No Way to Go but Up

It should not take a lot of effort for President-elect George Bush’s transition team to suggest policy options in Central America that would be more productive than the failed policies of the last eight years:

--Almost a decade after it began, El Salvador’s civil war remains a stalemate, and all signs indicate that it will get bloodier in coming years unless a way is found to end the fighting.

--In Honduras the Contra rebels on whom President Reagan counted to defeat Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime are demoralized, and some are reportedly fleeing their clandestine bases for Miami.

--In Nicaragua itself the economy is a shambles, but the Sandinistas retain their grip on power largely because the Contra war has given them a pretext to repress the country’s legitimate opposition forces.

--Relations between the United States and the one peaceful democratic country in the region, Costa Rica, are at their lowest point in years because Reagan stubbornly refuses to cooperate with a regional peace plan drawn up by its president, Oscar Arias Sanchez.

--Even the one country that could be considered a success because a civilian president was elected to replace a military junta during Reagan’s watch, Guatemala, is tainted if one looks at it closely. The government is hanging on by its fingernails in the face of growing pressure from right-wing extremists. Two coup attempts have failed in recent months.

As if all this were not enough, remember that it was frustration over Nicaragua that helped lead Reagan into the the worst scandal of his term in office, the Iran-Contra arms deal.

To get off to a better start, Bush must forget the paranoid view of Nicaragua’s revolution that is at the root of Reagan’s obsession with that country and that motivated his military strategy throughout the region. To cite just one sad example of the perverse effect that Reagan’s thinking had, his Administration ignored the ties that the Panamanian strongman, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, had to narcotics traffickers because he was willing to help the Contras.

Once the haze of ideology is blown away, the situation in Nicaragua does not look nearly so threatening as Reagan tried to scare the American people into thinking it was. For all their anti- yanqui posturing and socialist pretense, the Sandinistas are not Soviet puppets. Indeed, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev seems to have no interest in taking on the burden of another poor client state, like Cuba, in the Western Hemisphere. Once that is understood, the Sandinistas no longer seem to be a danger to this country, but an annoyance. And their leftist revolution does not pose a military threat so much as a challenge to U.S. ingenuity.

Seen in this context, the single biggest mistake that Bush could make in Central America would be to try to renew military aid to the Contras. It would prolong useless bloodshed to no good purpose. More money for the Contras would no more guarantee their success than did all the money that Reagan wasted on them. Worse, it would poison Bush’s relations with Congress, and with most of Latin America, just as his presidency is beginning.

A better strategy for dealing with the Sandinistas must be twofold:

First, the United States must continue to give moral and financial support to the opposition groups that have remained active inside Nicaragua, like the Roman Catholic Church, and independent labor unions and business organizations.

Then, since Reagan’s stick did not budge the Nicaraguan government, Bush must offer a carrot--U.S. economic aid to help rebuild Nicaragua’s war-ravaged economy. Lifting the sanctions on U.S.-Nicaragua trade that Reagan imposed in 1985 would be the most dramatic step that Bush could take to show the Sandinistas that, while he may not like them, he intends to pursue a more constructive strategy in dealing with them. Bush must also send a new U.S. ambassador to Managua as soon as possible, ending the silly game of diplomatic tit-for-tat going on between the two governments.

Once U.S.-Nicaraguan relations are on a more rational basis, it will be easier to tackle other problems in Central America, from refugees in Honduras to the economic deterioration in Costa Rica. It may even be possible to get the warring factions in El Salvador to resume their stalled peace talks.

Here Bush has an important advantage, for there is already a viable peace process under way in Central America. The Arias plan has all the elements needed to start calming the situation in that region--dialogue between governments and armed opposition groups, an end to outside interference in each country’s internal affairs, and improved human rights in all countries, including amnesty for political prisoners and freedom of the press. The one element that has been missing is the support of the region’s preeminent power. If Bush decides to do nothing else in Central America, he would take a major step toward helping to resolve the crisis there by allowing the Arias peace plan to move forward unimpeded.