CENTRAL AMERICA : Salvadoran Ex-Soldiers Protest Over Peace Pay

During El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, raucous street demonstrations were common, carried out by students, union activists and the political left, all angry at a string of repressive, military-backed governments.

Today, more than two years after the war formally ended, increasingly violent demonstrations have again filled the streets of this capital.

This time, the protesters are former soldiers from the Salvadoran military and its police branches, angry at a government they believe they once fought to support.

The soldiers, who lost their jobs as part of U.N.-brokered peace accords that required the army to be cut in half, seized the Salvadoran National Assembly last month and took dozens of legislators hostage.

One person was killed in the four-day incident, during which the Finance Ministry and other government buildings were also occupied.

And this week, about 600 former soldiers rampaged outside the presidential palace, burning tires and battling police until they were dispersed by tear gas and rubber bullets. Inside, President Armando Calderon Sol was hosting Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, and the brouhaha forced the two to cut short a press conference.

Several people were hurt, and two police officers were forced out of their cars by masked demonstrators who confiscated the officers’ weapons and overturned the patrol vehicle.

“Some of our people are fed up with waiting (for answers) through legal means,” said Mauricio Cornejo, head of an organization claiming to represent thousands of demobilized army men. “This is a time bomb.”

The violence, analysts say, has handed a difficult challenge to El Salvador’s first post-war government, already reeling from corruption scandals and a frightening crime wave. It shows that neither the government nor Salvadoran society is yet able to resolve conflicts in a peaceful way.

“We condemn these actions . . . promoted by a group of people with violent attitudes that endanger peace, democracy and the stability of the nation,” Calderon Sol said in a televised address after the occupation of the National Assembly.

He accused demonstrators of being manipulated by “those who act in the shadows” and who want El Salvador to “return to the law of the jungle.”

Cornejo and the other former soldiers are demanding severance pay and land that they claim they are owed as part of the peace accords. The government maintains that the demands go beyond what was envisioned in the accords but acknowledges that payment of severance indemnities has been slow.

*

A delegation led by Vice President Enrique Borgo Bustamante traveled to New York last month to ask U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for help in covering a $137-million shortfall in financing provisions of the peace accords.

Since the war’s end, the United Nations has maintained a peacekeeping mission in El Salvador, charged with monitoring a landmark treaty that raised high hopes, which have gradually been eroded by reality and politics. The U.N. mission is scheduled to close April 30.

Alarmed by the new and recurring outbreaks of violence, however, Boutros-Ghali proposed to the Security Council that a U.N. team continue to operate in El Salvador after the original mandate ends.