U.S. Adviser’s Account Stalls Salvador Trial

A Salvadoran judge postponed the trial of soldiers charged with murdering six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teen-age daughter while authorities Saturday investigated new evidence that could implicate high-ranking officials, a court spokesman said.

On Oct. 17, the U.S. government turned over to Salvadoran courts a statement by a former U.S. military adviser in El Salvador that may link the Jesuit murders, committed in November, 1989, to high-level government officials.

U.S. Army Maj. Eric Buckland told the Federal Bureau of Investigation last January that he had advance knowledge of Salvadoran military plans to kill the priests. A week later, he retracted the allegations, saying he made them under pressure from the FBI.

However, lie detector tests indicated that Buckland may have been lying when he said he had no advance knowledge of the killings, an FBI report said.

Judge Ricardo Zamora, in charge of the case, received Buckland’s conflicting testimony last week.

“We thought that almost everything had been done (to prepare the case for trial), but the judge will surely have to look into this,” a court official said Friday.

Buckland told the FBI in January that before the killings he accompanied a colonel sent by El Salvador’s defense minister to a meeting with Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, who has been charged with murder in the case along with eight other servicemen.

Buckland said he waited outside while Col. Carlos Armando Aviles met with Benavides. He said Aviles later told him of the plan to kill the priests.

The Salvadoran military believed the priests were sympathetic to leftist guerrillas fighting the U.S.-backed government.

“Aviles told me they wanted to handle it the old way by killing some of the priests,” Buckland said.

“I’m now aware that I had knowledge of the killings and was told they were planned by Benavides . . . I felt unconcerned that it would happen because other people were talking along those lines, and I didn’t feel that the El Salvadoran armed forces would do something about it,” Buckland said.

Buckland said Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, then armed forces chief of staff and now defense minister, assigned Aviles to calm down Benavides after hearing of his threats.

Last week, the chairman of a U.S. congressional commission monitoring the Jesuit case blasted U.S. officials involved in the investigation for withholding the information from Salvadoran authorities for 10 months.

“At best, I consider this to be an unbelievable and inexcusable error in judgment, and I have made my views known on this subject to the State Department, the Defense Department and the FBI,” Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) said.