Regional Peace’s Next Hurdle: El Salvador

The agreement signed by the five Central American presidents meeting in Tela, Honduras, brings the entire regional crisis back to its starting point of 1979-80: a consolidated Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, a military and political stalemate in El Salvador and a limited amount of superpower involvement in each country on both sides.

The agreement signaled the end of both the war in Nicaragua and the attempt by the United States to roll back the Sandinista revolution by force. The issue now is whether this second chance that the region’s presidents have crafted will be used to bring about the major changes their countries require.

In Nicaragua, the Tela accords, together with the last-minute internal agreement between the Sandinistas and their opposition, have called the United States’ bluff on the Contras.

U.S. conservatives, along with the Reagan Administration, had consistently maintained a logically unsupportable justification for aiding the Contras: that they were a home-grown, autonomous opposition to an unpopular, totalitarian, pro-Soviet regime; on the other hand, they could not survive without U.S. aid. The two arguments were contradictory: Either the Contras were an autonomous movement, in which case outside support, money and basing (in Honduras) were useful but not indispensable; or else aid from abroad was a life-and-death matter, in which case their popular support was highly questionable.

Proof that the Contras had never really established a base of strength at home could be seen in the fact that many of their leaders and supporters took the Tela agreements as the coup de grace to the armed anti-Sandinista opposition. Few believe that the Contras can survive as a large force, or even that they wish merely to subsist, without U.S. aid and their Honduran sanctuary.

Conversely, through the internal electoral agreement, there now can be political expression of the discontent that exists in Nicaragua. This discontent is the result of both the catastrophic economic situation and the deeper rejection of the revolution itself by important sectors of Nicaraguan society.

In a sense, the situation has come full circle: The United States has returned to its initial stance, implicitly acknowledged by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, that the Sandinista revolution was an unpleasant but inevitable fact of life for the region. And the Sandinistas, through their commitment to fair and free elections next year, will have to acknowledge that there is not an overwhelming consensus among Nicaraguans for radical change. The Sandinistas knew this and acted in consequence in the early years, and then they forgot it--or were forced to forget by the pressure of war.

The Salvadoran political equation also comes back to square one, thanks to the Tela agreements. Whatever remains of direct Nicaraguan and Cuban support for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front will cease. Managua will probably have to stop serving as a sort of sanctuary for the Salvadoran guerrillas’ leadership. But since the FMLN has always been, in contrast to the Contras, an essentially home-grown insurgency, the end of Sandinista backing will not make the rebels disappear. Indeed, without a political agreement, El Salvador’s civil war will only intensify.

The obstacle to a settlement in El Salvador has been the same since 1980: How do two relatively equal, diametrically opposed and violence-prone forces contending for power agree to share it or to compete for it peacefully? The only way is for a third force to oblige them to do so. That force can only be external, and under present circumstances, that means the United States.

The FMLN finally seems willing to engage in serious negotiations with the United States, as the rebels suggested to a group of American academics, congressional staffers and other foreign-policy specialists that met in Mexico last month.

But any such negotiations would first have to overcome the opposition that they would rouse from the Salvadoran right wing, and would entail substantive concessions from all sides. This in turn would imply a major shift in the economic, political and social status quo in El Salvador, which is precisely what the war has been about all these years. The FMLN would achieve less change than it has been seeking, but the Salvadoran army, oligarchy and right wing, together with the United States, would have to accept far more change than they have found tolerable in the past. There is little indication that such a disposition truly exists.

Perhaps the most lasting contribution that the Tela accords will make to the region’s future lies in its removal from the international spotlight. If Tela succeeds in transforming the military struggle into a political one and the international crisis into several national ones, it will have a meaningful effect. Central America’s problems will not go away, but they will finally acquire a dimension and a nature that can make them manageable.