Searching for a Consensus

By Kenneth W. Banta

Kissinger's commission whisks through six nations in six days

We are dedicated to the resistance of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. We are also dedicated to human rights and democracy. It is in pursuit of both of these objectives that we have come to look at the situation." So declared former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as he arrived at San Salvador's Ilopango airport last week accompanied by the eleven other members of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America. Kissinger had posed the essential dilemma for U.S. policy in the region: how to halt Marxist subversion while securing democratic rule for nations plagued with dictatorships of both the left and the right.

On their six-day, six-nation tour of the isthmus, that was just the question the twelve commission members were pondering. Appointed by President Reagan in July, the group was charged with arriving at a long-term policy capable of winning broad domestic support. The trip, Kissinger explained before his departure from Washington, would give the commission a basis for its recommendations. "What you get out of it is the flavor of a country," he said, "a judgment of the personalities, an opportunity to ask questions that have been bothering us."

The tour began in two outposts of political stability: Panama and Costa Rica. After giving a sympathetic but noncommittal hearing to Panamanian pleas for economic aid, the commission flew west to Costa Rica's capital, San Jose. Costa Rican officials expressed their concern that their country, the only successful long-lasting democracy in the region, faced a serious threat of subversion from Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Said President Luis Alberto Monge: "Never have our people been more afraid."

Arguing that their best defense was a strong economy, Costa Ricans lobbied for a $3 billion, ten-year U.S. aid program for their country. The most controversial encounter of the day, however, was unscheduled. After announcing that he would not meet with "people engaged in guerrilla warfare," Kissinger and two other commission members held a talk with Alfonso Robelo, a leader of the U.S.-supported rebels battling to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. Kissinger later said that his meeting with Robelo would be the tour's last with rebels of any stripe.

No one expected the next stop to be congenial, and it was not. From the moment Kissinger raised the subject on his arrival in El Salvador, the panel hammered away at one issue: human rights. The commission met with Interim President Alvaro Magana. Kissinger stated that the U.S. depended on El Salvador as a front line against Cuban-and Nicaraguan-inspired subversion in the region. But the commission members flatly condemned the country's abysmal human rights record (see box). In a tense confrontation with right-wing Constituent Assembly President Roberto d'Aubuisson, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland angrily questioned D'Aubuisson's charges that Samuel Maldonado, leader of the 100,000-strong Salvadoran Communal Union, a peasant organization that has close ties to U.S. labor groups, had collaborated with leftist guerrillas.

Human rights was also an issue in Guatemala, where a succession of often harsh military regimes has been waging war against leftist guerrillas. Nevertheless, following meetings with officials in the government of Chief of State Brigadier General Oscar Mejia Victores, Kissinger announced that, although the Guatemalans had made no direct request for military aid, "one couldn't help but be impressed by their need."

The need for U.S. help was even more pressing in Honduras, Central America's poorest nation and the U.S.'s key military staging area in the region at present. In Tegucigalpa, ailing Roberto Suazo Cordova, Honduras' first elected President after ten years of military rule, made an eloquent appeal for U.S. aid to a nation that "with much sacrifice has constructed a democratic government in exceptionally difficult circumstances."

On the eve of the commission's visit to Nicaragua, Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra charged that an attack by U.S. or Honduran troops was "imminent." Earlier in the week, U.S.-backed contras opposed to the Sandinista regime had ignited eight oil storage tanks at the port of Corinto, 80 miles northwest of Managua, causing huge fires that raged out of control for nearly three days and forced some 25,000 people to evacuate the town. On Friday, an oil pipeline at another major port, Puerto Sandino, was damaged by contra fire.

The commission's visit followed that of Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley, the highest-ranking U.S. official to travel to the country in almost two years. He had arrived to reopen high-level communications between the Reagan Administration and the Sandinistas and to discuss, in Motley's words, "the whole waterfront" of regional problems. There was no evidence that either visit had helped ease tensions between the two countries.

After six days of fact finding, the commission seemed to have reached agreement on what some of the facts mean. Said an aide: "The testimony on the military threat has been so impressive that there is now something of a consensus that the U.S. has to take steps against the Sandinistas." Maybe so. But two commission members, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss and San Antonio Democratic Mayor Henry Cisneros, have said they should not be counted on just to rubber stamp the policy of a Republican Administration. For its part, the Administration has never said it will take the commission's advice. Facts in hand, even Kissinger may still find it hard to influence U.S. policy.

With reporting by Marsh Clark, Timothy Loughran This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.