Officials Skeptical That Nicaragua Will Live Up to Pact : U.S. Concedes It Lacks Contra Strategy

The Bush Administration, with many of its key foreign policy positions still unfilled, conceded Wednesday that it has not developed a strategy to respond to a new Central American peace proposal intended to disband the Contras and remove the linchpin of U.S. policy in Nicaragua.

The proposal, signed by the presidents of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras, calls for disarming the Contras and closing their bases in Honduras in exchange for democratic elections and other political reforms in Nicaragua.

White House and State Department officials said that if Nicaragua’s Marxist regime meets its obligations under the pact, it would satisfy U.S. objectives in the region and achieve the goals of the Contras. Under those circumstances, the U.S. officials said, there would be no need for the Contras to continue to exist as a guerrilla organization.

However, the officials expressed deep skepticism that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government would keep its part of the bargain.

The pact calls for the five nations to draft, within 90 days, a specific plan to demobilize the Contras. But it does not require free elections until early next year. That would seem to put the Contras out of business long before the Sandinistas would be required to deliver on their obligations.

Nevertheless, Administration officials said it is too soon to determine what Washington will do if Ortega reneges.

Interviewed on a Washington radio station, Vice President Dan Quayle said that if the Sandinista government fails to live up to its obligations, “then we’ll have to regroup and come up with a new strategy to move the Nicaraguan leaders in the direction they say they want to move.”

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said: “We’re still analyzing details of it. We don’t have any immediate reaction.”

State Department spokesman Charles Redman said the U.S. government will discuss the plan with leaders of “the Central American democracies.” However, there seems to be little doubt that the region’s U.S. allies--El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica--will express full support for the agreement that their presidents have just signed.

Although leaders of those four nations have been openly critical of Nicaragua’s repressive regime, they have also made it clear that they are uncomfortable with the U.S.-backed rebellion against an other Central American government. Their latest effort to demobilize the Contras comes at the same time that the Bush Administration is involved in the tedious process of filling out its roster of senior policy-makers.

“There is currently a policy void,” said Rob Kurz, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “The United States is failing to protect its interests or carry out its responsibilities. No one should be surprised that the Central Americans are stepping into this void.”

Robert E. Hunter, a National Security Council staff member during the Carter Administration and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Bush may have muted his reaction to the Central American proposal because he has decided it has become impossible to support the Contras any longer.

“I don’t see a future for the Contras,” Hunter said. “Everything Bush has done so far indicates a desire to try to place Nicaragua in some broader context which will help him avoid an early political dispute and possible failure. He is concerned about Nicaragua, but to use an old Lyndon Johnson expression, ‘This dog won’t hunt.’ ”