COLUMN LEFT : Deep-Sixed With All Due Dispatch : U.S. actions could silence one witness to Salvadoran death squads forever.

Desperately trying to fend off a congressional threat to cut U.S. military aid to El Salvador by half, the Bush Administration claims that it is pressuring President Alfredo Cristiani and the Salvadoran military into bringing death-squad killers to justice. But Bush’s people are simultaneously making every effort to ensure that one damning witness to the workings of these death squads is silenced forever.

Around midday on July 10, several heavily armed men from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service broke down the door of a Long Beach home and hauled off a Salvadoran named Cesar Vielman Joya Martinez. They claimed that he had ignored a summons to appear in a Virginia court on charges of having illegally entered the United States after being deported in 1983.

But this was no ordinary immigration bust. Joya Martinez has been square in the sights of the U.S. government ever since he arrived here last October and began to testify about the role played by U.S. officials in death-squad killings in El Salvador, carried out by the First Infantry Brigade’s intelligence unit. Joya Martinez has described how two American military advisers controlled the intelligence department and paid the unit’s operating expenses.

The actual killings of suspected leftists, said Joya Martinez, were ordered by senior Salvadoran officers. Although the American advisers “didn’t want to hear of the actual killings . . . obviously they had to know what was going on.”

For the grimmest of reasons, Joya Martinez knew what he was talking about. He was a member of the special unit that he says performed at least 74 assassinations between April and July of 1989. He admits to murdering eight people himself.

Joya Martinez says that he shared a desk with the two Americans, known as “William” and “Major.” In the wake of his revelations, first aired on CBS last Oct. 26, newspapers such as the Washington Post have confirmed that two American advisers have been in a liaison role with the First Brigade and that the CIA has paid expenses to it for intelligence operations.

Joya Martinez has appeared before committees in both House and Senate, whose members found him convincing. His story received further confirmation when a Salvadoran woman fled to the United States and described how she had worked under Joya Martinez in the same unit.

For its part, the U.S. government has acted as if Joya Martinez is a dangerous inconvenience, a “smoking gun” to be deep-sixed with all due dispatch.

Its counterattack has been two-pronged. The State Department has organized a panel to investigate Joya Martinez’s credentials. Its true purpose--to discredit him--may be inferred from the fact that its panelists include the same Salvadoran intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Manuel Antonio Rives, who was involved in an attempt to get the only known witness to last year’s killing of six Jesuit priests to change testimony damaging to the Salvadoran military. Also on the panel is Richard Chidester, who describes himself as legal adviser to the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador. Since he is also involved in efforts to deport Joya Martinez, he can scarcely be regarded as disinterested in the matter of assessing Joya Martinez’s veracity.

Deportation is the other prong of the attack. The INS is trying to send Joya Martinez back to El Salvador, whose government has had the chutzpah to claim that it wants to prosecute him for a death-squad killing, thus making it the first time any Salvadoran government has displayed the slightest zeal to go after such assassins and their sponsors. If he is deported, the “smoking gun” will cease to pose a threat, since Joya Martinez’s life will most certainly be short.

Joya Martinez faces proceedings in the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia, known as the “Rocket Docket” by dint of its reputation as the most expeditious processor of such cases.

The stakes are very high. For Joya Martinez, there is the matter of his life. For the U.S. government, there is the threat that Joya Martinez poses to any claims, time-worn and absurd though they are, that the Salvadoran government has ever had the intention of cleaning up its act. He knows how the whole machinery of repression has worked. He knows the political and military higher-ups who ordered the murders. He knows the American players in this foul game.

For American citizens, the stakes are high, too. Here, this week, an inconvenient witness is being hurried to almost assured doom by a U.S. government intent on propping up a structure of murder and repression that should have been left to perish a decade and some 70,000 lives ago.