UPDATE / EL SALVADOR : Presidential Tightrope: Cristiani Walks the Line

President Alfredo Cristiani’s political life seems to be all he could want these days. Peace talks with leftist guerrillas are to begin next month, largely on his terms, and he appears to have reconciled the conflicting interests of the suspicious military and his American patrons over the most sensitive human rights case, the killing of six priests.

Nevertheless, Cristiani’s hold on power is unsteady, and his success contains the very factors that could undermine his domination.

With the peace talks as with the killing of the priests, the president’s most natural allies--the political right wing and the military--are skeptical at best about what Cristiani is doing, and important elements are totally opposed.

Even his strongest outside friend, the United States, is showing signs of impatience over Cristiani’s slow pace, if not his sincerity, in moving to reduce human rights abuses and to rid the armed forces of their most brutal officers.

“It’s like watching an illusionist,” a Salvadoran political expert said. “His enemies have all the real power, but Cristiani is holding them off by the illusion that the strength of events is with him.”

For now at least, the illusion, shored up by nearly $400 million in U.S. aid, is working. Cristiani has muted Washington’s concern that he is not making reasonable progress in resolving questions about the killing last fall of six Jesuit priests and two church workers, allegedly by army personnel.

Charges have been brought against an officer with enough rank to enable the U.S. Embassy here to attest to a skeptical Congress that progress is being made in solving the case.

At the same time, the rightist president has salved military discontent by not moving too far or too fast in the investigation of the killings.

By turning back suggestions that the investigation should go beyond the accused officer and eight lower-ranking soldiers, Cristiani has placated senior military men.

Further, he has not denied special treatment for the accused officer, Col. Guillermo A. Benavides Moreno, a military academy classmate of Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, the armed forces chief of staff.

Still, Cristiani’s situation is precarious. The slightest misstep could mean political disaster, for the military sees an attack on any officer as a threat to all.

For now, the positive news about serious peace talks with the rebel FMLN, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, has distracted nearly everyone’s attention from the case of the priests. But even the optimism about negotiating an end to the decade-old civil war has an element of unreality to it.

A European diplomat said the possibility of peace talks may be the factor that really does the president in.

“They (the right wing) feel he has betrayed them with Benavides,” the diplomat said. “If they think he is serious about negotiating with the FMLN, it could be the thing that sets them off, regardless of the U.S. aid.”

Apart from the specific problems of the Jesuits’ case and the peace talks, Cristiani faces the more general problem that a major success in either instance would be seen by the right wing and the military as an unacceptable consolidation of power by a man they figured to be a pliant figurehead.

The strains in the military are most obvious in the tenuous position of Col. Ponce, the chief of staff, who has supported the president since he took office last spring.

Ponce has held off his enemies by reminding them that he is favored by the Americans and any decrease in his or Cristiani’s standing would endanger the aid that keeps the military alive.

A foreign military officer said that if “the guerrillas stage another serious operation and have some success, it is unlikely that Ponce will survive, and if he doesn’t survive, Cristiani will either go, too, or be reduced to what the right wing has always thought he was supposed to be--a figurehead.”

What would that mean? As a U.S. official put it, “more war, more dead and the failure of a decade of American foreign policy.”