U.S. Worried About Salvador’s Cristiani, Being Sworn In Today

President-elect Alfredo Cristiani’s handling of key decisions concerning the military and his Cabinet in the days before his inauguration today has raised serious concerns among diplomats and officials about his ability to control radical hard-line elements in his own party and the armed forces.

Cristiani had gained support among Salvadoran moderates, the Bush Administration and even U.S. congressional liberals by arguing that he has the will and the strength to control the ultra-right wing of his party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance. Arena, as the party is known in a Spanish acronym, is led by Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former army major linked to the “death squads” that have murdered tens of thousands of Salvadorans in previous years.

However, that support is threatened by Cristiani’s inability to name his own choice for defense minister and to prevent D’Aubuisson allies from taking important government positions dealing with internal security affairs.

The United States provides El Salvador with nearly $550 million annually and the Bush Administration is seeking a similar amount for each of the next two years.

But with some members of Congress seeking to tie that aid to Administration guarantees that Cristiani will improve the country’s human rights performance and negotiate an end to a nine-year civil war, some U.S. officials find the president-elect’s performance worrisome.

“Cristiani has not done well,” said a U.S. official interviewed recently in Washington. “He is inexperienced and tends to believe (that) everyone believes the same things he does. I’m not sure he can handle the job.”

The president-elect’s first challenge came earlier this month with the need to select a defense minister to replace Gen. Carlos Vides Casanova, a close associate of outgoing President Jose Napoleon Duarte and a favorite of the U.S. Embassy here.

Cristiani originally favored the armed forces chief of staff, Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, the army’s candidate for the job and an advocate of American-designed limited counterinsurgency tactics against a Marxist guerrilla movement.

However, D’Aubuisson and other former military officers in Arena preferred Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, the air force commander who advocates a “total war” approach to fighting the rebels and believes that Ponce and Vides Casanova have caved in to American pressure on human rights.

The bitterness between the two camps evidently eluded Cristiani, according to diplomats and Arena sources. They said he had expected no real opposition to Ponce because of the colonel’s support within the army and from the United States.

These sources said Cristiani was caught completely by surprise when Bustillo pressed his candidacy by ordering his pilots to buzz the Defense Ministry and refusing to permit air support of ground troops. Ponce in turn threatened to send troops against the main air force base at Ilopango on the outskirts of the capital.

The crisis was averted when Cristiani accepted a compromise for defense minister, Gen. Rafael Humberto Larios, a relatively unknown artillery officer who was vice defense minister.

U.S. officials in Washington at first tried to put the best face on the incident, arguing that at least Bustillo was thwarted and that Larios was only an interim appointment while Ponce consolidated his position.

However, one official acknowledged that at best Cristiani showed indecisiveness and at worst “a weakness against the hard-liners that calls into question his ability and will to cut down D’Aubuisson’s influence.”

Perhaps in the long run, these officials and other outside observers say, the way Cristiani has handled his Cabinet appointments is a deeper cause for concern.

“He made a mistake from the beginning,” said a European diplomat, “when he agreed to allow D’Aubuisson and his friends a role in naming the security positions while he appointed the economic ministers.”

As a result, the minister of interior will be Vice President-elect Francisco Merino, a close associate of D’Aubuisson and an advocate of reviving paramilitary units not under the control of the armed forces. Such groups in the past were used as death squads.

Merino’s undersecretary will be Humberto Figueroa, a former army colonel and critic of human rights advocates.

The new justice minister, Jose Francisco Guerrero, is D’Aubuisson’s lawyer and has defended him against charges that he led death squads and plotted the assassination of American officials.

“These people do not inspire confidence in Cristiani’s judgment nor his dominance in his own administration,” said an aide to a liberal congressman in Washington.

That confidence was not strengthened last week with the reappearance of Hector Antonio Regalado, a dentist and close friend of D’Aubuisson whose nickname here is Dr. Death.

Regalado, who has been publicly accused by outgoing President Jose Napoleon Duarte as the assassin of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980 and as the designer of an unsuccessful 1984 attempt to kill then-U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, is widely credited with forming the death squads of the early 1980s.