Opposition Can Now Put the Lie to Sandinistas’ Claims

House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) deserves plaudits for sticking his neck out and trying to forge a policy that would develop the first bipartisan consensus on how the United States should deal with Nicaragua.

If first responses are an indication, he is already drawing fire in the form of ill-served condemnations from the left wing of the Democratic Party and the extreme right of the Republican Party--both of which view the Wright-Reagan Administration proposals as a betrayal of their own positions.

On the Democratic Party’s left, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts has branded the proposal a ploy “to score points with Congress . . . an effort to rehabilitate a flawed and failed policy,” while conservative Republican Rep. Jack F. Kemp of New York called the plan a “surrender when the tide was going our way.”

Sandinista leaders have given a mixed response. President Daniel Ortega viewed it as part of a strategy to get Congress to approve funding for the contras , but Carlos Tunnerman, Nicaragua’s ambassador to Washington, preferred to emphasize the “positive and interesting elements we can work with and can be improved.”

Those who are opposing the Wright plan from the start are, unfortunately, perhaps closing the door to the first major effort to end the Nicaraguan civil war. On the face of it, the major provisions of the proposal match and build on those suggested by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, and also address themselves constructively to major Sandinista concerns.

The heart of the proposal ties an immediate cease-fire in place with an immediate cessation of military aid to the contras, matched by a cutoff of similar aid to Nicaragua by the Communist Bloc countries, an end to the Nicaraguan state of emergency and a full restoration of civil liberties. Plans would be set for elections, and foreign troops would be withdrawn. This would lead to a widely desired national reconciliation among all Nicaraguans. The carrot offered by the United States, once these goals were achieved, would be that of expanded trade and economic assistance--both desperately needed by Nicaragua.

The Wright plan is important because it gives the Democrats something that they have been desperately lacking until now--a mechanism to show that they are not unconcerned with growing Sandinista intransigence and consolidation of power, and that they realize that simple opposition to contra aid is insufficient, since it does not present any incentive that could force the Sandinistas to the bargaining table. The problem with the Arias proposal, as Nicaragua’s internal democratic opposition has made clear, is that it would have cut off the contras without requiring that the Sandinistas give up anything.

Nicaragua’s democratic opposition leaders--extending from traditional conservatives to communists--note that the issue within Nicaragua is not one of dealing with an aggression by the United States against Nicaragua. Rather, as Carlos Huembes of the Confederation of Nicaraguan Workers put it to me last June, while Americans look at Nicaragua and see what a big power is doing to a small country, Nicaraguans are concerned “with what the Nicaraguan government is doing to its own people.”

Viewing the Sandinistas not as rulers of a popular revolution but as a group of Bonapartists, the opposition knows that the Sandinista Front’s path has been to hold power through repression. The Wright plan builds on their understanding that it is not the contra war that has forced the Sandinistas to resist democratization. The polarizing policies of the Sandinistas have proved to most Nicaraguans that it was their government, not the United States, that led to an increased armed opposition. As Huembes put it: “In 1981 there were 2,000 contras and the government saw them as an insignificant nuisance; now there are 20,000. Why?”

The Wright plan will serve to help Nicaragua’s democratic opposition by giving it support. The danger of the plan is that the Sandinistas will argue that demand for internal democratization is a new form of imperialism, meant to unseat from power those who made the revolution. But the existence of a strong opposition, no longer able to be suppressed, will give the lie to the total legitimacy claimed by the Sandinistas. Moreover, if the Sandinistas and their Western supporters are so confident of their overwhelming popularity, they have nothing to fear from adherence to internationally supervised elections that guarantee full participation in political life for the democratic opponents.

The Wright plan addresses itself to these realities for the first time, promises an end to the useless and horrible bloodshed and prepares the way for both democratization and stability in Nicaragua. It should be supported.