Why Contra Aid Is Wrong

In its zeal to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the White House now plans to use the star quality of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North to persuade Congress to pour even more money into President Reagan’s dirty little war.

The campaign began on the final day of North’s testimony before the congressional committees investigating the Iran- contra arms scandal. Republican members maneuvered to give North an opportunity to present, on national television, the same slide show that he used to help persuade wealthy conservatives to donate money to Nicaragua’s rebels. The hearing room was too brightly lighted to show slides, but he gave his pitch--a glib summary of the radical right’s vision of “Soviet penetration in this hemisphere.”

Similar televised appeals for aid to the contras, even those made by the President himself, have left most Americans unpersuaded that this nation must wage war against a tiny neighbor in order to preserve freedom. That is because the Administration’s Central American scenario is based, as U.S. Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) said, on “a series of lies.”

One is the claim that the Sandinista government somehow represents a threat to the United States. Reagan’s own commission on Central America, chaired by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, didn’t buy that one. The 1979 revolution that brought the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua was not, in and of itself, dangerous to the United States, even though the Sandinistas are Marxists. Nicaragua would threaten the United States if the government there allowed the Soviet Union to use its territory for military bases. The Sandinistas have not done so, and the Soviets have not pressed for bases because they know that the United States would not tolerate it. What keeps the Sandinistas close to Moscow is their need for military aid to ward off the contras--a need that would end when the war ended. Then the Sandinistas would need economic aid from the United States and its allies.

Another distortion is a simplistic view of the contras that is shared by Reagan and North, who call them “freedom fighters,” “the democratic resistance” or “a peasant army.” There is a grain of truth in those descriptions, but it is also true that the command of the contras is in the hands of former soldiers and loyalists of Anastasio Somoza, the hated dictator whom the Sandinistas helped oust in 1979. Some contra fighters have used brutal tactics that have alienated the very people whose support they need to defeat the government. Nicaraguans are war-weary and increasingly disillusioned with the Sandinistas, but they are not rallying to the contras, whom they distrust and fear.

Lately the Reagan Administration has urged more money for the contras--even if they are ineffective fighters, as recent evidence shows them to be. The contras will put pressure on the Sandinistas, the rationale says, and the pressure will force the Sandinistas to the negotiating table. The truth is that the Sandinistas have been willing to negotiate with the United States, and with their neighbors, for years. It is the Administration that has resisted efforts by several Latin American countries, from tiny Costa Rica to giant Brazil, to arrange peace talks in Central America.

Which brings us to the most transparent fabrication of all: that Nicaragua’s neighbors are secretly rooting for Reagan and, deep down, want the proverbial Colossus of the North to toss out the Sandinistas. North repeated those stories, too, as have Secretary of State George P. Shultz and other Administration officials. It just isn’t so. As any Latin American political leader can explain, they want no part of this hemisphere’s major power overthrowing a government with which they are officially at peace just because the major power dislikes the other government’s policies. Imagine the frightening precedent that this would create in Brazil or Argentina. Think of the bitter memories that it would revive in Mexico, where Marines landed as recently as 1914, and in Colombia, from which President Theodore Roosevelt helped wrest the territory that became Panama in 1903.

One basic fact that Congress and the American people must not allow to vanish into the minutiae of the Iran-contra hearings or to get washed away by North’s rhetoric is that every major democracy in Latin America opposes Reagan’s Nicaragua policy. That is why they came together as the Contadora Group in 1983, and why they have been patiently trying to arrange peace treaties between Nicaragua and its neighbors ever since. Even Nicaragua’s closest neighbors, who because they are poor and weak have the most to fear from an expansionist regime in Managua, do not wholeheartedly support the contra war. El Salvador and Honduras go along with it because their powerful military establishments want the arms that the United States is giving them to resist feared Nicaraguan aggression. Guatemala and Panama, more distant, want nothing to do with a fight against the Sandinistas. Costa Rica, the one genuine democracy in the region, is trying to arrange regional peace talks on its own.

Reagan clearly assumes that oft-repeated distortion will win out over truth with Congress and persuade it to give him another $140 million for the contras. If that aid request is approved by Oct. 1, the start of the federal government’s fiscal year, the money would keep the contras in the field another 18 months--until the end of Reagan’s term. This would mean that, no matter what became of his “freedom fighters,” Reagan could leave office claiming that he did what he could about Nicaragua, leaving the bloody mess for his successor.

Congress can avoid that outcome by terminating financial aid to the contras. Only if that happens can the peace plans proposed by the Contadora Group and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez have a chance to work without interference from Washington.