Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 21, 1993 TAG: 9303210128
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
U.S HAD TALENT FOR IGNORING THE TRUTH IN EL SALVADOR
Perhaps it began the day newly installed Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. suggested that four American churchwomen murdered by Salvadoran security forces may have inadvertently caused their own deaths."Some of the investigation," Haig told a congressional hearing, "would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle in which the nuns were riding may have tried to run a roadblock, or may accidentally have been been perceived to do so . . . "
It was March 18, 1981, and President Reagan had been in office less than two months. Haig had already said that "international terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern," and his statement about the churchwomen appeared to be the proof: In El Salvador the Reagan administration was worried about Marxist insurgency, not the behavior of a friendly government at war.
For 12 years, opponents of U.S. policy in Central America accused the Reagan and Bush administrations of ignoring widespread human-rights abuses by the Salvadoran government and security forces and of systematically deceiving or even lying to Congress and the American people about the nature of an ally that would receive $6 billion in economic and military aid.
Their views appeared to be vindicated last week, when a three-man U.N. Truth Commission released a long-awaited report on 12 years of murder, torture and disappearance in El Salvador's civil war. The commission examined 22,000 complaints of atrocities and attributed 85 percent of a representative group of them to Salvadoran security forces or right-wing death squads. It blamed the remainder on the guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).
After the truth commissioners appeared before the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee, Chairman Robert G. Torricelli, D-N.J., vowed to review for possible perjury "every word uttered by every Reagan administration official" in congressional testimony on El Salvador.
The Reagan administration is making no apologies. Elliott Abrams, who held two assistant secretaryships in the Reagan State Department, said, "The administration's record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement" and attacks on it are "a post-Cold War effort to rewrite history." He dismissed Torricelli's threat as "McCarthyite crap."
An examination of the public record fails to turn up any blatant lies. In speeches, interviews and countless appearances before Congress, Reagan and Bush officials said human rights was a top U.S. priority in El Salvador and insisted the Salvadoran government's record was one of steady improvement.
"We are not saying that the human rights problems of the country have been resolved," Thomas O. Enders, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during one typical exchange on Feb. 8, 1982. "But we see progress in the downward trend of non-combatant deaths since early 1981."