Central America The Disposal Problem

Five Presidents tell the contras to disband, but will they go?

The symbolism was as inescapable as the irony. When the five Central American Presidents gathered last week in the resort town of Tela in northern Honduras, their meeting place was a seaside compound once owned by the United Fruit Co., the U.S. multinational concern that long represented the essence of gringo imperialism in the region. There, the Presidents* negotiated the dissolution of the Nicaraguan contras, a force that to many Central Americans symbolized U.S. arrogance and interference during the 1980s. When the Presidents emerged from three days of deliberations, they had signed an agreement on a specific series of steps to...

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