With time running down on his much-lauded peace plan for Central America, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez is struggling to keep the destiny of his beleaguered region in the hands of local leaders.
Arias and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua took the offensive in that battle last Aug. 7 when they upstaged President Reagan by rejecting his peace proposal for the area and adopting their own.
But when the deadline for their regional effort lapsed on Jan. 15-with three civil wars still raging and democracy sorely lacking in parts of the region, most notably in Nicaragua-control over the fate of Central America threatened to shift once again to Washington, D.C.
Arias still insists that only peaceful diplomatic pressure should be brought to bear on Nicaragua`s Sandinista regime to get it to keep the promises it made in signing the peace pact, including the restoration of democracy.
But the Reagan administration is preparing to ask Congress for more U.S. aid for Nicaragua`s contra rebels, and last week the President authorized the resumption of weapons airdrops to the contras.
”This is the essence of the difference between how I want to approach the Sandinista government and the approach of the U.S. administration,” Arias said last week in the study of his San Jose home.
”I have insisted that the only way tqo kill Dracula is with a cross-not a sword,” said Arias, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize as the architect and principal force behind the peace plan.
”When I talk with most officials of the U.S. government, as well as members of Congress, they tell me that the contras have no chance of overthrowing the Sandinista government,” he said.
”If that is correct, and I share with them that point of view-you didn`t succeed in Vietnam with the strongest army in the world-then it is not very plausible to succeed in Nicaragua with an army of 12,000 to 15,000 compared to an army of 100,000 Sandinista soldiers.”
Moreover, Arias noted, when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega signed the peace plan in Guatemala City five months ago, he committed himself before the world to restore democracy to Nicaragua.
”No Marxist government in the past has committed itself to become democratic or to build a democracy-not in Eastern Europe, not in Cuba, not in Africa-nowhere, with one exception: Daniel Ortega last Aug. 7 in Guatemala City,” said Arias.
”So all we have to ask him now is to comply with what he agreed and to honor his signature, and that`s exactly what we did here in San Jose last weekend.”
The peace plan also called for cease-fires and amnesties by Jan. 15 in the guerrilla wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicargua, along with restoration of civil liberties and an end to giving aid or sanctuary to insurgents.
The five Central American presidents met in San Jose 10 days ago to assess their progress in complying with the peace pact, and Ortega pledged again to restore several basic liberties. Under pressure from the other four, Ortega promised to lift the wartime state of emergency and to open direct talks with the contras. In addition, he said he would grant amnesty and hold free elections in the near future.
The peace talks, which would be the first face-to-face negotiations between the contras and the Sandinistas since the war began in 1981, were expected to get underway by the middle of this week.
But critics of the Arias strategy question Ortega`s sincerity, pointing out that he has merely promised once again to do what he pledged to do-and has so far failed to do-when he signed the accord last August.
Honduran President Jose Azcona Hoyo declined in a recent interview to condemn aid to the contras.
”I don`t see any advantage to cutting it off if Nicaragua doesn`t open up democratically,” he said. ”If Nicaragua was democratized, the contras wouldn`t exist.”
Alfredo Cesar, one of the six members of the contra political directorate, was more blunt in his assessment of the Sandinista`s commitment to peace.
In an interview, he recalled the demand of the Central American presidents five months ago to give peace time to work.
”Peace has been given a chance and . . . the Sandinistas didn`t take the chance. So we can no longer work from the assumption that only peace has to be given a chance,” he said.
Asked about Arias` claim the contras can`t win the war, Cesar said: ”My answer is that even if we cannot win the war completely, we are winning one war, which is preventing consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regime. That is a success.
”They have not been able to consolidate because of the war,” he added.
”And so there will be a time when they will not have any other option but to look for peace. This is not the time yet. The Sandinistas need more pressure.”
To do that, Cesar prescribed a combination of military and political pressure by the contras and the Nicaraguan opposition in general, coupled with diplomatic pressure from the Central American democracies.
Sen. Phil Gramm (R., Tex.), who visited Costa Rica a week ago as part of a Senate observer group on Central America, said he was left with the impression that Azcona, Cerezo and Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte approve of contra aid to keep pressure on the Sandinistas. Cerezo and Duarte have not said that publicly.
”What action produces peace?” Gramm asked rhetorically in a telephone interview from Washington. ”Cessation of aid produces war in El Salvador, Honduras and possibly Costa Rica. The presence of aid continues an internal struggle in Nicaragua.”
While the future of peace in the region seems to lie with the U.S. Congress for now, he said, ”there is a growing unity of purpose” among the four presidents of democracies that ”will serve Central America well whether in a peace process or a conflict.”
Arias acknowledged that the four presidents had put considerable pressure on Nicaragua to keep its promises, but he noted that the Sandinistas were not alone in noncompliance with the peace plan.
”Honduras hasn`t complied with throwing the contras out of its territory,” said Arias. ”And in Guatemala, there is still some fighting, and we all expect the dialogue with the guerrillas to be started again soon. That is also the case with El Salvador.”
Still, he indicated the countries are more in compliance than Nicaragua.
”Now, of course, the eyes of the whole world are on Nicaragua,” Arias concluded, ”because if they do comply in the next few weeks, more aid to the contras might not be approved. And that`s why I told Ortega, `You have in your hands the destiny of peace or war in your own country.` ”
But Arias, too, questioned the motives of the Sandinistas, noting,
”Sometimes I tend to believe that the commandants prefer the military solution to the democratic one.”
Alejandro Bendana, general secretary of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, respond by charging that ”some of the Central American presidents were obviously on the defensive” because of the report of an international verification commission that documented noncompliance.
In a telephone interview from Managua, he said the other presidents had tried to put a disproportionate responsibility for the success or failure of the peace plan ”on Nicaragua`s back.”
