No Interest in Peace

Don’t listen when the Reagan Administration tells you it wants a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Central America. It doesn’t. First it sabotaged the Contadora peace plan. Now it is trying to do the same thing to the proposal presented by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica.

It began by pressuring President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador to ask for a postponement of the meeting on the Arias plan scheduled for this month in Guatemala. Then it summoned Arias, in the United States on a private trip, to the White House for a browbeating session with President Reagan, Vice President George Bush, national-security adviser Frank C. Carlucci, chief of staff Howard H. Baker and State Department officials.

The Administration’s objection to the plan is that it has some chance of actually working. Covering the guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Guatemala also, it is aimed chiefly at ending the war in Nicaragua between the Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed contras.

It calls for immediate cease-fires in all three conflicts and a cutoff of aid to all rebels, followed by amnesties for rebels and talks between governments and their unarmed opponents. Countries agreeing to the plan would agree to practice “total political pluralism”; freedom of the press and of assembly would have to be permitted within 60 days of signing.

The Reagan Administration claims it doesn’t like it because it wants to use the contras to make the Sandinistas change their system before any talks. That objection thinly veils the real one: The Administration is much more interested in attacking the Sandinistas than in devising a solution. Arias aptly pointed out that the absence of war would leave the Sandinistas with little excuse to continue suppressing civil liberties. As a shrewd observer of the war pointed out, the Sandinistas want to build the revolution on the backs of their Red Army, and the United States has obligingly furnished them with a White Army against which to fight.

Arias bluntly said that continued U.S. aid to the contras is incompatible with his plan. The President said that he remains “fully committed to obtaining renewed funding from the Congress” for the contras.

The contras have no hope of overthrowing the Sandinistas. Reagan’s course will therefore produce not peace but more war. He would ruin the Arias plan as he ruined the Contadora plan. It is up to Congress to stop the funding for the contras this fall and thereby give the Arias plan such little chance as it has left.