organize the death squads that are blamed for many of the 50,000 civilian deaths in El Salvador during the past five years.

“They trained people for the death squads at Sandoval’s farm,” he said. “Nicaraguans did some of the training, and Lau was in charge of the Nicaraguans.”

Archbishop Romero, a popular advocate of social reform in El Salvador, was gunned down while saying Mass on March 24, 1980, one day after he had urged Salvadoran soldiers “not to obey orders that are opposed to the law of God.”

Santivanez noted that a 1980 diary captured from an aide to D’Aubuisson and later published by a U.S. Senate committee contains an apparent reference to the payment to Lau (although the name was spelled differently) three days after Romero was gunned down. The diary entry, dated March 27, 1980, states: “Contribution to Nicaraguans $40,000.00. Col. Ricardo Lao . . . Contribution Nica--$80,000.00.”

The 51-year-old former intelligence chief said that when the killers returned to National Guard headquarters, they were cheered by fellow guardsmen for what they had done.

A spokesman for the contras, Bosco Matamoros, said he had “no knowledge whatsoever” of Santivanez’s charges.

Santivanez, who was ousted from El Salvador’s intelligence service in 1979, was later fired as the Salvadoran consul in New Orleans after he brought his charges to congressional committees last year. He said he came forward publicly Thursday in part to aid in the sale of a filmed interview with Berkeley documentary maker Alan Francovich. The 70-minute documentary film has been distributed in Britain but not yet in the United States. Santivanez is to get any profits from the film.