U.S. Decries Slow Pace of Priest-Slaying Inquiry : El Salvador: Four months after the massacre, embassy officials bemoan the lack of progress. But some say they have not pushed hard enough.

SAN SALVADOR —  American Embassy officials are increasingly frustrated and concerned over the slow pace of the Salvadoran government’s investigation of the deaths of six Jesuit priests and two other people, allegedly killed at the direction of high-ranking army officers.

Expressing strong dissatisfaction, the officials said over the weekend that the judge in charge of the investigation and the army’s Special Investigative Unit have listed about 180 people for interviews but have talked to no more than three a day.

“At that rate it will take months,” one official said.

The priests, all faculty members of the Jesuit-run University of Central America, were shot to death on their campus last November at the height of a major offensive by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the leftist guerrilla organization that has conducted the decade-long civil war.

Slain at the same time were the Jesuits’ cook and her 15-year-old daughter.

After a string of denials by government and military officials, including suggestions by U.S. Ambassador William Walker that the guerrillas might have committed the massacre, charges were finally filed against five enlisted men and four officers, including Col. Guillermo A. Benavides Moreno, one of the army’s highest-ranking members.

Since the charges were filed, the U.S. Embassy has pushed hard for action against Benavides, who is accused of ordering the killings. But some State Department officials and members of Congress say that Walker has not been tough enough.

For example, he was criticized internally by the State Department for not condemning more strongly reports that Benavides’ situation under arrest amounted to a vacation, with trips to the beach, a luxury apartment instead of a jail cell and catered meals.

Walker has said that “if true, the accusations were an outrage.” However, embassy officials say there is no proof that Benavides enjoyed such treatment.

Salvadoran military officials say that Benavides, who was in charge of the country’s military academy at the time of the killings, has been kept in a single room at an army installation. “His only luxury is a television set,” one colonel said.

Some members of Congress, as well as political opposition leaders here, say that the embassy also has lagged in pushing the government to pursue a theory that Benavides did not act on his own and was involved in a conspiracy with other high-ranking officers.

Embassy officials deny any foot dragging. But they acknowledge that they are greatly concerned over reports that Benavides has been receiving daily visits from fellow officers who reportedly tell him he has nothing to worry about.

Benavides is a member of the so-called tandona, the military academy class that dominates the armed forces’ high command and includes army Chief of Staff Rene Emilio Ponce and Deputy Defense Minister Juan Orlando Zepeda.

Each academy class honors a tradition of staunch loyalty to the class and often puts the interests of fellow class members above stated government policy. This is particularly true of the present tandona, which has protected class members even when they were accused of such crimes as kidnaping for profit.

“If he (Benavides) is being told he has nothing to worry about, that is truly an outrage,” one U.S. official said.

While not necessarily connecting the reports of Benavides’ special treatment to the lagging pace of the investigation, the officials also expressed consternation that the judge in the case, Ricardo Zamora, had not even met the head of the Special Investigative Unit until last Friday.

“When we found out they had never met, we raised hell,” said one official, “but it still took 10 days to arrange the meeting. It is frustrating as hell.”

Doubts about the government’s intentions, and particularly those of the military, are compounded by various reports concerning the so-called “ninth man,” Pvt. Jorge Sierra, who was one of the nine men charged in the killings but who was not arrested with the others because, according to the official announcement at the time, he had deserted.

According to a Western diplomat and a Salvadoran citizen with close contacts to the government, Sierra fled the country and may have made his way to the United States.

These sources say that Sierra heard a radio exchange between one of the officers at the site of the killings and a high-ranking officer at the Defense Ministry.

According to this account, the officer on the scene said the Jesuits had been killed and asked what to do about the cook and her daughter, who presumably had witnessed the shootings.

“He was told to leave no witnesses,” one source said.

All of this has led to other reports that Col. Zepeda will be removed from the Defense Ministry and dismissed from the army. However, some diplomats and government sources say that while Zepeda, a member of the present tandona , may be rotated out of the ministry as part of an expected personnel shift, he will remain in the army in a senior position.

“As far as we know, except for these stories about the ‘ninth man,’ there is nothing to prove the radio conversation happened,” one source said.