When Justification Is Named Certification

At our most recent Sojourners staff meeting, we were reviewing the content of this month's issue: "...and there will be an editorial on the justification of aid to El Salvador." The slip of the managing editor's tongue was unintentional, but spoke more to the point than do the proclamations of the Reagan administration about the human rights situation in El Salvador.

Last year Congress passed a ruling that the continuation of military aid to El Salvador would be conditional on Reagan's certification every six months of improvements in the country in four areas: human rights, control over its military forces, economic reforms, and commitment to free elections and negotiations among the competing factions in El Salvador's civil war. This summer progress on the investigation into the December, 1980 murders of four U.S. missionary women was added to the list of criteria.

At issue is $81 million in military aid committed for this year, and a proposed $166 million for next. On July 27, the Reagan administration, in a 48-page document signed by Secretary of State George Shultz, certified that conditions for the continuation of aid had been met.

Tragically lacking in the certification process is the requirement of proof. All evidence coming from the strife-torn country suggests that conditions have only worsened in the past six months. Since the country shifted to extreme right-wing control in March, the deaths have continued to mount.

Roberto D'Abuisson, leader of the ultra-right Republican National Alliance (ARENA), emerged as the head of the constituent assembly in the March elections. He made a campaign promise "to stamp out the guerrillas within a few months" by calling on 100,000 Salvadorans to take up their guns, an open invitation to slaughter.

"Guerrilla" is a term that in the eyes of the Salvadoran government carries no distinctions between an armed opposition and unarmed men, women, and children. In mid-May the army launched a 10-day military operation, its largest to date, in the northern province of Chalatenango. More than 5,000 troops, including a battalion recently returned from training in the United States, participated in the operation, which claimed the lives of up to 600 peasants. Two hundred were killed trying to flee across the river border into Honduras.

Twelve leaders of the Christian Democrat Party, whose Jose Napoleon Duarte held the presidency until March, were among victims of political killings since the elections. That such massacres and assassinations continue to occur, often accompanied by torture, mutilation, and rape, flies in the face of Reagan administration assertions that military troops are being brought under control.

Progress on the investigation into the slayings of the U.S. women was pronounced by the Salvadoran judge in charge of the case to be at a dead end a year after the murders. A second judge picked up the case and also subsequently resigned. The five National Guard soldiers being held for their alleged participation in the murders have yet to be brought to trial.

In their pursuit for resolution of the murders, members of the women's families have encountered non-cooperation from the U.S. State Department. They and many others believe that the Salvadoran and U.S. governments are involved in a cover-up designed to protect Salvadoran high officials who may be implicated in the deaths.

With Reagan's first certification in January, he included a memorandum stating that "one of the cornerstones of the reform program is land reform....Through assassinations of agrarian reform officials and intimidation of peasants, the extreme right seeks to defeat implementation of the law." This statement was issued in the pre-election days as justification for U.S. support of the "moderate" Duarte government.

With that extreme right now in power, the Reagan administration finds itself in an embarrassing dilemma. One of the constituent assembly's first official actions was to repeal the decree that was the foundation of agrarian and banking reforms proposed under Duarte's rule. The land reform was further dismantled when Decree 207 of the "Land to the Tiller" program, which entitled more than 150,000 tenant farmers to purchase land, was suspended for a year and the second phase of the reform indefinitely postponed. These actions were accompanied by the eviction of more than 9,000 peasant families from provisional lands.

Perhaps the administration's blundering efforts to produce evidence of massive Soviet and Cuban intervention in El Salvador taught it something about lying to the U.S. public. In this case, the administration is not denying that human rights abuses go on and that the land reform is in jeopardy--the evidence is too overwhelming. It simply takes the tack that, as bad as things are, slow improvements are perceptible and, after all, think how much worse things would be if we didn't keep pumping in military aid to try to stabilize the situation. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders said in defending the certification, "Progress is marred but real."

One of the administration's brief points of pride was the March elections. Hailed by U.S. officials as a stunning triumph for democracy, even this seems to have backfired. Reports released over the summer from scholars in El Salvador and the United States point out voting discrepancies and the probability of fraud. Close calculations show that it was logistically impossible for a million and a half Salvadorans to have voted, as election officials claimed.

Glowing government reports in the United States about high voter turnout did not take into consideration that voters' I.D. cards were stamped at the polls, so that persons with unstamped cards could be targeted for reprisals later as "guerrilla sympathizers." Nor was it mentioned that ballots were numbered and placed in transparent ballot boxes, so that votes cast were traceable. And the U.S. government seems to have forgotten that the opposition parties were not allowed in the elections, under the threat of death. A stunning triumph for democracy.

President Reagan had a difficult enough time trying to overlook military abuses that were carried out under the Duarte government, which claimed a public commitment to reform. But power has now been further consolidated in the barbarous hands of the military by the naming of Alvaro Magana, the army's choice, as provisional president of the country and by D'Abuisson's prominence. In his inaugural address, Magana triumphantly declared that his government "has nothing to negotiate." D'Abuisson is well known as a torturer and the founder of a death squad. Former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador Robert White claims that evidence links D'Abuisson to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Until the elections, D'Abuisson was disallowed entrance to the United States. But now Reagan is doing his best, under the catch-all guise of stopping communism, to paint a terrorist government in the best light possible.

Opposition to the certification burst forth from human rights groups, the church, and Capitol Hill. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) called the document a "sham." Efforts are under way in Congress to declare the certification null and void.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Americas Watch issued a 272-page counter-report charging the Salvadoran government with a campaign of "systematic political murder" that claimed 2,829 lives in the first half of this year, a figure corroborated by the legal aid office of the archdiocese of San Salvador. The report alleges that the certification document bases its assumptions solely on claims by the Salvadoran government and statistics from Salvadoran newspapers.

One senior official at the State Department said in defense of the certification, "We call it as we see it." But the United States is more than an unbiased referee in the confrontation in El Salvador between the government and a people consigned to miserable poverty. The Reagan administration remains blind to the suffering caused by U.S. military aid. The aid continues to flow, and the people continue to die.

When justification is named certification, the poor always suffer.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.