Latins Back Contra Aid? Nonsense !

President Reagan plays fast and loose with many facts and figures, but never so cynically as when he claims that Latin Americans support his covert war against Nicaragua. He did it again Monday, when he said that a Central American public-opinion poll showed that “in some countries the rate goes as high as over 90% of the people who support what we’re doing.”

When State Department spokesman Charles Redman was asked about the poll, he admitted that the figures were not quite so dramatic. Still, he insisted that they show “large-scale support for aid to the Nicaraguan resistance.” Redman said that 69% of Costa Ricans approve such aid, while 24% disapprove. In Honduras the figures were 55% to 25%, in Guatemala 54% to 22%, in El Salvador 48% to 19%.

Redman also revealed that the poll was paid for by the U.S. Information Agency, which does not discredit the results but does help put them into perspective. But Redman did not mention that the survey is badly out of date. Another poll, taken in November by the same Costa Rican research firm, found that only 39% of Costa Ricans support contra aid.

So it’s questionable whether the data represent current thinking in the region. Yet the poll cannot be dismissed out of hand. Anyone who has lived in Latin America recently, or traveled extensively there, knows that few Latin Americans wholeheartedly endorse the Sandinistas. Most Latins were glad to see dictator Anastasio Somoza deposed in 1979, and most are now disillusioned with the course that the Sandinista revolution has taken since then. But disappointment with the Sandinistas is a far cry from endorsement of everything that Reagan is up to Central America.

The President must have been dozing when visiting Latin American presidents--including Mexico’s Miguel de la Madrid, Colombia’s Belisario Betancur and Argentina’s Raul Alfonsin--lectured him about the dangers of his Nicaragua policies. And he apparently hasn’t read news reports quoting Peru’s President Alan Garcia and Brazilian President Jose Sarney as saying much the same thing.

Reagan apparently is also ignorant of the fuss created by the Contadora process, which may explain why he didn’t even mention it in his 22-minute speech about Nicaragua on Sunday. Contadora is an island off Panama where diplomats from that country, Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia gathered three years ago to begin negotiating a peace treaty for Nicaragua and its four Central American neighbors. The Contadora group has the support of every democratic government in Latin America and our allies in Europe. Significantly, the only resistance to the Contadora effort has come from Washington.

The Reaganites like to claim that Latin Americans really do support Reagan “privately,” but are too afraid of antagonizing the Sandinistas to say so publicly. Presumably the USIA opinion polls are intended to prove this. Yet they don’t square with how Latin Americans have expressed themselves in recent elections.

In December, voters in Costa Rica elected a peace candidate, Oscar Arias Sanchez, over a rival who promised to send border guards after the Sandinistas if they violated Costa Rican territory. Arias promptly began negotiating with Nicaragua to prevent border incidents.

Even in Guatemala, with perhaps Central America’s bloodiest history of the last 30 years (thanks largely to a CIA-inspired coup in 1954), voters last year elected a moderate peace candidate, Vinicio Cerezo, over a conservative opponent of the Sandinistas. On his inauguration day Cerezo announced that he would host a Central American summit meeting in May at which he and other Central American presidents, including Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, could talk about settling the region’s crisis peacefully.

Despite Reagan’s wishful thinking, most Latin Americans do not support a military solution for Nicaragua. They don’t trust the Sandinistas, but they would prefer to settle Central America’s troubles peacefully, preferably by themselves.

I have paid for no polls to support my conclusion, but my experience in the region and knowledge of its history tell me that Latin Americans look at Washington with distrust as often as they do with confidence. They remember better than U.S. citizens do how many times this nation has intervened in their affairs, and how those interventions often caused more problems than they solved.

For example, how many North Americans know the story of William Walker, a Tennessee adventurer who briefly conquered Nicaragua during the 1850s with a private army in the hope of annexing it to the United States? Events like Walker’s invasion and two U.S. Marine interventions in Nicaragua in this century are mere footnotes in U.S. history books. But they are pivotal events to people south of the Rio Grande. Latin Americans remember them the way we remember Pearl Harbor.

One thing that the Reaganites say is true: The Sandinistas are arming themselves to the teeth. But it’s largely because they believe that, given the precedents of history, a U.S. invasion is inevitable. This began to look more like a real possibility to other Latin Americans once Reagan asked for a $100-million escalation of the contras’ war. So it’s highly unlikely that the Central Americans who “supported” Reagan last year would respond the same today.