Sensitivity but Not Total Harmony

By George Russell

The U.S. and Mexico seek answers to the region's problems

The airspace over Central America was congested with diplomatic traffic last week, all of it aimed at finding peaceful solutions to the area's violent conflicts. No fewer than ten nations, including the U.S., sent envoys into action. The most visible outcome of the effort was a benign recognition that the Reagan Administration and its most important Latin neighbor, Mexico, were on separate, although slightly more compatible paths as they tried to deal with a serious common crisis.

In a 44-hour visit to Mexico City, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige led the highest-level U.S. delegation yet to meet south of the border with officials of the five-month-old administration of President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado. By the end of the encounter, both sides were happily claiming positive results. According to a State Department official, Mexico showed an "increased sensitivity" to U.S. complaints of Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan aggressiveness in fomenting subversion in Central America. Said a senior U.S. diplomat: "There is not total harmony, but there is now a more common perception of the situation." An aide to Mexican Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda Amor also found the exchange of views worthwhile. Said he: "The U.S. recognized the need to negotiate [a peaceful settlement in Central America]. That's the key for us."

Sepulveda, an articulate former professor of international law who served as Ambassador to Washington for nine months in 1982, stressed how important the Mexicans consider the subject. As the round of meetings began, he told his American visitors, "We are sure that a rapprochement between the distinct interpretations, perceptions and actions on these problems is not only desirable but rather an urgent condition."

Throughout the discussions, however, officials from both sides retained significant but friendly differences. The U.S. visitors underscored Washington's conviction that the Marxist-led guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador, which is now in its fourth year, is part of a subversive wave that is covertly backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba as well by Nicaragua. They explained that the U.S.'s increasingly controversial policies in the region, including economic and military support for El Salvador and sponsorship of a covert insurgency against Nicaragua, are a response to that provocation. Secretary of State Shultz, said a senior U.S. diplomat, "expressed in very firm terms our determination to continue our involvement in Central America until a peaceful solution can be achieved."

For their part, the Mexicans repeated their view that Central America's troubles result from decades of local injustice and oppression. They consider Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan meddling at most a secondary factor. The Mexican analysis is part of a longstanding policy of cultivating leftist regimes in Latin America, notably Fidel Castro's Cuba, both as a commitment to Mexico's own revolutionary past and as a kind of insurance policy against new revolutionary adventures on Mexican territory. Nonetheless, U.S. officials were pleased to hear that the Mexicans are now "very disappointed" by Nicaragua's heavy military buildup. Sepulveda particularly sought U.S. backing for Mexico's year-old call for a negotiated settlement of Central America's conflicts.

Secretary of State Shultz responded, as he has at home, that the U.S. supports the principle of negotiations leading to free elections in Central America. But he noted that the Reagan Administration would continue to block any maneuvers that would allow Latin guerrillas, as Shultz has said, "to shoot their way into power." Washington will also oppose any negotiations that fail to address Nicaragua's support of subversion in neighboring countries like El Salvador. U.S. officials emphasized the need for a multilateral agreement covering all the countries of Central America in order to bring Sandinista adventurism under control. The Nicaraguans doggedly resist the idea, pressing instead for bilateral talks with neighboring Honduras.

While delivering the U.S. message, Shultz and his Cabinet colleagues took pains to show they were not waving a big stick at Mexico. Before the visit, the Mexicans were concerned that the U.S. might use economic pressures to try to change their country's Central American policy. The De la Madrid government is in a critical economic phase as it imposes a tough domestic austerity program to stabilize its nearly $90 billion foreign debt, curb triple-digit inflation and maintain jobs for a labor force that is 10% unemployed and 40% underemployed. But no such heavy-handed U.S. measures were displayed. Cracked Treasury Secretary Regan at one point: "The only clubs I've brought with me are my golf clubs." The cooperative attitude of the American visitors affected the tenor of all the talks. Indeed, the atmosphere at a final commission dinner was described by a State Department official as "giddy."

As the American delegation returned to Washington, Mexican Foreign Minister Sepulveda flew to another session on Central America, a gathering of nine Latin American foreign ministers in Panama City. But two days later, the meeting of the "Contadora group," as it is known, after the Panamanian island on which it first met in January, broke up without having reached any agreement. The nine ministers eventually agreed to meet again in a month.

As the week's diplomatic process wore on, the Reagan Administration could savor some small gains in Central America. The first came in El Salvador, where Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia, 49, announced his resignation. For months, Garcia has been the object of increasing frustration for U.S. military trainers and restive officers of the Salvadoran armed forces. An astute politician, Garcia had been helpful to the U.S. in supporting El Salvador's land-reform program and curbing the excesses of right-wing Constituent Assembly President Roberto d'Aubuisson. But on the antiguerrilla battlefront, Garcia fought what for its cushy hours became known as a 9-to-5 war. He ignored U.S. advice to use aggressive small-unit patrolling tactics against the rebels, and instead sent major units of the 24,000-member Salvadoran army on wasteful sweeps through the countryside.

Garcia was succeeded by Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, 44, formerly head of the 3,000-man Salvadoran National Guard, some of whose members are charged with murdering four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980. The new Defense Minister is expected to turn control of the war effort over to qualified regional military commanders. Says a U.S. military official in San Salvador: "Vides Casanova understands that this war is being fought in the minds of the people and not over a particular piece of ground." A renewed Salvadoran government offensive against the guerrillas is expected within the next eight weeks.

Washington received another boost last week in Brazil. The government of President Joao Baptista Figueiredo announced that it had seized four Libyan transport aircraft loaded with a reported 200 tons of illicit arms and explosives. The destination of the clandestine shipment: the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. For the U.S., the discovery constituted welcome proof that leftist Central American insurgencies are being abetted from outside the hemisphere. Nicaraguan Ambassador to Brazil Ernesto Gutierrez implausibly said that his government knew nothing about the contents of the airlift.

Yet another murky incident unfolded when the Sandinistas revealed the mysterious suicide in Nicaragua of one of El Salvador's most important guerrilla leaders, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, 63. Cayetano Carpio was the head of the rebel faction known as the Popular Forces of Liberation, the most determinedly Marxist-Leninist of the country's guerrilla organizations. According to the Sandinistas, he took his own life on April 12, after the equally mysterious assassination in Nicaragua a week earlier of his No. 2 guerrilla commander, Melida Anaya Montes, better known as Ana Maria. The Nicaraguans announced the arrest of five other Salvadoran guerrillas, all members of Cayetano Carpio's group, in connection with the Anaya Montes murder. Among those detained was Rogelio Bazzaglia, described as Cayetano Carpio's "trusted lieutenant." Few people believed the Nicaraguans were telling the whole story behind the two deaths. Whatever the real explanation, the guerrillas and their Nicaraguan supporters had suffered a severe blow. Unanswered, however, was the question of whether U.S. diplomacy could gain any lasting benefit from the week's developments. --By George Russell.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/Washington and James Willwerth/Mexico City

With reporting by Johanna McGeary, James Willwerth This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.