Duarte Suggests Salvador, Nicaragua Hold Peace Talks With Their Rebels

SAN SALVADOR — President Jose Napoleon Duarte said Tuesday that El Salvador and Nicaragua should hold coordinated, though separate, peace talks with their rebel movements because the conflicts affect all of Central America.

Duarte said his proposal will go to President Daniel Ortega of leftist-ruled Nicaragua through Foreign Ministry channels, and he said he is ready to talk “at any time.”

Duarte proposed that he meet with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and its political arm, the Democratic Revolutionary Front, in El Salvador and that Ortega meet in Nicaragua with the United Nicaraguan Opposition and other groups of contras who are trying to oust the Sandinista government.

“I believe in Central America there is a co-mingling of effects,” he said in a series of brief interviews with foreign journalists. “What happens in one country affects another.”

“This is a plan of peace, not war,” he said.

Duarte said that two rounds of talks he had with Salvadoran rebels in 1984 “could not solve the Central American problem.”

“Those talks were from a Salvadoran point of view,” he said. “What I am proposing is from a Central American point of view.”

He called the proposal “an alternative” to the military approach now being taken in his country and Nicaragua.