CENTRAL AMERICA : Salvador Military Shows It’s Still Not Ready to Surrender

When air force jets streaked the sky on a recent afternoon and tanks and troops rolled through the center of this capital city, the occasion, ostensibly, was Soldier Day. The message, however, went deeper: El Salvador’s armed forces sought to show they remain a powerful force, one that still controls its destiny.

That destiny these days includes a debate over whether the next defense minister--traditionally this nation’s most powerful military man--should be a civilian.

The army votes a resounding “no.” Others think it might not be a bad idea.

A new defense minister, to be named on June 30, will replace Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce. Two U.N.-appointed panels have recommended that Ponce be removed from duty because of his role in human rights atrocities during this country’s 12-year civil war.

His replacement will be in charge of building a new postwar army, and some Salvadorans believe that task is best performed by a civilian.

But when rumors circulated that President Alfredo Cristiani was considering his close aide, Presidency Minister Oscar Santamaria, for the post, Ponce and other army officials were quick to insist that the job go to a fellow officer.

“It would be inopportune (and) inappropriate to put in a civilian,” Ponce said after last week’s Soldier Day festivities.

The Salvadoran army already is undergoing the most far-reaching reform in its history, ordered as part of U.N.-brokered peace accords that ended the war. Its size is being cut in half, and, most important, 102 senior officers are being purged because of poor human rights records or corruption.

Cristiani, responding to intense pressure from the military and the right-wing political party that is his power base, resisted the purge and sought to exempt a final core group of 15 officers, including Ponce. The Clinton Administration responded by suspending $11 million in military aid pending completion of the purge. Finally, Cristiani relented and agreed to U.N. demands to remove Ponce and the others by July 1.

Another sign that the purge was at long last being completed came May 1, when the army announced the dismissal from active duty of two colonels implicated in the cover-up of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter.

The list of officers to be purged was drawn up by a three-member panel of prominent Salvadoran civilians. Its work was followed several months later by the war crimes report, produced by the U.N.-appointed Commission on Truth, a three-member committee of international jurists.

Their conclusions leave Cristiani in a difficult position as he looks for a new defense minister. Four of the army’s five generals, all six brigade commanders and many of the other ranking officers who might be eligible to run the Defense Ministry are cited by one or both of the U.N. panels.

The one general unmentioned by either panel, Deputy Chief of Staff Mauricio Ernesto Vargas, was one of the government’s leading negotiators in the peace talks. He was widely seen as the likely next defense minister until it became clear that many in the army felt he had sold them out by agreeing to the creation of the two panels.

Political and diplomatic analysts say that, despite the dearth of appropriate candidates to choose from, Cristiani is unlikely to risk incurring further military wrath by naming a civilian defense minister.

“This is the best moment to do it, but he won’t,” said Gerardo LeChevallier of the Christian Democratic Party.