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Central American Crisis Is Put on Hold Until 1988

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<i> Jorge G. Castaneda is a writer and professor of political science at the National University of Mexico, and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. </i>

President Reagan’s meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev was certainly a high-water mark in his Administration’s diplomacy. But from a Central American standpoint he is already perceived as a lame duck. Given U.S. political realities, it appears that a lasting solution to the Central American crisis will not emerge before 1988.

Militarily, politically and diplomatically, the tensions at work in El Salvador and Nicaragua have come to a stalemate. Even the three-year-old Contadora peace-seeking process has been put on hold until spring, at Nicaragua’s request, ostensibly to give the newly elected governments of Honduras and Guatemala time to settle in.

Militarily, the impasse is more evident than ever. El Salvador’s FMLN guerrillas, though perhaps on the defensive in geographical terms, are continuing to inflict heavy damage on the U.S.-supported and -supplied army. Indeed, the insurgents seem to be attaining their goal of an average 15 casualties per day--the centerpiece of their new strategy of attrition. And, while relations between the guerrillas and their political cohorts are severely strained, there is probably greater unity among the five armed factions of the FMLN than ever before. Thus there are no grounds for believing that the government is making any significant headway in its attempt to defeat its left-wing adversaries.

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Similarly, there is little evidence pointing to any progress on the part of the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. In spite of the renewed U.S. aid and more combat experience, not only are the contras not advancing on Managua but also the Sandinista forces reportedly have pursued them into Honduras on occasion--and the Honduran military has looked the other way. Whatever its ideological convictions, Honduras does not want the role of surrogate for U.S. military strategy.

Unless that changes, and as long as Nicaragua can keep the contras’ Costa Rican southern front closed, their threat to the Sandinistas’ existence will remain insignificant, albeit costly and bloody. The conflict will escalate: Soviet helicopters, contra surface-to-air missiles--and SAMs for the Salvadoran guerrillas, to match. But the balance of force will remain the same.

If a military solution to the Central American crisis seems remote, a political one seems no closer or more attainable.

In El Salvador President Jose Napoleon Duarte has been seriously weakened by his daughter’s kidnaping. It may not be obvious to North Americans, but Latin American political machismo has its rules and its duties. Duarte flagrantly violated them when he sent the rest of his family to safety in the United States and then cut a deal with the guerrillas for his daughter’s release. Too many Salvadorans have lost family members in this war for their president to brazenly put his family in such a privileged situation.

If a political settlement in El Salvador requires a stronger army and president, or a stronger insurgent force, then it is as remote today as at any time since 1981.

The situation is similar in Nicaragua: Neither side can be forced into negotiations through its weakness, but neither the Sandinistas nor their opposition forces are strong enough to negotiate through face-saving magnanimity. The progressive displacement of hard-liners in the policy apparatus by the more compromising Ortega brothers might have led to greater Sandinista flexibility. But U.S. economic political and military pressure is now too great to allow the Sandinistas to negotiate, and too small to force them to do so.

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So if the United States and its allies are not strong enough to negotiate in El Salvador, and if their adversaries are too weak to negotiate in Nicaragua, only the diplomatic option is left. And that is as improbable as the political or military solutions are.

The Contadora effort was stalemated some time ago, paralyzed by its own contradictions and illusions as well as by the U.S. refusal to support its most basic premises. Now that Contadora’s chief promoters, Mexico and Colombia, have been struck by natural and political disasters, the little wind left in the regional initiative’s sails has disappeared.

Since early 1981 the United States has poured more than $2 billion in economic and military aid into Central America. During this same period at least 30,000 lives have been lost in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It would be disrespectful to the dead to say that all this has been in vain, but the United States has little to show for its efforts. It is essentially right back where it started in January, 1981: unsuccessfully trying to roll back revolution in Nicaragua, and stubbornly containing revolution but not defeating it in El Salvador. And, inasmuch as Reagan seems unwilling to change his policies by negotiating, and seems unable to carry those policies through to their ultimate and dire consequences--direct military intervention--today’s impasse will probably last through the end of his Administration. By then Nicaragua will have had nearly 10 years of Sandinista rule, making everything more difficult and more resistant to change.

There has to be a better way--one that is durable, realistic and will not damage U.S.-Latin American relations for years to come. Finding it means, to begin with, accepting the bankruptcy of existing options: military, political and diplomatic.

The search for a new approach also implies stepping back from day-to-day Central American ups and downs, and looking beyond the Reagan era. Whatever else it may be, a new U.S. approach to Central America must clearly be different: explicitly unilateral in order to be effective, consensus-backed (not liberal or conservative) in order to be sustained over time, geopolitical rather than ideological in order to be realistic, and, above all, understanding of the national interests of each Central American country and its immediate neighbors. Revolutionary or not, U.S.-oriented or otherwise, these national interests are the key to a Central American solution, precisely because they cannot ever be identical to U.S. interests, or irremediably opposed to them.

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