Aiming at the Sandinistas, U.S. Sabotages a Summit

Once again the Reagan Administration has sabotaged a promising attempt to achieve a negotiated peace in Central America. Last weekend, just as special envoy Philip Habib was leaving El Salvador--and as Elliott Abrams was in the neighborhood for “brief consultations”--President Jose Napoleon Duarte announced that he could not attend the long-planned June 25-26 summit meeting of Central American presidents. Immediately Honduras also pulled out, citing some vague lack of readiness for the meeting, which had been planned since January.

Of course, the State Department denied that U.S. pressure had been applied, and insisted that the summit meeting was merely postponed, not canceled. One need not be a cynic to wonder if Washington’s strategy is simply to wear down every peace-seeking Latin American until none are left to stand in President Reagan’s way.

The summit meeting had a single item on its agenda--a peace proposal that had been devised by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez. It called for a halt to American aid to the contras in Nicaragua, a cease-fire on the ground in both Nicaragua and El Salvador, and talks between those two countries as well as between both of the governments and their internal political opposition. Eventually there might be elections in both of the countries under some form of regional supervision.

While the so-called Arias plan was not entirely acceptable to the Sandinistas, neither was it rejected by them out of hand, since it called for a halt to U.S. aid to the contras and did not subordinate everything to talks between the contras and the regime in Managua.

It seemed that the United States would find an Arias initiative palatable, since Costa Rica is an old and close U.S. ally, deeply affected by the contra war but not at all disposed to pro-Sandinista laxity. At least it seemed that it would be more palatable than the Contadora effort of Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela. In April a resolution supporting the Arias plan passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 97 to 0.

The summit meeting in Guatemala City would have forced all five Central American governments to show their cards. The United States finally would have been forced to support whatever arrangement was worked out or to scuttle any solution that would leave the Sandinistas in power.

The United States was not pleased by the prospect of this showdown. And Duarte’s own situation has been deteriorating. So, with the help of the Reagan Administration’s policy police--and it could not have been otherwise, despite the State Department’s demurrers--Duarte invented some procedural protests and bureaucratic impediments and, together with Honduras, caused the meeting to be canceled. The would-be host, Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, was bitter. One Mexico City newspaper’s Sunday edition featured his blunt remark on the front page: “Everybody thinks American influence was behind the failure of the summit.”

If there were any doubts remaining as to where the obstacle to peace lay, or whether the nations of Central or Latin America could bring peace to the region on their own, without U.S. intervention, those doubts have been dispelled.

The Reagan Administration’s determination to bring down Daniel Ortega at all costs leaves the United States more alienated than ever. And the cancellation of the summit meeting does serious damage to Duarte, already weakened by growing guerrilla activity, economic unrest and his recent summary rejection of rebel proposals for humanizing that country’s civil war. By making his dependence on the United States so public, the Administration makes him even more powerless than before. Evidently, sacrificing whatever stature Duarte had left was considered an acceptable price to pay for bringing down the Arias plan.

When governments reject what appear to be acceptable terms for a bargain, it is generally because of weakness, stubbornness or both. It seems increasingly obvious that the contras will never be strong enough, their congressional lifeline always too tenuous and Ronald Reagan, their patron saint, too stubborn to make any concessions or encourage any hope for peace in Central America.

If the canceled summit meeting makes this clearer, it will have served a purpose. If by some miracle it takes place after all, the attempts to undermine it will have simply enhanced its importance and the urgency of its work.