Carter Plan to Visit Stirs Salvador Furor : U.S. Embassy Reacts Angrily to Wave of Right-Wing Criticism

A proposed visit by former President Jimmy Carter has touched off a wave of right-wing criticism here and, at the U.S. Embassy, concern for his security.

One anti-Carter comment, comparing the former President’s proposed trip with the late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s visit to Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956, touched off a furious protest by the embassy.

“I don’t care if it’s (former President Richard M.) Nixon or Carter, but you compare a U.S. President to Khrushchev and you’ve got a problem with me,” a senior U.S. official said.

Embassy officials said that Carter plans to spend two days in El Salvador in early February on a fact-finding tour. The former President heads the Carter Center for Public Policy at Emory University in Atlanta.

El Salvador’s rightist, wealthy elite blames Carter for reforms in land tenure, banking and export policy that were carried out here during his term in the White House. According to a recent editorial in the newspaper El Mundo, the reforms “completely changed the traditional social, political and economic nature of our people.”

The editorial held Carter and his ambassador to El Salvador, Robert E. White, responsible for the 1979 coup that ousted the government of Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero, and for many other problems, including guerrilla attacks last year that took place five years after Carter left office.

Juan Vicente Maldonado, director of the National Assn. of Private Enterprise, was quoted Tuesday in the newspaper Diario de Hoy as saying that a Carter visit would be “an affront to the honor of the people.”

It was to Maldonado that the Carter-Khrushchev comparison was attributed. After receiving a protest from the U.S. Embassy, Maldonado attempted to retract the remark in a letter to the press, saying it had been “unauthorized.”

A senior U.S. Embassy official lamented the Maldonado quote, saying that such attacks in the press make the right seem radical. He said the United States would like to foster the formation of a right-of-center party committed to democracy, but added, “They do not help us to do it when they show themselves to be unreconstructed Nazis.”

An official who asked not to be identified said embassy intelligence reports indicate that the former President might be a security risk here. He said it was not clear how dangerous it might be for Carter, but he said the embassy’s concern had been passed on to him.

“Our security people will take a good and close look at the situation because the man is so unpopular here,” embassy spokesman Donald Hamilton said. “Obviously more precautions will be taken than for a Midwestern congressman, but I don’t think there are any security problems that can’t be solved.”

Carter is also unpopular with Salvadoran rightists because of his insistence on improvements in human rights. While he was President, the depredations of right-wing death squads were at their peak.

An estimated 50,000 civilians have been killed or have disappeared in El Salvador since 1980, many of them at the hands of death squads.