Reagan Defers to Latins, Delays U.S. Peace Plan

President Reagan has placed his Central America peace proposal on hold and is determined to give the five Central American presidents a chance to make a success of their plan, Administration officials said Monday.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said that the plan adopted Friday in Guatemala City by the presidents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala “clearly moves the process forward in an encouraging manner,” although he said it is too early to predict whether it will bring peace and democracy to Marxist-ruled Nicaragua.

At the same time, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that the United States, despite its own proposal for peace in the region, will work with the Central American nations toward making their initiative succeed.

Mild Rebuke to Bush

Fitzwater delivered a mild rebuke to Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and others who have said that the Guatemala City plan makes too many concessions to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and places the U.S.-backed contras in an untenable position.

“You will find within the Administration a whole spectrum of attitudes about this proposal,” Fitzwater said. “The vice president’s viewpoint is one, and I can give you probably 40 or 50 others. . . . But I think it is fair to say that everyone in the Administration, including Secretary Weinberger, Vice President Bush and everyone else, agrees with the overall policy of seeking a negotiated settlement in Central America.”

Reagan will discuss the Central American peace process in his televised speech Wednesday night, Fitzwater said.

Neither the White House spokesman nor Redman endorsed the Guatemala City plan in its entirety, but they sought to avoid any appearance that Washington was out to undercut it. In effect, they said, if the proposal fails, no one should be able to say that the United States brought it down.

Redman said the U.S. proposal--which he called the “Wright-Reagan” plan to stress that it was a bipartisan effort co-sponsored by House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.)--was Washington’s “contribution” to the deliberations of the five Central American presidents.

He said that some aspects of the U.S. proposal may yet be considered by Central American leaders as they work out the details of their peace initiative. But when he was asked if the U.S. plan was dead, Redman said, “What we’re working with now is the plan that was arrived at by the presidents in Guatemala City.”

Under the terms of the U.S. plan, the Administration would not seek additional funding for the Nicaraguan contras until Sept. 30. If progress were made toward a negotiated settlement for peace before that date, the moratorium could be extended.

The Guatemala City plan calls for a suspension of all military aid from outside the region to Central America’s various insurgent groups when a cease-fire goes into effect--90 days from last Friday if the terms can be worked out.

Fitzwater refused to say just how long the Administration would wait before asking Congress to renew contra funding.

“We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of progress is made,” he said. “We don’t want to say or do anything that might work against the possibility of peace. We have agreed with Speaker Wright not to engage in speculation about funding and where we go from here, and we don’t intend to do that.”

Despite their effort to give the Guatemala City plan a full chance for success, both Fitzwater and Redman said the measure apparently does not contain any provisions that would ban Soviet or Cuban support for the Sandinista regime. Such a ban was featured in the U.S. proposal, and the Administration clearly hopes to persuade the Central American leaders to add that restriction.