Contadora Group Again to Miss Treaty Deadline--but Peace Process Won’t Die

Like a store that has one going-out-of-business sale after another, the Contadora Group has set repeated deadlines for signing a Central American peace treaty and yet has managed to survive when these target dates have passed without results.

The latest deadline was to have been June 6, and once again no treaty will be signed by then--in large part because a completed treaty text has not yet been agreed upon. Yet the Contadora process, as the initiative is called throughout the region, will not die.

Its Latin American sponsors will keep the process alive because they see Contadora as the only forum for a negotiated settlement of conflicts in the region and the only alternative to a U.S. military solution.

Named After Island

The Contadora Group took its name from the Panamanian resort island of Contadora where the foreign ministers of Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela met Jan. 8-9, 1983, and began the initiative with a call for negotiations among the five Central American republics--El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Ever since then, the four Contadora nations have been working toward the goal of a signed and ratified peace accord, an effort in which they are now formally backed by Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay, which banded together last year as a Contadora support group.

Since September, 1984, the Central Americans have considered several draft treaty documents, each of which has had the support of one or more of the five, but three key points at issue have never been resolved to the simultaneous satisfaction of all. These are the balance of military personnel and hardware among the five, foreign military exercises in Central America and a system for verifying compliance with the terms of any treaty.

“No one is going to sign an unfinished pact,” Guatemala’s Foreign Minister Mario Quinones said in a recent interview.

The presidents of the five Central American countries met in Guatemala on May 24 and 25 for the first time since the Sandinista revolution put a Marxist government in power in Nicaragua in July, 1979. After 10 hours of private talks, the chiefs of state reiterated their support of the Contadora process, thus keeping it alive, but they remained divided on the key issues.

They agreed that the Contadora process “is the best political option that Central America has for achieving peace and democracy and reducing tensions that have been generated in the countries.”

Quit Mentioning Date

But they quietly dropped any mention of the June 6 target date that had been set by the Contadora Group.

Another stumbling block in the way of a treaty is the longstanding confrontation between Nicaragua and the United States. Nicaragua’s Sandinista leaders say they will sign an agreement only after the United States discontinues its support of the rebels, called contras , who are trying to bring down the Sandinista government with guerrilla warfare. The Reagan Administration says it will continue to support rebel activities until the Sandinistas agree to incorporate the contras into the Nicaraguan political system, something the Sandinistas refuse to do.

The Reagan Administration says it supports the Contadora process, but it has made the contras the backbone of its Central American policy. President Reagan has asked Congress for $100 million in military and other aid for the contras and, although the House rejected the proposal once, it is to take up the request again this month. The Senate has approved the proposal.

Before the Central American presidents met last month, U.S. officials, apparently fearing that the Sandinistas might have a sudden change of heart and sign a treaty by the June 6 target date, took a hard-line position on the proposed pact.

A Pentagon report concluded that even if Nicaragua’s leftist government signed a treaty, it would eventually violate it. And Administration officials, who have long stressed that a treaty must be fully verifiable, added that they would not recognize any treaty that did not include a schedule and precise provisions for its implementation.

At the same time, U.S. allies El Salvador and Honduras began talks with Guatemala aimed at reviving the Central American Defense Council, set up in 1963 as part of the old Organization of Central American States. The organization, one of many historical moves toward political unity in the region, has largely been dormant since El Salvador and Honduras fought a brief war over disputed territory along their common frontier in 1969.

El Salvador’s chief of staff, Gen. Adolfo Blandon, ruled out any possibility that Nicaragua would serve on a revived council.

“We have a threat in the region that is Nicaragua,” Blandon said.

Diplomats in the region speculate that if the Contadora process were eventually to collapse, a revived Defense Council could invite the United States to intervene, as some Caribbean governments did in 1983 to bring about the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October of that year.

U.S.-supported governments in this area that in the past have emphasized their own security in light of a possible Sandinista threat have recently begun to focus on the same question that concerns U.S. officials--democracy in Nicaragua.

At the recent meeting of the five Central American chiefs of state, President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica spent much time arguing with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega about the meaning of democracy. And in a visit to Washington last week, Honduras’s President Jose Azcona Hoyo said that a Marxist-Leninist government is not compatible with the other governments of Central America.

A Western diplomat, who asked not to be further identified, said, “The United States cares about internal democracy far more than the Central American countries, but in the final analysis they are going to align themselves with the United States.”

Nicaraguan officials, meanwhile, sound more convinced than ever that war with the United States, or with U.S. surrogate forces, is virtually inevitable. They are preparing for such a war even as they continue to combat the contras’ guerrilla warfare.

Nonetheless, the effort to work out a peace treaty continues. Central American and Contadora Group diplomats met in Panama last week to go over the outstanding issues. For the first time, they discussed the nuts and bolts of arms reduction but were unable to agree on a list of hardware to be covered.

Nicaragua, which has said it would be willing to discuss limitations on offensive weapons, presented a list of 14 categories in which it is willing to accept restrictions, including the number of military airstrips, aircraft, tanks, artillery and foreign advisers.

Honduran officials said the proposal is not a serious one because it includes weapons that Nicaragua does not have. Also, the Hondurans and others have said there is no way to distinguish between offensive and defensive weapons.

“A rock I have can be an offensive weapon if you are unarmed,” El Salvador’s Blandon said.

Nicaragua also has indicated that it wants to discuss international military maneuvers, such as those the United States carries out regularly with Honduras in that country, but the U.S.-backed nations want to take up this point in separate negotiations. Guatemala presented a list for discussion that includes numbers of troops, but Nicaragua refuses to talk about any limitation on troops.

Nicaragua has the largest army in the region, about 60,000 troops. El Salvador, with the next largest army, has about 50,000. Neither figure includes militias or civil defense forces.

Nicaragua has argued that each country’s security needs should be taken into consideration in setting arms limits. Guatemala and Costa Rica have proposed a blanket limit for all countries.

The issues will be taken up again Friday when the foreign ministers of the Contadora and Central American countries meet in Panama--to continue to negotiate, but not to sign, a treaty.

No one thinks that failure to meet the June 6 target date means the end of the Contadora process. When the foreign ministers meet Friday, they are expected to set another target date.