Rx: More of Everything

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Kissinger's panel urges more military and economic aid for Central America

The recommendations took five months of debate to frame and 132 pages to spell out. But the essence of the Kissinger commission's prescription for U.S. policy toward war-torn Central America could be put in a single word: more. More recognition, to begin with, that the U.S. has a vital interest in combatting Marxist revolution in the isthmus, and the misery and oppression that feed such revolution. Thus much more aid of every kind: more guns, ammunition, helicopters for friendly governments, but also more money to buy food, build roads and schools, train nurses and dentists. More pressure for democratic reform and an end to right-wing death-squad killings too. All this effort to be applied with more consistency, for more years into the future, than the U.S. has ever committed itself to before.

It was a message that Ronald Reagan welcomed. Said the President: "I'm impressed with the depth of the analysis and the creativity of the recommendations." Reagan might well have been even more impressed by the skill of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in winning substantial bipartisan support from his commission for a program that the Great Communicator has been unable to sell to a skeptical Congress and nation. The commission, composed of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, displayed enough independence to avoid any imputation that it had acted as a rubber stamp. The Democrats, led by AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, successfully insisted on some language that troubled both Reagan and Kissinger. Yet in the main they assented to proposals that one State Department official accurately described as "by and large, an endorsement of what Administration policy is."

That does not mean the commission has yet been able to create the consensus necessary to push its ambitious program through Congress, let alone remove Central American policy as an issue in this year's presidential campaign. The findings, in classic presidential-commission style, included something for everybody to applaud, but they also contained something for everybody to denounce. A number of liberal Democrats attacked the panel's stress on military aid and its refusal to countenance any form of power sharing between the right-wing government and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. Said Maryland Congressman Michael Barnes, one of eleven legislators and foreign policy experts who participated in the commission's debates as "senior advisers," though not voting members: "The central thrust of this report is to recommend military solutions for the region and to deny the viability of political ones."

The White House initially hinted that Reagan might ignore a key proposal: that U.S. military aid to El Salvador be continued and expanded only if the government curbs right-wing killers. But by week's end Reagan was promising to try to work something out with Congress. As to the commission's recommendation for a fiveyear, $8 billion program of economic aid, Senate Democratic Leader Robert Byrd grumbled, "It is highly questionable for a nation that is racking up $200 billion-a-year deficits to consider pouring $8 billion into Central America."

The debates within the commission, however, indicate that such differences can be overcome. The twelve commissioners* and their eleven advisers were all strong personalities with widely different viewpoints. It seemed likely they could become the equivalent of a hung jury. But after 30 days of meetings in Washington, during which they heard from nearly 200 witnesses, and nine days of travel in Central America, Mexico and Venezuela, where they listened to 300 more, their views blended into substantial agreement.

The decisive experiences in creating consensus were in Central America. In what turned out to be a mistake, the Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua invited the commission to Managua to hear its side. Eight hours of intelligence briefings and harangues by Nicaraguan officials convinced the commissioners that the Sandinistas were not freedom-loving revolutionaries but totalitarians working closely with Communist Cuba and the Soviet Union. Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a commission adviser, summed up the Americans' disillusion by coldly telling Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto: "You lied."

In Costa Rica, the commission's liberals were impressed by the fear of Nicaragua expressed by leaders of that unarmed democracy, and in El Salvador the conservatives were shocked by Rightist Roberto d'Aubuisson's seeming indifference to death-squad killings. By the time the commissioners gathered in Washington for a final round of report writing, the liberals were ready to endorse a stronger condemnation of the Sandinistas and other Marxists, and the conservatives to accept a sterner denunciation of right-wing violence. The conservatives were further convinced of the need to expand food, education and health aid in Central America even as it is being reduced at home.

The commission report describes Central America as a region of vital interest to the U.S. because of its proximity to U.S. borders and strategic Caribbean shipping lanes. It found the isthmus threatened by mutually reinforcing menaces: economic collapse and Communist subversion, the latter directed and armed from the outside by Cuba and the Soviet Union, using Nicaragua as a forward base. To have any hope of bringing peace and stability to the region, the panel concluded, the U.S. must combat both dangers simultaneously. So long as a third of all Central Americans suffer from malnutrition and about half the population in some countries is illiterate, rebellions will win recruits. But there can be little hope of sustained economic advance until guerrilla violence is suppressed. Said the commission: "Regimes created by the victory of Marxist-Leninist guerrillas become totalitarian. That is their purpose, their nature, their doctrine and their record."

The report noted, "The worst possible policy for El Salvador is to provide just enough aid to keep the war [against leftist guerrillas] going, but too little to wage it successfully." Yet that is what Washington may be doing: military aid is too small in the long run even to maintain the present stalemate. The commission gave no figure of its own as to how much might be required, in money and arms, but it cited a Pentagon estimate of $200 million each year for 1984 and 1985. That would be about three times the existing annual level.

The commission also recommended resumption of military aid to Guatemala, where the government is currently keeping a much smaller leftist insurrection in check; increased military aid of an unspecified amount to Honduras, Nicaragua's northern neighbor, where U.S. troops will soon be winding up joint exercises that are scheduled to be renewed in July; and a repeal of the existing ban on U.S. aid to foreign police forces. The ban was enacted to prevent the U.S. from underwriting human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes, but it has had the perverse effect of denying security assistance to democratic Costa Rica, which has no army and relies entirely on its police force to keep order.

The commission, however, added a huge "if." It asserted that "with respect to El Salvador, military aid should, through legislation requiring periodic reports, be made contingent upon . . . the termination of the activities of the so-called death squads, as well as vigorous action against those guilty of crimes and the prosecution to the extent possible of past offenders." This wording was primarily the work of Kirkland, who has been incensed by the unpunished murder of two AFL-CIO representatives in El Salvador in 1981, and it pointed to a very real dilemma.

Kissinger, while accepting that wording, added a note urging that "conditionality" not be interpreted "in a manner that leads to a Marxist-Leninist victory." In a briefing for reporters, he explained that it would be "absurd" to stop military aid to El Salvador on human rights grounds if the cutoff resulted in a victory for a Communist regime that would kill even more indiscriminately. But if Salvadoran rightists do not believe that there is a risk of an aid cutoff, how can they ever be persuaded to curb their terrorism? Said one commissioner: "We never really resolved the dilemma of the death squads vs. the Gulag."

Another troublesome point was U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. In general, the commission took an uncompromisingly hard line: The U.S. must not settle for "static containment" of a heavily armed Marxist dictatorship. Instead, the U.S. should keep pressure on the Sandinistas to schedule free elections, end censorship and otherwise liberalize their regime, without necessarily abandoning power.

But should the U.S. continue aid to the contra guerrillas who are waging war against the Sandinistas? Ten of the commissioners indicated that aid to the contras was a useful instrument of pressure against Nicaragua. Henry Cisneros, Democratic mayor of San Antonio, and Carlos Diaz-Alejandro, a Cuban-born Yale economics professor, objected. Diaz-Alejandro viewed aid to the contras as "likely to strengthen the most extremist sectors of the Sandinista leadership" against what would be perceived as an outside threat to Nicaragua. Cisneros urged that aid to rebels be suspended through 1985 to give the U.S. a chance to test hints by the Sandinistas that they might be willing to agree to some liberalization. Partly at the urging of Commissioner Robert Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Cisneros and Diaz-Alejandro muted their dissents, recording them as individual "notes" rather than as a formal minority report.

There was virtually no dissent on the economic sections of the report. The Reagan Administration has requested $477 million in economic aid to Central America this fiscal year. Kissinger and his colleagues urged that it immediately request $400 million more and then allot a total of $8 billion for fiscal years 1985 through 1989. At an annual average of $1.6 billion, that sum would be'more than triple the current request. The commission proposed that the aid be concentrated on basic needs: food, education, health, and the building of roads, ports and other labor-intensive projects.

About a quarter of the aid would be dispensed through a Central American development organization that would draw up regional plans. It would be chaired by an American but include representatives of all seven Central American nations.* In effect, this would be the Marshall Plan for Central America long advocated by Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a senior adviser to the commission. Economic aid, the panel said, should be made conditional on the recipients' agreeing to democratic reforms that would make the benefits available to poor as well as rich.

In both Congress and the Administration there is talk that these recommendations could be put into effect only by stuffing them all into an omnibus bill that would contain something for legislators of every ideological persuasion. In his weekly Saturday radio broadcast, Reagan announced that he would submit "a comprehensive plan for achieving the objectives set forth by the commission" and gave it not one but two names. Formally, and grandly, it will be called the Central American Democracy, Peace and Recovery Initiative. Reagan is unofficially calling it the Jackson Plan, after the late Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, who suggested creation of the commission. Like Kissinger and his colleagues, the President is playing bipartisanship for all it is worth. A problem like Central America, where governments, economies and lives are at stake, demands nothing less.

--By George J. Church. Re ported by Laurence I. Barrett and Johanna McGeary/Washington, with other bureaus

* Chairman Henry Kissinger; former New Jersey Senator Nicholas Brady; Henry Cisneros; former Governor of Texas William Clements; Carlos Diaz-Alejandro; National Federation of Independent Business President Wilson Johnson; Lane Kirkland; Political Analyst Richard Scammon; Boston University President John Silber; retired Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart; Robert Strauss; Project HOPE President William Walsh.

* Costa Rica. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. Belize, Panama and even Nicaragua, if it agrees to internal reform.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Johanna McGeary