Senate OKs $720 Million in Aid to Panama, Nicaragua : Congress: An abortion proposal attached to the bill raises the prospect of a veto by Bush.

The Senate, threading its way through a tangle of unrelated amendments, finally approved President Bush’s request for emergency aid to Panama and Nicaragua on Tuesday. But the $720-million package still faces a threatened presidential veto over a controversial provision covering abortions in the District of Columbia.

The aid package, which contained all but $80 million of the emergency assistance that Bush sought for Panama and Nicaragua, was passed by a voice vote as part of a $3.4-billion supplemental spending bill. It now must be reconciled with a House-approved measure that includes the same amounts but not the controversial abortion provision.

While aid for the newly democratic governments of Panama and Nicaragua drove the bill along its bumpy ride through the Senate, floor fights over abortion and the death penalty and 11th-hour concerns about Lithuania dominated the weeklong debate.

Propelled by Republicans, the Senate, on a 73-24 vote, added an amendment to the bill advising the White House against seeking Senate approval of a new trade agreement with the Soviet Union until Moscow has lifted its economic embargo of Lithuania and begun negotiations with the republic.

Lithuania and another foreign policy controversy--military aid to El Salvador--also dominated a session in which Secretary of State James A. Baker III appeared before a Senate panel earlier in the day.

Testifying to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handles foreign aid, Baker came under pressure from several lawmakers who argued that an agreement reached in Paris last week to give the Soviet Union “most favored nation” trading status was ill-timed in view of the Lithuanian crisis.

Baker, defending Bush’s “balanced” response as the best approach, said that the Administration is committed to helping Lithuania realize its independence but only in a manner that does not jeopardize the wide range of “very important interests” at stake in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.

While congressional concern over Lithuania dominated the closing hours of the Senate’s debate of the supplemental appropriations bill, it was the inclusion late Monday of the abortion provision that clouded its prospects.

The provision, allowing the district to use revenues from municipal taxes to fund Medicaid abortions for poor women, was identical to one that the President vetoed last year. White House officials have said that, as much as he wants the Nicaragua-Panama aid package, Bush will veto the bill if the provision is not deleted in the conference with the House.

If that happens, the aid package will be kicked back to the Senate. If the veto is sustained there, the process will begin all over again, resulting in a succession of delays that would make it difficult to predict when emergency aid will reach Panama and Nicaragua.

Baker appealed to the senators to pass the legislation quickly and not “play politics with the future of freedom and democracy in Central America.”

However, it was U.S. aid for another Central American ally, El Salvador, that Baker defended during most of his time on the Hill on Tuesday.

On Monday, a House Democratic task force released a report concluding that an investigation into the murder of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador last year has been brought to a “virtual standstill” because of stonewalling by Salvadoran military officials.

The report, whose conclusions the State Department has reluctantly endorsed, is expected to greatly strengthen the hands of Democrats in both the House and Senate who are proposing to cut military aid to El Salvador by 50%.

Baker conceded that future levels of U.S. aid to El Salvador will depend in part on how the Salvadorans handle the investigation, which could end up implicating senior military officers.