Central America’s Untried Answer: Why a Contadora Treaty Will Work

Contadora. In these four syllables supporters of U.S. military aid to the anti-Sandinista contra rebels in Nicaragua hear the echo of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella tapping on the flagstones of Munich. Contra opponents hear the whisper of hope for peace and democratic progress in Central America. Many Americans though, hear nothing. For them the word “Contadora” is another baffling bit of media jargon, much repeated but little understood.

This fuzziness is unfortunate, not only obscuring any clear understanding of how Contadora can work but also contributing to the public impression, fostered by the Reagan Administration, that Contadora is the last refuge of the appeaser. In fact the proposed Contadora treaty is the prudent policy most likely to lead to the triumph of democracy and American values in Central America.

Senior diplomats from Mexico, Venezuela, Panama and Colombia met on Contadora, a resort island off the coast of Panama, in January, 1983. There, they devised a plan to democratize and demilitarize Central America. There were four major points to the proposed treaty: 1) removal of all foreign military personnel from the region; 2) strict border supervision to protect the sovereignty of states; 3) phased reductions in military forces, and 4) democratic pluralism in free elections in each counrty. Recently foreign ministers from eight Latin American countries reaffirmed their commitment to the Contadora process and expressed opposition to the Reagan Administration plan to give the contras $100 million in military and non-lethal aid.

Contra supporters are ruling out the possibility of applying the Contadora process in Nicaragua. No communist government has ever gone democratic, they note, citing former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. Thus, they say, Nicaragua will always remain an aggressive Marxist-Leninist state, ready to export revolution to other countries in the region.

Contadora doesn’t depend on denying this idea but does note its most important nuance, what might be called the “Draper Corollary.” Historian Theodore Draper, in a critique of Kirkpatrick’s thinking, said it is not quite accurate to say that a communist state cannot evolve into a democracy. In the Prague Spring of 1968, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was undergoing a profound process of liberalization from within; only the intervention of the Soviet army killed it. In Poland during the Solidarity period, the Communist Party liberalized from without. Again, only the threat of Soviet intervention strangled the democratic movement. Democratic ideas can grow in communist soil.

The Draper Corollary recommends putting a priority on removing all Soviet Bloc military presence from Nicaragua. This would greatly improve the chance that the Sandinistas might eventually become more democratic. (The emphatic declaration of various Sandinista leaders about their life-long devotion to orthodox Marxist-Leninism doesn’t disprove this case; such declarations were also heard from various Czech communists in the 1960s.) The hope in the intermediate term is for a Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua similar to Yugoslavia: relatively open in political terms, domestically, and nonaligned, internationally.

But is that hope an illusion? The Sandinistas, after all, could have settled for that in 1979, when they took power, but did not. As contra supporters point out, President Jimmy Carter tried friendship and aid to the Sandinistas for 18 months. That aid failed to change the Sandinistas’ communist course. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan has tried military pressure for 61 months and that hasn’t changed Sandinista behavior either. More important, without the assistance of Soviet Bloc advisers, the Sandinistas cannot sustain power in the face of the massive popular opposition that they now face.

And the reason is the second principle of Contadora, which we might call the “Aquino Effect.” As the triumph in the Philippines of Corazon Aquino shows, democratic forces can peacefully overcome enormous odds and enormously better-armed opponents. One key is American identification with the democratic forces--the longer the better.

The Administration claims to be doing this by aiding the contras, but its case is weak. Contra leadership is drawn from the wealthy elite that supported former dictator Anastasio Somoza. They received early training from Argentine military officers, whose leaders were convicted in December of running an anti-democratic reign of terror in Argentina that killed at least 9,000 people. And while the contras have drawn much democratic support, none of the democrats have much authority in the movement.

It is more plausible to view the contras as the latest (and perhaps last) in a long line of dictatorial forces that the Reagan Administration has aided. In the case of Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines, the military regimes of Guatemala and Argentina, this aid has been justified as essential to democracy. The Reagan Administration now knows that in all these cases the aid was no help to democracy. Indeed, one wonders if some of the Reagan Administration’s passion on the contra issue isn’t part of an effort to discover at least one place where they won’t be proved wrong.

Contadora backers have hurt their case, though, by not supporting the Nicaraguan internal political opposition. Although Nicaraguan democrats have not been subjected to the extreme state-sponsored brutality that democrats in El Salvador and Guatemala confront, they nontheless are threatened by a repressive anti-democratic regime. Contadora in no way gives the Sandinistas the Good Housekeeping seal, only the guarantee that the United States will not pursue the Sandinista’s physical destruction. Contadora does not even mean the immediate end of the contra movement whose peasant and Indian supporters are motivated by deep and real grievances.

No one should pretend that the liberalization of the Sandinista regime will result from the goodness of the commandantes’ hearts or take place quickly. The situation in post-Contadora Nicaragua could resemble that of Chile today. Chile, like Nicaragua, suffers under a powerful and intractable dictatorship that has lost whatever legitimacy it once had. The United States openly supports the democratic opposition. Democratization is not likely to occur soon but when it does--and it will--the United States is likely to be on good terms with whoever comes to power. So too, in Nicaragua.

The crucial difference, contra supporters will insist, is that the Sandinistas, even without Soviet Bloc advisers, could still manage to export revolution. But revolution, like other commodities, depends on supply and demand. As the democratic trend takes hold, even tentatively, in countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, or more firmly in Argentina, the strength of revolutionary movements wanes. The leaders of these countries fear militarization of the region far more than they fear the prospect of Sandinista aggression.

On an absolute scale of risk, Contadora has much to recommend it. The worst-case scenario, often cited by Reagan Administration spokesmen goes like this: The contras are cut off, and the Sandinistas go on a regional rampage, invading their neighbors and making direct U.S. intervention inevitable. But if a Contadora treaty collapsed, the United States could act militarily with the full backing of Latin America and U.S. public opinion. The contra crusade today has no such support.

And in a best-case scenario, Contadora might eventually lead to a kind of “Managua Spring,” a liberalization from within the Sandinistas or from outside Solidarity-like pressure. That would be the most effective repudiation of the myth of communist invincibility.