High Court Spoiled Bid to Solve Bishop’s Murder, Salvadorans Say

SAN SALVADOR —  Officials in the Salvadoran government say that the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, which helped spark the nation’s civil war and caused worldwide outrage, will remain unresolved because of a Supreme Court ruling that the testimony of a key witness is not valid.

The ruling, handed down Dec. 21, has caused an uproar in El Salvador, escalating the already heated presidential campaign rhetoric between the Christian Democrats of President Jose Napoleon Duarte and the rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), the main opposition party.

“In fact, the case is now closed and justice has been mocked,” said Roberto Giron Flores, who, as attorney general, was investigating the case until he was fired Dec. 23 by the Arena-controlled National Assembly.

U.S. officials, who invested much time and effort in the case, were outraged by the ruling and are making that displeasure known, but diplomatic and political sources say the Americans acknowledge that nothing can be done to revive the case.

Romero, a charismatic, outspoken opponent of rightist death squads and military repression, was killed by a single shot through the heart on March 24, 1980, while saying Mass. It was the most publicized killing of thousands carried out by the death squads, and Duarte had vowed to punish those responsible.

Former U.S. Ambassador Robert E. White asserted that the killing was ordered by Roberto d’Aubuisson, a founder of Arena and currently a legislator in the National Assembly. D’Aubuisson has denied the allegation.

In November, 1987, Duarte made public testimony given to investigators by Amado Garay, identified as the driver of the getaway car in the killing. Garay said that he worked for Alvaro Saravia, a cashiered Salvadoran air force captain and protege of D’Aubuisson. Garay said that after the killing, Saravia reported on the success of the operation to D’Aubuisson.

D’Aubuisson declared at the time that Garay was lying and rejected the allegations.

Based on Garay’s testimony, after he passed numerous lie-detector tests and other elements of his testimony were investigated, the Salvadoran government, with U.S. help, asked for Saravia’s extradition from Miami, where he was living illegally.

Saravia was arrested in Miami for violating the terms of his visa, and has been held since, as the extradition request proceeded. He was to have been extradited in early January, according to legal sources.

But the Salvadoran Supreme Court, described by knowledgeable diplomats and Christian Democrats as dominated by the far right, ruled Dec. 21 that there were no grounds for arresting Saravia if he returned to El Salvador and that the extradition request itself was illegal.

The court ruled that delay in presentation of Garay’s evidence, after “seven years, seven months and 24 days, completely undermines the credibility of his testimony” and resulted in no evidence linking Saravia to the killing.

“The problem here is that we have to understand the judicial system has been totally dominated by Arena, which blocks the investigation and application of justice,” said Antonio Morales Erlich, secretary general of the Christian Democrats. “I want to say as a lawyer that the witness and evidence presented in the Romero case were ample to proceed with an arrest order.”

On Dec. 23, the assembly, in its last session of the year and with only the Arena deputies supporting the move, fired Giron Flores as attorney general, alleging “incompetence and immorality,” and named Arena sympathizer Roberto Garcia Alvarado to replace him.

“The truth is that I was fired for a simple and fundamental reason--because the Romero case was about to be resolved,” Giron Flores said. “Saravia was about to return and we were going to discover who was responsible. . . . The Romero case is now closed, and I was fired so the case could be closed.”

Knowledgeable observers say that Giron Flores is correct, because, by ruling that the testimony was too old--although no Salvadoran law places time limits on the validity of testimony--any new evidence or testimony will be thrown out on the same grounds.

“On legal and procedural grounds, the case is dead,” said one person familiar with the case.

Gregorio Rosa Chavez, auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, after a Mass on Christmas Day, said, “In the church, we think (Saravia) has valuable information on this act which convulsed the country.”

Arena’s presidential candidate, Alfredo Cristiani, said that Giron Flores was fired for “demonstrable reasons showing he was not fit to continue in office,” and Cristiani accused the Christian Democrats of throwing up a “smoke screen” and “politicizing” the matter by trying to link the firing to the Romero case.

The investigation into Romero’s killing was being handled by a special investigative unit that had received U.S. training. According to two people involved in the investigation, Saravia was also to be charged upon his return here with the kidnaping and murder in 1985 of Carlos Guerra Campos, a wealthy coffee grower. Investigators said that they planned to use the Guerra Campos case to force Saravia to give evidence in the Romero case.

“It was to be our checkmate move,” one investigator said.

Investigators also said that Garay had identified Dr. Hector Antonio Regalado, a dentist, as the triggerman in the murder, although they said that there was no hard evidence other than Garay’s statement linking him to the shooting.

Regalado, an expert marksman, was head of security at the Constituent Assembly when D’Aubuisson was president of that body in the early 1980s.

Earlier this year, two men who worked in the assembly at that time said that Regalado ran right-wing death squads from the building.