Mediator Is At
Home As Peacemaker
By Carol Rosenberg, MiamiHerald.Com
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the man
who is seeking to resolve the Honduran
crisis in his living room, is a 67-year-old
economist and lawyer by training with
salt-and-pepper hair, and the 1987 Nobel
Peace Prize.
He is also a wealthy aristocrat -- known to
many as Don Oscar -- who skillfully overcame
his own nation's single-term presidential
limit by championing a reinterpretation of
the Costa Rican Constitution that allowed
him to run and win his current, second term,
which runs from 2006 to 2010.
Friends and admirers describe him as a
dogged, self-confident conservative, a bit
dull by some standards with a professorial
air and passion for demilitarizing Central
America.
Even as he agreed to mediate the crisis last
week, he said Honduras' coup d'etat was an
inevitable outcome -- and ''wake-up call for
the hemisphere'' -- of the Latin America's
bloated militaries, whose costs he estimated
at $50 billion this year.
''We should recognize that such events are
not random acts,'' he wrote in an opinion
page article published last week in American
newspapers. ``They are the result of
systematic errors and missteps that many of
us have been warning about for decades. They
are the price we pay for one of our region's
greatest follies: its reckless military
spending.''
Arias held two days of talks last week with
delegations of ousted Honduran President
Manuel Zelaya and his appointed successor,
Roberto Micheletti, in the Costa Rican
capital. They broke for the weekend, for a
hiatus whose length was uncertain.
It may strike outsiders as odd that Arias
has chosen to mediate the crisis inside his
home behind an ivy-covered fence in San
Jose's Rohrmoser neighborhood. Costa Ricans
call their nation's current version of The
White House La Casa de Don Oscar.
But he has been hosting Central America's
leaders in that same single-story home for
years, dating back to his first 1986-90
presidency. It has lush gardens, a swimming
pool, expansive living room and impressive
library where he engages in perhaps his
favorite pastime, reading.
Last week, journalists were camped in a tent
outside to monitor the mediation effort.
Born Oscar Arias Sánchez to a prosperous
coffee-growing family in September 1941, he
is a divorcé with a doctorate from England
in political science and the 1987 Nobel
Peace Prize ''for his work for peace in
Central America,'' which culminated that
year in an accord signed in Guatemala.
`VERY CHARMING'
''He is sure of himself, and very charming.
Warm? I wouldn't go that far,'' says William
Goodfellow, executive director of the Center
for International Policy, a Washington,
D.C., think tank, who has known him for 23
years.
''He knows the region. He knows the players.
And he's trusted by everybody,'' he said.
In a less widely known victory, Arias
persuaded Haiti's since-ousted President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to abolish his army
in 1995.
How'd he do it? He ordered a poll of Haiti
through his Arias Foundation for Peace and
Human Progress, funded by his Nobel prize,
to demonstrate to Aristide that 62 percent
of his people endorsed demilitarization.
Arias made a name for himself during the
Cold War. He was elected to the presidency
when the Reagan White House was supporting
the Contras and the region was wracked by
warfare, instability and anxiety.
He took a look at the then-foundering ''Contadora
Plan,'' which envisioned having Colombia,
Venezuela, Panama and Mexico mediate
regional peace, and drove through a peace
program of his own. Ronald Reagan may have
wanted the Sandinistas and their leader
Daniel Ortega vanquished, but Arias saw
elections as the answer.
''Oscar Arias is not a leftist,'' says
Goodfellow. ``He dislikes and distrusts
Fidel Castro and is certainly no fan of Hugo
Chávez. But his commitment to democracy is
in every fiber of his body.''
In between his two terms as president, he
traveled the world, spoke widely and was
sometimes mentioned as a candidate for
secretary general of the United Nations or
Organization of American States, ambitions
that could be enhanced by his latest effort
at mediation.
DETERMINATION
Admirers say he is stubborn, and use words
like ''patience'' and ''persistence'' in
describing the characteristics that brought
peace to Central America and the prize to
the house where he now seeks to solve the
Honduras crisis.
''He was very skilled in getting the various
warring parties together in Central America
and convincing presidents to accept
settlements that were arguably not in their
interests,'' says William M. LeoGrande, a
Latin American expert and dean of American
University's School of Public Affairs.
``He got the Sandinistas to agree to hold
internationally supervised elections. He got
the Salvadoran government essentially to
negotiate with its armed opposition.''
His greatest talent?
'His not being willing to take `no' for an
answer,'' said LeoGrande. ``He's adept at
identifying the commonalities in people's
stated positions and then holding them to
those.''
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