Marchers Lobby El Salvador to Back Peace Plan : Human rights: Protest outside L.A. consulate is part of effort to force President Cristiani to adhere to U.N. accord to purge armed forces of abusive officers.

Excoriating El Salvador’s military as “terrorists,” some members of Los Angeles’ exiled Salvadoran community marched outside the Central American nation’s consulate Tuesday and demanded that President Alfredo Cristiani adhere to a United Nations plan to purge the armed forces of known human rights abusers.

“There can be no real peace if the military and its worst elements remain in control,” said Isabel Beltran, who was among those leading the chants of dissension.

The demonstration was part of a broader effort by activists nationwide and in El Salvador to force a reversal by Cristiani, who revealed last week that he was not following a U.N.-brokered peace plan that would have purged the military of more than 100 of its most abusive officers.

In announcing his decision, Cristiani, a member of the right-wing National Republican Alliance party, said he was attempting to avoid potentially destabilizing unrest and legal battles from targeted officers. Critics charged that the government was reluctant to alienate its military sponsors.

Outraged by the president’s decision, opponents in the United States and elsewhere have mounted a campaign that they hope will force the government to remove key military figures, including Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce, the nation’s defense minister. Activists are distributing form protest letters to be forwarded to Cristiani in El Salvador and U.S. congressional representatives in Washington.

“We cannot allow the government of El Salvador to allow those most responsible for murders, massacres and other violations of human rights to remain in power,” said Amilcar Martinez, one of the 50 or so protesters who gathered outside the El Salvador Consulate near MacArthur Park on Tuesday.

Activists say the president’s backpedaling could threaten the U.N.-sponsored peace accords, which last year ended a bloody 12-year civil war between leftist rebels and the government that left more than 75,000 dead and triggered massive flight of the populace. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans in Los Angeles closely monitor developments in their troubled homeland.

Although both sides committed abuses during El Salvador’s conflict, human rights monitors, church groups and others have pointed to the Salvadoran military--long the nation’s most dominant institution, and long underwritten with U.S. tax dollars--as the grossest violator. Investigators have linked the military to mass slaughters of civilians, bombardments of neighborhoods and villages, and the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

With such a tortured history, many Salvadorans residing in Los Angeles expressed outrage that Cristiani was refusing to dismiss key generals and other top military brass. Such a step is essential to bring the armed forces under much-needed civilian control, marchers argued.

“The people of El Salvador, both at home and in Los Angeles, are disgusted by this latest effort to retain the power of the military,” said protester Myron Payes. “The government has not complied with its promises.”