Salvador Government OKs Blanket Amnesty : Latin America: Pardon flouts U.N. report. Critics say ruling party’s intention is to spare itself embarrassment.

SAN SALVADOR —  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.

Cristiani’s Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena party, and two small rightist parties hold a 49-vote majority in the 84-member assembly.

Crowds shouting “Justice, yes! Amnesty, no!” drowned out legislators attempting to speak in favor of the law and delayed the vote for hours, at one point forcing ruling party representatives to abandon the assembly.

Urging the nation to “forgive and forget” the violence of the past decade, Cristiani proposed the amnesty earlier last week, on the eve of a U.N.-sponsored report that blamed state security forces and rightist death squads for most of the war’s atrocities.

El Salvador’s left and opposition parties oppose an absolute amnesty, saying a pardon should come only after the most egregious war criminals are brought to justice.

“You are trying to forget history; I hope to God you do not repeat it,” Ruben Zamora, a legislator for the leftist Democratic Convergence, said in an impassioned speech to decry the law. “This is a grave error . . . (that) rather than uniting will divide Salvadoran society.”

In New York, Alvaro DeSoto, a high-ranking U.N. official who was the author of the Salvadoran peace plan, said after learning of the amnesty that implementation of the U.N. report’s recommendations is “as mandatory as all the other recommendations in the peace accords.”

Cristiani’s amnesty plan will pardon everyone named in last week’s report by the Commission on Truth, a panel of jurists set up under peace accords that formally ended the war last year. Among those who would benefit from the amnesty are the army colonel and lieutenant convicted of murdering six Jesuit priests in 1989.

The commission also accused Defense Minister Gen. Rene Emilio Ponce of ordering the Jesuits’ murders--a charge he denied--and the amnesty would presumably exonerate him too. Ponce offered his resignation just before the report was made public, but Cristiani does not seem inclined to accept it.

“Our war was the dirtiest war you can imagine, but it was dirty on both sides,” Arena legislator Gerardo Escalon said in an interview defending the amnesty. “There’s no reason to rub more salt in the wounds.”

The new law gives “full, absolute and unconditional amnesty” to anyone who committed a political crime or “connected common crimes” before Jan. 1, 1992, the date of an official peace agreement.

The only exception listed in the law is kidnaping for profit. In one notorious case, an army officer was convicted of running a kidnaping ring in the late 1980s that targeted right-wing families while attempting to frame leftist guerrillas.

Cristiani and other government officials said amnesty is crucial to reconciling this tiny country after a brutal war that killed more than 75,000 people, most of them civilians.

“We must avoid the revenge and confrontational attitudes that would hinder peace,” Legislative Assembly President Roberto Angulo, also of Arena, said. “The wounds of the war can only be healed with a pardon.”

But critics said the amnesty was intended primarily to spare Arena associates the embarrassment of further investigations into death squad financing and other crimes.

“This is a self-amnesty,” said Gerardo Le Chevallier, a legislator for the opposition Christian Democratic Party. “People are going to be left with many desires for revenge and for investigation.”

He and others predicted that the amnesty vote would bring international condemnation to the Salvadoran government. Already, Cristiani was under fire for failing to complete a purge of the armed forces ordered as part of the U.N.-brokered peace accords. In response, the United States, longtime backer of a succession of Salvadoran governments, suspended military aid this month.

The debate leading up to the vote--being held in a rare Saturday session convened exclusively to enact the amnesty--was anything but conciliatory.

Several hundred people who crowded into a visitors gallery above the assembly chamber waved banners protesting the amnesty: “Mr. Cristiani, don’t play with peace” and “To approve amnesty is a joke on the people.”

Their shouts drowned out speakers, forcing Angulo to suspend the session. As the crowd continued to shout “Justice!” Arena legislators abandoned the assembly, shouting back “Communists!”

When the session resumed in the afternoon, the crowd was smaller and shouted for a while before leaving. About a dozen young Arena supporters arrived then to take seats in the gallery. They were dressed in T-shirts proclaiming, “D’Aubuisson, you will live forever!”

Roberto D’Aubuisson founded Arena and was named in the Commission on Truth report and elsewhere as a prominent leader of death squads. The commission said D’Aubuisson, who died of cancer last year, ordered the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

In addition to those who killed the Jesuit priests, others who stand to benefit from the amnesty include the rebels who gunned down four U.S. Marines and nine civilians at a sidewalk cafe in 1985 and possibly the five national guardsmen convicted of killing three nuns and a religious worker in 1980.

Zamora said the amnesty was an attempt to “bury once and for all” the Commission on Truth findings, which have been bitterly criticized by the government, army and rightist figures who are most implicated.

Zamora said the vote represented the first major piece of legislation on which consensus was not reached since the peace accords, a development which he said undermined a year’s work.

Such swift approval of the amnesty, he said, deals a devastating blow to justice in El Salvador. “Far from an instrument of pardon, this has become an instrument of covering up the truth,” he said.