A Case for Listening

After seven years at each other’s throats, officials of Nicaragua’s government and the U.S.-backed rebels who would run them out of office are exploring the chances for peace.

However slim those chances may appear, they are no worse than the odds that Washington has always given that the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government would never sit down with the Contras. Certainly nothing that Washington can do now will make the odds any better or worse, including even talking about reviving proposals to send aid to the Contras.

The circumstances cannot be what Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez had in mind when he drafted the plan that led, eight long months later, to Monday’s meeting.

By the time the talks started, Sandinista troops apparently were back across the border after raids into Honduras that Times correspondent Richard Boudreaux reports were designed to cut the supply lines of the Contra rebels.

The same day about 3,200 American troops still were in Honduras, Nicaragua’s neighbor to the north. What they were doing there depended on who in Washington was doing the explaining. By some accounts they were sent to reassure Honduras, even though the U.S. troops boarded transports without live ammunition. By other accounts they were on a routine training mission, some within 15 miles of the border of Nicaragua. That is the war-torn country that President Reagan said some years ago could meet his policy goal just by saying “uncle.”

A third version had it that the troops were sent to Honduras to stampede Congress into appropriating more money for aid for the Contras--money that could only prolong a guerrilla war that already has killed 40,000 people.

This war has mesmerized the White House and distorted the nation’s view of where its interests lie and where its security is threatened for long enough. Central America’s leaders think they can keep enough pressure on the Sandinistas to maintain the peace, send foreign advisers packing and stop meddling in the affairs of their neighbors if the big powers will leave them alone. Nothing else has worked. Washington should stop talking and listen. What it hears might indeed lead to peace.