Death-Squad Salvadorans Said to Train in U.S.

WASHINGTON — In an echo from El Salvador’s blood-soaked past, a U.S. training program for foreign police officials has been disrupted by charges that its participants include members of that country’s rightist death squads.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and several human rights activists say that three Salvadoran National Guard officers recently trained in Washington and Phoenix were guilty of rights abuses.

“We’re training hard-core killers to be more efficient,” Harkin charged. “It’s just despicable.”

State Department officials, defending what is a major component of the Reagan Administration’s worldwide anti-terrorism effort, dismissed such talk as “hysteria.”

“These are unsubstantiated charges,” said Michael Kraft of the Office of Counter-Terrorism, which sponsored the training course. “We checked on the participants before they came, and we found nothing that indicated a record of torture or killing or human rights abuses.”

Bad Records Erased

But another, more senior official, who requested anonymity, conceded: “There could be some truth in it, but I doubt anyone can ever prove it. These guys (in the training program) were in the National Guard when it was doing some very nasty things, but in a country where every officer’s bad record has been erased, how do you know?”

The officers’ accusers concede that the charges remain unproven, but the mere shadow of the death squads has prompted Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., the city of Phoenix and the state of Arizona to pull out of the program.

The furor reflects a basic conflict over U.S. policy in El Salvador. The Administration, eager to declare victory in its effort to reform the Salvadoran armed forces, has never insisted that the government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte eliminate death squad suspects from its ranks.

But some human rights activists argue that unless the former killers are purged, the country’s security forces will never truly be reformed.

“It’s an abomination,” said Leonel Gomez, a Salvadoran and former labor union official who has lived in exile in Washington since 1981. “The State Department is afraid that if they put any pressure on, the (Salvadoran) army is going to divide. . . . So they not only let these guys stay in (the armed forces), they bring them up here.”

‘Thousands of Deaths’

Gomez, who State Department officials say has been credible in the past, charges that three of 16 police officials in the first Salvadoran anti-terrorism program last month were known to have participated in death squads. “These three were responsible for thousands of deaths,” he said, “literally thousands.”

He identified them as Col. Jose Dionisio Hernandez, a senior officer in the National Guard, Lt. Col. Jose Adolfo Medrano, the guard’s chief of intelligence, and Maj. Baltazar Lopez Cortez, former chief of the guard’s intelligence staff. The State Department confirmed that all three men did take part in the training program.

The three officers could not be reached to answer the charges. The Salvadoran armed forces spokesman’s office was closed Wednesday, a holiday in El Salvador.

A Salvadoran who had direct knowledge of the security forces’ intelligence operations said that none of the three were in a position of command. “But all three have been killing people for a long period of time--not spectacularly, just consistently,” said the source, who asked not to be named.

Identities Confirmed

Harkin said that five other sources also have confirmed the charges, although he admitted he had no concrete evidence of specific acts committed by any of the three.

“In terms of having a smoking gun, no, we don’t have one,” he said. “But in terms of testimony from people who know of their connections with the death squads, we have plenty.”

The State Department says that it carefully checked the backgrounds of participants in the training program to make sure none of them had records of human rights abuses, but it admits that is not conclusive proof. “For that sort of information, our embassies don’t have a very good memory bank,” he said.

The officers’ group, the first from El Salvador to take part in the police training program, was on its last day of management training in Phoenix when the city council voted to end the city’s sponsorship of the program. Then Northwestern, which had already given the Salvadorans three weeks of classroom training, pulled out as well.

The State Department says the program will continue. A second group of Salvadorans is completing training this week under the sponsorship of the Louisiana State Police in Baton Rouge.