The Central Lesson From Central America

Explosive events in Central America--near civil war in Panama, U.S. troops in Honduras, a surprise cease-fire in Nicaragua and a stronger guerrilla movement in El Salvador--all confirmed this past week that just as there is usually an enormous price for misleading people in one’s private life, so a nation may pay an enormous cost for a misleading foreign policy based on untruths and illusions.

In Panama the Administration looked the other way as the Central Intelligence Agency put on the payroll a general recognized to be corrupt but considered reliable. We now know that Brig. Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega has been actively involved in drug-running to the United States and gunrunning to the rebels in El Salvador.

The U.S. secretary of state praised the Panamanian election as a fine example of democracy when the Administration knew it had been stolen. Now we are trying to wrest control of Panama away from the very forces we had encouraged to control the country.

The Administration claimed U.S. policy in the area had support from governments within the region. We ended up with the Central Americans defying the United States by endorsing the plan initiated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez to bring peace to the area.

The Administration pretended that the Contras were a serious military force. But within a few weeks of a congressional vote denying them further aid--a period so short it could not possibly have made a difference in their ability to fight--they were routed by Sandinista forces who drove them out of Nicaragua into Honduras. The Administration had to send U.S. troops to save face (although another purpose may have been to frighten Panama). And the reaction of true Reaganites to the news of the cease-fire reached between the Sandinistas and the Contras is “discomfort,” according to press accounts.

The Administration asserted that President Jose Napoleon Duarte was making progress in creating a democratic order in El Salvador and cutting the ground out from under the guerrillas. But Duarte’s party last week suffered a major legislative defeat and the far right, which has been closely associated with the death squads that helped bring on the civil war in the first place, is stronger than it has been in years. Government repression against democratic elements is mounting as is leftist intimidation of government supporters. As a European diplomat recently stated, “American aid has paid for the illusion that things aren’t going so badly--when in fact they are.”

Few postwar administrations have been so contemptuous of the role of honest talk, international law and the democratic process in dealing with international issues. But because this Administration has continued to misrepresent the realities in Central America, U.S. policy toward the region is in tatters. Driving U.S. policy has not been a clearheaded assessment of the realities on the ground but an effort by an ideologically rigid Administration to pass its failures onto someone else. Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) innocently betrayed the real rationale of U.S. policy when, in speaking of her Senate colleagues, she noted: “A lot of people are looking for some political cover, quite frankly. They don’t want to face that nagging question, ‘Did you lose Nicaragua?’ ” Her remark is an even better description of White House policy.

Yet it will be a tragedy for North Americans and a catastrophe for Central Americans if the 1988 presidential foreign-policy debate descends to the level it did in 1952, when the Republicans accused the Democrats of losing China, and in 1960, when the Democrats returned the favor by accusing the Eisenhower Administration of losing Cuba. It was never in the cards for the United States to “save” any of these countries from political and economic forces that were in the process of eliminating foreign influence, not responding to it.

The same point is valid in Central America today. U.S. pressure and economic aid can hold off change but it cannot stop it. Among the U.S. options is not a preservation of the status quo, as we are attempting to obtain in El Salvador. Nor is a return to the past--the previous Contra strategy--possible in Nicaragua.

What, then, would be the elements of a sensible policy? They might involve the following points:

To begin with, Washington could give some of the recent peace initiatives a chance by finally facing up to the changing nature of the security threat confronting the United States. Certainly in this hemisphere it has radically changed.

In the past century when steamships and navies needed coaling stations to travel far and wide, small bits of territory scattered across the face of the globe acquired enormous strategic importance. Like the periodic watering stations needed by the U.S. transcontinental railroad for its steam engines, the global system could not work without dependable points of supply.

Even in the post-World War II period, until the arrival of strategic missiles with transcontinental range, small countries near the coast of one of the superpowers still had major military significance. The United States needed to base its B-52s near the Soviet periphery. Until it got stronger rockets, it needed nuclear-weapons bases close to Soviet soil. But as the range and accuracy of these weapons steadily improved, the value of these bases began to decline. This is as true for the Soviet Union as it is for the United States. Technology affects both countries. The new threat or challenge to the United States, at least in this hemisphere, is the uncontrolled river of people and drugs flowing across the U.S. border. Former CIA Director William E. Colby is not wrong when he contends that the primary security threat to the United States now is not Soviet rocketry but illegal immigration from Latin America. He certainly is right if we ask ourselves what foreign factors are most likely to alter radically the character of political life inside the United States.

This being so, the principal U.S. security objective in Central America should be to find some way to stop the fighting, the ferocity of which is only pushing people to flee to Mexico and the United States. A secondary objective is to bar any security arrangement between Nicaragua and the Soviet Union that would represent a serious new military threat to U.S. security.

The United States by this logic should not be opposed to power sharing in El Salvador because again its main objective is to end the fighting; and the fighting will not stop until the left is guaranteed the degree of protection and participation that power-sharing would entail. We should continue to press the Sandinistas to offer a guaranteed political space inside Nicaragua to stop the fighting there. The United States should concentrate its attention on improving the social and economic conditions of ordinary people in Central America so that life will be acceptable enough for them to stay.

Administrations should spend more of their political capital trying to persuade the Congress to permit sugar imports from Central America instead of financing arms for the Contras. Real American security would be better served, for Central America will either send us its roducts or its people.

But it is not possible to begin this more realistic approach until political figures in Washington cease misleading people about the situation in Central America. U.S. policy in the area now requires, therefore, an uncommon measure of statesmanship and openness, without which the killing in Central America will probably not end despite some promising events. If it continues, it becomes ever more likely that one day soon among those lost will be a not insignificant number of young Americans.