Nicaragua Conversion of a Timely Kind

By Jill Smolowe

Some Americans see Nicaragua drenched in a dangerous sea of red. Others view the country as bathed in a brilliant aureole of white light. Forget gray. Much as in the debate that polarized Americans during the war in Viet Nam, cool heads and dispassionate judgments seldom prevail in a discussion of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. The Sandinistas are either hard-core Communists with a cruelly totalitarian agenda or committed revolutionaries with a uniquely Latin American vision of the future. The U.S.-backed contras, on the other hand, are either brave freedom fighters or treacherous mercenaries. WARNING: entry into the debate may be hazardous to your reputation.

No one knows that better than Robert Leiken, 47, a Central American analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. For years he toiled anonymously on the intellectual left, pursuing liberal causes and scholarly studies. While working at a succession of jobs, including posts at some prestigious think tanks in Mexico City and Washington, Leiken produced papers on Soviet strategies in Latin America. His work, however, rarely received much public notice. In early 1984 he edited a collection of essays called Central America: Anatomy of a Conflict, which took the Reagan Administration to task for promoting confrontation rather than negotiation in Central America. It aroused notice among Democratic Congressmen who opposed Reagan's policies, but Leiken's reputation remained limited mainly to the specialized world of Latin American policy.

Then came the deluge. In October 1984 Leiken (rhymes with bacon) published an article in the New Republic titled "Nicaragua's Untold Stories." It was a searing indictment of the Managua regime that accused the Sandinistas of repression, corruption, political manipulation and fealty to Moscow.

The idea that a well-respected liberal analyst would launch such a strong attack on the Sandinistas caused considerable stir in Washington. Leiken's apparent conversion was seen by the entrenched left as a betrayal and by Reaganites as a vindication of their long-held views. Most important, many Democrats who had relied on Leiken's analyses began to reconsider their Sandinista sympathies. Senator Edward Kennedy had the article read into the Congressional Record. Suddenly, Leiken became as controversial as Nicaragua itself.

( Since then, Leiken has assessed the Sandinista issue in other articles, including two pieces in the New York Review of Books. After two trips this year to Nicaragua, the most recent with Democratic Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, he has changed his assessment of the contras. He argues that while the rebels were initially a small mercenary force made up of supporters of ousted Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, they have, as a result of widespread disenchantment with the Sandinistas, grown into a diverse army of 20,000 that is now a popularly based vanguard for a widespread and growing rebellion. Most scholars in the field reject Leiken's assessment, but he argues that popular perception of the contras in both the U.S. and the cities of Nicaragua has not yet registered this change because the rebels have failed to embrace "democratic leadership."

Leiken says his conversion was not of the light-blinding sort experienced by St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Rather, he claims, it was based on numerous trips to Nicaragua, during which the true nature of the Sandinista regime gradually became apparent even as his study of the contras convinced him of their potential. The changes in the Nicaraguan situation, he feels, have not been adequately reported by the U.S. and international press.

The analyst is now urging the contras to shed their "cia-imposed leadership." He says that it is resented by the combat troops, considered "hostile to democracy" and is damaging to the unity of the various contra factions. He believes that if the contras unite under a common political banner, with such respected democrats as Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo at the top, Nicaraguans and Americans will support the rebels as a legitimate democratic resistance force.

If his condemnations of the contra leadership do not please White House officials, his calls for "military pressure" to force the Sandinistas to the bargaining table do. Thus Leiken has been accused of being a mouthpiece for the Reagan Administration. Yet he has condemned Reagan's failure to forge a bipartisan consensus. "I think the Administration has chosen to divide the country rather than unite it by using inflated, hyperbolic rhetoric," he says. "The struggle within the elite in the U.S. has taken precedence over what's going on in Nicaragua."

The charge that he is a turncoat particularly rankles Leiken, who still considers himself a member of the left. His credentials are impeccable. In the . 1960s he joined the ban-the-Bomb movement and agitated against the Viet Nam War. In 1975, briefly interrupting an eight-year period of work and study in Mexico, he weighed in with the pro-busing factions in Boston. "No one is going to force me out of the left," Leiken vows. "They may call me a defector and an impostor, but they're not going to force me to change the things that I believe."

Many liberal scholars and journalists have come down hard on their former ally. Alexander Cockburn has charged in the Nation that Leiken's writings are packed with "calumnies and falsehoods." Kevin Kelley of the Guardian, a small radical newspaper in New York, fumed in an article that "Leiken has clearly perfected a political formula that appeals to neoliberal publications." Leiken has been called a press agent for various contra leaders, and his willingness to testify before congressional committees has brought charges of opportunism. Even analysts who respect Leiken's knowledge of Nicaragua are disturbed by his strong advocacy posture. Says Peter Bell, president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York City: "I don't believe that anyone who presents himself as an analyst ought to be as involved as he is in a partisan way."

Leiken has vocal supporters. Mark Falcoff of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington defends Leiken's analysis and argues that his colleague is attacked because he has deviated from the leftist line popular among academics. Others who know Central America well defend Leiken, if not always his point of view. "Bob probably knows more about Nicaragua than any other non-Nicaraguan," says Nina Shea of the New York-based International League for Human Rights. "He's tireless in his pursuit of the facts and lets the chips fall where they may."

Whatever others think of him, there is no denying that Leiken is, as Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, puts it, "an important player." This week the House of Representatives reconsiders the Reagan Administration's contra aid package. If it is passed, the White House will owe a measure of thanks to Leiken. Through his testimony on the Hill and his published arguments, he has played a significant role in developing the compromise bill that was passed three weeks ago by the Senate. The Reagan Administration hopes that this bill will be similarly palatable to Republicans and Democrats in the House.

With reporting by Barrett Seaman/Washington