Arias’ Vision Takes a Beating : Nicaragua May Get Stuck With a Mutation of Democracy

While Mikhail S. Gorbachev was visiting Washington, Oscar Arias Sanchez was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The Nobel committee probably made the right choice. The Central American peace process is certainly as much a breakthrough as the summit meeting, and Arias’ idea of how to bring peace, democracy and development to Central America could start “new thinking” in much of the developing world.

The peace process that Costa Rica’s president set in motion last summer has by now confounded almost everybody--the Reagan Administration, its congressional opponents, all the pundits, even Daniel Ortega. The Sandinistas looked like the easy winners when the Arias plan was approved by the five Central American presidents in Guatemala on Aug. 7. The Administration denounced it as “fatally flawed,” and conservatives reviled Arias for delivering a stab in the back to the Contras. The Contras themselves were stunned. The expectation was that their army would fade away as the “peace process” unfolded, that the Sandinistas would exchange superficial and transient reforms for legitimacy and permanent power, and that President Arias, his ambitions focused on international opinion, would bless the foul transaction and collect the Nobel Prize.

But instead of resting on his laurels, Arias became more active, insisting that the Sandinistas had to find a way to talk with the Contras. At the same time, exuberant congressional liberals overplayed their hand by making it clear to everyone, including the Sandinistas, that their first concern was to quash President Reagan’s pet program; their last, democracy in Nicaragua. Ignoring Arias’ own recommendations, Reagan vowed to go to Congress for more Contra aid. Invited by House Speaker Jim Wright, Arias arrived first and got some key conservative congressmen to “give peace a chance.” At length, seeing that it was stuck with Arias, the Administration shelved its aid request, letting public attention shift from Washington to Nicaragua.

There the Contras had refused to fold up their tents; instead, they had become a surprisingly active and effective performer, launching their most able diplomatic, political and military campaign of the six-year war. The Sandinistas, on the other hand, after having consistently outmaneuvered the Contras and the Administration for years, blustered, blundered and bullied their way into diplomatic isolation. Then, just when everyone was sure of Sandinista intransigence, Ortega made a startling about-face: He agreed to talks with the Contras (indirectly, through Nicaragua’s cardinal), and flew to Washington for a word with Speaker Wright.

With a maneuver that the comandante believed “left the Administration totally isolated,” Ortega got Wright to stray beyond the usual institutional boundaries and promote as a “step forward” a Sandinista cease-fire proposal, raising a hailstorm of protests from the State Department and even from staunchly liberal quarters like the Washington Post. Ortega was safely out of town by the time Wright realized that he had stepped into something soft and sticky.

Arias’ peace process had proved to be a Tar Baby.

Earlier last summer the Sandinistas devoted their diplomatic energy to efforts to revive the Contadora initiative and pre-empt the Arias plan. They failed, and when the Reagan-Wright joint plan for Nicaragua was announced, the Sandinistas signed on the Arias plan as the lesser of two evils.

Arias’ plan was a conceptual sea change from the tack that was followed by the four Contadora countries (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama): achieving peace by assuring the security of sovereign states and getting them to negotiate; then economic development could be set in motion, which would lead to democracy. For Arias the relationship of sovereignty, peace, development and democracy is less lineal, more dialectical. “Without democracy, there can be no peace in Central America,” Arias says frequently. No development either, because Arias stresses that development requires the active participation of all the economic agents of society--workers and peasants with the right to organize, professionals and entrepreneurs with autonomy, all represented in the political process. That would require compromise on a historic scale--not only among sovereign governments but also between those governments and their opposition.

For centuries Central America has been torn apart by militaristic factions under foreign patrons. In the colonial period, groups loyal to the French and the Dutch fought with the Spanish for power. After independence from Spain, the British and the Americans contended. Now the Russians have fielded a team. Arias believes that only by establishing democratic structures for resolving disputes can the region break the cycle of outside interference and internecine war.

At issue between Ortega and Arias is not just the logistics of the peace plan; it is their essentially differing conception of politics and development. One fundamental view--dominant in Chile, South Africa, Cuba and, at least until very recently, in Moscow--is that politics is merely a function of economics, and economic development mainly a matter of putting together disciplined workers and large-scale industry. For Arias politics and economics are intertwined: Development requires investment and coordination, but it also requires the right of workers to organize and strike, of intellectuals to read and publish, and of political parties to organize and compete. This is the “world-historic” dimension of Arias’ Nobel prize.

Liberal Democrats do not dispute Nicaraguans’ right to democracy. But they consider U.S. “intervention” so evil that they have made its termination their top priority. Thus they have come to share the view of Ortega and many of the Contadora foreign ministers that the basic conflict in Central America is between the Reagan Administration and the Sandinistas, that what is at issue is national sovereignty. Liberals have thus come to share with Ortega and others an objective and a view-point: Both wish immediately to disarm the Contras, and both believe that peace must precede democracy.

The Administration’s clamor over what it regarded as Speaker Wright’s trespass onto presidential turf drowned out the more salient fact about Ortega’s cease-fire proposal: that it was a direct assault on the Arias plan.

The governing principle of the plan is simultaneity: Peace and democratization go together, not peace first and democratization (maybe) later. Ortega’s proposal substitutes reciprocity for simultaneity. The Sandinistas promise democracy after the Contras are disbanded, just as they promised democracy after the revolution in 1979. Arias insists that democratization must go hand-in-hand with disarmament in order to bring about peace. Ortega’s cease-fire is essentially an invitation for Contras to surrender. It’s not a cease-fire “in place”; the Contras are to assemble in “designated cease-fire zones supervised by Sandinista security forces.” After a month, during which they can receive no more U.S. military or humanitarian aid, they must lay down their arms to the Sandinista army. In return, they are allowed to receive the same Sandinista “amnesty” that they previously rejected: As pardoned criminals, they can “join in the political life of the nation by participating in the National Dialogue inaugurated by the government of Nicaragua on Oct. 5.” The national dialogue is the very same forum between the opposition and the government that has failed even to set an agenda, largely because of the government’s declared position that precludes any discussion pertaining to the nature of Sandinista rule--its partisan army, bloc committees, unrestricted presidential power, the state security apparatus, the actions of Sandinista mobs or turbas, etc. Under Ortega’s proposal, the Contras must accept amnesty and “join political life” under a government that, in direct violation of the Guatemala accord, has refused to disband the special courts through which the government routinely sends members of political opposition to lengthy jail sentences in prisons closed to international supervision.

The Sandinistas promise that after surrender, after U.S. aid is cut off and Contra camps in Honduras are disbanded, they will bring democracy to Nicaragua. They are asking Nicaraguans and other Central Americans to pin their hopes for democracy on a government that has refused to permit any television broadcasting that is not controlled by the state, any news broadcasting by the Catholic radio station, any participation by the (Sandinista-dominated) Congress concerning questions of defense or the national budget, or any discussions between the government and the opposition on such questions on the Sandinistas’ merger of party, state and army.

Instead of noting the flagrant contradiction to the Arias plan, Wright welcomed Ortega’s proposal and suggested to Ortega, who rapidly accepted, that liberal Democratic activists like Paul Warnke be assigned to Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo’s mediation team. Wright’s actions revealed that he now shares the basic Central American views of what has been called the “McGovernite” wing of the Democratic Party.

Ironically, the right and left wings of Congress have much in common here. Defenders of Somoza yesterday and of Ortega today argue that stability must precede democracy. They fail to see that only democracy can bring stability to Latin America. They do not understand that, like many parts of Latin America, Central America is living through an age of democratic revolution. Arias does. He understands that--in the words of Nicaragua’s leading poet, Pablo Antonio Cuadra--”the totality of our civil wars and our armed uprisings have been based on frustrated demands for democracy. All our dictators have disguised themselves as democrats . . . . What we inherited, at immense pain and cost, was a tradition of democratic aspiration.” Arias knows that the revolution against Somoza was for democracy, not socialism, and that democracy is part and parcel of peace, stability and development for Central America.