A Battle of Military Egos

As a minor mutiny ends, the U.S. reaffirms its support

The bizarre rebellion ended as suddenly as it had begun. But when Lieut. Colonel Sigifredo Ochoa Perez gave up his six-day mutiny against Salvadoran Minister of Defense General Jose Guillermo Garcia last week, the damage had been done. The incident highlighted what many analysts feel is a troubling obstacle to U.S. aims in the embattled Central American nation: a lack of discipline on the part of the Salvadoran military. All too often, its leaders seem to be more concerned with internal rivalries than with fighting left-wing guerrillas united under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The crisis began when Garcia, who was jealous of Ochoa's increasing prominence as a successful antiguerrilla fighter, ordered the 40-year-old officer to resign his command in the northern province of Cabanas and assume duties as military attache in Uruguay. Ochoa refused. He declared his province a "free territory," and phoned a San Salvador radio station to demand that Garcia resign as head of the armed forces because he had shown himself incompetent in handling the country's three-year-old civil war.

U.S. embassy officials felt there was more to the dispute than Ochoa's reluctance to move to the diplomatic backwater of Uruguay. They speculated that Garcia had wanted to transfer the popular Ochoa in order to strengthen his own political ambitions as a potential challenger to right-wing Constituent Assembly President Roberto d'Aubuisson. Garcia has generally supported increased U.S. involvement in El Salvador and land reform, while D'Aubuisson has not. At the same time, U.S. officials feared that Ochoa, a military classmate of D'Aubuisson's, was being used by D'Aubuisson in order to force Garcia out as Defense Minister. Some Salvadorans looked for a less complicated motive. Said a military analyst: "This is a question of two very ambitious, vain men. In the Salvadoran army, once a commander gets a little too popular, a little too visible, he gets dragged down, or else he becomes a threat. Tigers don't eat tigers; they get moved to different cages. Ochoa was too visible."

Shortly after dawn Wednesday, Ochoa came to terms with Garcia through the mediation efforts of provisional President Alvaro Magana and senior army officers who supported Ochoa's protest but not his tactics. In the compromise, Ochoa's reassignment to Uruguay was withdrawn. He was also promised he would not be arrested or court-martialed. Ironically, Ochoa's insubordination may earn him a prestigious assignment at the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington.

Although he has been criticized privately by both U.S. and his own military officers for his ineffectiveness as a military leader, Garcia had been hinting that he would stay on as Defense Minister past his scheduled retirement date in February and that he might even run for President when elections are held in March 1984. Now, his authority shaken, Garcia is expected to resign "after a prudent, face-saving time period," according to one U.S. official.

The breakdown in El Salvador's military chain of command comes at an awkward moment for the Reagan Administration. The President has until Jan. 23 to submit his semiannual certification to Congress that El Salvador's government is making progress on human rights and is carrying out land reform. Without the statement, the President must immediately cut off all military assistance. State Department officials described the Ochoa-Garcia duel as "absolutely not germane" to the certification, and said last week that the Administration would once again rule in El Salvador's favor. Washington officials noted with satisfaction that the number of politically motivated murders was now below 200 a month, down from an average of 500 a month in 1981. Said a State Department official: "That is still a hell of a lot of killing. It is not an entirely positive picture, but a defensible one." In El Salvador's political morass, expectations remain modest. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.