New Central American Peace Bid Welcomed by U.S.

The United States on Friday welcomed the revival of the Contadora Group’s efforts to negotiate a peace treaty for Central America and said that special envoy Harry W. Shlaudeman soon will visit all of the nations involved except Nicaragua.

At Nicaragua’s request, the four-nation group’s three-year-old effort was suspended in December, but foreign ministers of the five concerned Central American nations, including Nicaragua, agreed during a meeting in Guatemala this week to have Contadora resume its work.

State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said that Shlaudeman, the Administration’s envoy for liaison with the Contadora countries, will visit Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and El Salvador next week. In February, he will go to Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.

The Central Americans agreed to resume the peace process at the request of the four Contadora nations--Mexico, Venezuela, Panama and Colombia--and of four other Latin nations that recently banded together as a “Contadora support group” to encourage the negotiating efforts.

‘Heart of the Problem’

Kalb said that the ambassadors in Washington from the eight countries met Thursday with Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who reaffirmed “strong U.S. support” for their peace efforts. But Kalb said Shultz told the ambassadors that “Nicaragua’s behavior, in particular its repeated failure to keep its word, is the heart of the problem and for that reason we look at prospective (peace) agreements from the standpoint of workability.”

Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, with a heavy dose of sarcasm, thanked Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on Friday for having helped the Administration convince Congress that the Sandinista government isn’t democratic after all.

“He’s my greatest lobbyist in the U.S. Congress,” Abrams said of Ortega. “He’s not on salary but he really ought to be because he has turned around congressional opinion on Nicaragua.”

Abrams was asked his opinion of the Nicaraguan leader during a transatlantic television interview with British journalists.

“A couple of years ago, there were an awful lot of congressmen who still had hopes for democracy in Nicaragua. Now that everyone has met Daniel Ortega and watched what he has done to the church, to the press, to the trade unions in Nicaragua, we have no reason to doubt him and I think I need to say a word of thanks to that,” Abrams said.