Looking at the Glow

The prospects for peace in Central America look brighter now than they did a week ago. The pessimists can find plenty of reasons to say that that distant glow shimmering on the horizon is only a mirage. But the optimists can plausibly argue that it just may be possible to get from here to there.

The agreement reached Friday by the five Central American presidents in Guatemala City is tentative, fragile, complex all at once. But it has one cardinal virtue, on which it may be possible to build a stronger structure: It is a Central American proposal, imposed by no outside nations. It has long seemed probable that the surest resolution of the Central American conflicts, chiefly those in Nicaragua and El Salvador, would in the end result from efforts of the nations most affected--those two, and Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala.

Add to this approval of the plan presented by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica the American plan for Nicaragua devised by the Reagan Administration and House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.). Even if the Reagan-Wright plan were entirely, and shamelessly, political--on the Administration’s part, to trap the Democrats into approving more aid to the contras , on Wright’s, to get the Democrats off the political hook of having to oppose it--it has put onto the table new shifts of position, new hints of concession by the United States, that will be hard to sweep off the table peremptorily.

The most feasible goals to be sought in Central America are an end to the fighting, the removal of outside military support, non-interference by each country with the others and progress toward more democratic governments. These are the goals of the Arias proposals. They have been the stated goals of the United States, but U.S. sincerity has been belied by President Reagan’s insistence on removal of the Sandinista regime--a result no one thinks possible short of U.S. military force.

You can find in the new U.S. plan signs that the overthrow of the Sandinistas may no longer be the Administration’s sine qua non. Whether that is so is crucial. There will be ways to tell soon enough. The plan says, for instance, that all negotiations must be completed by Sept. 30, the date the current contra aid runs out. If the Administration insists on that point, the plan will be shown to be a cynical ploy, for no one thinks negotiations could possibly be finished in so short a time.

But if on this and other points the United States is flexible, even while there is flexibility in Central America, there can be some hope that the distant light may not be an illusion.