Arias, Confident of Peace, Worries About Democracy

When President Oscar Arias Sanchez leaves office today, the front-row spectators will include a historic lineup: the prime minister of Belize and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.

For the first time in Central America’s 168 years of independence, the entire isthmus is governed by civilian leaders chosen in competitive elections. The inauguration of Arias’ successor, Rafael Calderon Fournier, will bring them all together.

On Monday night, five of the visiting leaders gathered for dinner at Arias’ home to bid farewell to the man whose diplomacy helped stop the Contra war in Nicaragua, brought warring parties in El Salvador to the peace table and launched a tradition of regional summit meetings to defuse military tensions.

The departure of Arias, who wrote the Central American peace plan that earned him the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, leaves just one of the plan’s five signers, President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo of Guatemala, in office. Cerezo’s term ends next January.

Looking back on eight presidential summits, Arias says he is confident that his plan will survive and keep the isthmus on an irreversible path toward peace. He worries, however, whether democracy can satisfy the expectations of its 28 million people.

“I am very optimistic about the future of Central America,” Arias declared at his final press conference Friday. “When the presidents meet again, they won’t have to face the issues of amnesties, cease-fires and liberation of political prisoners. Thank God they are now able to change their agenda and concentrate on trying to create more wealth and distribute that wealth in a more egalitarian way.”

But he warned: “Unless the Central American democracies deliver the goods, they cannot survive. That is the challenge for my colleagues in the years ahead.”

As a private citizen ineligible for reelection, Arias, 49, will not be far from that effort. After a May 17 speaking date at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia--he will share a forum with his old nemesis Ronald Reagan--and a trip to Italy next month to cheer Costa Rica’s soccer team in the World Cup competition, he plans to resume his personal diplomacy through the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress.

Launched with his $332,500 Nobel Prize money, the foundation has applied for a $70,000 planning grant from the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to develop a program of conflict resolution on the model of former President Jimmy Carter’s center in Atlanta.

Arias said that Carter himself encouraged the idea and that his own two children--Sylvia Eugenia, 14, and Oscar Felipe, 10--talked him out of an alternative plan to accept a two-year teaching fellowship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

The Arias foundation could stand ready to mediate the Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrilla wars that his peace plan has failed to end, he said, or step in “wherever there is conflict in the world.”

The peace plan was signed in August, 1987, by Arias and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It called for regular elections, political freedoms and negotiations to end guerrilla wars; it also barred outside aid to rebel groups.

Aimed mainly at neighboring Nicaragua, the plan prompted the U.S. Congress to halt military aid to the Contras in February, 1988, and is bearing new fruit as Arias leaves office.

Daniel Ortega stepped down as Nicaragua’s president April 25 after his Sandinista Party, which seized power by force of arms in 1979, lost a national election. Today, the U.S.-backed anti-Sandinista rebels are to start handing their rifles to U.N. peacekeeping troops in compliance with a final peace accord.

Under a “Bullets for Bytes” program led by Arias and Mayor Tom McEnery of San Jose, Calif., the Contras’ weapons will be matched by Sandinista guns and be melted down and sold as mementos to international donors. The money will buy computers for schoolchildren in Nicaragua.

Arias has met in recent days with Salvadoran guerrilla leaders to advise them on peace talks that will resume this month in Venezuela and with U.N. officials to ensure their involvement in Central America after his departure.

In an interview Friday, Arias said the biggest obstacle to his diplomacy came from Reagan Administration officials and his own domestic critics who applied “enormous pressure to bury the peace plan” every time a deadline passed without compliance.

“I used to be told that it was impossible for the Sandinistas to hold free and fair elections,” he said. “My reply to them was that there is always a first time.”

He credited Ortega with having “the courage to accept a reality very different from what he had in his mind and his heart in 1979” and President Bush for “giving peace a chance” by promoting elections instead of war in Nicaragua.

“The Reagan Administration made too big an issue of Nicaragua,” he said. “It’s not true that the Sandinista government was a threat to the United States.”

Now Arias is worried that, with the Sandinistas and Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega gone, Washington’s interest in Central America will fade.

The Costa Rican leader, a one-time university professor with a sheepish demeanor and a big ego, never misses a chance to hold up his own nation as a model.

Descending the steps of the Roman Catholic cathedral with his wife, Margarita, after a thanksgiving Mass on Friday evening, he was mobbed by admirers, a stooped-shouldered figure in the middle of a downtown traffic jam with no bodyguards.