U.S. Panel Assails Probe of Killing of Salvador Priests

A congressional task force, releasing a report that may help seal the fate of continued U.S. military aid to El Salvador, said Monday that Salvadoran investigators have made no serious effort to determine whether senior military officers were involved in the murders of six Jesuit priests and two others in San Salvador last year.

“The investigation is stalled,” said Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass), chairman of the House Democratic task force appointed by House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) to monitor the situation.

Rejecting arguments by Salvadoran and U.S. officials that a few undisciplined individuals in the military were to blame for the deaths, the 19-member Democratic panel concluded that the priests’ murders were symptomatic of “an attitude of suspicion and anger towards activist segments of the church that remains all too widespread within the armed forces” in El Salvador.

While the task force said it believes Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani is “sincere” in his efforts to encourage a “professional investigation” into the Nov. 16 slayings, it found that the government probe since April has “come to a virtual standstill” over the apparent reluctance of investigators to question senior officers or gather additional evidence against the nine officers and enlisted men already accused in the case.

Coupled with what it said are serious flaws in the Salvadoran justice system, this reluctance to probe any deeper into the murders of the priests, their cook and her daughter “make it less and less likely that full justice will ever be done,” the task force report concluded.

The lengthy report, compiled over four months by a panel of key Democrats who include both supporters and critics of the Cristiani government, was released a day before Secretary of State James A. Baker III is expected to begin consultations with congressional leaders in a new effort by the Bush Administration to persuade Congress not to vote for a cutoff of military aid to El Salvador.

Arguing that such action would only weaken the Cristiani government on the eve of delicate peace talks with Salvadoran rebels, Baker earlier this month got House and Senate leaders to agree to try to fashion a bipartisan policy towards El Salvador similar to the consensus achieved last year on Nicaragua.

Congressional Democrats agreed, but the consensus began to crumble when two weeks slipped by with no further action by the Administration. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, signaling its impatience, voted last week to cut military aid to El Salvador by half.

While the task force made no recommendations about military assistance, Democrats clamoring for a cutoff said the report gave them the ammunition they needed to force the Administration into negotiations that should result in future aid being linked more closely to the Salvadoran military’s record on human rights.

“I don’t know what their position is going to be, but we’re pretty close to our bottom line with what the House committee did last week,” said Rep. Gerry E. Studds (D-Mass.), sponsor of the amendment passed by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

The Studds amendment, attached to a supplemental spending bill passed by the committee April 26, would withhold half of all pending military aid to El Salvador--about $40 million this year and $85 million in fiscal 1991. President Bush could then either restore the aid or reduce it to zero, according to a complex set of conditions applying to the behavior of both sides--the Cristiani government and the leftist rebels--in El Salvador’s decade-long civil war. A similar proposal authored by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) is already pending in the Senate.

Congressional sources have characterized the proposals as an attempt to signal both the Bush Administration and the Cristiani government that Congress is becoming increasingly frustrated because--terrorism by the rebels notwithstanding--U.S. aid is being used to fund human rights abuses by the military.

That frustration was underscored by a disclosure in the task force report that seven of the officers and enlisted men arrested for the Jesuits’ murders had only two days earlier participated in combat training exercises supervised by U.S. Special Forces advisers in El Salvador.

“Obviously, we’re not suggesting U.S. advisers trained them to kill the priests,” a congressional source said. “But it does suggest that U.S. advisers are training the wrong kinds of people in El Salvador.”

Moakley said that the task force, during its investigations in El Salvador, found numerous indications of a cover-up designed to shield senior officers from further probes into the Jesuits’ killings.

He also said that Col. Guillermo Benavides, the most senior officer charged to date in the killings, has been allowed to spend his time in detention at a military vacation resort and that there are mounting indications he eventually will be acquitted.