Salvador Army Upset Over Probe of Priest Slayings

The investigation into the killing of six Jesuit priests has caused serious tensions in El Salvador’s powerful military, with the confinement of two colonels in connection with the case--one as a suspect and another who allegedly fingered the suspect to U.S. officials.

Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, who was responsible for the zone where the killings took place, has been confined to his base at the Gen. Gerardo Barrios Military School, according to military and civilian sources.

But the armed forces high command also has restricted Col. Carlos Armando Aviles, chief of psychological operations, whom they accuse of leaking Benavides’ name to the U.S. Embassy, the sources said. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Aviles had been assigned to go to Washington this month as a military attache in El Salvador’s embassy and the armed forces’ chief advocate there, but sources say his assignment was canceled as a result of the controversy.

“Certain parts of the army are very agitated. You can almost touch the tensions among the senior officers,” said one diplomat.

“What this (the confinement of Aviles) does illustrate is that, within the military, there were divisions opening up--very sharp divisions,” the diplomat said.

A presidential spokesman has denied confinement of Benavides. Armed forces officials and spokesmen did not respond to repeated telephone calls and could not be reached for comment. Aviles also was not available.

International diplomats and U.S. congressional observers consider the Jesuits case a watershed test of the military’s willingness to prosecute human rights abuses and of its traditional system of internal loyalty and self-protection. Despite thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of military and paramilitary “death squads” during El Salvador’s 10-year civil war, no military officer has ever been convicted for a political crime.

The case is also seen as a test of President Alfredo Cristiani’s ability to assert civilian authority over the powerful armed forces, which have grown from 12,000 members at the beginning of the war to an estimated 55,000 today.

The priests, their cook and her daughter were killed with automatic rifle shots before dawn Nov. 16 at the Jesuit-run Central American University. The victims included university rector Ignacio Ellacuria and vice rector Ignacio Martin-Baro, both leading intellectuals who favored negotiations between the government and left-wing guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The murders were committed in a heavily militarized zone during a curfew that had been declared in response to a major rebel offensive in the capital. The killers reportedly spent at least 45 minutes on campus without a confrontation with army or rebel troops.

Initially, the Salvadoran government and the U.S. Embassy seemed to be trying to deflect attention away from the military. Cristiani sent teams of businessmen and army officers to the United States and to other Latin American countries with a message to foreign officials that the FMLN, as the rebels are known, could have committed the murders.

Meeting with Congress members and their aides in Washington last week, U.S. Ambassador William A. Walker stressed the lack of conclusive evidence in the case and dedicated much of his talk to “disputing the circumstantial evidence,” according to one aide present.

Then, suddenly, President Cristiani appeared on television here late Sunday to assert that members of the armed forces “were involved” in the slayings. He confirmed this week that 45 soldiers and two lieutenants from the elite Atlacatl Battalion have been confined to barracks of the security forces and that the killers were believed among them.

Some political observers believe the announcement was timed to coincide with a flurry of visits by international delegations, including Canadian and British police and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs. The killings have received international condemnation, and some members of Congress have threatened to cut U.S. aid to El Salvador--amounting to $1.4 million a day--if no one is prosecuted.

Friends of Cristiani said he made his announcement to put the military on notice and to push the case forward.

“He was speaking to the armed forces, telling them, ‘This is the position; I’ve told the world, and you move at your own risk,’ ” one source said.

With the announcement and the international pressure, this source said, Cristiani “has more space (to push the army) now than he’s ever likely to have again.”

However, other sources said that Cristiani made the announcement to preempt possible leaks to the visiting police, Congress members and journalists. Some members of the Atlacatl Battalion already had begun to provide information under interrogation when military officials and Cristiani discovered that “one colonel had named another colonel,” a source said.

Aviles allegedly told U.S. officials that Benavides had spoken about the killings and was a suspect in the case. U.S officials then reportedly confronted the military high command with the information and indicated where they got it, according to several sources.

Aviles was given a lie detector test to see if he was the source of the leak, military and civilian sources said, adding that he denied it but failed the test.

Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, armed forces chief of staff, reportedly was embarrassed and angered and is said to be viewing the passing of information to U.S. officials as a power play by Aviles against him and rest of the high command.

“He was made to look bad,” a source close to Cristiani said of Ponce.

It is also unclear specifically why Aviles has been confined: for talking to the Americans or for denying to his commander that he did so. But blowing the whistle on Benavides would be considered a breach of the army’s code of ethics and traditional mode of operation.

The Salvadoran army is a tightly knit institution based not only on military obedience but also on a system of loyalty to one’s tanda , or graduating class from the military academy. Tanda classmates not only complete military school and are promoted together, regardless of competence, but they also become business partners, confidants and the godfathers of each others’ children.

Benavides is a member of the 1966 graduating class, the same tanda as Ponce, the chief of staff. Members of the class hold most of the important military command posts.

Aviles was two years behind Ponce and Benavides; like Ponce, he was the leader of his tanda, and his classmates are expected to rally to his defense.

The case is sensitive among both classes, as well as those of the detained lieutenants.

“You’re talking about prosecuting and people (military officers) going to jail. That’s never happened before,” a military source said. “You have people being chastised for not having told something they knew and for having spoken. And you have three or four (military classes) affected.”

Some in the military are concerned that this case will help the guerrillas’ strategy of trying to divide the army. In their last peace proposal, the guerrillas called for the removal of the members of the class of 1966 who hold high military positions.

On Wednesday, Cristiani and Ponce met with the commanders to lay out the evidence against the confined soldiers and officers. Afterward, a military source said, Ponce met alone with the members of his tanda .

The meetings were “to calm them down, to sell them the message. We’ll see in the next days and weeks if it worked,” another source said.

Some diplomats and political observers say they believe that the Jesuits case will be prosecuted and that the old military practice of impunity will come to an end.

“In the past, to become a colonel in El Salvador was like becoming a general in (Gen. Leopoldo F.) Galtieri’s Argentina. You were above the law,” one source said. “Suddenly, Cristiani is saying you aren’t.”

But other longtime political observers are skeptical. They don’t expect this case to be different from other notorious unsolved crimes, among them the 1980 slaying of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero of San Salvador. In another case that year, four U.S. churchwomen were raped and murdered. Four low-level National Guardsmen were jailed for the crime, but the so-called “intellectual authors” were never identified or prosecuted.

In 1986, U.S. and Salvadoran officials broke a kidnaping-for-profit ring in which at least two colonels from the class of 1966 were implicated. One colonel was warned and allowed to flee the country and another was briefly confined to his quarters. His tanda- mates closed ranks in his defense and sent a messenger to tell then-President Jose Napoleon Duarte that there was not enough evidence for a trial. The colonel was released.

“We have to see how this develops, but I hope it will be different,” a source close to Cristiani said.