Irate Congress Threatens to End Salvador Aid

Outrage over the slayings of six Jesuit priests and two others in San Salvador swept Congress on Friday, with lawmakers threatening to seek to cut off military aid to El Salvador unless its government moves swiftly to muzzle the right-wing death squads that many believe are responsible for the killings.

In response to tough questioning before a Senate subcommittee, Bernard W. Aronson, assistant secretary of state for Latin America, conceded that death squads connected to the Salvadoran military apparently were responsible for the execution-style slayings of a Jesuit university rector, five other priests, their cook and her 15-year-old daughter early Thursday.

“What my guts tell me is that they were killed by the right,” Aronson said. He added that although the United States has no information about the identity of the killers, “it is more likely that it was from the violent right than the violent left.”

In statements strongly denouncing the killings, lawmakers also blamed the death squads.

El Salvador’s rightist president, Alfredo Cristiani, has denied that his government was involved in the killings, and he has promised an investigation.

Several longtime opponents of military aid to El Salvador, including Democratic Sens. Alan Cranston of California and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, called again for suspension of aid to El Salvador.

Likening the U.S. military aid to “pouring gasoline on a burning house,” Cranston said Cristiani has shown “he is unable to control right-wing death squads operating under the protection of the U.S.-armed military forces.” The guerrilla conflict in El Salvador, he said, has been “reduced to the level of street thugs butchering each other and innocent passers-by.”

The Salvadoran military is currently battling the largest guerrilla offensive in 10 years.

Cranston said it is time “to send a strong and unmistakably clear message to El Salvador that we will neither support the right-wing butchers who have sullied the Salvadoran government nor support the Communist guerrillas who prosecute their war by crippling essential services and terrorizing civilians.”

Other lawmakers conceded it is unlikely that the Senate will vote to cut off aid to El Salvador. The Senate voted 82 to 18 last September to give El Salvador $90 million in military aid this year to help it withstand assaults by the guerrillas’ Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

However, several members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned that moves to suspend the aid will gain momentum unless Cristiani moves swiftly to bring the perpetrators of Thursday’s slayings to justice. He also needs to crack down on the death squads and suspend the aerial bombing of civilian areas of the capital of San Salvador, where the guerrillas have taken cover in their latest offensive against the government, they said.

“The time has come for President Cristiani to evidence his commitment to controlling those officials within his own government and within his own party who are in very large part responsible for the civil conflict in El Salvador,” said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

“President Cristiani is either in control of his government or he is not . . . ,” added Dodd, who has supported military aid to El Salvador in the past. “President Cristiani either deserves our support, or he does not.”

Aronson’s testimony before Dodd’s subcommittee was frequently disrupted by hecklers loudly protesting military aid to El Salvador. Aronson denounced the slayings of the priests as “barbaric” and said the United States has made it “verly clear” to Cristiani that “we want this crime investigated fully, swiftly, and those responsible punished with the full force of the law.”

But he disputed assertions by other witnesses, including a Roman Catholic Church representative, that the Salvadoran government has made no serious efforts to curb human rights abuses.

Aronson said abuses had been declining until FMLN guerrillas earlier this year began systematically targeting the families of military officers for assassination. He said this campaign was an effort to goad the death squads back into action in order to discredit the Cristiani government.

“I am not in any way suggesting there is any justification for killing by the right . . . ,” Aronson said. “Those people are as much the enemy of El Salvador as the FMLN is. They need each other, and they feed each other. But it has been a policy of the FMLN to get the right-wing death squads to come out of the closet and polarize the government.”

Aronson was interrupted by a heckler as he told the panel of the Bush Administration’s determination that the killers be caught.

“But they won’t be,” a young man shouted as Capitol police dragged him from the hearing room. “They won’t be because you’re going to give them more aid. The blood of El Salvador is dripping from your mouth, sir.”

Hecklers from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which earlier in the day staged a demonstration in front of the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington, interrupted pro-government witnesses seven times during the hearing before being ejected from the room. A CISPES spokesman said the group also plans to stage a march from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House today.

Several senators, questioning the Administration’s plan to rush additional military aid to El Salvador to help it beat back the guerrilla offensive, deplored the military’s use of helicopter gunships and other aircraft in civilian areas of the city where the guerrillas have holed up.

They also called on the Administration to pressure Cristiani to negotiate at least a temporary truce to allow Red Cross volunteers to evacuate wounded civilians from several sections of the city said still to be under siege.

Aronson said that despite some excesses, the Salvadoran military has tried to avoid civilian casualties where possible, resorting in most cases to hand-to-hand combat rather than aerial strikes. The guerrillas, he said, were callously “using civilians as their shields.”

He said the Administration favors a permanent cessation of hostilities followed by a resumption of negotiations between the government and the rebels. That course would be better than a temporary truce that could give the guerrillas a chance to rearm, he said.

“What we have to assure is that this final offensive is indeed the final offensive . . . ,” he said, “that it does not get bloodier, that El Salvador doesn’t become another Beirut.”