Salvador Faces Crucial Test in Purging Abusive Officers : Reform: Success of peace agreement with rebels and hopes for democracy hinge on cleanup of military.

El Salvador’s military is nervously awaiting the purge of its worst human rights abusers, an unprecedented move seen as key to the success of promised democratic reforms and to the peace accords that ended 12 years of brutal civil war.

Under terms of a U.N.-brokered peace settlement signed by the government and left-wing guerrillas last January, a three-member Ad Hoc Commission investigated the military. Late last month, commission members--all civilians--handed President Alfredo Cristiani a list of dozens of officers who the commission determined should be removed from duty because of corruption and abuses.

Although the purge list is still secret, it is believed to contain the names of as many as 90 senior officers, possibly including two generals.

The commission’s work will test whether El Salvador can change the course of a long, bitter history in which members of the powerful U.S.-backed armed forces have almost always gone unpunished for crimes ranging from torture to mass murder.

“This is the beginning of the end of impunity and of all kinds of abuse,” said Eduardo Molina Olivares, a retired professor and founder of the Christian Democratic Party who served on the Ad Hoc Commission.

“We acted on moral and ethical grounds (and) made very important and far-reaching decisions.”

Cristiani is bound under the peace accords to carry out the commission’s recommendations, and his actions will measure whether the military can finally be brought under civilian control. Some observers wonder if the president has the political muscle to carry out the agreements.

Cristiani, who is under intense international pressure, has 60 days to act from Sept. 23, the date the final report was delivered to him and to U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

The prospect of a purge is inflaming tensions in a country slowly recovering from a war that left tens of thousands of people dead. It is unsettling to an already disgruntled military that resents being targeted for scrutiny and reform. The military and the political right wing both question the impartiality of the commission, and rumors that a coup d’etat was being plotted have circulated regularly in the capital. Most observers, however, consider a coup unlikely at this time.

Never before in Latin America has a military Establishment been willing to submit to such an extensive house-cleaning carried out by civilians. In Argentina, five members of a ruling military junta were tried and convicted for human rights violations, but they were eventually pardoned.

“This is a very painful time for (the military),” a U.N. official said. “With all the power they had for so long, to find themselves, practically overnight, pressured from all sides is very difficult.”

Military officials charge that the guerrillas are not keeping their part of the bargain, which includes gradual demobilization of rebel fighters. About 40% of 8,000 guerrillas have laid down their weapons, according to U.N. peacekeepers, but many are resisting while awaiting titles to land, another thorny aspect of the peace accords that has yet to be resolved.

At the same time, critics on the left, including many from the guerrillas’ umbrella organization, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), fear that the purge won’t go far enough. If it does not, they warn, the military will remain an imperious, dangerous institution free to abuse power without being held accountable.

Many fear a violent backlash from the armed forces, which are believed to possess intelligence files on the government’s opponents.

“The biggest danger is not a coup d’etat because that makes no sense,” opposition politician Ruben Zamora said. “The danger is that they unleash a dirty war.”

Zamora and others are demanding that Cristiani eventually turn the Ad Hoc Commission’s report over to independent leaders so that they can monitor the government’s compliance. Both the government and military, however, are determined to keep the report confidential.

Sources familiar with the report say that it strikes directly at the military’s long-protected, 2,300-man officer corps. The commission’s three members interviewed about 250 men, most of them generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels, and reviewed their service records. A number of majors and captains implicated in specific instances of mass killings were also interviewed.

The most intense speculation revolves around whether the defense minister, Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce, and his vice minister, Gen. Orlando Zepeda, are slated to be purged. Both were implicated by a U.S. House of Representatives Democratic task force in the planning of a massacre in 1989 in which six Jesuit priests were killed. Both have denied involvement.

Previously, Zepeda headed intelligence and commanded the 1st Brigade, a unit widely accused of operating death squads. In the early 1980s, Ponce was in charge of the militarized Treasury Police during a time when leaders of the left were being murdered.

Zepeda, reacting last week to reports of an imminent purge, defended his troops and said that any “so-called violations” were committed as part of the military’s constitutional duty to protect and serve.

“We are in a deplorable war of images where all the enemies of the armed forces and military chiefs are appearing,” Zepeda said. “Those military men affected (by the purge) must be allowed to know why they are being dismissed or transferred and must be presented with the proof.”

In addition to the purge, the peace accords require the military to reduce its 63,000 members by half, to disband elite counterinsurgency battalions and to let civilians oversee training in the future.

So far, about 20,000 soldiers have been discharged, and the Treasury Police and national guard--security forces that had bad human rights records--have been disbanded.

The accords also set up a second panel--a so-called Truth Commission--to investigate the country’s most egregious human rights atrocities, including the mass killing of about 1,000 peasants at El Mozote in 1981 and the murder of Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980.

Molina said the Ad Hoc Commission relied in part on information from El Rescate, a Los Angeles-based agency that compiled hundreds of pages of data on human rights violations and cross-referenced the information with the records of 300 officers. El Rescate singled out 66 officers who held command positions over army units that allegedly committed serious crimes.

The Truth Commission will also receive reports from another Los Angeles agency, the Central American Refugee Center, which plans to interview hundreds of survivors of massacres and other atrocities who now live in Southern California.

Military leaders question the objectivity of the Ad Hoc Commission and are demanding to see proof of its allegations. They reject the notion of “impunity”--the idea that the military has long gone unpunished for human rights violations--saying that the military has traditionally punished its own.

“The problem is that because of a few bad (members), an entire institution is being judged,” said Col. Carlos Rolando Herrarte, commander of the 5th Brigade. “Our doubt is that the results (of the commission’s work) will not be objective, but subjective.”

Herrarte and many others in the military resent the fact that leaders of the Farabundo Marti Front are not being subjected to the same human rights probe. The Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador and human rights organizations say that, while guerrillas committed many abuses, they did not act out of a systematic program to kill civilians.

Herrarte was named in the El Rescate report, which holds him responsible for an army contingent that committed 48 abuses.

Herrarte was in Los Angeles late last month to speak to a panel on El Salvador at the annual International Congress of the Latin American Studies Assn. Even there, in the setting of a hotel ballroom, the tensions brewing at home were in clear evidence.

Sharing the podium with representatives of the United Nations and the guerrillas, Herrarte delivered an acerbic, hard-line speech in which he blamed the “Communist terrorists” of the FMLN for posing a continued threat to peace.

“We’ve completed our part of the agreement, even when it went to the very purview of the military,” he told the panel. “The armed forces have been tolerant and obedient. . . . We worked to obtain definitive and irreversible peace. Is the FMLN doing the same?”

The army’s security concerns have been heightened by the discovery of six hidden stockpiles of rebel weaponry. And anger and frustration continue over the distribution of 520,000 acres of land to former combatants who, under the peace accords, are supposed to receive plots in exchange for demobilizing. The government is supposed to buy the land from its original owners at market prices, but authorities complain that they don’t have the money to do so.

Despite persistent obstacles and bitter recriminations, there has been no violation of a cease-fire that went into effect when the peace accords were signed Jan. 16, according to U.N. officials. But it is increasingly unlikely that the Oct. 31 deadline for final rebel demobilization will be met.

Under the accords, the commission does not have to present a case against any officer whose dismissal is being recommended. Nor does the commission remand anyone to trial; it can only require that a designated member of the military be dismissed or reassigned.

Bernard Aronson, the Bush Administration’s top State Department official for Latin America, and Gen. George Joulwan, commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, visited El Salvador last week to discuss the purge commission’s report with army officials and Cristiani.

“I’m not going to say it’s not a bitter pill for the armed forces to swallow, because clearly it is,” Aronson told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador. “It obviously adds to the tensions of the moment.”

Wilkinson reported from Los Angeles, and Miller, The Times’ bureau chief in Mexico City, was recently on assignment in El Salvador.