Central America Giving Peace Another Chance

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It was against that discouraging backdrop that the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua met with Arias near the Costa Rican capital of San Jose last week to assess the progress of the peace plan. Originally expected to begin and end Friday, the meeting dragged into the next day as the leaders bargained and bickered over a round table. Arias' frustration surfaced Saturday after a morning swim before the session resumed. Said the dejected summit host: "I did everything I could. We all knew that if we failed to come to an agreement, the war would continue." Before the day was over, however, the tide had turned and Arias' reputation as a peacemaker had regained its luster.

Arias had not waited for the summit to chastise those whom he accused of hindering the peace plan. In a letter to three top contra leaders who fled Nicaragua several years ago and now reside in Costa Rica, the soft-spoken President demanded that they abandon their rebel activities or leave his country. The three, Alfonso Robelo, Alfredo Cesar and Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, sit on the six-member board that directs the contras' political affairs and produces a steady stream of anti-Sandinista propaganda. The next day Arias counterbalanced his anti-contra blast with a blunt four-page letter accusing Nicaragua's Ortega of failing to comply with the peace agreement. While the Sandinistas allowed a single opposition newspaper, La Prensa, to reopen last October, they have shown little readiness to allow broader political freedoms. Admonished Arias: "There is no room for legal structures that deny democratic process."

The Reagan Administration kept a close eye on the Costa Rica summit. In a whirlwind tour of Central America two weeks ago, Lieut. General Colin Powell, Reagan's National Security Adviser, irritated Nicaragua's neighbors by suggesting that they might suffer U.S. aid cutbacks if they abandoned the contras. Powell also urged them to condemn the Sandinistas' intransigence as a major obstacle to peace. The Administration's critics saw the mission as part of an overall plan to topple the Sandinistas by using the contras to wage a proxy war. The outcome of last week's summit, however, seemed to dim hopes that Congress would approve more military aid for the contras anytime soon. Conceded an Administration official: "The Sandinistas are off the hook for now. It's extremely difficult to justify lethal aid if the Sandinistas appear to be accommodating." The trick for Managua will be to keep up that appearance abroad without eroding its hold on power at home.