Pact Reached on Salvador Officer Purge

Government and leftist rebel leaders have agreed to a timetable for purging dozens of abusive and corrupt officers from El Salvador’s armed forces, a senior U.N. official said Saturday.

The agreement apparently resolves the most serious crisis to hit El Salvador’s peace accords since the end of a brutal 12-year civil war in January, but the military’s reaction will likely be decisive.

“It looks like we have total agreement. There are still a few minor details to sort out, but it augurs well for the delicate weeks ahead,” said U.N. Assistant Secretary General Alvaro de Soto.

He did not give details of the timetable.

The U.N.-brokered peace plan had begun to unravel last month as each side accused the other of foot-dragging in complying with demobilization deadlines.

Under the accords, President Alfredo Cristiani’s government is obliged to cut the 60,000-member armed forces by 50%, demobilize counterinsurgency units and remove officers who have committed human rights abuses. Since the civil war was formally ended in January, about 1,500 rebel fighters have laid down arms.

The government and rebels recently agreed to postpone the peace plan’s initial Oct. 31 deadline to Dec. 15, although Cristiani said he would suspend the restructuring of the armed forces until all rebels have demobilized.

De Soto did not elaborate on whether Cristiani had changed his stance but said an understanding had been reached that made him optimistic of “a definitive end to the war” by Dec. 15.

Last week, Deputy Defense Minister Juan Orlando Zepeda openly criticized Cristiani for giving too much ground to the United Nations and the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

Zepeda and Defense Minister Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce are both believed to be on the list of officers to be removed. Military chiefs are incensed by the scale of the purge, drawn up by a three-man civilian panel created under the accords.

Sources close to the military command say officers are desperate not to leave with the stigma of human rights atrocities hanging over them. Human rights groups say the army backed, and in some cases ran, the death squads that killed thousands of suspected leftists in the early years of the war.