Making `A Risk for Peace' Pay Off

He had planned it down to the last detail, and in the end, as one observer put it, "it was like picking cherries, one by one."

In a region of the world known for strife rather than compromise and factionalism more than unity, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez seemed to be setting himself up for failure when he tried to sell his vision for regional peace to the other four Central American heads of state. But Arias' idea became reality in August, 1987, when the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua met with Arias in Guatemala City and signed the treaty.

The plan that Arias calls a "risk for peace" has captured the world's imagination. Largely for that effort, Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 13, 1987, becoming the first Central American ever to receive the award. In the process, Arias, who will deliver today's Commencement address, has become something of a hero to the people of his country and his region.

According to a variety of experts on Central America, the means by which Arias pulled off the dramatic agreement reveal his talents as a skillful negotiator. They add that Arias' pragmatic idealism is in many ways reminiscent of John F. Kennedy '40, a man whom Arias has chosen as a role model.

To pull off his gamble for peace, Arias employed a variety of tactics, each designed to pull in different nations. He also had no compunction about scrapping traditional procedures when they threatened the August meeting's success.

The site of the meeting ensured that at the least Guatemala, as the host country, would back the negotiating strategy.

By including language in the plan casting doubt upon the legitimacy of all insurgent movements in the region, Arias won El Salvador's support.

But the key to the plan was Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega. An earlier meeting in February had included all the nations except Nicaragua, but everyone knew--none better than Arias--that unless Ortega signed on, the accord would have no substance.

At Guatemala City, the foreign ministers of the five nations held preliminary meetings but were unable to reach a consensus. Although ordinary procedures called for the ministers and the presidents to meet all together, Arias arranged for the five leaders to meet alone.

Arias confronted Ortega head on, asking him if he was willing to make concessions, says Peter Hakim, staff director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Inter-American Dialogue. If not, then it would be better for the leaders to go right to dinner and cut the meeting short, Arias said, according to Hakim.

Such a direct statement at the start of the talks set Ortega off balance, Hakim says, and led him to make the concessions necessary to sign on. Now only Honduras remained. Though hostile to the plan, the country risked being the "odd man out," Hakim says, and Arias emphasized that danger. As a result, Honduras, too, signed on to the Arias plan.

Arias' behavior was a case study in grace under pressure, experts say. And that description, which was often applied to Kennedy, would surely please Arias, who in many ways has modeled himself after the late president.

Arias was a summer school student at Harvard while Kennedy was president, and by his own account, he took Kennedy as his guide after meeting the presidential candidate on Cape Cod in 1960.

University Marshall Richard M. Hunt says the Costa Rican has expressed a special pleasure at being invited to give the Commencewment address because he sees Harvard as "President Kennedy's university."

In many ways, Arias' background is similar to Kennedy's. The son of one of Costa Rica's wealthiest coffee-trading families. Arias studied in both Europe and America and is known for his strong interest in cultural pursuits and intellectual life.

Furthermore, Ruben Robles, who has known Arias since his run for the presidency of Costa Rica in 1985 and is now an official at the Costa Rican embassy in Washington, D.C., says that much of Arias' campaign strategy in 1985 was inspired by JFK.

"He used the idea of bringing in the young blood, new thinking, new ideas into the party. He focused on 21-to 35-year-olds, and that developed a tremendous amount of momentum," Robles says. Arias used the idea that a torch had been passed to a new generation of Costa Ricans in his campaign, and that message proved to have resonance.

Robles says that the key to Arias' triumph as the Partido de Liberacion de National (PLN) candidate, which came after aggressive inter-party contention in the primary, was his idea that "technologija" had to be brought into the government. His championing of professionalism was a subtle way of emphasizing the same theme, that the days of the older political establishment had been eclipsed by a younger generation.

Despite his anti-establishment rhetoric, Arias rose up through the ranks of the party; in 1964, he became an assistant to PLN's elder statesman, Jose Figueres Ferrer, and in 1965 he worked on a PLN candidate's unsuccessful presidential bid.

When Figueres returned to the presidency in 1970, he gave Arias an entree into the Costa Rican government, appointing him to his economic council, In 1972, Arias became minister of planning and political economy. By 1979, he had been elected to the PLN's top post, that of general secretary.

Costa Rica is a small and fairly poor nation. But it has been democratically run since a civil war in 1948 led to the abolishment of Costa Rica's military. Power has been peacefully transfered at the conclusion of each president's four-year term. By law, a Costa Rican president cannot succeed himself.

"You'd feel very easy in Costa Rica, and it would compare favorably with Western European and even U.S. democracy," Hakim says. He notes that in addition to a strong two-party system, Costa Rica has a vigorous free press and a fairly equitable economic system.

Largely because of Costa Rica's democratic history, Arias was uniquely positioned to present the peace plan, experts on the region say. As Hakim puts it, "Costa Rica is in, but not of, Central America" which is best known for death squads, brutal dictatorships and guerilla warfare.

In a speech this fall at the Kennedy School of Government, which, University Marshal Hunt notes, favorably impressed those involved in selecting the Commencement speaker, Arias made a direct connection between Costa Rica's unique history and his efforts on behalf of peace.

"I come from a small country that was not afraid to abolish its army to become stronger. In my country there is not one tank, not one cannon and not one warship or helicopter gunship. We love democracy and respect the law," Arias said in that speech.

"Ours has been a working democracy for 100 years. It is the oldest in Latin America and one of the oldest in the world," he said this fall. "Our ambition is development. Our desire is peace on our borders."

The Arias plan aims, as he said in his K-School speech, to foster "reconciliation wherever brothers are killing each other." The plan asks foreign powers to stop using military influence in the region and calls on the signers to refrain from using their countries as springboards for aggression against their neighbors. The plan also calls signatory nations to make an effort to democratize their countries.

The success of the plan depends on how one views it. If seen primarily as an effort to end the civil war in Nicaragua, and to bring peace between the Sandinista government and its neighbors, the accord seems to have been successful.

As a result of the plan, the Contra rebels and the Sandinistas government agreed to cease fire early this year, and they are engaged in negotiations. Additionally, the Nicaraguan government has allowed the previously shut down newspaper La Prensa to begin publishing again.

But critics of the plan suggest that the reforms are at the best cosmetic.

Hakim says that if one looks at the Arias plan in literal terms--putting aside the concerns about Nicaragua's civil war that inspired it--then it fares less well. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salavador all currently have internal strife or repressive regimes, he says.

And the plan has recently become something of a political liability for Arias, Hakim says. Costa Rica has recently been the recipient of a flood of Nicaraugan refuges. That deluge combined with the country's current economic difficulties have made some Costa Ricans wonder whether Arias spends too much time trying to solve other people's problems, Hakim says.

Whether or not the plan has been effective in a pragmatic sense, there is no question that the recognition it has received has given a tremendous symbolic boost to Costa Rica's spirits and its sense of self-confidence.

Hakim notes that Arias' plan for a settlement caught the world's imagination, while the United States' efforts in the same area had failed abysmally. The pact lead to an "immense pride by Central Americans generally" that the U.S. had been surpassed by the efforts of five small Central American nations, Hakim says.

The pact also put the country, and its unique democratic experience, under the spotlight of world attention.

"Costa Rica is known to the World. They don't confuse us with any other people," Robles says. "Costa Rica is for the first time the place of a Nobel Prize winner, and that he was president makes it better."