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the indigenous population, which might conceivably have made it a major threat
in the future.
The context of revolutionary insurgency, repressive counterinsurgency,
severely exacerbated by U.S. intervention, was profoundly threatening to Central
America’s closest neighbors (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama) whose
governments formed the Contadora group in the early 1980s. Their purpose was
diplomatic mediation to reduce international tensions in Central America. They
took the existing governments of the region (including the Sandinistas) as given,
seeking to promote diplomatic settlements of disputes between existing
governments. Contadora was strongly opposed by the U.S. government, which
successfully induced all countries but Nicaragua to scuttle the
Contadora peace plan in 1986. 3
However, this was the high point of Reagan Administration influence in
Central America, as the Iran-Contra scandal (Walsh 1994) broke later in the year,
exposing deliberate violations of law at high levels and effectively immobilizing
the Administration’s Central American policy. Costa Rica’s newly elected
president, Óscar Arias, saw an opening for a comprehensive negotiated peace.
In the course of 1987, a peace plan was negotiated and agreed upon by all five
Central American presidents. It was based on the Contadora proposal, but went
beyond that initiative in also committing each government to negotiating a peace
settlement that would end the insurgencies and incorporate the former
insurgents into a constitutional, democratic regime. The Arias Peace Plan was
thus the foundation for negotiated settlements and democratization in Nicaragua,
El Salvador and Guatemala (Honduras had no internal insurgency, though it was
the principal base for the Nicaraguan Contras, and Costa Rica had no insurgency,
though it too had been a Contra base). 4
Nicaragua, as the only revolutionary regime in the region, was
indispensable to the success of the plan, because its neighbors would see no
incentive to negotiate their own peace settlements until they could see that the
subversive threat from Nicaragua was ending. At the same time, the peace plan
was most welcome to the Sandinista government because it promised to
undercut U.S. support for the Contras and to encourage opposition elements to
participate in democratic politics rather than insurgency and subversion.
Thus, the main focus of attention was on the peace negotiations in
Nicaragua from late 1987 to late 1990. With the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
Administrations doing whatever they could to undermine the negotiations, to
discourage opposition parties from participating, and to keep the Contras intact
as a fighting force, the vast majority of Nicaragua parties and factions, including
most of the Contras, nevertheless did agree to demobilize and participate in the
November 1990 general elections, conducted under the 1987 Constitution and
with large numbers of international observers (Walker 1991).
The Bush Administration (1989-1993) did its best to encourage opposition
boycotts, and openly predicted widespread, officially coordinated fraud. Much of
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