The Execution of Priests and U.S. Policy : El Salvador: Cristiani and Bush have already set up a pretense of seeking justice, and once again Congress will be cowed. Or will it?

With the murder of six priests, the Jesuit-nurtured reason that sought to illuminate the Salvadoran body politic has been extinguished, and El Salvador is on the brink of another dark spiral of violence.

In Washington, the latest in a series of Salvadoran assassinations provoked the usual promises of an investigation and threats by liberals in Congress to cut off the $500 million a year in U.S. aid. But it seems only fair to the memory of the slain Jesuits, who were among the few in their country with the wisdom and resources to think about the future, that American policy-makers take this sad juncture as a mandate to seriously examine their failure.

The six Jesuits targeted by assassins were not simple parish priests. They were among the few voices of reason and reform not already dead or exiled. Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of El Salvador’s most prestigious university, was a force in persuading the FMLN to enter into negotiations with the right-wing government of Alfredo Cristiani. Ignacio Martin-Baro, the vice rector, was El Salvador’s leading pollster. The other four priests also were eminent figures who cannot be replaced.

To understand the impact that their deaths will have, imagine that the leading lights of Harvard have just been rounded up, tortured and murdered, their bodies left in Harvard Yard. The attorney general warns other academics that they should leave the country if they want to stay alive. He promises an investigation but puts the police off-limits, although police-issue weapons were used and witnesses claim that there were 20 to 30 policemen at the scene.

When the authorities kill a country’s leading reformist thinkers, what kind of message does that send about reform, or about thinking itself?

Following a time-tested script, in San Salvador and in Washington everyone is calling for an investigation; the United States, which has spent $14 million in the last five years on a so-called Judicial Reform Project, dispatched forensic specialists. But it is the Salvadoran attorney general who will oversee the government’s investigation, and already he has blamed the FMLN guerrillas for the killings and urged the country’s liberal Catholic bishops to leave (whether this is a warning or a threat is unclear). President Bush says that he has urged Cristiani to “get to the bottom of this”--but he has accepted Cristiani’s assurance that the government wasn’t involved, thereby foreclosing the most promising avenue of inquiry. It was left to the normally cautious archbishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas, to voice what every honest Salvador-watcher thinks: the “extremely strong presumption that the assassins . . . are elements of the armed forces or those intimately tied to them.”

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of the Foreign Relations Committee, one of the leaders of the half-hearted, just-before-adjournment effort to reduce aid, told David Brinkley that “the status quo cannot prevail.”

But in the coming months, it probably will. The investigation will go nowhere. Congress will again threaten an aid cut-off. The White House will hint at what it has known all along: that the Salvadoran military killed the Jesuits. The Administration will pledge vigilance to ensure that justice is done. Congress will be temporarily mollified. A breakthrough in the investigation will be announced; arrests may be made. A few enlisted men may even be convicted. But sooner or later, as the investigation fails to bag higher-ups and Congress’ complaints accelerate, the White House will resort to red-baiting. The accusation of “losing El Salvador” has always been enough to discourage Democratic dissent in Congress.

The problem is that U.S. policy, naively aimed at bolstering the middle in El Salvador, is being manipulated by the extremes. Building up an army to beat the guerrillas has only strengthened a military clique whose basic motivation is to feather its nest and protect its own. The army has shown no willingness to prosecute officers implicated in criminal activity. And the Administration cannot threaten the integrity of the army by forcing it to purge itself, because that would cripple U.S. efforts to eliminate the FMLN. Hard-line elements of the army see right through U.S. promises on human rights to the bottom line. The FMLN, meanwhile, strikes hard at this contradiction, knowing that its own military offensive will harden the army against peace talks and provoke further acts of barbaric violence against the citizenry.

The Administration has many reasons for wishing the FMLN not to come to power, and many Salvadorans agree. But events like the murder of the priests should remind us what the FMLN is fighting for. There have been elections in El Salvador for several years now, but there is still no justice. As difficult as it is to stomach the idea of a guerrilla victory, how much longer do we want to pour millions into a military force that has no intention of reforming itself or the social order it upholds?