Inter American Dialogue Organization

A blue-ribbon panel including two former Republican Cabinet members is urging President-elect Bush to abandon the goal of overthrowing Nicaragua's leftist regime and negotiate a U.S.-Nicaraguan security agreement instead. The Inter-American Dialogue, in a report scheduled for release today, declares that continued U.S. hostility toward the Sandinista regime "would condemn Central America to many more years of confrontation, destruction and despair."

A blue-ribbon panel including two former Republican Cabinet members is urging President-elect Bush to abandon the goal of overthrowing Nicaragua's leftist regime and negotiate a U.S.-Nicaraguan security agreement instead. The Inter-American Dialogue, in a report scheduled for release today, declares that continued U.S. hostility toward the Sandinista regime "would condemn Central America to many more years of confrontation, destruction and despair."

Alarmed by signs of weapons traffic between Colombian rebels and the Middle East, the Bush administration is weighing a proposal to declare the destruction of leftist guerrillas in the South American country an explicit goal of U.S. policy. Some senior officials are also pushing for the administration to assert, for the first time, that the Colombian rebels are a specific target of the worldwide U.S. war on terrorism, administration officials said.