
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 23, 1990                   TAG: 9005230415
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HOUSE OKS, THEN KILLS, CUTS IN EL SALVADOR AID

The House symbolically voted Tuesday night to put sharp curbs on U.S. military aid to El Salvador, but reversed itself moments later and killed the bill to which the curbs had been attached.

The action came just a few hours after House and Senate negotiators completed a separate, $4 billion bill sending emergency aid to new democracies in Nicaragua and Panama.

The 250-163 vote to restrict Salvador aid was intended largely as a show of strength designed to increase pressure on the Bush administration to accept tough new restrictions on military assistance beginning with the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

The move also was a sign of growing dissatisfaction in Congress with El Salvador's lack of progress toward protection of human rights despite continued high U.S. spending on foreign aid to the war-scarred Central American country.

But that signal was muddied when the lawmakers, their normal skepticism toward foreign aid fanned by Bush administration lobbyists, reversed course and voted 244-171 to kill the underlying legislation.

The turnabout raised the prospect that the separate $4 billion catchall spending bill with money for Nicaragua and Panama, badly wanted by Bush, could be delayed. At the least, it seemed likely to further sour relations between Congress and the White House and complicate prospects for a negotiated bipartisan policy on El Salvador.

During debate on the aid restrictions Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., noted that El Salvador's decade-long civil war has cost 70,000 lives, uprooted one-fourth of the country's population and left its economy in ruins, while the tiny country has swallowed $4 billion in U.S. aid. "I don't see how anyone could be satisfied with that record," he said. "It is time for a new approach."

The amendment adopted by the House, sponsored by Reps. Joe Moakley, D-Mass., and John Murtha, D-Pa., would have withheld of 50 percent of El Salvador's $85 million in annual military aid this year and in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

The provision had been attached to a bill authorizing the spending of new economic aid money for Panama and Nicaragua. But the victory for aid opponents was dampened because of the defeat of the underlying bill.

The $4 billion bill containing cash aid for Nicaragua and Panama - the subject of almost daily White House pleas for faster action - was completed in a House-Senate conference committee and was headed for final approval in the two chambers, probably before Congress adjourns Friday for a 12-day Memorial Day recess. This bill contains a waiver of the normal requirement that such aid be preceded by an authorization bill.

by CNB