Stonewalling

Officials ignore new clues

Sixteen sets of fingerprints. A revealing smear of red paint. Ballistics tests on high-powered rifle bullets. A collection of such solid clues has raised serious new questions about the official investigation into the brutal murder late last year of three American nuns and a lay religious worker in El Salvador. But TIME has learned that while the inquiry has turned up an impressive amount of hard evidence about what took place, Salvadoran authorities are stonewalling, stubbornly refusing to press the inquiry to the point where their own security forces might become implicated.

When the American women missionaries were found shot to death last December, U.S. officials cited "circumstantial evidence of possible security force involvement." But Salvadoran police and military officers dragged their feet in trying to track down the killers of the women, prompting the Carter Administration to suspend all U.S. aid to El Salvador until a "complete, thorough and professional investigation" of the murders had been undertaken. A four-man Salvadoran commission of inquiry was finally appointed, and a team of FBI agents was dispatched to help.

Then came last month's offensive by El Salvador's leftist guerrillas. The U.S.

moved swiftly to restore $5 million in nonlethal military aid and add $5 million in weapons and ammunition. One reason cited for the resumption was a vague claim by the State Department of "progress" in the murder investigation.

In fact, the only real progress has been made by the FBI agents and other independent investigators.

Some of the FBI team's findings:

> Sixteen sets of latent fingerprints were lifted from the burned, blackened paint of the white Toyota microbus the four women were driving the night they were killed.

&#gt; The microbus bore a smear of red paint, where it had apparently scraped against another vehicle. Peasants in the area reported seeing the microbus being towed by a red vehicle.

> Although official Salvadoran doctors refused to perform autopsies at the time, two of the nuns' bodies were later exhumed in the U.S. and bullets were removed from them. Ballistics tests revealed the kind of high-powered rifle the bullets came from are a type regularly used by the security forces.

> The names of all security forces personnel on duty in the area where the women were killed, about 20 men, were established. Some were national police troops; others belonged to the Hacienda (Treasury) Police.

The next steps should have been simple. The fingerprints of the 20 policemen could have been compared with the prints on the microbus. The weapons issued to the men that night could have been examined and ballistics tests performed. A search could have been made for a red vehicle. The Salvadoran government has failed to take any of these steps.

It is unlikely that the U.S. will apply any further pressure to find the killers.

Last week the State Department reiterated its "concern" about the investigation but "delinked" it from future aid to the Salvadoran government. Shortly after the new U.S. charge d'affaires, Frederic Chapin, arrived in El Salvador last week, he spelled out the Reagan Administration's new priorities: to give "full support to the present government" against the leftist insurgents and "to help impede the intervention of third countries" in El Salvador's affairs. "All else," the charge concluded, "is subordinate."

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