Arias Urges Nicaragua Talks in Bid to Halt New Contra Aid

Struggling to revive his regional peace initiative, President Oscar Arias Sanchez is pressing both sides in the Nicaraguan conflict to resume peace talks before Congress votes on new aid for the U.S.-backed Contras.

Advisers to Arias said that he does not expect negotiations to achieve quick results but wants to avert a renewal of military aid to the Contras and a collapse of Nicaragua’s shaky truce before President Reagan leaves office Jan. 20. Such a holding action, in their view, would improve prospects for a settlement early in the next U.S. Administration.

Arias is planning to meet this week with Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista president of Nicaragua, to discuss terms for restarting face-to-face talks that the Contras broke off two months ago. The Costa Rican leader hopes to win concessions that will bring the rebels back to the bargaining table.

His push for peace talks parallels a similar effort by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who returns to Central America late today for the third time in five weeks. While both Arias and Shultz are wielding diplomacy against the Sandinistas, Arias opposes a White House bid to renew military assistance to the rebels and, his aides say, has ruled out urging Western nations to deny economic aid to Managua to force Sandinista concessions.

“Arias does not have a solution if peace talks fail,” said Guido Fernandez, a close presidential adviser. “If there is more military aid and more war in Nicaragua, the chances for his peace plan’s survival are very thin.”

The Costa Rican initiative is the only sign of life in the Central American peace accord a year after the region’s five presidents signed it. The historic agreement of Aug. 7, 1987, launched promising efforts to end three guerrilla wars and ensure full democratic rights, and it won Arias, the principal architect, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. But all progress had ceased in recent months.

The treaty committed Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to negotiate cease-fires, to stop aiding rebel forces elsewhere and to guarantee a free press and elections, amnesty for political offenses, respect for human rights and liberty for dissident groups to operate openly.

So far, the most dramatic result of the accord was Congress’ cutoff of U.S. military aid to the Contras last February and a truce agreement in Nicaragua the following month. The regional accord has also achieved limited freedoms for the anti-Sandinista political opposition and the leftist opposition in El Salvador.

But it has failed to end wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, where peace talks quickly collapsed, or to halt Soviet Bloc support for Marxist rebels in those countries. The U.S.-backed military establishment in Honduras, which dominates the civilian government, has violated the agreement by continuing to allow Contras to operate from bases in its territory.

Death Squad Killings

Hundreds of prisoners in El Salvador and Nicaragua have been freed. But killings by military and paramilitary death squads “continue on a wide scale in Guatemala and El Salvador and on a smaller scale in Honduras,” according to a report issued last week by Americas Watch, a U.S. human rights monitoring group. It also reported several political killings in Nicaragua, where they had not been common.

One reason for these setbacks is a surge of right-wing opposition movements in Guatemala and El Salvador in recent months against the two Christian Democratic presidents who signed the accord.

Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo survived a military coup attempt in May but was left politically weakened. In El Salvador, President Jose Napoleon Duarte’s party lost its legislative majority to rightists in the March elections, then splintered into factions as Duarte fell ill with terminal cancer three months later.

Despite its paralysis, officials and diplomats in the region say the peace accord has shifted the focus of decision-making about Central America away from Washington by giving regional leaders both a lasting set of guidelines and an informal mechanism for settling conflicts themselves.

Formally, the peace accord expired last January, when the five presidents held a second meeting and did not extend the deadline for compliance. They also abolished an international commission that had monitored the accord.

Focus on Nicaragua

Since then, Arias has focused his foreign policy exclusively on Nicaragua. The momentum toward an armistice there ended June 9 when peace talks broke off, and it was set back a month later when the Sandinistas imposed a sweeping crackdown on the opposition.

It was a sign of the peace accord’s lingering influence that Shultz failed to win a joint condemnation of Nicaragua by its neighbors last week, because the initiative had come from Washington.

Instead, Arias has announced plans to deliver his own formal assessment of the state of peace in Central America, before the U.S. congressional vote. In a sneak preview last Thursday, he told reporters the Sandinistas were guilty of “major sins” against the peace process.

Arias’ strategy reflects one of the ironies of his peacemaking role: the way he uses the threat of Contra aid as a weapon. The leader of a tiny country with no army, he can wield only his moral authority as a Nobel laureate. Yet while he steadfastly opposes arming the Contras, his aides say, Arias knows that if he singles out the Sandinistas for strong condemnation, they will fear a pro-Contra vote in Congress and might offer concessions.

“We know the Sandinistas are worried,” said a Costa Rican official. “It was Ortega who has asked for a meeting.” Another official said: “If Ortega makes important concessions, the peace plan will survive the Reagan Administration.”

Reversal of Crackdown Sought

Both officials said Arias will ask Ortega to reverse last month’s crackdown by freeing jailed dissident leaders and reopening the Roman Catholic radio station, while doing away with the press censorship law and granting the opposition its own television station.

U.S. officials said that Shultz, who is to meet today with Arias, supports the Costa Rican leader’s efforts. Unlike previous Administration envoys, Shultz has not lectured Arias about the need for military aid or criticized his peace plan, which Reagan once termed “fatally flawed.”

“Oscar has said all along that our differences are not over objectives but over tactics, and now (for lack of military aid) we’re adopting his tactics,” U.S. Ambassador Deane R. Hinton said in an interview. “I don’t think that’s going to get us very far (in Nicaragua) . . . but it’s certainly better than letting things come apart.”

Arias said he told Shultz last month “that the Sandinistas today are bad guys, and you are good guys” in the eyes of the world but that the roles would be reversed if Contra military aid is restored.