More Salvador Officers Will Be Purged, Cristiani Says : Central America: Pressed from at home and abroad about delays, the president pledges to fulfill peace pact.

Hit with a firestorm of protest over delays in purging El Salvador’s armed forces of their worst human rights abusers, President Alfredo Cristiani promised Monday to remove more officers from duty.

Warned by both Washington and the United Nations that he must carry out a complete purge, Cristiani sent two special envoys to New York to inform top U.N. officials of his plans to fire or transfer dozens of officers.

But diplomatic sources familiar with the planned purge said that Cristiani’s list will omit several senior officers whose removals are being demanded, including the defense minister, Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce. And other dismissals are likely to be postponed, the sources said.

The purge is a key step required by U.N.-brokered peace accords that last month ended El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. It is seen as a test of whether the powerful military that long dominated this country can be brought under civilian control.

“The purge of the armed forces is the just and necessary vindication of the victims who suffered repression . . . (and is) an essential and decisive step to making democracy possible,” commanders of the former rebel coalition said Monday in urging Cristiani to finish the task immediately.

The former rebels have disarmed as part of the peace accords but are holding onto a stockpile of antiaircraft missiles until the purge is complete.

Under the accords, the armed forces were to have been cleansed of corrupt and abusive officers by Dec. 31. When that deadline came, Cristiani issued an order that fired only three officers and gave new command posts to at least seven officers who have been accused of violations by human rights groups.

Because other dismissals said to have been ordered were kept secret, Cristiani’s apparently limited actions unleashed a wave of condemnations from the political left, the Roman Catholic Church and the United Nations.

“The military continues to stomp all over the presidential office,” Radio Farabundo Marti, formerly a rebel station, said in a broadcast editorial Monday. “This signifies that the military is a cancer that has not been removed, even though the war has concluded.”

Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of San Salvador cautioned that “the peace accords must not be played with,” and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali over the weekend warned Cristiani that he was in danger of violating the peace agreement.

Faced with such mounting pressure, Cristiani’s press office Monday released a statement announcing the existence of a supplementary order of transfers and dismissals of officers. The confidential list is to be delivered to U.N. officials today. If the purge or any other part of the peace accords are not fulfilled, El Salvador risks losing vital U.S. economic aid.

Under the accords, a three-member civilian ad hoc commission was set up to review the military and make binding recommendations to Cristiani. The panel interviewed about 200 officers before recommending the removal of more than 100 men, including Ponce and his deputy minister, Gen. Orlando Zepeda, according to sources familiar with the commission’s work.

Although the armed forces originally agreed to go along with the purge, the scope of the commission’s recommendations was broader than anyone expected. Top army officers openly criticized the commission, saying that its efforts were part of an international leftist conspiracy to discredit the Salvadoran military.

For Cristiani, conducting the purge is undoubtedly the most difficult task he is bound to complete under the peace accords. Secretly and without public fanfare, dozens of officers have been cashiered, relieved of command posts or transferred in the last two weeks, diplomatic and military sources say.

But a small, core group of officers has so far been spared, these sources say. For weeks, Cristiani, under enormous pressure from senior military commanders, sought to negotiate with former guerrillas a plan whereby the purge would be gradual. Arguing that the stability of the nation was at stake, Cristiani told the guerrilla commanders that he wanted to exonerate or delay the departure of as many as 14 officers, among them Ponce, diplomatic and rebel sources say.

In exchange, the rebels would receive better-quality land and more money for retraining. Through long and arduous negotiations, the list of officers for whom exceptions would be made was whittled to seven. But the former rebels were sharply divided over the issue, and the talks finally fell apart Dec. 30 before agreement could be reached.

On Monday, the five top commanders of the former rebel coalition met privately for several hours, then were scheduled to meet with Cristiani again later.

The war here between U.S.-backed government forces and leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front killed an estimated 75,000 people and occasioned brutal atrocities on both sides. With the peace accords signed a year ago and formalized last month, the guerrillas agreed to lay down their weapons and become a political party, while the government agreed to sweeping political and military reforms, chief among them the purge.

The fact that several commanders of the former guerrilla front were willing to negotiate with Cristiani over the purge--and perhaps give reprieves to some officers--angered many of the Farabundo Marti rank and file and others on the political left.