El Salvador Reforms Incomplete, U.N. Says : Central America: The government hasn’t met today’s deadline for land distribution to veterans and housing for war refugees, report declares.

Nearly four years after the signing of a peace agreement to end more than a decade of civil war, the government today missed its deadline for completing the reforms promised in the treaty, according to the U.N. mission overseeing implementation.

The U.N. report confirms what almost weekly recent demonstrations in this capital city and land seizures in the provinces have indicated: The government is behind in its commitment to give land to former soldiers and guerrillas who fought in the 12-year conflict.

Nearly one-fourth of the former combatants have not received their land, the United Nations found. The report also determined that rural housing programs for war refugees are even further behind than the land distribution plan.

The government’s failure to meet its commitments has provoked concerns among politicians and religious leaders that rising impatience could cause social unrest.

Earlier this month, former combatants occupied a government building and took employees hostage to demand that the government distribute land and death benefits to survivors.

Police have dispersed squatters on various occasions, and many Salvadorans worry that violent confrontations could occur. A legislative proposal of jail sentences for people involved in land seizures created a public outcry.

“I call for the transfer of farming basics so that everyone can support his family decently,” Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle, who normally refrains from political comments, said during his weekly Sunday news conference.

The United Nations has extended deadlines to Dec. 31 for land distribution and April 30, 1996, for rural housing projects to provide new homes for war refugees.

But the mounting social pressure created by the government’s failure thus far to keep its commitments may prove hard to defuse, analysts warned.

While acknowledging that the government has not given away all the land it promised, Mauricio Ernesto Vargas, the presidential commissioner charged with implementing the peace accord, said the agreement’s terms have been 95% fulfilled.

Complying with the agreement has cost the government of El Salvador more than $2 billion. Slightly less than one-third of that amount was supplied by international agencies.

To fund the remainder, the government in June raised the value-added tax to 13% from 10%, provoking protests and creating double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy, according to many economists.

More than one-fourth of the $2 billion has been used to establish democratic institutions, notably the National Civilian Police, which replaced the military police force.

Staffed half by former guerrillas and half by former soldiers, the civilian police have started out with a tarnished reputation. Church leaders and politicians have called for a cleanup of the new police amid charges of corruption and police participation in “social cleansing” murders.