Editorials

...The major logistical concern of the Tela agreement, the repatriation of the contras and their families to Nicaragua, or their resettlement in a third country, will be a daunting task...

...By lunch on Tuesday, she would enlist the other editors in assigning book reviews and letters to the remaining available space and then, after an afternoon's flurry of measuring and pasting, the printer's messenger would have the "dummy...

...must finally become serious about pressing all parties for a negotiated settlement there...

...Two years after Oscar Arias Sanchez's initial effort at Esquipulas, Guatemala, the regional peacemaking process inaugurated there continues with greater seriousness and specificity...

...The accord sets out not only to create a means of disbanding and resettling the Nicaraguan contras, but to establish ways of solving other regional conflicts and of promoting intraregional trade...

...While the majority of Salvadorans long for an end to hostilities, the extremes have not forsaken their dreams of total victory...

...The Tela accord confirms the ascendancy of Managua's pragmatists...

...In keeping with the spirit of the Tela accord, the U.S...

...At our new quarters on Dutch Street, she had at last an office of her own, in which she presided over a jungle of plants, an enormous picture file, and the biweekly task of fitting each issue together...

...Yet, whatever the disappointments and failures to come, Tela stands today as a benchmark in Central America's regional, self-directed process of peacemaking...

...REMEMBERING ANNE Anyone who wrote for Commonweal over the last thirty years will have come, in time, to know Anne Robertson...

...she knew who had moved, who had a new job or a new project, often who had suffered a loss or disappointment...

...Then a freak fall dealt Anne herself a prolonged convalescence with several broken bones...

...There is little doubt that the Nica-raguan regime will retain sympathy for the FMLN in El Salvador, but the Tela accord's provision for roving international observers to interdict any arms transfers or any insurgent use of border areas will make practical expression of that sympathy difficult...

...Because of the cumulative effect of poor nutrition, inadequate-to-hazardous living conditions, the lifelong absence of rudimentary health care, scarce work and unregulated working situations, and the presence within individuals of a skein of debilitating diseases, the possibility that death may come calling on any given day is real...

...The effort demands our admiration and support...

...They deserve our cooperation...

...Red is a favorite color of the region's weavers, and red is the color of the decade now closing...

...Beneath the inactivity and pain of her recovery, it had worked its deadly way undetected and was already fatally spread when diagnosed this past June...

...Not all these strands are fully secure...

...We invite our readers, our writers, and Anne's friends to gather with us for a Mass in her memory on Wednesday, September 27, at 6:30 P.M...

...Tela should put to rest the U.S...

...Perhaps on the phone, perhaps through a short, appreciative note, she made and kept contact with our authors and reviewers...

...But the Tela accord should signal a change: from an onslaught against the region's people to one against their poverty and political exclusion...

...It seemed to us who watched a kind of meditation that absorbed and held her fast in the exercise of her craft...

...While a major portion of the Tela communique deals with the civil war in El Salvador-it calls on all parties to seek a reconciliation-the accord, by its very nature, can offer little practical help...

...Our dear friend and beloved colleague will be sorely missed here at Commonweal...

...Once an almost preternatu-rally shy person in groups, she could be herself in encountering people individually, whether face-to-face or through the mails...

...a large order...

...So the Tela process could come unraveled, and with Central American history as prelude, that would be no surprise...

...Tela, then, reflects the design and complexity of the region's native tela...

...The editors now on staff arrived long after Anne Robertson...

...Part of the $49 million in last April's contra aid package was for use in the contras' "voluntary regional repatriation...

...For the U.S., the moral should be: "Let it happen...

...Anne's titles, first editorial assistant and, finally, production editor, do not capture those lasting ties with writers, nor the engaged spirit with which she proofread galleys, and certainly not the literary sensibility that made her the strong right hand of Commonweal's book and poetry editors...

...Anne had come to Commonweal from Jubilee magazine, a journal that combined the rebelliousness of the Beat generation with the postwar search for a spiritual discipline...

...they also found a mind that was quick with enthusiasm and a delighted co-conspirator in the battle against pretension...

...Indeed, the titles barely hint at the devoted and precise eye that "dummied up" each issue of Commonweal...

...Certainly a good portion of the often remarked loyalty of our columnists and regular contributors was rooted in Anne's keen attention to their concerns and in her personification of what the magazine stood for at its best...

...Anne Robertson died the evening of August 12 at home with her family...

...But the futility of the war and its suffering have fostered a realization across the entire political spectrum in Nicaragua that, in the words of contra leader Arturo Cruz, "We Nicaraguans now can only face one another and blame or help ourselves...

...But finally, she returned to the office with a slight limp, with a cane, and with an eagerness to get back to work...

...She was a person in search of wisdom, and to many of us, though never, it seemed, to herself, she was a person who had found it...

...The civilian presidents of Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala who signed the Tela agreement are all serving out their final terms...

...Tela finally sets dates, proposes means of implementation, outlines verification procedures, and introduces third parties willing to assist in both bankrolling and monitoring the project...

...She continued to be drawn to the literature of mysticism, East and West, just as she continued to write to Jubilee alumni such as Thomas Merton or the poet Robert Lax...

...propensity for exerting proprietary control over Central American destinies...

...In Spanish, tela means cloth, whatever is woven on a loom...

...More than 160,000 people have died there over the past ten years of civil conflict...

...That initial agreement called for the disbanding of the contras...

...While such a realization has dawned finally on Nicaraguans, it remains a long way off for Salvadorans...

...From time to time she emerged to question, to ask an editor to turn a line, to query a spelling or date...

...In Anne, people found a sympathetic listener and a faithful correspondent...

...In Central America, the red is wound tightly with the black...

...It should be made available now, and augmented as necessary...

...The accord provides for international coordination and oversight of this process...

...The best and only workable first step toward this goal is in such multilateral accords as Tela...

...The Tela agreement is a winding together of a number of strands...

...In El Salvador, the red and the black will continue to issue from the loom relentlessly...

...We came to depend on her "institutional memory," her readiness to pitch in at deadline moments, her critical attention to detail, and in moments of uncertainty her ability to judge whether an article was for the commonweal, or not...

...On Mondays and Tuesdays of alternate weeks, pica rule, scissors, tape, and lay-out sheets were massed on Anne's desk as she contemplated the puzzle of the next issue...

...In the old quarters on Madison Avenue, Anne labored, appropriately enough, in the very center of things, a row of file cabinets serving as her workspace as well as the border between the business and editorial sections of the office...

...The Tela accord will not instantly change this pattern, but it is important...

...A few years ago, with her father and her sister, Anne nursed her mother through a prolonged terminal illness...

...The parties yield bits of sovereignty to one another and to international bodies...

...Their willingness to guarantee greater political freedoms, pardon political prisoners, suspend conscription, permit (indeed, promote) monitoring of the political/electoral process, and adopt a more conciliatory attitude toward the Catholic hierarchy reflects a realism imposed no doubt by the costs of the contra war, the blockade, and mismanagement...

...Joseph's Church, 371 Sixth Avenue, New York City...

...Forty percent of the region's people live in desperate poverty...

...One-third of the country is under the influence of the FMLN, while the March elections brought all three branches of the government under the control of the rightist ARENA party, which former President Jose Napoleon Duarte has said supports a totalitarian project and an economic policy for the rich...

...Unknown to her, however, she also returned with a cancer...

...in the latter two countries the military leaders who hold options on the political future of their nations are not distinguished by any special regard for human rights, constitutionalism, or international law...

...There is no immediate end to the poverty in Central America and the hostilities it inflames...

...But it is Washington that bears the greatest moral obligation to resettle those who carried on its fight...

...The regime in Nicaragua is required by the accord to absorb the contras while at the same time broadening political freedoms, giving up any dreams of exporting its revolution, and coping with a near-disastrous economy...

...specifically, its effort to overthrow the Sandinista revolution by imposing an economic blockade and by using the contras as military proxies...

...It is time for Central Americans to weave their own destiny...

...there is reason to hope that it displays some of its strength and durability as well...

...Indeed a dozen or more editors, and an equal number of non-editorial staff, came and went over the years when she was contacting book reviewers, arranging theater dates for drama critics, and piecing together issues...

...still, the name is apt...

...at St...

...She was fifty-seven...