NEWS ANALYSIS : Central America Turns to Democracy: Can It Work?

If Nicaragua can hold a free election and cope with the results, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez said last weekend, “Central America will be a very different place.”

Arias, the architect of the peace talks that led to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s surprise election Sunday as president of Nicaragua, already has seen his prediction come true. In little more than two months, the political landscape of Central America, a land racked by seemingly endless war and desperate poverty, appears to have been transformed.

As recently as December, the area was a string of nagging crises for the Bush Administration: Dictator Manuel A. Noriega was in power in Panama, the leftist Sandinista government appeared solidly in control of Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador was in a brutal, downward spiral.

Now, Noriega is gone, the Sandinistas are on their way out, and El Salvador’s leftist guerrillas--soon to lose their aid from Managua--may be weaker than ever before. Administration officials, contending that the chances for a negotiated peace in El Salvador “have never been better,” pledged Tuesday to press seriously for a U.N.-monitored truce in the 10-year-old guerrilla war.

In effect, President Bush appears on the verge of securing what his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, pursued fruitlessly for eight years: A Central America of pro-American governments, none of them seriously threatened by leftist rebels.

From a Central American perspective, the change is even more historic: For the first time in 168 years of independence from Spain, every country except Belize will have a civilian president chosen in a competitive election. Belize is a constitutional monarchy, with the British sovereign as head of state.

Predictably, debate has already broken out over who deserves more credit: George Bush or Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reagan or Jimmy Carter.

More important, though, is the policy problem of the next decade. For the United States, the military crisis that dominated Central America policy during the 1980s is turning into a more subtle--but no less demanding--issue: Can democracy be made to work?

“Every Latin American country in which an elected government has taken over from an authoritarian regime has faced the same problems that face Nicaragua: an economy in crisis and a powerful military,” noted Peter Hakim, director of the Inter-American Dialogue, a group of former U.S. and Latin American leaders. “And in almost every country, their record on solving either problem has been abysmal.”

Earlier experiments with democracy in Latin America frequently foundered when peace and prosperity failed to materialize, spurring military officers to seize power.

Bush and other officials have vowed that this time will be different. But their own aides, as well as Latin America experts outside the government, say keeping that promise will require two commodities in short supply: American money and American attention.

Asked by a reporter whether the United States can afford to aid Nicaragua and the other countries of the area, Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson replied: “The question is, Can we afford not to help them? And the answer is no.”

But other officials said the increasing demand for U.S. aid from “new democracies” around the world, including Panama and Eastern European countries as well as Nicaragua, cannot realistically be met from the Administration’s current $15-billion foreign aid budget.

Equally important, some say, is whether the Administration will pay enough attention to Nicaragua and the rest of Central America to help the countries solve their political, social and economic problems.

“Your love story with Nicaragua is going to be over very soon,” predicted Bosco Matamoros, a spokesman here for the U.S.-backed Contras. “You Americans have been fed up with Nicaragua for a long time.”

Hakim agreed. “If Violeta Chamorro is lucky, the Sandinistas will make threatening noises about taking back power,” he said. “That’s the only thing that will keep the Bush Administration interested.”

For the moment, the Administration is clearly interested in Nicaragua--in making sure the two-month transition from Sandinista President Daniel Ortega to the inauguration of Chamorro on April 25 goes without a hitch.

After that, the Administration’s attention is likely to turn to El Salvador, where some officials argue that the leftist guerrillas may be persuaded to give up their fight on U.S. terms.

“We believe that conditions have never been better to promote a genuine, negotiated settlement to the war in El Salvador,” a senior State Department official said. “Clearly there’s an enormous exhaustion inside the country and a weariness with the war. Both sides recognize that a military solution means endless years of more suffering.”

He said Secretary of State James A. Baker III has talked with U.N. Secretary Gen. Javier Perez de Cuellar twice this month to help work out a plan under which U.N. troops would guarantee a cease-fire agreement.

However, Mark Falcoff, a Latin America expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said the election results in Nicaragua could make it harder to start negotiations in El Salvador--at least in the short run--by encouraging the country’s rightist-led armed forces to seek a military victory.

“The real problem is that neither side in El Salvador is going to negotiate except when it can humiliate the other,” Falcoff said. “The Salvadoran army doesn’t look any more interested in negotiations this week than it did last week.”

There are still grounds for optimism, though, Falcoff said. “Every Latin American country except Cuba now recognizes that you need to have an elected government,” he noted. “From now on, a Latin government without an elected government is a pariah. It can’t get into the game. The military now understands this, even in Guatemala and Argentina”--countries where the military is still a major political force.

“It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be prosperous, or that the military has gotten out of politics altogether,” he said. “But it’s a major historical achievement nonetheless.”