COLUMN LEFT : Fight Some Butchers, Pay Others : Bush’s restoration of aid to the Salvadoran government was at the least cynically timed.

Less than a month after President Bush chose Jan. 15 as the date to restore $42.5 million of military aid to the Salvadoran government comes the destruction of the single Salvadoran newspaper not utterly subservient to that country’s brutal overlords. In the early hours of Feb. 9, the offices of Diario Latino were burned to the ground. The paper’s director has no doubts about the authors of this arson attack. As he stood in the rubble he said, “I, Francisco Valencia, accuse the armed forces of this deed. But they will not silence us.”

Just six months ago, Diario was described in the New York Times as “one of the only newspapers to breach the traditional strict limits on freedom of expression.” It was the sole Salvadoran newspaper to criticize the governing Arena party and the Armed Forces, to offer a voice to political opposition, to publish the full text of U.S. Rep. Joe Moakley’s report on the Jesuit murders investigation, and its reporters the only local journalists to visit FMLN-held territory in an attempt to cover the war fairly. Diario has now paid the price for its courage.

As he ordered the bombers over Iraq, President Bush did not forget to lend heart to the Salvadoran military and its death squads. Within six days of his restoration of full aid, 15 peasants were massacred by hooded men in El Zapote, just outside the capital of San Salvador. Based on the findings of Tutela Legal, the Catholic Church’s human-rights organization, San Salvador’s Archbishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas, has charged the Salvadoran military with the crime, the worst human-rights abuse since the murders of the Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter 14 months ago.

A week after the El Zapote massacre on Jan. 29, the U.S. government rewarded the Salvadoran army with a fresh delivery of three A-37 Dragonfly jets and six UH-1M helicopters. Three days later, the army detained for three hours a group of 18 journalists, six of them foreign reporters, including the Los Angeles Times and CBS correspondents. As these journalists returned from Morazan, where they had been covering the rebels’ return of SAM missiles to the Nicaraguan government, their equipment was confiscated and they were told, “If this happens again, you could all be dead.”

The dispatch of military hardware more than makes up for the U.S. Huey UH-1 shot down by the FMLN in Lolotigue on Jan. 2. After the crash, two wounded U.S. military advisers were shot by members of the guerrilla unit, providing the justification for renewed aid. The FMLN has admitted responsibility, dismissed the culprits from active ranks and announced that they will hold a trial with the participation of independent observers.

Compare this with developments in the investigation of the Jesuit killings. The investigation has been a grotesque affair, marked by destroyed evidence, false testimony and collusion between U.S. and Salvadoran officials. Right after Bush announced his intention to restore aid, two of the chief prosecutors in the case resigned, citing their attorney general’s failure to stand up to pressure from the armed forces. A Jan. 7 report by Rep. Moakley’s staff states: “Perhaps the best summary of the current status of the case was provided by one Salvadoran government official who told us that ‘the armed forces wrote the first act of the Jesuits’ case by murdering the priests; now, they are writing the final act by controlling the investigation.’ ”

Despite the fact that the original aid cut was premised on the failure to prosecute the Jesuits’ killers, there was barely a whisper of congressional resistance to Bush’s restoration of aid. But most despicable about the new infusion of aid is Bush’s use of the Gulf War as a distracting cover.

Congress capitulated because, as Moakley (D-Mass.) put it, “All our constituents see or hear about is the Gulf. If we make a big stink about El Salvador, our constitutents are going to ask: ‘What about our kids in the Gulf?’ ”

As Bush faced the nation in the first hours of bombing, invoking Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, Salvadoran killers accused by peasants of disemboweling pregnant women and casting their fetuses into bonfires could exult at the prospect of more U.S. cash to underwrite their savageries.

Amid all the second-guessing after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait came public revulsion at the disclosure of how devoted a defender of Iraq’s brutalities the United States government had been through much of the 1980s. The Salvadoran government, far more dependent on U.S. funds, has needed no lessons from Baghdad in the abuse of human rights. Nothing more underlines the hollowness of Bush’s claims to be leading a moral crusade in the Middle East than his energetic sponsorship of the horrors in El Salvador.