Salvador Civilian Police Facing Uphill Struggle : Central America: New agency is considered the cornerstone of lasting peace. But it is crippled by a meager budget, scarce supplies and political resistance.

CHALATENANGO, El Salvador — Nelson Donan, the new police chief in this town, surveyed his stock of equipment. To enforce law and order in 1,200 square miles of mountainous territory, Donan and his 310 agents can count on nine cars (seven in working order but only one with four-wheel drive), a few radios and a ration of three gallons of gasoline per vehicle per day.

Sometimes officers must ask victims to give them a ride to the scene of the crime, or at least to buy gas. Police simply cannot reach some of the more remote towns in this rugged area.

“Every day it seems like there are more cutbacks,” Donan said.

El Salvador’s new civilian police force is considered the cornerstone of lasting peace in this country after more than a decade of cruel civil war. But the police agency finds itself crippled by a meager budget, scarce supplies and what diplomats describe as political resistance from a die-hard right wing.

Critics accuse the government of President Alfredo Cristiani of failing to give full support to the civilian force because its development reduces the power and influence of the military and their rightist backers by creating a professional body of law enforcement that no longer can be used for political goals.

While the civilian force struggles, the government has quietly maintained a militarized force--the dreaded National Police. It was supposed to be phased out under the terms of U.N.-brokered accords that ended the war nearly a year ago.

Creation of the new police force, with training by FBI agents and an international team of experts, was a key component of the accords and was seen as a basis for building a fair system of justice here. The new officers include former leftist guerrillas and former National Police officers, all of whom must take courses in human rights and democracy.

The civilian police are replacing forces that traditionally served the conservative elite and the military, whose purpose was not to solve crimes but to control the population, usually through fear and intimidation. They were widely associated with death squads that killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians suspected of sympathizing with Marxist rebels who fought a series of U.S.-backed Salvadoran governments in the 1980s.

U.N. officials and diplomats say there is ample evidence of the government’s reluctance to dissolve the militarized National Police, an attitude that raises questions about the government’s commitment to the new civilian agency.

Critics also say the government is undercutting the credibility of the civilian force by quietly transferring veteran officers into the new force without screening out those with records of abuse or giving them the specialized training required.

“The whole legitimacy that the new police is enjoying, where for the first time in the history of this country you can see people trusting the police, that is going to be lost,” leftist legislator and presidential candidate Ruben Zamora warned.

“We will not believe in the police, and if we don’t believe in the police, the setting for confrontation is going to be there. It is important that the original design of the civilian police not be perverted. The future stability of this country is what is at stake.”

Despite the government’s pledge to shut down the National Police by next year, a war-era academy continues to graduate 60 to 70 officers a month, diplomats say. U.N. officials say the National Police force has actually grown in number rather than shrunk; military authorities who run the National Police gave it a $22-million budget for next year, legislators with access to the budget say.

U.S. officials recently took the Salvadoran government to task for holding back U.S.-supplied money that had been earmarked as assistance for National Police officers returning to civilian life, in an apparent attempt to discourage the officers from retiring. In a confidential memo to Cristiani, U.S. Ambassador Alan H. Flanigan warned that the money would be cut off if not spent properly. Sources said the money has since been disbursed.

The government, denying that it is shortchanging the civilian police, said it must maintain the National Police because of an alarming crime wave, especially in the capital. Under pressure from the international community, Cristiani finally produced a plan for dissolving the National Police by October, 1994.

Cristiani also says the shortages faced by civilian police can be blamed on a drop in foreign aid and the failure of other countries to come through with promised donations for police. The United States is spending $31 million over the next three years to help train and recruit the new force.

Meanwhile, the civilian police, who will eventually number 6,000, press on valiantly against the odds. Deployed in five of 14 provinces and armed with 9-millimeter Beretta pistols instead of the assault rifles of their predecessors, they actually seem welcomed in neighborhoods and towns like north-central Chalatenango, in contrast to the police of the past. They wear blue uniforms instead of the olive-green fatigues of the National Police.

One story making the rounds is that when the new officers first went on patrol in the eastern city of San Miguel, the residents applauded.

The civilian force is also seen as the best example of how former enemies can work together as the country seeks reconciliation after 12 years of fratricidal war. In some cases, former paramilitary police are taking orders from former guerrillas, and vice versa.

“They sleep together. They eat together. They patrol together,” Donan said. “Tensions and problems cannot exist.”

Still, Donan frets about whether he can keep up his officers’ morale in the face of shortages and shoestring budgets. They recently saw their meal allowance cut nearly in half, from 10 to 6 colones, or about 70 cents, and their salaries of $186 a month are substantially less than what recruits expected.

The government recently ordered the United Nations to cease providing the civilian police logistic support. So while Donan cannot reach the outer limits of his rural territory because only one four-wheel-drive vehicle is working, the local U.N. mission’s new, sturdy jeeps sit unused a block away.

U.N. monitors, diplomats and opposition politicians are alarmed over efforts to place National Police officers directly into the civilian force without “new doctrine” training. The government has gradually phased two existing police units completely intact into the new force.

The two units, an elite anti-narcotics squad and a U.S.-financed special investigative department, number several hundred officers. They underwent a merely pro forma screening and received 35 hours of human rights and other special training instead of the five-month course required of other new police officers, U.N. officials say.

One of the dangers of this practice, the sources say, is that the investigative arm of the police will be dominated by officers who have not been part of the reform. This becomes especially critical in the wake of a resurgence of death-squad-style killings that recently targeted two senior former guerrilla leaders.

Officials of the onetime rebels’ Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, known as the FMLN, said they have identified 36 officers from the two units who tortured prisoners and committed other human rights abuses during the war. “How can we have confidence in the new police if the old elements of the police are there without any process of sorting out who is good and who is bad?” Zamora asked.

International observers are especially worried that if the government that is chosen in presidential and legislative elections next March is from the right wing, there may be a wholesale transfer of the last 2,000 or so National Police officers directly into the civilian force, without vetting or training. This, they caution, could create a force that does not represent change.

“The police has to function for all of the society,” said Claudio Armijo, an FMLN official who monitors the police. “We cannot go back to a police at the service of one sector. That is the past history . . . a history of war. We cannot return to the past.”