Blunt Words

Angry reaction to a warning

"A slap against the already injured and bloody face of our country."

"Arrogant omnipotence." "Unworthy foreign intervention." Those epithets, and others, blared from a full-page advertisement last week in one of El Salvador's largest newspapers, El Diario de Hoy. Sponsored by the 702-member Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the broadside reflected a swelling tide of outrage in the conservative business community against U.S. Ambassador Deane Hinton, 59. Reason for the uproar: in the toughest speech he has made in his 17 months in El Salvador, Hinton cautioned that the U.S. "could be forced to deny assistance to El Salvador" if the country did not substantially improve its respect for human rights.

Hinton delivered his warning at a luncheon meeting of El Salvador's influential American Chamber of Commerce. In accented Spanish, he told 300 Salvadoran business leaders that they must begin to face up to the most grisly aspect of their country's three-year civil war against Marxist-led guerrillas: the murder of some 30,000 Salvadoran civilians and at least six Americans at the hands of paramilitary death squads widely believed in most cases to have connections with the local security forces. It was a subject, Hinton told his audience, that "so many of you, because of indifference or shame or fear, leave in eloquent silence." The killings, Hinton noted, were the work of a Mafia and must be stopped. Said he: "Is it a wonder that much of the world is predisposed to believe the worst of a system which almost never brings to justice either those who perpetrate these acts or those who order them? The gorillas of this Mafia, every bit as much as the guerrillas in Morazan and Chalatenango [departments], are destroying El Salvador."

Hinton has delivered the same message before, but never in such bold language. He clearly had in mind the U.S. congressional hearings on El Salvador that are scheduled for January, when the Reagan Administration must once again certify that the country has made progress on human rights and social reforms to justify the approval of a requested $166.3 million in U.S. military and economic aid during fiscal 1983. Of particular concern to the Administration is the refusal of a Salvadoran judge to try a local army officer who has been accused of ordering the 1981 murders of two U.S. land-reform experts and a Salvadoran labor leader. The U.S. is also annoyed by the reluctance of the Salvadorans to bring to trial five former National Guardsmen accused of murdering four American churchwomen in 1980.

The response of the Salvadoran business community to Hinton's speech offered few grounds for optimism. In addition to castigating the Ambassador for his words, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry advertisement referred to U.S. blemishes, including bygone lynch laws and the continued existence of America's own criminal Mafia. Friendship between nations, said the advertisement, is "a generous sentiment, not subject to conditions." Alas, that is hardly ever so in international relations. As Hinton warned, friendships that come under intolerable strain can also come to an end.

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