Nicaragua Takes Its Case Abroad

Envío team

Nicaragua’s denunciations of US terrorism have been heard this month in the world’s most prestigious forums, focusing renewed attention on the Central American conflict and the Contadora peace efforts.

While the Nicaraguan government maintains its military offensive and continues to consolidate its strategy for economic survival, a shift in US policy toward Nicaragua might depend on the resolutions that come out of the International Court of Justice at The Hague and on the results of what appears to be the “final stage” of the Contadora negotiations. Any such shift, whether tactical or real, will be closely tied to the political positions that the United States and other advanced capitalist countries take regarding the Latin American foreign debt. It will also be linked to the positions the US takes in its dialogue with the Soviet Union, in which the subject of Central America will surely be broached.

It is a complex moment internationally, in the face of which the United States could, and indeed should, reevaluate the course of its current policy toward the region and, in particular, toward Nicaragua.

Nicaragua takes its denunciations
to international forums

Denunciation of the Reagan administration’s policy of state terrorism has been a constant in Nicaraguan foreign policy, especially since the October 1983 attack on oil storage facilities in Corinto. This month, Nicaragua took its denunciation to Canada, Angola and The Hague. It was in this last forum that Nicaragua’s ongoing denunciation reached its peak, legally and internationally.

By demonstrating what the US terrorist policy consists of and how it has been developed and carried out, Nicaragua showed the origins and nature of what the United States and some of its Nicaraguan allies are trying to present as a “civil war.” Nicaragua’s intent is not only to explain the war, however. It is also to try to stop it, by showing the world that it is not a civil war to be resolved through “dialogue” only between the parties to the conflict. The war is, rather one of outside intervention, in which the dialogue must take place between the attacker and the attacked.

In keeping with its own rules, the World Court must come to a definitive judgment by no later than the second half of November. If there are no delays, this will coincide with the final period the Contadora group has set for the signing of its peace agreement.

In The Hague

For a week of sessions beginning on September 12, the last phase of hearings were held at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, to judge the accusations made by the government of Nicaragua against the government of the United States for its war of aggression.

The United States did not attend the hearings. This came as no surprise since the US government withdrew from the case in January, thus demonstrating its disrespect for the Court’s jurisdiction. “The accused did not take its place on the bench because the aggression is so immoral and so illegal that the government of Ronald Reagan is ashamed to appear in public,” said Comandante Luis Carrión, who headed the group of Nicaraguan and US witnesses who offered evidence on Nicaragua’s behalf. (In addition to the US witnesses brought by Nicaragua, North Americans are also on the legal team advising the Nicaraguan government and participating in this judgment. Among them are Abraham Chayes, former legal advisor to the State Department during the Kennedy administration, who is considered a leading authority on questions of international law.)

To back up its charge against the US government, Nicaragua took 1,500 pieces of written evidence to The Hague. Five witnesses presented evidence and submitted to cross examination by the 15 judges who make up the Court, among whom is normally a US representative, Stephen Schwebel.

Comandante Luis Carrión, currently in charge of Regions I and VI, those most affected by the war, presented a chronology of the counterrevolutionary war and its evolution to the Court, highlighting the direct intervention of the CIA in the formation of the counterrevolutionary army and in the design of its military strategies.

David MacMichael, former CIA analyst in El Salvador between 1981 and 1983, began by giving the Court the political “justification” of the counterrevolutionary war at its outset—to stop arms traffic by the Sandinista government to the Salvadoran FMLN, and thus to stop the “export of revolution.” MacMichael acknowledged that in 1980 and early 1981 arms had been sent from Nicaragua to El Salvador, but said that since that time there has been no more proof of such shipments. Furthermore, he said, there is no foundation whatever to the “proof” periodically presented to that effect by the Reagan administration as argument that financial aid to the contras should continue.

In his argument to the Court, MacMichael added that this proof was nothing more than a pretext since, from the moment the counterrevolutionary groups were organized by the CIA, the objective was none other than to destabilize and overthrow the Nicaraguan government. MacMichael also talked about the continuous tactic of “border provocations” employed in the war. Shooting from Honduran territory against Nicaraguan objectives and infiltrating armed contras across the border have been characteristic of the war. “The CIA believed that the Sandinistas lacked maturity, that they were impulsive and had the mentality of guerrillas,” the CIA analyst explained, attributing to this view the US conviction that the Sandinistas would sooner or later violate Honduran territory in response to these provocations, thus justifying an escalation of the war.

Michael Glennon, legal adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee between 1977 and 1980, presented a report in which he accused the United States of violating the human rights of the civilian Nicaraguan population through the activity of the counterrevolutionaries. He documented this accusation with a series of testimonies he had collected during one week of visits to areas in which the contra groups were operating.

William Hüpper, Nicaragua’s Finance Minister, pegged the indirect material losses caused by the aggression at $1.3 billion, and indicated that other international organizations put the figure closer to $3 billion. Hüpper requested of the Court that the United States compensate Nicaragua for $372 million, the calculation of the direct damage resulting from the aggression.

Jean Loison, a French priest who works as a nurse in the La Trinidad hospital in Estelí, presented to the Court stories of kidnappings, assassinations, rapes and destruction cruelly carried out by the counterrevolutionaries. He also showed dramatic photos of wounded people and of mutilated or tortured bodies.

Among the written evidence presented during these days of hearings was the affidavit of a former leader of the FDN, Edgard Chamorro. Many of the details offered in his testimony appeared in a recent issue of The New Republic.

Given that the International Court of Justice is the judicial branch of the United Nations, if the condemnation comes during the UN’s 40th General Assembly as expected, it would have a major impact in the international sphere. It would give Nicaragua’s charges greater worldwide projection than ever before. This in turn cannot fail to have repercussions on the positions governments around the world are taking to try to persuade the Reagan administration to change its Central American policy, at a moment when the administration’s hegemonic strategy is also being strongly questioned in other areas, such as South Africa. The US position in international forums is becoming further complicated because of reiterated support for Contadora and because of the vigorous efforts Latin American countries have made in the United Nations for political and economic changes in response to the foreign debt problem of the continent.

In Canada

Over 100 delegates from more than 90 countries attended the 74th conference of the Interparliamentary Union in Ottawa, Canada, this month. Nicaragua’s National Assembly, elected in November 1984, sent a pluralist delegation of FSLN and other party representatives, headed by Comandante Carlos Núñez, president of the Assembly. In the parliamentary forum Nicaragua again denounced the US’s terrorist policy. It also underscored a subject of growing international debate—the gravity of the foreign debt—and called for a “new international political order,” together with the New International Economic Order, to be based on respect for the self-determination of peoples. The Nicaraguan delegation made bilateral contacts with 65 of the 90 delegations to detail the country’s process of institutionalizing the revolution, especially the current consultation process for drafting Nicaragua’s new constitution. (The 75th conference in April 1986 will deal with two specific issues: Central America and nuclear disarmament.)

In Angola

Luanda, Angola, hosted the Ministerial Conference of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations, with ministers representing 101 countries of the third world. The Nicaraguan delegation was led by Henry Ruiz, Minister of Foreign Cooperation. In his position speech, Comandante Ruiz also denounced the terrorist policy of the current US government, calling it “the most serious threat that has existed in the world since the end of World War II.” The final resolutions expressed the concern of the non-aligned countries about the Central American situation, particularly that of Nicaragua, and gave support to the Contadora peace process. Additionally, and for the first time, the foreign debt was a separate point in the final declaration. The debt was categorized as a burden “incompatible with the countries’ development.”

Reagan administration puts in play a multifaceted blockade

Although the United States elected not to listen to the charges against it, the World Court hearings necessarily obliged the Reagan administration to raise the level of anti-Sandinista rhetoric even higher with new arguments. This rhetoric had cooled down noticeably in the period following Reagan’s accusation, made just before his illness, that Nicaragua belonged to some sort of “terrorist international.”

The Nicaraguan government is convinced that the World Court’s verdict will be favorable to Nicaragua and that the Court will condemn the United States for its violation of international law by promoting the counterrevolutionary war. The United States has the same conviction, and is thus attempting a blockade, at least to delay the results, if not to alter them.

On September 13 the State Department released a new document about Nicaragua, called “Revolution Beyond our Borders,” clearly written to counter the arguments being analyzed and published from The Hague. The document, which links the “internationalism” always proclaimed by the Nicaraguan revolution with an alleged Sandinista “practice of intervention” in the other Central American countries, brings together a series of “proofs” to demonstrate this identification. It aims mainly to prove the “legality and morality of the use of force” against an “illicit aggression.”

According to this new redefinition by the United States, the war Nicaragua is confronted with is no longer emphasized as a civil war. It has passed from the cliché of an “internal conflict” to that of a conflict internationalized for the “common good.” The document says in part:

“It is evident that the actions of the United States are not the acts of a government only seeking a pretext to intervene. It is a question of concerted actions with allies in an effort to persuade an aggressor government to stop its illegal activities in the interest of peace and security for the region.

“The efforts of the United States to help the nations of Central America in their defense against Nicaraguan actions have extended to various interrelated elements, which include [military and economic assistance, economic pressures, maneuvers, etc. are cited here], and assistance to Nicaraguans who are resisting the repressive internal policy and the interventionist foreign policy of the Sandinista regime. This last element of the collective response to Nicaraguan aggression has been the principal focus of Sandinista complaints. The Sandinistas have sought to portray this assistance as illegal—even though it is a response to aggression—because many of the details concerning this program are “covert.” But the legality of the use of force has nothing to do with the level of covertness maintained.

“It is simply that the Sandinista intervention, including its support for the guerrilla forces in other countries, has provoked a collective response. A nation that participates in the illegal use of armed force against others becomes the appropriate object of a necessary and proportionate action on behalf of the victim and of its allies in the exercise of their individual and collective right of self defense. An aggressor cannot avoid its responsibility for the illegal use of force, nor can it deprive its victims of their basic right to self defense. Sandinista protests of innocence cannot alter the fact of its continuous and unprovoked aggression its neighbors. Nicaragua cannot claim the protection of the same principles of international law that it itself is violating.” (All US government documents reproduced in this article are unofficial translations from the Spanish.)

At The Hague, the US witnesses pointed out the weakness of the argumentation in this document and asked why the United States, if it has so much evidence and so many legal reasons, limits itself to putting them out only through its propaganda apparatus rather than using them to defend itself in the World Court.

Some two weeks after publication of this document, Secretary of State George Shultz, speaking to a foreign policy group in New York, stressed the “legitimacy” of Reagan policy, opposing this to the Sandinistas, whose government he called “a moral disaster” and its ideology “aberrant.”

At this same time, the Reagan administration, in an official statement, approved Israel’s bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis, which killed more than 70 Tunisians and Palestinians, defining it as an act of legitimate defense against the “aggressor,” alleged in this case to have killed three Israelis in Cyprus. This is another example of the global logic by which Reagan tries to transform the state terrorism of the strongest against the weakest into “legitimate defense” and seeks to legitimize reprisals as valid instruments for the imposition of particular policies.

As became clear this month, the strategy to neutralize the conclusions of the verdict is not limited to rhetoric; concrete measures are also being taken. Since May, the Reagan administration has been planning to reject the Court’s jurisdiction not only regarding the current case, as it began by doing in January, but in any controversy concerning its “national security.” It is only awaiting an opportune moment to announce this decision. Although this broader disregard of the Court would signal even more clearly the US government’s contempt for international law, the administration expects it to succeed in pressuring the Court to delay its verdict, or soften the terms of its condemnation.

Nicaraguan continues confronting state terrorism

The war goes on in Nicaragua, reflecting the consequences of state terrorism on a daily basis both in the battlefields and in the rest of the country. As Nicaragua’s President attempted to explain recently, the multitude of economic difficulties expresses not even a “subsistence economy,” but the “survival economy” currently in effect.

According to information from the Ministry of Defense, between September 4 and October 23, there were more than 130 battles between the Sandinista army and the counterrevolutionaries, in which the latter suffered 441 dead. As is customary, there were no figures on Sandinista casualties.

The month was marked by Honduran-Nicaraguan border incidents on September 13 and 14, the eve of the celebration of Central American independence and just after an important meeting of the Central American and Contadora foreign ministers in Panama. According to the Honduran version, the Nicaraguan army carried out a half-hour attack on the department of El Paraíso, in Honduran territory, leaving one dead and eight wounded Honduran soldiers. The Nicaraguan version, to the contrary, was of a dangerous provocation in which some 40 US soldiers and 2,500 Hondurans gave artillery and air support to roughly 700 FDN counterrevolutionaries infiltrating into Nicaraguan territory. In contrast to similar situations that occasionally took place up to several months ago, this event was viewed by Nicaragua as particularly serious due the participation of Honduran A-37 and F-86 fighter planes which violated Nicaraguan air space and attacked Sandinista troops and planes. The high-altitude attack did not produce any wounded, although a Sandinista helicopter was damaged by a Honduran plane.

These border incidents created alarm in both Nicaragua and Honduras, where some sectors feared that these might be the first steps of the long-feared increase in confrontation between the two countries. Contadora called Honduras and Nicaragua and reached an understanding which served to avoid an escalation; it also initiated an urgent round of consultations with the Lima Support Group.

“These actions do not originate from the will of the Honduran government,” said the President of Nicaragua in his Independence Day speech on September 15, “they are imposed by the government of the United States.” He also invited Honduran President Suazo Córdova to meet with him in Tegucigalpa, Managua, or “in any country in our Latin America.” This proposal for bilateral dialogue, reiterated by President Ortega two days later with a proposal for the joint patrol of their common border, was ignored for several days by the Honduran government and Nicaragua was unable to reach Suazo Córdova by phone. Finally, the Honduran Foreign Ministry officially rejected the proposal for dialogue. “It would be useless,” said the diplomatic note, “and would be just another publicity show.” Rejecting bilateral dialogue, Honduras referred to Contadora’s global negotiations as the “ideal channel,” even though Contadora itself had been urging the two countries to reach a bilateral resolution of the border conflict.

Following several days of strong tension, an apparent normality returned to the border and the dispute seemed at an end. But this could not remain the case, since there are still bases along the Honduran border, harboring armed and active counterrevolutionaries. This indeed is the kernel of the problem; hidden within the “sanctuary” offered by the Honduran government to the counterrevolutionary troops and their US advisers is the time bomb that the US hopes to set off when it most serves the administration’s interests.

In the first days of October tensions shot up again with Nicaragua’s announcement that 2,500 counterrevolutionaries were concentrated in camps close to the border, supported by two Honduran army battalions, ready to invade Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan government—which in its note to the Honduran government detailed the number of men in each of the camps, the name of each camp and its location in El Paraíso—asked Contadora to form a special commission to investigate the situation.

The expulsion of the contras back to their bases in Honduras and Costa Rica as a result of the successful Sandinista offensive had to provoke serious border incidents sooner or later. It does not suit these neighboring countries to have a massive and obvious presence of armed men in their territories, since they make a habit of not acknowledging their presence. The best way to get rid of them is to send them back to Nicaragua. This logic is compatible with the current counterrevolutionary strategy of accelerated attacks and efforts to quickly reach strategic points. It is not permissible for the contras to return to the camps in Honduras and stay there doing nothing; they have to reinfiltrate. This also serves Washington’s need to present clear evidence to the communications media and Congress that the contras are still active and continue to be an effective alternative. The United States is also aware, on the other hand, that with Honduran presidential elections coming up, the massive and active presence of FDN counterrevolutionaries in Honduras is a growing problem.

This permanent, practically uncontrollable armed threat along Nicaragua’s immense borders has been the most continuous way of exercising the “prolonged military pressure” to which US Ambassador to the UN Vernon Walters said this month the United States intended to submit Nicaragua. (Walters was described at The Hague as one of the oldest and most direct organizers of the counterrevolutionary army.) It is evident that this decision, made public with no shame whatever, is one of the administration’s “efficient” ways not only to block Contadora, but also to turn any peace accord that might be signed into a worthless piece of paper.

Besides these serious incidents on the Honduran border, there was also the disruption of “Plan September” in the mining zone of Central Zelaya. Hundreds of members of two regional commandos of the FDN, led by well known heads of this armed group, launched an attack with the objective of taking the three mines—Siuna, Bonanza and Rosita—for their strategic economic importance, as well as to destroy both the cooperatives and the Sumu indigenous communities in the zone, the latter with the goal of derailing the autonomy process underway there. [Editor’s note: in the nineties, most of this indigenous group changed its name to Mayangna.]

As a result of combats, 150 counterrevolutionaries were killed, another 150—peasant farmers who had joined the attack force either through kidnapping, pressure or personal choice—handed themselves in to the army, and 45 counterrevolutionaries were captured. Before the plan was neutralized, the contras had succeeded in burning 25 trucks, destroying four bridges and assassinating 100 civilians, all as part of their terrorist war of attrition. The characteristics of Plan September were similar to those of Plan Roundup, in that the operations could be qualifies as suicidal or desperate. The FDN irrationally invested enormous forces in its pursuit of the spectacular blow that it seems to need these days to accredit itself with its US financiers. It is also to justify the request for dialogue that the US makes at every opportunity to the Nicaraguan government in the name of the FDN. It is obvious that the pressure on Nicaragua to accede to a “dialogue of national reconciliation” would appear to make more sense if the counterrevolutionaries were in a real position of force today, had taken and held some strategic target, had consistently increased its offensives and won victories, etc. It is precisely this that the counterrevolutionary operations inside Nicaragua in the past few months have tried, without success, to achieve. Meanwhile, the bulk, of the “freedom fighter” troops continues to pressure from the borders.

Concurrently, another war is being fought at the cost of millions of córdobas and tremendous grassroots mobilization across the country. It is the massive campaign against the dengue virus now at an epidemic level, particularly in populated areas. The campaign involves the disinfecting of all workplaces, schools, private houses, fields, etc., and the fumigation is being carried out with planes, trucks and on foot. Seeking out every small collection of still water, the goal is to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito, carrier of dengue. President Ortega said on September 29, considering the rapid spread of the disease and the damage it has caused the population, including a hemorrhagic complication that can be fatal, the possibility could not be ruled out that this epidemic, plus the Xantonoma plague that is threatening thousands of acres of cotton, is a product of bacterial warfare initiated by the United States as part of its unbending aggressive policy toward Nicaragua.

Cardinal Obando, elected president of the Bishops’ Conference on September 3, is continuing his tours through cities, neighborhoods and rural areas, insisting on his formula of “national dialogue” to end the war. He is following the same scheme of previous visits—festive reception, a mass with a homily that almost always has the same content and lunch at the home of a prominent member of the community. The Cardinal’s message continues to refer to “dialogue” and “reconciliation,” always in a religious key, and now more directly religious concepts such as “pardon” and “forgiveness towards one’s enemies” are becoming the vehicle for the topic of dialogue. In the San Caralampio barrio in Matagalpa, the emotional fervor that surrounds the preparations for the reception took a qualitative leap. There the Cardinal was received by a large banner greeting him as the “Great Prophet of the 20th Century” and the “Future Pastor of the Universal Congregation.”

In three different editorials, Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the FSLN, responded strongly to the hierarchical strategy of presenting Obando as the “Cardinal of Peace,” with his proposal for dialogue and the pretension of approaching the issue from a religious and neutral position. The most criticized declarations this months, however, were not those of Obando but of the outgoing President of the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, who in a conference in Bonn, West Germany, justified US help to the counterrevolutionaries, called for “free” elections in Nicaragua and declared that 75% of all Nicaraguans are opposed to the current government, which he described as a Marxist clique out of touch with the people. Made by a prelate who agreed to represent the Bishops Conference at the presidential inauguration, after elections that impressed even L’Osservatore Romano for their honesty, these statements reflect a hardening of the conflict the hierarchy has always had with the revolutionary process. A September 20 editorial in Barricada offered the opinion, perhaps more directly than ever before, that Bishop Vega’s comments had “situated the Catholic Church inside the framework of aggression financed by the US administration.”

If the final verdict from The Hague is indeed favorable to Nicaragua, the nature of the counterrevolutionary war as a foreign military intervention will be underscored for all the world to see. Adding to this the continual strategic weakening of the contra groups by sustained Sandinista military offensives, the church hierarchy’s position becomes highly questionable. A peace formula based on dialogue with the counterrevolutionaries would be more isolated internationally, and the proposal to renew the Manzanillo talks would gain more space, as a way of beginning a turn around in Reagan’s aggressive policy. In such talks the US dismantling of the counterrevolutionary forces it has financed would necessarily be a topic for discussion. It has been a difficult subject to broach bilaterally between Nicaragua and its neighbors up to now, and it is an essential part of Contadora’s plan for a political solution to the conflict.

The final stage of the Contadora negotiations: State terrorism’s trial by fire

Contadora held one of the most important meetings in its long and difficult negotiating process this month. For three days starting September 11, the foreign ministers of the four Contadora countries together with those of the Central American countries discussed a new version of the peace proposal first presented in September 1984; this version, which they hope will be the definitive one, would go then from Contadora, Panama, to New York, to be formally presented to the United Nations General Assembly.

Better the collapse of Contadora than a bad accord

On September 9-10, the eve of this important meeting, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams convoked a special meeting—also in Panama—of all the US ambassadors in Central America, Panama and Belize, together with officials from the Defense Department, the National Security Council and the CIA. A document dated September 4, titled “View From Washington,” provided the basis for the discussions. Although the meeting was given very little publicity, the polemical document made its way to the press, as tends to happen these days given the divergent policies toward Nicaragua and Central America within US power circles. After the leaked document was made public, the State Department tried to insist that it was only “a draft.”

Regarding El Salvador, the document said in part: “We have finally convinced people that El Salvador is a society that is reforming and that the guerrillas do not represent the Salvadoran people. We should continue promoting this belief.” The war was evaluated as follows: “It does not seem that the war can be won by either side.”

Regarding Nicaragua, the central topic of the meeting, the following represent the basic assertions of the document:

- “Nicaragua continues to be our greatest problem and the possibilities of an advance there are limited.”

- “The Nicaraguan armed resistance is a potent force, but it is still very far from success.”

- “The support of the population is growing but it is not yet very solid.”

- “They [the counterrevolutionaries] must understand the absolute necessity of engaging in a clean war.”

- “The eight countries [the Contadora Group and the Lima Support Group] are maintaining strong pressure on the United States and our friends to accept any accord rather than a good accord.”

- “We must develop an active diplomacy to neutralize the Latin American solidarity efforts directed against the United States and its allies, whether they are sponsored by the Support Group, the Cubans or the Nicaraguans. We must find the way to turn the pressures being directed against us and our friends to our advantage.”

- “The collapse of Contadora would be better than a bad accord.”

After the document was leaked, causing a stir in the United States, Benard Kalb, spokesperson for the Secretary of State, decided to clear up some concepts. “The United States,” he said, “rejects the idea of an unsolvable war in El Salvador.” On the subject of a “clean war” by the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, he said; “The United States continues to censure violence against non-combatants in Nicaragua. The armed opposition in Nicaragua has declared that such practices are not representative of its policy and that those responsible for the abuses have been punished. The Nicaraguan opposition is not dedicated to systematic abuses. It is evidently a key element of Sandinista propaganda to make these accusations, however.”

As a complement to the political analysis, the document proposed $482 million in additional assistance for Central America—minus Nicaragua, of course: $300 million in economic aid and $182 million in military assistance. Meanwhile, President Reagan himself proposed to Congress this month that in the fiscal 86 budget $54 million be included to help the Central American countries (minus Nicaragua, and plus Panama and Belize) in their “struggle against terrorism.”

Regarding Latin America, one of the statements noted: “Our attention has been on Central America because the most immediate threat to our interests is there, but we do not have the luxury of thinking that economic and other affairs in South America and the Caribbean will be resolved by themselves.”

Some of the principal limits to the US strategy posed by both the revolutionary project and the counterrevolutionary project can be detected in this “view.” Several US ambassadors in Managua and a good part of their diplomatic personnel have sent such appraisals to Washington repeatedly. It seems that they have finally been heard, at least partially. There is now the realism in Washington to appreciate the counterrevolution’s bad political image and military incapacity. There is the realism to fear Contadora and the new Support Group. Of all the statements, the one that caused most concern in political circles was the possibility that an accord contrary to US interests could come out of Contadora. Of course, any accord that is even slightly impartial goes against its interests, which are hegemonic.

The Panamanian Foreign Minister called the US statements neither “the most opportune nor the most positive” and said that “the use of these terms (such as ‘collapse’) is neither healthy nor suitable and we let this be known.” The Foreign Minister from Colombia pointed out that nobody would sign a “bad accord” and that the determination of whether it is good or bad is the task of the Central American countries.

A new peace accord with fundamental changes

Against the backdrop of this initial tension and pressure, the meeting of the nine foreign ministers of Contadora and Central America got under way. New revisions to the September 7, 1984 peace accord were presented and discussed, and again revised. The 1984 accord itself was different from Contadora’s original, having incorporated changes presented by Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica. Even after that significant process, which resulted in a document less favorable to Nicaragua, it was the only country that agreed to sign.

The five foreign ministers of Central America approved by consensus the majority of the points contained in the new draft, some of which Father Miguel D’Escoto called “fundamental changes.” The Nicaraguan foreign minister called the meeting “positive” and specified that, while Nicaragua must study the changes carefully, to “study” the new text did not mean to reject it. At the beginning of October, during Vice President Sergio Ramírez’s lightning visit with the Presidents of Colombia and Panama, he declared clearly, “We are disposed to sign now.” (Sergio Ramírez took to Panama and Colombia the request that Contadora designate a commission to visit the Honduran border, and to ask the US for a “truce” in the war of aggression. This trip and its next stage—Argentina—are also related to the specific economic support that Nicaragua is soliciting from Latin America in these difficult moments.)

On October 7, the Central American representatives are to meet again with Contadora in Panama specifically to discuss the three points on which no consensus was reached last time: 1) arms control and reduction; 2) mechanism for implementing and following up the accords; 3) military maneuvers. The representatives have a maximum of 45 days to analyze, discuss and come to agreement on these three points, as well as to agree to the dates by which the commitments should go into effect. At the end of this period the accord should be signed. The four Contadora ministers presented the text of the accord on September 26 to United Nations Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuellar.

In the days following the termination of the Panama meeting, a kind of mysterious silence surrounded the contents of the accord. It was as if no one wanted to be the first to express any discord toward a text which, thanks to the international prestige accumulated by Contadora, everyone applauded, approved and wanted signed, even without knowing or studying it. Following the Panama meeting, the Contadora ministers were clearly anxious to bring about if not peace, then at least the signing of a relatively respectable peace accord as soon as possible so as to finally bring this difficult initiative to an end.

The contents of the accord were soon made known in greater detail. A comparative reading of the new accord with the one of a year ago shows that there are indeed fundamental changes, and not just “refinements,” as the Contadora ministers call them. The changes reflect concessions to some of the positions that Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica took when, counseled by the United States, they refused to sign a year ago. A year of pressures has had its effects.

Military maneuvers: From more radical positions regarding the total proscription of military maneuvers, the new proposal is that they be gradually phased out, and also that, within delimited conditions, they be legitimated through a certain kind of juridical status.

Arms and troop limitation and control: Some aspects of this point have been seriously modified, without specifying mechanisms with fixed time periods by which Nicaragua can assure its defense against the aggression. Despite the fact that the war is still going on, for example, a moratorium on equipment and troops is established from the date of the signing of the accord, after which “the maximum limits” will be established. The geography and the geopolitical position of the United States will not be a part of the criteria for these limits.

Security: As was to be expected, the most substantial changes have occurred in the area of agreements about security, the key accords for achieving peace. All the changes from the September 1984 text in this category, as we have been analyzing in these pages the past few months, favor the US strategy in Central America. Nonetheless, given that the hegemonic pretensions of the US strategy are so all-encompassing, the administration has not gotten all the changes it wanted, and those it achieved are not as far-reaching as desired. Regarding security, there was consensus in Panama on such important points as the following:

- Elimination of foreign bases, schools and other installations from Central American territory, with those existing to be eliminated within six months after the signing of the accord;

- Evacuation of military advisers and “foreign elements liable to participate in military, paramilitary and security activities” within six months after the signing of the accord. (Some distinctions were established among different kinds of advisers.)

- Prohibition of any Central American government from lending political, military, financial or any other kind of assistance to irregular forces. It will be the obligation of the Central American governments to exercise tight vigilance along the borders, to dismantle the installations used by these forces and to remove them from the border areas.

Though to accept the recent changes implies sacrifices for Nicaragua with regard to guarantees for its own defense, they imply many more for the United States, which would have to sign the Additional Protocol of the accord. Everything indicates, then, that despite all the changes introduced, this must be the “bad accord” to which the “View from Washington” referred, and to which the collapse of Contadora would be preferable.

Preparing the blockade or the collapse

Keeping a lower profile than on other occasions, the US government has already initiated its effort to effectively block Contadora, a strategy that in this final phase could end with its definitive collapse. US diplomatic moves are already showing that even this newly modified accord is not satisfactory to the administration, which really wants to eliminate the cause that originated the Contadora initiative—the revolutionary change in Nicaragua. It also wants to neutralize the implication of Contadora itself, which is that Latin America can and should resolve its own conflicts without caving into US hegemonic interests.

The first steps to block Contadora or lead to its collapse are the following:

- The already mentioned meeting of Elliot Abrams in Panama. (At that moment, the United States already knew in detail the whole text of the accord.) The document prepared for the meeting openly proposed the collapse, as well as the design of diplomacy capable of “neutralizing Latin American solidarity.”

- A quick trip, pushed forward from its original date, by special ambassador for Central America Harry Shlaudemann to the four Support Group countries. Shlaudemann took the message to their foreign ministers that the United States supports Contadora, is not going to invade Nicaragua, is not going to renew the Manzanillo talks, and that Nicaragua should move toward national reconciliation. (The Peruvian reaction to this visit was made public, as Foreign Minister Alan Wagner insisted that the United States should express its “support” for Contadora by suspending the commercial embargo, cutting aid to the counterrevolutionaries and renewing the Manzanillo talks.)

- The meeting on October 1 called by George Shultz with the foreign ministers of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica “to coordinate future actions” in the region. A barely publicized statement came out of that meeting in which the foreign ministers—except Guatemala’s who, maintaining his country’s independence, did not want to sign—initiated this “coordination” by requesting the broadening of the Support Group (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru) to include Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. In declarations made after the meeting, the Salvadoran and Honduran foreign ministers pointed out the necessity, if there was to be peace in the region, that Nicaragua open itself up to a “dialogue of national reconciliation.” (That precisely had been George Schultz’s phrasing in his address to the UN’s 40th General Assembly some days earlier.) The Honduran foreign minister, pushing this position even further, stated that Honduras would not sign the Contadora peace agreement if there is no national reconciliation in Nicaragua.

These first three steps show the route the United States seems to be taking in its plan to block Contadora: to complicate the process at the eleventh hour with its demands, and to stretch out the signing of the accord in order to exhaust the initiative itself and replace it with another. But it will not be so easy. By now the accord has already been formally presented to the United Nations, as well as to the European Economic Community: dates have been set that cannot be appealed; and the nature of the debates, as well as of the forces on either side of it, have been given greater international attention than perhaps ever before. The US, then, must move much more subtly now than it did last year when it successfully torpedoed the accord, leaving only Nicaragua willing to sign.

To neutralize the Contadora Support Group, which the US fears, the Reagan administration proposed through its Central American allies to increase it, obviously thus to dilute it. Two small countries, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, were submitted for approval. Increasingly overwhelmed by their economic crises, both have shown increasing docility toward US policy. The Dominican Republic was the only Latin American country, save the Central American allies of the United States, to issue an official statement in support of Reagan’s April 1985 “peace plan,” which insisted on the ultimatum that the Nicaraguan government dialogue with the counterrevolutionaries. The most suspicious aspect of the suggestion to broaden the Lima Group is that it was the United States that suggested these countries.

In addition to the expansion of the Lima Group, the United States, together with El Salvador and Honduras, is again promoting the “dialogue of national reconciliation” as a peace condition. It is also trying to impose this request on Contadora in an effort both to pressure and to confuse. It is a publicity tactic to confuse in the sense that it tries to cover over the fact that in the recent Panama meeting Contadora explicitly rejected any further discussion on this topic, a decision that all five Central American ministers approved. The political commitments in the accord that were agreed to in Panama were the following: amnesty, respect for human rights and the equal participation of all political forces.

Other unknowns regarding the impact that they may have on the Contadora negotiations are the resignation of Panama’s President and the earthquake in Mexico. With respect to Panama, it can be expected that the greater influence General Noriega is assuming in the country will also make Panama the most belligerent within Contadora. Noriega, representing a new “Torrijismo” in Panama, is very interested in a speedy peace solution. With respect to Mexico, the question arises about the political “bill” that the United States could present Mexico with given the acuteness of the Mexican economic crisis. Will the new economic necessities generated by the catastrophe influence the political position that Mexico has always maintained so coherently in Contadora? Up to now there are no indications of any change.

In today’s complex international panorama, the subject of peace in Central America is related more than ever to topics that are the focus of the larger international picture. For the Reagan-Gorbachev talks in November, the unprecedented US-USSR Working Group, created for this occasion, is studying the Central American question, with a particular focus on Nicaragua. Even though the US-Nicaragua conflict is clearly a North-South one, these talks give it the East-West connotation the US has always wanted it to have. The public declarations of the Soviet Foreign Minister suggest that the Soviet Union is maintaining a firm position in support of Nicaragua’s self-determination.

Meanwhile, Latin Americans are taking increasingly insistent positions on the most significant of the North-South conflicts, expressed as the “foreign debt problem.” The North Americans, for their part, are increasingly worried. If the Reagan administration fears Latin American unity and pressure around the Central American conflict, it fears it even more in the case of the debt. To divide and gain time will be its strategy in this case as well—to “block” united positions and “collapse” the proposed solution to the problem of the debt, a new international economic order.

Moreover, it was not without reason that Nicaragua was elected on September 17 to head the fourth commission of the 40th General Assembly of the United Nations. The Decolonization Commission will be in charge of confronting the problem that today monopolizes world attention: that of the racist regime of South Africa, unquestionably supported by the US government.

Everything seems to indicate that this time the Contadora negotiations are really approaching their final hour. The last stage will not be an easy one. In fact none of the stages have been easy in this Latin American negotiation process, carried out under the looming warmongering will of the United States. These 45 days before the eventual signing of the accord will predictably be ones of major confrontation. The UN framework, in which speeches by heads of state from all over the world are lending support to the Contadora negotiation, could contribute to the arrival of this moment, but the enthusiasm comes without yet having seen what the moment will be. It cannot be forgotten that the most tension-provoking element of the regional situation still persists, the Reagan administration policy of intervention and war.

And this is the essential point. The most important thing, obviously, is not a peace accord, but peace. The most important thing is not when the accord is signed, but when the United States decides to end its policy of terrorist war. More important than a peace document, which could end up a worthless piece of paper, are the acts of war that could continue bedeviling the hope for peace. The United States not only seeks to alter the accord guaranteeing that peace. It also seeks to continue promoting war, raising the stakes, trying to justify it, offensively ignoring the meaning of the Contadora negotiations: the acceptance of a Central American map in which countries with diverse social and political systems can coexist, relatively free of US hegemony. To sign a peace accord not only when the war is continuing but when the financier and promoter of this war announces that it is going to continue it as a means of pressure to impose its hegemonic will, creates an unavoidable contradiction. This has been the permanent contradiction of Contadora and it is now the contradiction that casts a huge shadow on the signing of the accord.

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