Central America Gives Us an Opening : Time’s Right for Economic Strategy Where Military One Failed

Reaction to the Sandinista-Contra cease-fire agreement by supporters of the Administration’s Contra military strategy has been fascinating. Most act as if it is all over: The Contras have surrendered; the Sandinistas have won; the Democrats lost Nicaragua and will pay for it at the polls; without military aid there is no way to pressure the Sandinistas to democratize.

But the fact is that, far from being over, the cease-fire arrangement negotiated at Sapoa, Nicaragua, last week opened up --in Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez’s words--”new dimensions and horizons in the search for peace in Central America.” If the Administration really wants to ensure Sandinista compliance with the agreement and to promote pluralism in Nicaragua, it should now move rapidly to mount an integrated economic development and recovery program for the entire Central American region.

The arguments for such a course are clear. Effective development and recovery programs would help repair war’s physical destruction of infrastructure in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and thus help consolidate peace in the region; it would help our friends grapple with the root causes of revolution and instability, and it would provide far more effective leverage on Nicaragua now than military pressure. Despite the conventional myth, Nicaragua’s economic misery and isolation were at least as much of a reason for the Sandinistas to seek an accommodation with the Contras and peace with its neighbors as Contra military pressure. Nicaragua desperately needs economic relief, and the Sandinistas clearly have no prospect for any significant help from the Soviets or the Cubans. Therefore, a development program in which Nicaragua would be invited to participate, provided it complied with its commitments, would be a powerful lever.

Such an urgent economic program would make sense in terms of U.S. objectives in the other countries as well. In El Salvador continued poverty, unemployment and injustice have all increased popular disaffection. The ability of any future Salvadoran government to pacify the country and achieve reconciliation will depend in no small part on economic recovery and development and, therefore, on external aid. The same in Guatemala and Honduras. And the United States owes the Costa Rican government a great deal for saving us from our own folly.

Above all, the timing is right. The ceasefire agreement provides just the context in which a quick follow-on development program can have a major effect. With both sides in Nicaragua’s civil war now ready to forgo violence and move their struggle to a political plane, and with the whole region tired of war and in need of attention to its economic and social problems instead, the time has come to abandon an increasingly sterile proxy-war tactic and grasp the opportunity for a more constructive strategy that can secure the cooperation of all of Central America, and of our South American and European friends as well. A development and recovery program holds just that promise. Renewing military pressure promises only to spread the killing and to deepen the intransigence and bitterness.

An effective economic program should not require funding at higher than current levels, and perhaps not as high--especially if the military-aid components are converted to development objectives. In the context of a different political strategy, U.S. assistance might well contribute to development more efficiently. A U.S.economic-aid package should entail not only multiyear commitments of aid but some measure of debt relief and trade concessions as well. It should seek to divide the burden better with other donors like Western Europe and Japan. The unilateralism of the Administration’s Contra strategy has tended up to now to impede such cooperation. On the other hand, the Central American governments, including Nicaragua, have already held a series of meetings with the European Economic Community to fashion a regional development program.

A U.S. aid package should also seek to promote regional economic cooperation and a revival of the Common Market. Wrapping Nicaragua up in economic commitments with the rest of the region can provide effective political pressure for moving that nation toward pluralism.

But, alas, can the Administration marshal the energy and imagination necessary to fashion such a strategy? It remains obsessed with the sterile conception that a Contra military force is the only tool that we have for dealing with the Sandinistas. So far, Administration spokesmen have voiced only grudging skepticism and warnings about the Sapoa agreement. All indications are that the Administration will remain on the sidelines, waiting for the cease-fire agreement to fail so that it can argue for re-igniting the war. And some may even be tempted actively to encourage skepticism and doubt so as to make such a failure more likely. The call for a guarantee of renewed U.S. military aid in case the agreement fails does just that. It is an invitation to the intransigents among the Contras to drag their feet in the hope of renewing the war and “winning.”

For nearly eight years the Administration has been mired in a dilemma that it has not been able to resolve. Overthrowing the Sandinistas through the Contras was never a rational possibility at cost levels that were politically feasible. And the Administration has consistently refused to use Contra pressure as part of a negotiating strategy aimed at a modus vivendi. Faced with a terrible gap between ends and means, it has been unable to change either.

There is little wonder that the sterility into which the Contra strategy was leading the region prompted the Central Americans to take their destiny into their own hands--first at Esquipulas last August, and now at Sapoa. As Contra leader Alfredo Cesar was reported as saying about the cease-fire agreement, “There was a special nationalism. The feeling was, let’s try and get away from the superpowers.”

It will be tragic if we miss the lead that Central Americans themselves have given us to seek more effective tools and strategies to secure our objectives in the region. And it would be ironic indeed if, instead of controlling the Central American agenda, the Administration’s strategy makes us marginal to the region’s dynamics.