A Question of Objectivity

By George Russell

The debate grows over who is killing whom in El Salvador

Anywhere else the court appearance might have been a routine event, but in El Salvador it was momentous. As heavily armed members of the Salvadoran national guard stood by, six of their former colleagues appeared last week before a judge in the town of Zacatecoluca. The judge's task: to decide whether the six should stand trial for the brutal murders 14 months ago of three American nuns, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel, and a U.S. religious lay worker, Jean Donovan. At week's end, the judge ruled that five of the men should be charged with homicide; the sixth, he found, had not been involved in the crimes.

For the first time in El Salvador's four-year-old war against 4,000 to 6,000 Marxist guerrillas, members of the government's 22,000-man security forces were being brought to judicial account over the deaths of noncombatants. Even before the judge's decision, Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, in a national television address, called the men "the only and the true guilty ones" in the crimes. Duarte seemed particularly anxious to squelch accusations that the murders might have been ordered by higher authorities in the Salvadoran military.

Despite Duarte's assertion that justice was being done, the court appearance by the former guardsmen came only after prolonged U.S. pressure on his civilian-military government to take action. That pressure had been given additional urgency by the U.S. Congress, which demanded assurances by the Reagan Administration of action on the murders before releasing $26 million in military assistance and $40 million in economic aid to El Salvador in 1982. As part of the same assurance process, President Reagan last month certified that the Duarte government had made a "concerted, significant and good-faith effort to deal with the complex political, social and human rights problems it is confronting."

Reagan's move seemed only to deepen a vigorous debate over U.S. support for the Duarte government. More than 30,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting in El Salvador. While many victims are the unavoidable casualties of battle, many others are killed in cold blood--mostly by freelance right-wing death squads and government security forces, but also by leftist guerrillas.

The problem is trying to figure out who is killing whom, and a number of human rights organizations in both the U.S. and El Salvador are now engaged in compiling that information. Hardly any of these body counters blame the guerrillas for significant abuses, a sign of the anti-government bias of most of the human rights organizations. Even so, U.S. officials are concerned that the Salvadoran government's publicized reputation for brutality is undermining Administration aid for the regime. Last week Deane Hinton, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, bluntly warned that human rights abuses by government troops have come "dangerously close" to an intolerable limit. Said Hinton: "If there is one issue that could force our Congress to withdraw or seriously reduce its support for El Salvador, it is the issue of human rights."

Indeed, in Washington the most extreme critics of the Administration's policy are likening the growing U.S. role in El Salvador to the early stages of American involvement in Viet Nam (see ESSAY). Other, less strident critics, such as Democratic Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, last week helped to introduce a joint congressional resolution urging the U.S. to promote a negotiated settlement between the government and its leftist opponents. Three delegations of congressional Democrats flew to El Salvador over the weekend to take a closer look at local conditions. Even as the Congressmen began to arrive, another furor broke out, after a U.S. television crew filmed American military instructors in civilian clothes carrying M-16 rifles near an area of guerrilla activity. The military men were helping Salvadorans on a bridge-building exercise, but U.S. policy in El Salvador firmly states that military men must avoid combat zones and carry only sidearms for protection. Ambassador Hinton ordered home the group's leader, Lieut. Colonel Harry Melander, and reprimanded the others.

Concern over El Salvador is also dividing the U.S. press. The Wall Street Journal last week editorially criticized the New York Times and the Washington Post for their reporting Jan. 27 of large-scale killings of civilians by the Salvadoran army in the department of Morazan. The Journal complained that the relatively uncritical handling of the story, especially by the Times, amounted to a "propaganda exercise" for the guerrillas.

The most vehement flurry of words has come over the Reagan Administration's assertion of human rights progress in El Salvador. The official U.S. view of the situation was restated last week in the State Department's annual country-by-country survey of human rights practices around the world. In 1981 in El Salvador, says the report, "human rights violations were frequent, but there was a downward trend in political violence." By the count of the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, there were 6,116 violent deaths during the twelve months, against 9,000 in 1980. The report says the guerrillas, the right-wing death squads and members of the government's internal security forces all have a hand in the violence.

The Administration's conclusions about declining violence have been assailed by a wide variety of human rights organizations. The legal aid office of the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador has set the number of deaths in 1981 at 13,353. Human rights researchers at El Salvador's Central American University put the figure at 13,500. The Salvadoran Human Rights Commission claims that the real number is 16,267. Amnesty International, the highly respected international human rights organization, sent a telegram to President Reagan saying that "we cannot concur" with Washington's assessment that the Salvadoran government is beginning to control the excesses of its own armed forces. The American Civil Liberties Union has issued a 287-page report claiming that the Duarte government is responsible for "the great majority" of some 200 politically motivated murders a week and other forms of systematic repression.

There is little doubt that Salvadoran security forces are involved in large numbers of brutal murders, although the evidence for that is often circumstantial. But many, if not most, of the human rights organizations in El Salvador have given up their objectivity in analyzing the antiguerrilla struggle: their statistics are clearly slanted in favor of the insurgents.

Most of the human rights organizations in El Salvador are relatively new arrivals on the scene. The church aid office was established in 1975 to provide legal services for the country's multitudinous poor. It took up church human rights activities in 1977 at the behest of the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a social radical by Roman Catholic Church standards. The office has been publicly criticized by Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, Romero's more moderate successor, for issuing a series of "one-sided reports" on human rights.

The Salvadoran Human Rights Commission was founded in the early 1970s with the backing of some of the country's Christian Democrats. According to R. Bruce McColm, who has written a study of El Salvador for Manhattan's highly regarded Freedom House, the commission's objectivity was directly compromised when one of the country's most extreme guerrilla groups maneuvered a member into a leadership role in the human rights organization. Since then, says McColm, the commission has been described as "unpatriotic" by Salvadoran President Duarte, himself a Christian Democrat.

The documentation center of the Jesuit-run Central American University was opened in 1976 to investigate social and economic conditions in El Salvador, and began to produce reports on violence in the country only in May 1980. The academics describe their work as that of a "processor of information," not an active investigator of human rights transgressions. But they work from the information of other sources, which include the other local human rights organizations.

Amnesty International and the A.C.L.U. have far greater reputations for objectivity. Founded in London in 1961, Amnesty International has won a Nobel Peace Prize for its human rights efforts. The A.C.L.U. chiefly concerns itself with defending the constitutional rights of American citizens. Indeed, the A.C.L.U. rarely reports on human rights conditions outside the U.S. But despite the high reputations of both organizations, they also are forced to rely on data supplied by the Salvadoran organizations. Furthermore, as groups preoccupied with the behavior of governments toward their citizens, both tend to discount guerrilla atrocities as outside their areas of concern.

Privately, U.S. Government sources admit that their own figures could err by as much as 30%. The problem is that the U.S. embassy in San Salvador compiles its weekly report of killings from local press accounts, which are limited in scope. Also affecting embassy figures is the fact that the State Department refuses to recognize any guerrilla attack as a military engagement, and therefore boosts the number of deaths that it attributes to terrorism.

El Salvador's bloody struggle, and the controversies it has produced, are nowhere near resolution. The indiscriminate killing will doubtless continue, particularly since the guerrillas are expected to try to disrupt scheduled March 28 elections. Ambassador Hinton was only being realistic when he once wrote that "we look for gradual, not rapid improvement [in human rights conditions] over a period of years. Violence is too engrained in this society to expect more.'' --By George Russell. Reported by Hays Gorey/Washington and James Willwerth/San Salvador

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington, James Willwerth/San Salvador

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