OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ is an uncommon man from an uncommon country.
The country is Costa Rica, a small republic of 2.5 million people in Central America whose many admirers tend to overload it with lavish compliments. They call it "the Switzerland of Latin America" or "the Denmark of the Isthmus of Panama." They make other benign comparisons.
These parallels hold, but not for long. Costa Rica is small, like those two European countries. It is also passionately democratic, and manifestly independent and individualistic, as they are. All three have been progressive welfare states for a long time.
But Costa Rica has something the other two haven't. Or better put, it hasn't got something the other two have: It has no army.
Arias, 58, served as president of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for helping to end the wars that raged through Central America in the 1980s. He is eager to preach the demilitarized state to anyone, or any country, open to it.
Using his Nobel funds, he created the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress to further this aim.
He has had surprising success in two countries that have been devastated by militarism. Arias will likely tell the stories of the conversions of these two nations at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow in his free lecture at Goucher College's Merrick Hall. Arias, Goucher's 1999 Sarah T. Hughes Politician-in-Residence, will be at the school in Towson all day, meeting and talking with students and faculty.
He will also promote his International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers, which he is eager for the United States to adopt.
While he was president, Arias approached Guillermo Endara, the president of Panama, Costa Rica's neighbor. "I promised him we would be the first nation to recognize his government if he would do something which is quite historic: that is, get rid of the armed forces," Arias said during a telephone interview from San Jose, the Costa Rican capital.
Such a proposition from one head of state to another might seem presumptuous, even brazen. But there were mitigating circumstances. For one thing, Endara's government was ignored in the region. It needed a friend.
Endara had been fairly elected in 1989, only to have his victory snatched away by Panamanian defense forces. This was one of several actions by military strongman Manuel Noriega that led the United States to invade Panama and arrest Noriega as a drug smuggler.
In the aftermath, Endara was sworn in. But the ceremony was tainted in the eyes of many Central Americans because it was held in the Canal Zone. That strip of U.S.-held territory bisects Panama and has been a provocation for anti-American fervor almost since it was established, shortly after Panama became an independent state in 1903. Nearly every Latin American country opposed the U.S. invasion, so the Canal Zone swearing-in made Endara a pariah in the region.
Endara was receptive to Arias' proposition for another reason. Noriega was only the latest in a long line of tyrants, would-be despots and military meddlers that have stultified Panama's political, economic and social life. What Arias was offering appeared to be a chance to put an end to all that. The beleaguered president accepted the offer, and Arias formally opened diplomatic relations with Panama. Later, Panama approved a constitutional amendment that disposed of the military.
"So, constitutionally Panama is the second country in the world to ban its armed forces," said Arias. "As a consequence, I tell my friends in the U.S. that the border between Panama and Costa Rica is the safest border in the world."
A path to peace
Arias is utterly committed to demilitarization as a path to peace. He is an evangelist of the creed, saying, "Our best defense has been to be defenseless. It gives moral authority to a country. Nobody would dare attack us. We would be defended by the whole world."
The man given the most credit as the originator of Costa Rica's disarmed state was Jose Figueres Ferrer, who led a successful armed uprising in 1948 in reaction to an attempt by President Teodoro Picado to annul the election of Otillio Ulate Blanco. Figueres eventually won the presidency himself.
The constitution of Costa Rica was rewritten in 1949 to prohibit the raising of a national army except during a national security crisis. The absence of the army (border guards were retained) has ensured the peaceable transfer of presidential power. The money that would have been spent on a military establishment has gone to hospitals, schools, and other bricks of civilization.
Arias knows that military establishments frequently serve themselves before they serve the national interest. They consume funds that could be better spent. They corrupt the political process.
The Nobel laureate said his dream was to see the entire turbulent region of Central America demilitarized. He wanted countries accustomed to near-perpetual warfare, such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, to muster out their armed forces. But he was not successful, except in Panama, and most recently has turned his attention to the countries of West Africa, where military budgets are particularly burdensome.
But first he found success in a most unlikely place, closer to home: He got Haiti to constitutionally abolish its armed forces, adding a third member to the peculiar club of the defenseless.
Arias began this effort in Washington, where he went to persuade exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to follow Endara's example. Shortly after he was brought back to Haiti in October 1994 and reinstalled as president with the help of American troops, Aristide took the necessary step to disestablish the armed forces: He took military funding out of the budget.
Meanwhile, using money from European governments, such as France and the Netherlands, which support his activities, Arias worked to generate support for this move, especially among Haiti's politicians.
At Aristide's inauguration, he sat near Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Arias recalled. "I pointed to the national band and told her that was all that was left of the Haitian armed forces," he said. "She laughed."
Maybe she was laughing at him, for sounding so naive.
Arias might believe that his country is armed by its virtue in rejecting militarism, and that might seem naive. He has proved his mettle by his determination to stick to his principles. At the time of Arias' inauguration in 1986, the Reagan administration was financing the contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, using Honduras and Costa Rica as staging areas for military operations.
Arias pledged a policy of strict neutrality for Costa Rica. Many of the Reagan administration's agents assumed this was only for public consumption. However, Arias sent his border guards to close a secret airfield, built in northern Costa Rica on the orders of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North to supply contras in Nicaragua. Arias shut down other contra bases and expelled leading contras from the country.
Later, he went to Washington and told President Reagan the last thing he wanted to hear -- that the contras couldn't win. At the same time, Arias was berating his Sandinista neighbors for running an authoritarian regime, and the Hondurans for turning their country into an American military base.
Politically astute
By deploying all of his political astuteness, Arias survived the Reagan administration's attempts to undermine him. He knew how Washington worked; he had cultivated friends on Capitol Hill, such as Jim Wright, the former Democratic Speaker of the House, and others in Congress opposed to the contra war. Some people credit Arias with single-handedly sinking the Reagan administration's Nicaraguan policy.
The former president of Costa Rica understands politics. As a young man, he studied at Boston University, where he was impressed by the Nixon-Kennedy debates, taking John F. Kennedy as a political model. He studied political science at the University of Essex in England, then went home to become a professor in the subject at the University of Costa Rica.
Arias, born in Heredia near San Jose, is a wealthy man, a member of one of the oldest coffee-producing families in the county. It is a political family, having produced officials for a number of presidential administrations in Costa Rica and for the national legislature.
These days, Arias has been using his political skills to marshal the moral authority of 17 Nobel Peace laureates behind his International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers, a proposal that he will elaborate on in his speech tomorrow. The code would require nations buying arms to meet certain "internationally recognized standards of democracy and humanitarian law."
The purpose of the Arias arms-transfer code is to end the practice of selling weapons to regimes run by dictators. It is a pointed message to be bringing to the United States, at a venue 50 miles from Washington.
Statistics gathered by the Arias Foundation from the World Bank, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and other agencies show that the United States is responsible for 45 percent of all weapons transfers in the developing world. Eighty-five percent of those weapons sold by this country go to undemocratic governments.
Richard O'Mara is a reporter for The Sun and its former foreign editor.
Pub Date: 03/28/99