El Salvador Armed Forces

In a challenge to both President Alfredo Cristiani and the United Nations, El Salvador's top military commanders angrily denounced an international investigation that blamed them for widespread wartime atrocities, and they suggested that they would fight their ouster. The bitter military response to the U.N.

When army officers accused of the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests were finally brought to trial two years ago, many Salvadorans applauded the event as a sign that justice would be served. It was rare for a murder case to actually reach a court; rarer still for a military man to face judgment for crimes against civilians.

Amid shouts of protest, the right-wing party of President Alfredo Cristiani swiftly pushed through a blanket amnesty Saturday that pardons all Salvadorans who committed political murder and other crimes during 12 years of civil war. In a stormy legislative session that showed just how fresh the war's wounds still are, the national Legislative Assembly approved the amnesty on a 47-9 vote. There were 13 abstentions, and 15 legislators were absent.

For a few minutes, the sidewalk in front of the Downtown federal building became the scene for a mock trial. As the lunch crowd streamed from office buildings, a dozen Salvadoran activists and 70 demonstrators last week acted out a theatrical tribunal entitled: "Salvadoran Military on Trial: No Purge, No Peace." The drama ended with the dismissal of officials accused of carrying out human rights abuses in El Salvador, something local activists have sought for years.

The Marxist guerrillas who fought U.S.-backed Salvadoran forces for more than a decade--and who were championed by many in the American left--killed civilians, shot prisoners and committed other war crimes, a U.N.-sponsored investigation found. The probe by the Commission on Truth blamed the overwhelming majority of violent acts in El Salvador's civil war on state security forces and allied death squads.

Even while pleading for a climate of forgiveness, the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador called Monday for the dismissal of all military officers and government officials cited for human rights violations and proposed that all violators, including rebel officers, be banned from taking part in Salvadoran public and political life for at least 10 years. These provisions, which have already led Defense Minister Gen.

The watershed U.N-sponsored investigation into the brutalities of El Salvador's civil war paints a chilling picture of organized, systematic violence conducted by a network of military officials and right-wing death squads bent on destroying any and all enemies.

An international Commission on Truth, in a scathing report on the pattern of Salvadoran violence, identified prominent military and Establishment figures Sunday as perpetrators of assassination, massacres and other atrocities in the long civil war that has finally come to an end in El Salvador under a U.N.-mediated peace agreement. In some of the most prominent case studies, the U.N.

The most powerful military man in El Salvador offered his resignation Friday, on the eve of the limited release of a damning human rights report that is expected to name him and dozens of other army officers in connection with some of the worst atrocities of this nation's 12-year civil war. The resignation of Defense Minister Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce comes as a major blow to the government of President Alfredo Cristiani.

The Security Council chastised President Alfredo Cristiani and the former rebel guerrillas Tuesday for failing to fulfill all the requirements of the U.N.-brokered peace agreements that ended the long civil war in El Salvador. But in private, ambassadors acknowledged that they are far more troubled by Cristiani's refusal to dismiss all tainted officers of his armed forces than by the failure of the guerrillas to destroy all their weapons.