THE CONTRA AID QUARREL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303320002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 13, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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rr~~APPEAh/ WASHINGTON POST
13 April 1986
fr Henry Kissinger
First, `Latinize' It
The debate over aid to the Nicaraguan contras is at
last coming to an end. It is probable that the Reagan ad-
ministration will receive much of what it requested
for military aid. One must hope it will not be so hedged
with conditions as to make coherent policy nearly impos-
sible.
The administration has put forth an analysis that logi-
cally implies the need to overthrow the Sandinista re-
gime. But the means it has requested for the next 18
months, $100 million of aid in various categories, are
clearly inadequate to achieve this or perhaps any other
goal. And the administration's repeated assertion that
the use of American force is totally excluded underlines
the incompatibility of rhetoric and policy.
Critics have used this inconsistency not to ask for a
larger effort but to deny the need for any military effort
whatever. This leaves the national debate suspended be-
tween a demand for victory without resources and a
commitment to diplomacy without incentive.
History offers no example of successful negotiations
with communists sustained exclusively by persuasive-
ness. If negotiations over Central America begin with a
renunciation of U.S. military pressure, a diplomatic
stalemate and ultimately consolidation of unrestrained
communist rule in Central America will be certain. Dis-
mantling the contras is therefore the surest way to
wreck negotiations.
Many well-meaning Americans have sought to rely
entirely on the so-called Contadora process-the media-
tion effort on the part of Mexico, Colombia, Panama and
Venezuela, recently reinforced by Brazil, Argentina,
Peru and Uruguay. But neither the domestic structure
of these countries nor their history allows them to serve
as vehicles for what Latin Americans consider U.S. uni-
lateral dominance.
The fundamental facts are no longer contested. The
Sandinista regime came to power promising democratic
renewal. It is now well on the way to turning itself into a
Marxist-Leninist regime on the Cuban and Soviet model.
It has built up an army larger than that of all the other
Central American countries combined. It is sustained by
a minimum of 8,000 Cuban advisers, of whom at least
3,000 are military; Bulgarians, East Germans, Libyans
and the largest Soviet embassy in the hemisphere, out-
side of Washington, provide the military, administrative
and intelligence sinews. It is this Soviet and Cuban pres-
ence and the size of its armed forces, not just its internal
arrangements, that make the Managua regime a strate-
gic threat.
This state of affairs gives the United States three
broad choices:
^ It can let existing trends in Nicaragua continue and
then seek to contain the resulting military, intelligence
and political machine. The National Bipartisan Commis.
sion on Central America, of which I was chairman, re-
jected this approach unanimously two years ago as being
beyond the physical resources of the Central American
countries and requiring a large, permanent major U.S.
military presence that neither Central American
nor U.S. public opinion would sustain. Public opinion
is all the more critical because, for the first time in
history, all the countries of Central America, except
Nicaragua, are democracies, albeit at the fragile initial
phase.
T~icA
The Contra Aid Quarrel
? It can seek to overthrow the Sandinista regime.
This is impossible without direct U.S. military interven-
tion. At the beginning of the Reagan administration, and
even as late as the invasion of Grenada, the costs of such
a policy might have been sustainable. But nothing in the
present policy of the administration-from the scale of
aid requested to the president's repeated public disa-
vowal of the use of American force-suggests that it
has the stomach for such a move, which would guaran-
tee that the remainder of the president's term would be
marred by implacable congressional opposition and by
domestic and international upheavals.
^ The most realistic course is a combination of ne-
gotiation and pressure designed to deprive the Sandin-
ista regime of the capability to subvert or to undermine
its neighbors.
The congressional vote will settle the issue of what
pressures are available to support this policy. De-
bate has produced a bipartisan consensus on the need
to negotiate. The focus of debate must now shift to
what should be the content of negotiations, and
what should be done if, despite all best efforts, they
fail.
A new bipartisan diplomacy should seek the coopera-
tion of the democratic nations of Latin America. My own
sense of what serious and well-disposed Latin leaders
believe-indeed, what they have told me-goes some-
thing like this:
The present course of the United States is doomed. It
provides neither enough incentives nor enough pressure
to prevent the consolidation of the Nicaraguan regime.
Its inevitable failure will encourage all the radical ele-
ments in the Western Hemisphere.
At the same time these leaders believe that eventu-
ally Washington will be driven by its very failure to in-
vade Nicaragua. This would confront them with the near
certainty of domestic upheavals.
Those Latin American leaders who seek to avoid both
U.S. failure and U.S. military intervention will have to
deal with two realities: contra pressures supply the in-
dispensable incentive for negotiation, and Latin Amer-
ican leaders have a stake in a concrete negotiating pro-
gram. They cannot wish in the end to sponsor a phony
negotiation that will make all the dilemmas intractable
and sooner or later produce a blowup.
An understanding U.S. policy should attempt to
"Latinize" the process to the greatest degree possible.
Oaf A
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The message issued by the Contadora nations and the
four supporting nations at Caraballeda, Venezuela, in
February, was much more explicit than previous Conta-
dora efforts on the need for Nicaragua to open its politi-
cal system. It was also more balanced and precise on the
demilitarization of Central America-though there is
still a way to go on both issues. The collapse of the most
recent Contadora meeting as a result of Nicaraguan in-
transigence should facilitate a joint approach between
the United States and the Contadora group.
A joint strategy should seek to separate the issue of
Nicaragua's internal arrangements from its ability to
project its purposes across its frontiers. The former
issue can be given a longer time-span for solution than
the latter. The immediate goal must be for Nicaragua to
reduce its Cuban and Soviet connections to traditional
state-to-state relations and rely for its economic and
security support on the nations of the Western
Hemisphere. Without Soviet and Cuban military and
economic support, Nicaragua would be a nuisance, not a.
threat.
This will not be liked by some in the administration
any more than by many in Congress. But it is the
only way to gain Latin support and to give us options
other than abdication or direct U.S. military interven-
tion.
A program to achieve a bipartisan consensus in the
United States and to "Latinize" the Central American
problem could have the following components:
1. Nicaragua would terminate its special relationship
with Cuba and the Soviet Union. It would renounce all
loans and credits from Eastern-bloc countries. These
would be replaced by a special fund set up by the nations
of Latin America, perhaps with West European and
Japanese support.
2. The United States would commit itself to carrying
out the unanimous recommendations of the National Bi-
partisan Commission for the development of the demo-
cratic nations of Central America. This would include
the five-year commitment of economic assistance,
stalled in Congress, and the creation of a Central Amer-
ican Development Organization, stalled by bureaucratic
foot-dragging. Nicaragua could join this program as soon
as it met the criteria for democratic processes applying
to the other nations.
3. All Cuban, Soviet, Libyan and other radical advis-
ers in Nicaragua would be replaced by experts from
Latin American countries.
4. The armed forces of all Central American coun-
tries would be limited to levels generally comparable to
those of 1979 when the Sandinistas came to power.
There would be strict limitations on types and numbers
of weapons.
5. All signatories would commit not to attack other
countries in the hemisphere; not to transfer arms co-
vertly or openly to insurgents; not to practice subver-
sion. This would, of course, require the end of U.S. mili-
tary support for the contras and of Nicaraguan assist-
ance to the Salvadoran guerrillas.
6. A process of conciliation would begin between in-
surgent
of t otgroups and existing her countries a. under the aus-
pices
The whole process, including verification, would
be guaranteed by either the major regional powers or by
the Contadora countries and their support group, the
Organization of American States.
The leaders of Latin America have a special right to
ask the United States to be sensitive to the difficulties of
their position, and they have a special claim on U.S. con-
cern. But it is in their own long-run interest to trans-
form the abstract generalities of the current Contadora
process into detailed programs to forestall pressures for
a showdown.
The administration's contribution to national unity
must be to put forward a constructive and farsighted ne-
gotiating program. But Congress cannot go on year
after year with a debilitating rear-guard action. It has an
obligation to provide the means to sustain a negotiation
its leaders have so insistently demanded.
c 1996, b Anplea Times 8yndkate
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