State Dept. Panel Defends Reports on Salvador Abuses : Latin America: Democrats in Congress, human rights activists call the study a whitewash by the department.

A State Department panel concluded Thursday that U.S. diplomats reported honestly and fully on human rights abuses in El Salvador during the 1980s but that higher officials in Washington sometimes distorted their reports for political reasons.

The largely laudatory report abruptly reopened the 13-year-old debate over U.S. policy in Central America, and it prompted human rights activists and liberal Democrats in Congress to charge the State Department with whitewashing its own performance.

“Within the parameters of overall U.S. policy, the (State) Department and Foreign Service personnel performed creditably--and on occasion with personal bravery--in advancing human rights in El Salvador,” said the panel, led by retired Ambassador George Vest.

“The embassy put steady pressure on the Salvadoran government and military to bring perpetrators to justice,” it said, although it noted that many murderers were never prosecuted.

Leading Democrats in Congress quickly condemned the report, commissioned by Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

“This is a considerable disappointment,” said Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), chairman of the House subcommittee on Latin America. “If we want a good, tough review of the Foreign Service’s performance, we aren’t going to get it from the Foreign Service.”

The report “glosses over . . . the lies, half-truths and evasions that we came to expect from the State Department during that period,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) complained.

“I knew no one was going to like it,” sighed Vest, a former assistant secretary of state. “We were pretty tolerant of the way political appointees presented information to Congress during that period. We know it’s a fact of life. . . . Information is going to be presented in a way that tries to sell the policy.

“But the embassy (in San Salvador) generally did a fair, objective and persistent job, regardless of what they said in Washington.”

Christopher commissioned the study after the U.N. Commission on Truth reported in March that the U.S.-backed Salvadoran armed forces and allied paramilitary groups were responsible for most of 13,562 reported murders and disappearances during the civil war.

The U.N. commission concluded that senior Salvadoran military officials, including several defense ministers and chiefs of staff, either approved or helped cover up serious human rights abuses.

The State Department panel, on the other hand, found that U.S. Embassy officers were careful not to accuse high-ranking Salvadoran military officers of responsibility for the crimes but concluded that this was appropriate.

“No one disputed that there had been cover-ups” in El Salvador, the panel said. “But the U.S. government could not accuse . . . individuals unless it had facts to support their case.”

Human rights activists said that finding missed the point.

“The State Department went out of its way to disassociate the government forces from the abuses that were being committed,” said Cynthia Arnson of Americas Watch. “That was the main thing people needed to know about human rights in El Salvador--and this report just lets that slide.”

Nevertheless, the State Department panel did find that in some cases, “mistakes were certainly made.” It characterized the problems as “glitches” in an otherwise praiseworthy effort. Among the findings were these:

* In 1981, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran battalion massacred more than 500 civilians at El Mozote, but embassy officials downplayed evidence of the incident. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders went further, telling Congress that there was “no evidence to confirm” the reports of a massacre. A few weeks later, the State Department declared that there was “no evidence to support” the allegations, although this was “clearly incorrect.”

* After those statements, the embassy made no further attempts to investigate the massacre. U.S. officials did not even ask to see the photographs of dozens of corpses that American journalists took at the site. “The El Mozote issue appears to have been lost in the flood of ongoing embassy business,” the report says.

* The embassy learned as early as November, 1980, that Salvadoran rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson had directed the March, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, but it did not publicly acknowledge the information until 1987.

* U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr, who served in El Salvador from 1985 through 1988, was criticized by the State Department’s inspector general for deliberately omitting “bad news” from his cables to Washington. Corr, now a professor at the University of Oklahoma, said the charge was “a bad rap.” He acknowledged omitting information about corruption for fear it would leak but said he never excluded bad news on human rights.

* U.S. officials repeatedly bungled their investigation of the 1989 murder of six prominent Jesuit priests by a Salvadoran military unit. A U.S. military adviser waited two weeks before reporting key evidence that the Salvadoran unit had carried out the murders, and the chief U.S. military adviser then exposed the source of the information to the Salvadorans.

Vest said he felt considerable sympathy for the diplomats who had to wrestle with the moral dilemma of working effectively with the Salvadoran government while trying to curb its human rights abuses.

“In principle, in my heart, I’m with the people who wanted human rights to be our sole priority,” he said. “But in the real world, you don’t have the luxury of having an absolute choice.”

“The essential test is: to what extent did the policy succeed?” he added. “This policy hasn’t succeeded totally, but it’s made some progress. El Salvador is a much better place to live than it was when all this started.”