NEWS ANALYSIS : Heed Nicaragua Lesson, Salvadorans Told

When Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez met this week with the antagonists in El Salvador’s civil war, he urged them to look to Nicaragua for lessons in how to make peace.

“In Nicaragua, nobody asks any more how many died in the latest battle,” Arias said. “They ask how the election campaign is going.”

As enemies in Nicaragua turn from bullets to ballots, the rightist government and Marxist rebels of El Salvador have launched their own effort to end Latin America’s most intense conflict, a 10-year war that has cost an estimated 70,000 lives.

But the peculiarities of the Salvadoran war make it more intractable than the fading Nicaraguan war between the Sandinista government and U.S.-backed Contras.

The Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front agreed Sept. 15 in Mexico City to try to make peace “by political means in the shortest time possible” through monthly negotiations.

Their first round of substantive talks, however, reached an impasse here Wednesday. In three days, they agreed on nothing but to meet again in November.

In some ways, the Salvadoran talks mirror those the Sandinistas and Contras held in late 1987 and early 1988. While battle fatigue pushed the contenders to the table, diplomacy has worked against the guerrilla side in both countries.

Poles apart in ideology, the FMLN rebels and the Contras ended up in the same bind--both facing a government bolstered by the 1987 Central American peace agreement that aims to end rebel insurgencies.

Within the limits of that five-nation accord, which brought Arias a Nobel Peace Prize, both rebel groups were obliged to recognize a regime they had fought to overthrow and to negotiate for little more than equal rights in a freer political system.

In Nicaragua, peace talks broke down in June, 1988, but not before producing an informal truce that still holds. With the Contras weakened by a cutoff of U.S. military aid, the Sandinistas drove most of them into Honduras, then won a regional pact for the rebels’ disarmament in exchange for early elections, set for Feb. 25.

Nobody expects a quick settlement in El Salvador. But Arias and other optimists dare to predict that the ebbing tide of East-West conflict makes one inevitable.

Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani has proposed an immediate cease-fire; just as the Contras reacted to a similar Sandinista offer two years ago, the FMLN rejects it.

The guerrillas say Cristiani is maneuvering politically to undermine them without making real concessions. As a prelude to a cease-fire, they demand fundamental reform of the constitution, the political system, the judiciary and the military.

A Costa Rican official involved in both peace efforts said that sooner or later the FMLN will have to accept a cease-fire with few conditions, at least as a basis for further talks.

“If not, they risk losing their credibility,” he said. Recalling that the Contras “ceased to be a legitimate force” after breaking off their talks last year, he added that “the same thing could happen to the FMLN.”

The official said Arias privately pressed this view on the guerrillas, holding up the Nicaraguan cease-fire--the so-called Sapoa agreement of March, 1988--as a model.

FMLN leaders have listened to Arias with quiet dismay, rejecting his premise that the two conflicts can be treated equally.

In their view, the FMLN is strong enough militarily to win concessions in return for a cease-fire, while the Contras were defeated on the battlefield.

“Sapoa is a dirty word for the FMLN,” rebel spokesman Arnoldo Ramos said. “It implies symmetry between our forces, which are self-sufficient, and the Contras, which are a mercenary army of the United States.”