Cristiani: Ally Under the Gun

Sunday’s funeral service for six Jesuit priests murdered in El Salvador drew mourners from every political faction in a bitterly divided nation, including President Alfredo Cristiani. This was an important symbolic act, but will mean little if the killers are not brought to justice. President Bush must demand that Cristiani try to do so. The more than $1 million a day in U.S. aid ought to be enough to merit Cristiani’s compliance.

Virtually every account of the killings suggests they were carried out by a death squad linked to the security forces, an opinion shared not just by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church but by officials at the U.S. embassy in San Salvador. If so, it is only the latest barbarity tied to rightist death squads in the last decade, including the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the 1981 assassination of two U.S. labor advisers. Yet, although many Salvadoran officers have been linked to these crimes, not one has ever been convicted.

Since 1979, when generations of festering social problems and political corruption in El Salvador erupted into a bloody civil war (some 70,000 people have died in a nation of only 5 million) successive U.S. administrations have justified aid to El Salvador on the grounds that it was helping build genuine democracy there. A key element of this strategy has been to train a more honest, professional military, one that, among other things, respects human rights. The murder of the Jesuits provides a pivotal test of whether that strategy was realistic.

Another test will be how the Salvadoran military conducts itself in the aftermath of last week’s surprise offensive by the rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. The last rebel units have withdrawn from working-class suburbs that surround San Salvador, areas where the rebels have always had sympathizers. U.S. advisers must warn the Salvadoran military that treating those barrios as occupied territory, and taking revenge on the residents, will only create new waves of sympathy for the FMLN.

The U.S. specialists who advise the Salvadoran military know which officers are suspected of death-squad activity, so they know where to start looking for the priests’ killers--not just the actual gunmen but those who plotted the crime. If the Cristiani government is as democratic as it claims, it will respond to the public outrage over the murders by helping track down the killers. If the Salvadoran military is truly professional, it will be eager to purge its ranks of thugs who murder priests, and two innocent bystanders, in cold blood.

But if the Cristiani government fails this test, Congress must ask whether U.S. aid is really helping El Salvador, or just propping up a system that, despite a slightly more respectable facade, is as brutal and corrupt as ever.