National Agenda : A Matter of Justices : Corrupt courts have perpetuated El Salvador’s misery, a U.N. panel charges.

When army officers accused of the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests were finally brought to trial two years ago, many Salvadorans applauded the event as a sign that justice would be served.

It was rare for a murder case to actually reach a court; rarer still for a military man to face judgment for crimes against civilians.

But after three days of trial and appeals by defense attorneys to the jurors’ sense of patriotism and national pride, seven of the nine defendants, including soldiers who confessed to pulling the triggers, were acquitted.

Only two men--Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides and Lt. Yusshy Rene Mendoza Vallecillos--were convicted in the murders of the priests, their cook and her daughter. More importantly, nothing had been established to indicate how high in the military chain of command the culpability went.

To human rights experts and other veteran monitors of El Salvador’s weak and corrupt judicial system, the verdicts were not that surprising. The case was doomed much earlier, say these observers--by military control over what evidence would come to light and by politically motivated interference with the judiciary.

The state of the Salvadoran judiciary has emerged once again as a hotly debated topic here after a new report blamed the system for helping to perpetuate a brutal 12-year civil war that killed more than 75,000 people.

In its landmark report, the U.N.-appointed Commission on Truth found that judges and the courts have been so dominated and intimidated by the armed forces that justice is scarce. And without a reasonable expectation of justice, the commission said, a society is doomed to violent self-destruction.

“Not one of the three branches of public power--the judicial, legislative or executive--was capable of controlling the overwhelming military domination of society,” the commission stated in its 236-page report, released March 15 in a ceremony at the United Nations.

“The judicial system was weakened as intimidation seized it and laid the foundation for its corruption,” the commission said. “Since this power had never enjoyed a true institutional independence from the legislative and executive branches, its inefficiency only increased until it became, either because of inaction or a regrettable attitude of subordination, a contributing factor to the tragedy that the country has suffered.”

The commission said that a complete overhaul of the judicial system--starting with the removal of all 14 members of the Supreme Court--is crucial to preventing war’s return to El Salvador.

Immediately, this point became the issue that the government and El Salvador’s powerful right wing have seized most ferociously in their efforts to discredit and dismiss the report’s findings.

“The commission is going much further than we ever intended,” said government spokesman Oscar Santamaria, a former justice minister and the government’s representative in peace negotiations. “We did not want these gentlemen . . . to come and propose situations that would destabilize the institutions and the system.”

The report blamed most of the political murder, torture and other war atrocities on state forces and allied death squads. Leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front also came under criticism for murdering civilian mayors and other war crimes.

The guerrillas and El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government forces fought for more than a decade until reaching an impasse two years ago that forced the two sides into negotiations. U.N.-brokered peace accords put a formal end to the war last year.

The same accords established the Commission on Truth. Under the agreement, President Alfredo Cristiani is bound to follow the commission’s recommendations. But over the weekend, his party’s legislators pushed through a blanket amnesty for political murders and related crimes, undermining the commission’s authority.

And where the judiciary is concerned, it appears increasingly unlikely that Cristiani will comply. He is constitutionally barred from firing members of the Supreme Court and does not seem inclined to ask them to step down.

Members of the Supreme Court are chosen by the national Legislative Assembly, which is currently controlled by Cristiani’s rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena. The current justices are serving a five-year term that ends in June, 1994. The next court will be appointed by a new Legislative Assembly following general elections in March of that year.

Supreme Court President Mauricio Gutierrez Castro was criticized most harshly by the U.N. report, which cited his “scarcely professional conduct” and accused him of interfering with explosive cases, including the El Mozote massacre.

El Mozote, a remote hamlet in northeastern El Salvador, was the site in 1981 of an army operation in which soldiers killed hundreds of peasants, many of them children. The case languished virtually untouched by authorities until last year, when activists pressured the government to allow foreign experts to investigate.

Gutierrez Castro is said to have resisted allowing the experts into the country, then dragged his heels throughout the ensuing investigation. The report quoted Gutierrez Castro as saying in July of last year that the exhumation would prove that “only dead guerrillas are buried there.”

Three months later, when the first exhumations were completed, the forensic experts found 143 bodies, of which 131 were children under age 12.

Gutierrez Castro, a member of Arena, has continued to defend his performance and said the Commission on Truth has absolutely no legal or jurisdictional basis for trying to have him dismissed. “Only God can remove me from my post--by taking my life,” he defiantly told reporters.

The left has joined in the call for the Supreme Court to resign and is generally supportive of the commission’s recommendations. “What the Truth Commission wants is an end to the impunity,” FMLN spokesman Leonel Gonzalez said. “And to put an end to impunity, you have to put an end to the structures that have generated this situation of violence.”

During its fratricidal war, El Salvador was a country where a massacre of hundreds of peasants might never reach any sort of legal reckoning; where judges were routinely threatened by army officers and by leftist guerrillas; where both the right and the left often took justice into their own hands.

“Salvadorans don’t look to the justice system to solve their problems,” said Martha Doggett, a member of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

“They have so little experience with a justice system that works that they don’t know what it can do for them. What little experience they have had has produced such mixed results.”

Previous efforts to reform the judiciary have achieved only spotty success.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars over the years on programs intended to buttress the Salvadoran judicial system--part of a total $6-billion package of U.S. economic and military aid to El Salvador during the last decade.

The Salvadoran government has also implemented some reforms, including changing the way the legislature chooses Supreme Court justices with the goal of making the appointments less political.

Still, say critics, there is a long way to go. The judicial system here is “vertical,” meaning that the Supreme Court, whose members are most often elected by the party in charge, holds enormous sway over courts throughout the country.

Until recently, a judge in a criminal case had the dual role of investigating the matter and presiding over it. Juries are not given legal instructions before deliberating on their verdict; they’re told they must decide a case based on “inner conviction” of a person’s guilt or innocence.

Evidence, if not collected by the investigating judge, must be presented by an auxiliary organ of the judiciary--often a division of the state security forces.

“Underwriting Injustice,” a 1989 study of the Salvadoran judiciary by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, found that such an arrangement created judicial paralysis in human rights cases because the only entities with authority to present evidence in cases involving security forces were the security forces themselves.

The most glaring example was the Jesuit case. The Special Investigative Unit, a team of detectives set up as part of the U.S.-financed program in 1985, was in charge of investigating the Jesuit murders.

The Commission on Truth report said that, far from working to clear up the case, Col. Manuel Antonio Rivas Mejia, head of the unit, worked to destroy evidence and hide the truth to protect Benavides.

Rivas Mejia counseled Benavides to destroy the barrels of the guns used to kill the priests and to burn log books that showed who attended a meeting where the murders were apparently ordered. The Commission on Truth found that Defense Minister Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce ordered the slayings, a charge he has denied.