The Bashful Peacemaker : A ‘Man of Books’ Works to Draft a New Chapter in Central America History

Margarita Penon de Arias is fond of a photograph of her husband taken during his campaign for president. It shows a serious-looking young man standing on a speaker’s platform between two aides, their hands clasped and arms raised in a gesture of expectant triumph.

The first lady of Costa Rica laughs when she looks at that picture now, because she remembers how awkward the pose was for Oscar Arias Sanchez. “He was not exactly your image of a fiery Latino politician,” she says. “Those two men were there to lift his arms for him. He just wouldn’t do it on his own.”

Her story is revealing of the character of her husband, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A bookish man who had studiously prepared since his privileged boyhood for the presidency he won last year, Arias forced himself to overcome a painful shyness to sell himself to the voters.

It was that same stubborn determination, those who know him say, that helped him win the Nobel for achieving what was considered an impossibility a year ago, an agreement with fellow Central American presidents to end their guerrilla wars through democratic reforms.

Whether or not the accord signed Aug. 7 is fulfilled, Arias will enter history as a statesman who not only opposed the Sandinista rulers in neighboring Nicaragua but also resisted U.S. pressure to ally his tiny pacifist nation with the contras fighting to topple them.

Who is this would-be peacemaker and what drives him? How does the leader of a country without an army believe he can pacify a region plagued by warfare, repression and economic destruction for most of its history?

Vulnerable to Asthma Attacks

Physically, Arias, 46, is an unimposing man with a boyish face and a slouching posture that makes him seem shorter than his 5 feet, 8 inches. He is so vulnerable to severe attacks of asthma that he carries a bottle of oxygen with him everywhere.

But he is propelled by an infectious idealism, workaholic energy and a sense of urgency imposed by the constitutional limit of a single four-year term. Convinced that little of his domestic program can succeed without peace in the region, he has endeavored to sell his nation’s brand of pluralist democracy to its embattled neighbors, particularly Nicaragua, before their wars spill across the Costa Rican border.

Arias’ conservative critics at home accuse him of aloofness. Indeed, the president prefers to let his ministers manage conflicts over domestic policy and, after 18 months in office, he still seems uneasy with crowds. But in private or with small groups, he can be charming and forceful, especially in defense of his peace mission.

“Politicians have an obligation to be dreamers, to be idealists, to be Quixotes,” he said in a recent interview. “It is our obligation to want to change things. Nobody in Central America can be satisfied with the status quo. There is too much poverty, violence, hunger and misery.”

Sitting in his library, dressed informally in a black sweater and surrounded by walls stuffed with books, Arias called himself “a timid intellectual” who has learned through politics to “enjoy speaking with the people.”

But the ideals that guide him, he said, come mostly from the thinkers and poets he has read and the statesmen he has read about: Churchill, Roosevelt, DeGaulle, Kennedy and the 19th-Century founders of his own nation. “I am a man of books,” he explained.

His love of books, instilled early in life by a father who read to him, cuts his sleep to four or five hours a night, according to his wife. Among the duties of his ambassadors abroad is to mail him new volumes he chooses after reading reviews in the New York Review of Books and other periodicals.

The elder son of a wealthy coffee-growing family, Arias grew up with a tradition of public service. His grandfather served in two presidential cabinets, and his father headed the Central Bank.

Oscar Arias entered Harvard in 1960 as a premed student, but his distaste for dissecting frogs led him instead to law and economics. He eventually dropped out of Harvard. Later, he later took degrees in both law and economics at the University of Costa Rica and received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Essex in England, after writing a dissertation on his country’s leadership.

Tense, Introverted

John Biehl, a Chilean-born economist, was struck by Arias’ personality when they were classmates at Essex in the late 1960s. The two became friends, spending long evenings talking politics, singing and reading poetry with other Latin American students at Biehl’s home.

“Oscar was nicknamed El Presidente for his ambition,” Biehl recalled. “But he was so tense, so introverted and studious. It took a lot of good wine to get him to relax and laugh a little.

“He was born in a golden cradle, with everything you could ask for. He could have enjoyed an easy life, but it was obvious he had taken the most difficult road, one he had no talent for. He didn’t know how to communicate. I think that is why he chose politics, simply because it was hardest for him. The bigger the challenge, the more he grew.”

After three years of university teaching back home, Arias was appointed minister of planning in 1972. Seven years later, while serving as a congressman, he became secretary general of the left-of-center National Liberation Party.

In his formative years, Arias was attracted to foreign leaders with liberal leanings. At Harvard, he wrote a letter congratulating John F. Kennedy on his election and was invited with other Latin American students to meet the American President at his Cape Cod home. Later, on a visit to Chile, Arias spent hours with the country’s Christian Democratic president, Eduardo Frei.

Theme of Challenge

“From Kennedy, I took the message that the torch must pass to a new generation,” Arias said. It was to become the theme of his successful challenge to the old guard of his party, which was divided between two older rivals for the 1986 presidential nomination.

“Kennedy gave Oscar a romantic vision of politics that few other leaders would dare articulate in the world of today,” Biehl said. “His speeches are plagued with Kennedy quotations.”

His calm, measured oratory is also sprinkled with literary passages he has memorized. When defending his peace mission, he likes to quote Don Quixote, the legendary dreamer: “The glory of having undertaken this feat cannot be darkened by any evil.”

But the man who has influenced him most, Arias said, is not a statesman or a poet but Karl Popper, the political philosopher. Popper’s book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” solidified his aversion to authoritarian regimes. Today, he puts the Sandinistas in that category and says they could not win “a really free election” in Nicaragua.

Arias’ ideals are rooted in Costa Rica’s 120-year tradition of free, compulsory education and its peaceful evolution toward a two-party system much like that of the United States. After settling its last civil conflict in 1948, the country abolished its army.

Moral Authority

In one of his most impassioned speeches, Arias told his countrymen on television last summer that Costa Rica’s defenselessness gave it the moral authority to demand peace in Central America.

“The world will listen not because we make cannons thunder or drive tanks or fly fighter planes,” he declared. “They will listen because we refuse to stop dreaming of peace, because we have not turned our backs on our ideals.”

Like his country, Arias has dared to be different. As a student, he talked so much of his ambition that a school yearbook noted he was “studying to be president.” Margarita Penon de Arias recalls that before their 1973 wedding, friends warned her against marrying “that lunatic who wants to be president.”

“There is a saying in Costa Rica that goes, ‘No quiero, no quiero, pero echame en el sombrero, ‘ “ she said. “It means we say we don’t want something but we’ll do anything to get it. Oscar is not like that. He is very open about what he wants. I often tell him he should be more diplomatic.”

Asked by a Costa Rican interviewer what he thought of DeGaulle’s prescription that a great leader should be mysterious, Arias replied: “Why? I want to be transparent. My politics are crystal clear. I have no cards up my sleeve.”

Devoted Father

As is typical of Costa Rican leaders, Arias keeps a high profile, often driving his own Jeep through downtown traffic in San Jose. A devoted father, he interrupts meetings at his residence to have a word with his children, Sylvia, 12, and Oscar Felipe, 7. During evening receptions there, it is not unusual to see them playing in the halls in their pajamas.

“In Costa Rica, fortunately, we don’t have a long tradition of protocol,” Arias’ Vassar-educated wife says. “People accept us as we are.”

Arias’ refusal to alter his personality for the presidential race frustrated his campaign aides. Guido Fernandez, his media man, took him to New York for expensive lessons on how to pose for television, but he ignored most of the advice. Before speeches, his wife stood behind him and yanked his shoulders back. He slouched anyway.

“At first when he walked into a room, he had to make an enormous effort to break the ice,” Margarita said. “He got over that when we started having campaign rallies that people could bring their children to. That changed everything. Oscar relaxes around kids.”

Arias upset Rafael Angel Calderon, his conservative rival, in the February, 1986, election and took office in May at age 44, Costa Rica’s youngest president ever.

Seized on Peace Issue

The campaign turned on the issue of peace. With their candidate behind in the polls, Arias’ aides noticed a survey showing that fear of Costa Rican involvement in the growing Nicaraguan conflict was a major, unexploited concern among voters. Arias seized on the issue and, without prescribing a plan, promised to “keep the peace for my people.”

Just after taking office, Arias closed a CIA-financed contra airstrip in northern Costa Rica, ending his predecessor’s policy of clandestine support for the rebels. The Arias peace plan came later, in response to growing U.S. pressure on him to permit a revival of the contras’ southern front.

The plan’s logic was simple, he told a doubting President Reagan in a 35-minute monologue at the White House last June: The contras have failed to do the job. The war has made the Sandinistas even more repressive. Remove the contras, and Managua will have no excuse. The plan would oblige it to allow press and political freedoms and hold open elections.

Arriving at the Guatemala summit last August where the plan was to be signed, Arias was equally blunt with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. “We’re here in good faith, but it depends on you,” an aide quoted Arias as saying. “If you’re not willing to make concessions, we can have lunch and a couple of drinks and just go home.”

Roosevelt Strategy

That night Arias applied a strategy he learned in a history book from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. To keep the other Central American presidents working toward an agreement, he persuaded them to order room service instead of breaking for dinner. “I told them the eyes of the world were upon us, that we had a historic responsibility,” Arias said later.

By his own and other accounts, Arias has been able to spurn Washington’s repeated pleading of the contra cause while maintaining Costa Rica’s longstanding friendship with the United States, which is pouring $187 million in aid into the country this year.

Arias summed up his attitude with a parable: “When my 7-year-old son asks me for permission to play at his cousin’s, and I tell him no, I don’t feel my child is pressuring me. I just tell him no again.”

“The United States is the most benign empire of all empires,” a presidential adviser said. “They have respected him. With the United States one can disagree on fundamental things and get away with it. Oscar is aware of this and he is grateful.”

Arias’ peacemaker role has enhanced his popularity at home. A poll of San Jose residents taken by a Gallup affiliate showed his approval rating rose from 55% in July to 71% just after the signing of the peace accord.

Legislation Blocked

But that has not made it easier for him to deal with his domestic critics, who claim he is concerned more with his image than with the country’s ailing economy. For two weeks in October, as the president celebrated his peace prize, the opposition Social Christian Unity Party blocked his emergency tax legislation in the National Assembly, delaying negotiations to reschedule Costa Rica’s $4.4-billion foreign debt.

The president’s top domestic priority, a plan to build 80,000 new houses, is also controversial. Amid charges of corruption and inefficiency, the board of directors of the government’s housing institute resigned in July. Rodolfo Mendez Mata, a civil engineer who is the assembly’s minority leader, calls the program a poorly supervised “populist gimmick” that is creating “urban disorder.” Arias says it will make Costa Rica a nation without slums.

The task of placating such criticism usually falls to Rodrigo Arias, the president’s younger brother and one of his three closest advisers. A lawyer, Rodrigo managed the campaign and is now minister of the presidency, a kind of premier for domestic affairs. Biehl, the president’s old school chum, counsels on foreign policy and drafts most his speeches. The two are so like-minded, Fernandez says, that “a few gestures are often enough to understand each other.”

Arias’ 39-year-old wife has been involved in his work since she edited his doctoral dissertation. Today she reviews his major speeches and is in on key decisions. “You can’t pinpoint Margarita’s influence, but everything is influenced by her,” says one aide.

The president calls Margarita “an excellent adviser, . . . a better prize than the Nobel.”