Will Peace Be Given a Chance?

Some tough bargaining took place this week at the summit meeting of Central America’s five presidents in Costa Rica. It happened because no matter how much four of them mistrust Nicaragua, all five are desperate to end the region’s bloodshed.

After several tense meetings, they signed a broad peace agreement that includes two fundamentally important points that few observers expected to emerge from the negotiations. If everyone involved in the region, including the United States, honors the two points, this could go a long way toward ending the civil war in El Salvador and the Contra war in Nicaragua.

A key concession was made by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who astonishingly joined other leaders in condemning the leftist rebels determined to overthrow the government of El Salvador, and calling on them to resume negotiations with President Alfredo Cristiani. This was a telling turnabout for the Sandinistas, who have provided lots of aid and comfort to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front during its insurgency.

In exchange, Cristiani and three other presidents joined Ortega in demanding that the U.S. government stop supporting the Contras and instead devote all its “humanitarian” aid to disbanding the Nicaraguan rebels. The presidents even suggested that Contra aid money be administered by the United Nations rather than the United States, prompting White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to bark that the Bush Administration is “skeptical” about the latest Central American peace agreement.

Sure, given the failure of previous peace plans in Central America, some skepticism is warranted. But there is an important message in the Costa Rica summit for Washington: All of the region’s small nations are so terribly, thoroughly weary after a decade of political turmoil that peace is now more important to them and their people than is ideology.

In all the years since Ronald Reagan declared Central America an important battleground in the war against the Evil Empire of Communism, Washington has put far more effort into giving military aid to its friends in Central America than into seeking peaceful resolutions to the region’s many problems. At their latest summit the Central Americans are saying that it’s time to give peace a chance.