LATIN AMERICA : U.S. Military in El Salvador at Center of Another Scandal

The civil war is over, and the presence of U.S. Army advisers is being substantially reduced.

Yet suddenly, for the second time in three months, the U.S. military here finds itself at the center of scandal.

First, an American defense attache leaving a party shot and killed his Salvadoran bodyguard; the army major was whisked out of the country but may be court-martialed.

Next, an American lieutenant colonel tried to prove to Salvadoran police that a grenade he was holding was a dud. He pulled the pin, and the explosion killed him and wounded four Salvadoran policemen and bodyguards.

During the long war that the U.S. government helped fight against El Salvador’s Marxist guerrillas, such incidents probably would have been kept quiet. But now, in a sign of how times change, the cases are being widely publicized and criticized--by the left, to be sure, but even more vociferously by the right and the institutions of a government long bolstered by the U.S.

Suggesting that alcohol or drugs were involved in the cases, the head of the Salvadoran police--a force built largely with U.S. money--went so far as to demand that all U.S. Embassy personnel submit to drug tests.

“Many of these people were once in Vietnam,” said Jose Maria Monterrey, chief of the National Civilian Police, “so I think it would be appropriate for them to take dope-detection tests.”

Monterrey based his comments on a report from chief coroner Juan Mateu Llort, who claimed that U.S. Army Lt. Col. Julio Rivera was under the influence of three drugs when he detonated the grenade. This week, however, the U.S. Embassy said drug tests were negative. When questioned, an agitated Monterrey responded, “The courts, not the embassy, are the authority here.”

Since El Salvador’s civil war formally ended in 1992, members of El Salvador’s right-wing government have become increasingly angry at the Clinton Administration, which has released incriminating documents about the right’s war-time involvement in death squads.

Police say Maj. Ismael Lopez, an assistant army attache assigned to the U.S. Embassy, killed his bodyguard, Jose Crescencio Diaz, on Jan. 21 after becoming drunk at a party. Diaz had taken away Lopez’s gun, but then returned it and was shot.

What most rankled Salvadorans was that Lopez, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity, was immediately put under the protection of the U.S. Embassy and sent out of the country in a U.S. military aircraft.

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Police Chief Monterrey accused embassy personnel of interfering with the investigation. Supreme Court President Mauricio Gutierrez Castro, who himself has been accused of botching cases in the past and is under international pressure to resign, suggested that laws were broken in spiriting Lopez away. The Salvadoran Foreign Ministry demanded an explanation of the procedure used in arranging his departure.

Embassy officials deny tampering with the investigation but have agreed to more formal clearance of military air traffic in the future, according to sources.

They also sought to assure the Salvadorans that Lopez would be submitted to U.S. military justice.

A hearing is scheduled next Wednesday to decide whether Lopez will be court-martialed on a charge of unpremeditated murder, according to a spokesman at U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Panama.

Just as the Lopez case was fading from public awareness, Rivera was killed April 3.

Three Salvadoran guards were stopped by police for speeding and jailed when police found a hand grenade and other weapons on them.

Rivera was summoned to the police station to take them into custody, but he first tried to prove that the grenade was a dud. When it exploded, it killed him and wounded two policemen and two of the Salvadoran guards.

The embassy, expressing “dismay” over the accident, flew the two police officers who were most seriously wounded to Texas for treatment.