Saving the Peace in El Salvador : The left has balked as the U.S. holds a key to preventing revival of a ghastly war

The El Salvador peace accord that brought a ghastly civil war to an end last January is in imminent danger of collapse. On Friday of last week, the leaders of the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, indefinitely suspended the staged demobilization of their guerrilla forces.

The FMLN charges the government with several violations of the peace accord. The most important of these, and the one that the United States may even at this late hour help to address, is the charge that the Salvadoran government is preventing the creation of a civilian police force.

During the 12 years of the war, the Salvadoran military turned its weapons not just against the leftist FMLN but against the Salvadoran people. Last September, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides was convicted of giving the order that led to the 1989 murder, by an army death squad, of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Hundreds of other such incidents have been documented, and so it is crucial that, by the terms of the peace accord, the army as such is to have no further role in domestic security. For those purposes, a civilian police force drawn in part from both the army and the FMLN is to replace it. In April, the U.S. Congress approved $21.5 million for the Salvadoran military and $64.7 million for the implementation of the peace accords, including, crucially, the creation of this new police force.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has refused to open its files on the army it trained and funded for so long with so many hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars. The three-member Salvadoran civilian commission charged with purging the military of war criminals en route to the creation of the new police force has been stonewalled, and there is no other good source for information on army abuses. The Aug. 15 deadline for the report of that commission is clearly not going to be met.

The result? The FMLN has balked at what begins to look like a unilateral demobilization that would leave not just its supporters but, in principle, the entire country at the mercy of an army still intact and still funded by the United States. The peace accord did not call for that.

On June 7, 1992, Russia opened the 100-million-document Communist Party archives. When so extensive a record is thrown open for review, no one, including the current incumbents, is necessarily safe from embarrassment. But opening the archives was clearly the right decision: Without candor, there can be no recovery from the abuses of a police state.

The same path is the one that the Bush Administration should follow in opening U.S. files on El Salvador. The stakes, for Americans, are small. For Salvadorans, whose newborn peace is now gasping for each breath, they have never been higher.