Blocking Democracy

"WARNING: The Reagan Administration has determined that interacting with leftists could be dangerous to the American public's health." The preceding sentence seems to have been indelibly stamped on the orders of those who issue visas to enter the United States. Last year, for example, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the widow of Salvador Allende--both prominent left-wing activists--were denied permits to enter this country. Their ideas, Washington feared, might somehow pollute innocent American minds.

Last week, the Administration attempted to carry its sorry policy one step further by delaying the issuance of visas to a group of Nicaraguan officials who were there to visit the Law School. The purpose of the delegation's trip--postponed indefinitely because of the State Department's bureaucratic harassment--was to study the American electoral system in preparation for Nicaragua's 1985 elections. Besides visiting the Law School the Nicaraguans were scheduled to meet with Congressmen in Washington and attend a United Nations conference, all of this part of a 17-nation tour. In an attempt to explain the visa delay, a State Department official hinted that Washington thought the visit unnecessary: "The [ruling] Sandinistas will probably not allow a situation to develop where they would lose power," the official said.

By that perverse bit of logic, Washington has conveniently condemned in advance an election it hopes will not take place at all. For should the Nicaraguans go through with their election plans, it seems likely the Sandinistas would retain power fairly. Such a development would put a lie to one of the more basic tenets of Reagan's ideological platform, namely the belief that a leftist government and democracy are incompatible.

Washington's game plan is simple: keep tensions with the Sandinistas high to increase their paranoia and hence their authoritarian impulses, and do nothing to help them develop more democratic institutions. The visa delays fits neatly into the latter half of the Administration's strategy.

On its own "merits," the Administration's tactic is pitiful indeed. But given the history of American involvement in Central American elections, this latest episode is nothing short of a disgrace. For years, whoever happened to be sitting in the Oval Office rubber stamped the blatantly fixed elections of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastassio Somoza. A similar policy has prevailed for dealing with equally corrupt Guatemala since 1954, when a U.S.-instigated coup deposed the democratically elected, but leftist, Arbenz government. And the Reagan Administration points with pride to its role in conducting and monitoring the March 1982 elections in El Salvador certainly not the model of democratic procedure some have claimed they were since the ballots were numbered and the left was precluding from participating by the existence of government "death lists."

The Sandinistas Nicaragua is hardly a paradise on earth. But it is an immeasurable improvement over Somoza. And measured by an accurate yardstick, human rights excesses in Nicaragua are considerably fewer than in El Salvador or Guatemala. If we allow them enough breathing room, the Sandinistas could produce a truly democratic form of government. Instead, by hindering the efforts Managua is making to improve the present system, we are only choking off the erratic first breaths of an ideal our country supposedly advances.