Kissinger's commission whisks through six nations in six days
We are dedicated to the resistance of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. We are also dedicated to human rights and democracy. It is in pursuit of both of these objectives that we have come to look at the situation." So declared former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as he arrived at San Salvador's Ilopango airport last week accompanied by the eleven other members of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America. Kissinger had posed the essential dilemma for U.S. policy in the region: how to halt Marxist subversion while securing democratic rule for nations plagued with dictatorships of both the left and the right.
On their six-day, six-nation tour of the isthmus, that was just the question the twelve commission members were pondering. Appointed by President Reagan in July, the group was charged with arriving at a long-term policy capable of winning broad domestic support. The trip, Kissinger explained before his departure from Washington, would give the commission a basis for its recommendations. "What you get out of it is the flavor of a country," he said, "a judgment of the personalities, an opportunity to ask questions that have been bothering us."
The tour began in two outposts of political stability: Panama and Costa Rica. After giving a sympathetic but noncommittal hearing to Panamanian pleas for economic aid, the commission flew west to Costa Rica's capital, San Jose. Costa Rican officials expressed their concern that their country, the only successful long-lasting democracy in the region, faced a serious threat of subversion from Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Said President Luis Alberto Monge: "Never have our people been more afraid."
Arguing that their best defense was a strong economy, Costa Ricans lobbied for a $3 billion, ten-year U.S. aid program for their country. The most controversial encounter of the day, however, was unscheduled. After announcing that he would not meet with "people engaged in guerrilla warfare," Kissinger and two other commission members held a talk with Alfonso Robelo, a leader of the U.S.-supported rebels battling to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. Kissinger later said that his meeting with Robelo would be the tour's last with rebels of any stripe.
No one expected the next stop to be congenial, and it was not. From the moment Kissinger raised the subject on his arrival in El Salvador, the panel hammered away at one issue: human rights. The commission met with Interim President Alvaro Magana. Kissinger stated that the U.S. depended on El Salvador as a front line against Cuban-and Nicaraguan-inspired subversion in the region. But the commission members flatly condemned the country's abysmal human rights record (see box). In a tense confrontation with right-wing Constituent Assembly President Roberto d'Aubuisson, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland angrily questioned D'Aubuisson's charges that Samuel Maldonado, leader of the 100,000-strong Salvadoran Communal Union, a peasant organization that has close ties to U.S. labor groups, had collaborated with leftist guerrillas.