What We’re Paying for in El Salvador

El Salvador is as destitute and lawless as it was when civil war erupted there a decade ago. The majority of the population has seen its standard of living fall, while military officers, well-connected businessmen and corrupt politicians have pocketed millions of dollars in U.S. aid. The government of President Alfredo Cristiani has been discredited by its unwillingness to investigate the killing of six prominent Jesuit educators. It seems that $5 billion in U.S. aid and years of bipartisan congressional support for the government have only made life more miserable.

U.S. involvement was supposed to make things better in El Salvador. Since 1981, Congress and the executive branch have pumped more than $1-million-a-day in aid into what some enthusiasts called “a showcase of democracy.” Partisans of this policy argued that U.S. influence would curb the human-rights abuses--an estimated 50,000 civilians have been killed--and restore the rule of law.

The reality is far different. Time and again, individual Salvadorans from all walks of life have taken Washington’s rhetoric of human rights seriously--only to be punished for it. Salvadorans who, at considerable personal risk, provided crucial information about human-rights cases have consistently been ignored, ridiculed, betrayed or endangered by U.S. officials. Meanwhile, Salvadoran military officers known to be guilty of grotesque crimes have been accorded protection and privileges by the U.S. government.

The probe of the Jesuit killings is only the latest example. The six educators were slain outside their campus residence last November. Luisa Cerna, a housekeeper, lay in the shadows while a squad of U.S.-trained soldiers carrying U.S.-supplied rifles shot the Jesuits. Cerna escaped unnoticed and offered to give her testimony to U.S. officials. They grilled her for hours without allowing her to have counsel present--though a Salvadoran military officer was allowed to sit in. Her interrogators tried to get her to admit that one of the murdered men had been a guerrilla. Cerna says she felt threatened and told the men she had seen nothing. U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William G. Walker promptly labeled Cerna’s testimony “useless.”

Church officials in El Salvador and the United States then denounced the U.S. treatment of Cerna. Back among people she trusted, Cerna stood by her original statements that the killers were uniformed government soldiers. The subsequent confession of several Salvadoran soldiers who carried out the killing confirmed Cerna’s account.

A second Salvadoran who came forward with information on the case was also burned by U.S. officials. In January, Col. Carlos Armando Aviles, a Jesuit-educated officer, told a U.S. military officer the name of the Salvadoran who had ordered the killings. Aviles requested the information be treated confidentially.

Yet a U.S. official confronted senior Salvadoran officers with the allegation, and identified Aviles as its source. He was exposed as an informant and now denies having provided the Americans with any information. Not surprisingly, no other Salvadoran officers have since provided any inside information in the Jesuit case.

In both instances, U.S. officials deny their actions were intended to hamper the investigation. But Salvadorans have seen this before on the part of U.S. officials.

At best, Salvadorans who come forward with information about human-rights abuses will be ignored. In 1984, for example, a former Salvadoran intelligence officer went public with an insider’s view of the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Roberto Santivanez said the murder had been sanctioned by the country’s military leadership and was overseen by a senior officer named Nicolas Carranza. Carranza also happened to be an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency, paid $90,000 annually for his services, according to the New York Times.

Santivanez’s revelations have proved credible. Yet neither the State Department nor the Congress conducted a serious investigation of his charges. Indeed, Santivanez--now living quietly in the United States--has additional important information about the events leading up to Romero’s death that he has not yet revealed publicly. No one in a position of authority in the U.S. or Salvadoran government has questioned him about it.

Meanwhile, Carranza, often identified as the leading organizer of military death squads in El Salvador, has been treated kindly by U.S. authorities. U.S. law forbids granting visas to foreigners who advocate violence. Even Jose Napoleon Duarte, the late president of El Salvador, said in his autobiography that Carranza advocated violence as the only way to deal with his political foes. Yet Carranza travels to and from Kentucky, where his family lives, without objections from the State Department.

Or consider the case of the CIA’s favorite kidnaper. In April, 1986, the Salvadoran government announced that it had broken a kidnaping-for-profit ring.

The ring, run by right-wing military officers, kidnaped local businessmen. Posing as left-wing guerrillas, the kidnapers extracted large ransom payments from at least five families. Salvadoran investigators had developed a strong case against a colonel named Roberto Mauricio Staben. Two participants gave statements identifying Staben as the “intellectual author” of the ring. Staben was placed under house arrest. The U.S. embassy released statements supportive of the investigation, and U.S. Ambassador Edwin G. Corr said he supported the probe. Then Staben’s fellow officers came to his defense and demanded his release. After a few weeks, Staben was let go for “lack of evidence,” and the U.S. Embassy had no comment.

Lack of evidence? Besides the two eyewitness statements implicating Staben, the U.S. government had its own internal documentation of Staben’s activities. The State Department has dozens of top-secret documents concerning Staben. The CIA acknowledges, when responding to recent inquiries, that it generated no less than eight reports concerning Staben and the kidnaping ring in April and May of 1986--sometimes producing two in one day.

In response to a Freedom Of Information Act inquiry, the CIA refuses to release any portion of these reports. Richard F. Stolz, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, cites a law prohibiting the disclosure of the names of CIA employees.

While the U.S. government protects Staben, Salvadorans who try to bring him to justice pay with their lives. Three witnesses in the case have been killed while in detention. In May, 1988, Jorge Serrano Panameno, the Salvadoran judge assigned to review the kidnaping allegations, was killed by unknown gunmen. The investigation is effectively dead. Staben, still an active duty officer, lives comfortably in San Salvador.

Given this history, imagine how U.S. human-rights rhetoric sounds to the Salvadoran ear in 1990. Congressmen, liberal pundits and Bush Administration officials lecture Salvadorans about their unwillingness to investigate human-rights abuses. But why should Salvadorans risk their safety to probe the government’s darkest secrets when North Americans--at no personal risk--don’t even try to pry the same secrets out of the Washington national-security bureaucracy? The truth is that the continuing cover-up of the Jesuit murders, the Romero assassination and the kidnaping ring could not succeed without the active assistance of officials in Washington and Langley.

“U.S. policy-makers contribute to a conspiracy of silence about the real situation in El Salvador,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “They spout bright shining lies about democracy and civilian control of the military.”

As these lies lose their luster, Congress is edging toward voting a drastic reduction in military aid to El Salvador. An aid cut would soothe the conscience of congressmen disturbed by the Jesuit murders, but it avoids the question of responsibility. A recent congressional study showed that 14 of 15 top Salvadoran Army commanders have overseen gross abuses of human rights. All 14 have been paid for with funds approved by the same representatives now so disturbed.

For a decade, Congress and the executive branch have preferred to ignore such abuses. They have funded programs to strengthen the Salvadoran judicial system. They have publicly called for human-rights investigations. They have required human-rights training for all Salvadoran soldiers.

The problem is: Truth is a menace to U.S. policy in El Salvador. Revelations about the killers of the Jesuits and Romero, about top military commanders and thuggish underlings are starting to irritate that long-dormant organ known as the congressional conscience. U.S. officials realize the next revelation about Salvadoran reality might precipitate a total aid cutoff and the fall of the U.S.-backed government. The desire to protect a confidential informant like Aviles, to respect an eyewitness like Cerna or to repudiate a gangster like Staben is clearly outweighed by the desire to protect the relationship of the Salvadoran armed forces and U.S. national-security agencies. A conspiracy of silence about the history of that relationship now seems essential to U.S. policy.

Yet the suppression of historical truth is exactly why U.S. policy is losing support in Washington and El Salvador, despite the billions spent. As Harkin noted, “These lies do not fool the people of El Salvador who must live with the tragic results of U.S. policy.”

An aid cutoff, while morally attractive, does nothing to redress the cause of U.S. failure in El Salvador. Rather than wash its hands of the Salvadoran military, Congress might assume responsibility for filling in the blank pages of U.S.-Salvadoran history. J. William Fulbright’s 1966-67 hearings on the Vietnam War attempted to hold Washington policy-makers accountable for their actions and educate the U.S. public.

A similar full-scale congressional review of U.S. policy in El Salvador in the last decade would end the conspiracy of silence that continues to deceive Americans who trust their government not to protect killers; a silence that punishes Salvadorans who hope the United States will live up to its ideals.