U.S. to Boycott World Court Nicaragua Case : Washington Suspends Its Bilateral Talks With Sandinistas

The United States suspended its talks with leftist Nicaragua on Friday, saying it will refuse to negotiate further unless the Sandinista regime makes more concessions to its Central American neighbors in Contadora peace negotiations.

A statement issued by the State Department said the bilateral talks, which have taken place at the Mexican Pacific coast resort of Manzanillo since June, “have not made substantive progress.”

“We believe it appropriate and possibly helpful to (the Contadora) process to hold off any further Manzanillo meetings while those negotiations are in progress,” the statement said.

The surprise move came only a few hours after the State Department had announced that it will boycott further proceedings in Nicaragua’s suit in the World Court demanding an end to U.S. support for rebels fighting the Managua regime.

A senior State Department official said the talks were broken off in an attempt “to put the Nicaraguans’ feet to the fire” in advance of a Contadora conference scheduled for mid-February.

“The Sandinistas have been trying to use our bilateral talks as an excuse for avoiding the issues in the Contadora process,” he charged. “This makes Contadora the only forum.”

But a diplomat at the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington rejected that charge and accused the United States, in turn, of trying to torpedo the Contadora talks.

“A lot of the hopes for success in Contadora depended on progress in our bilateral talks with the United States,” he said. “By withdrawing from Manzanillo, the United States is boycotting Contadora.”

The two sets of negotiations both have been aimed at easing tension between Nicaragua and its neighbors but neither has produced much visible success.

The Contadora talks, launched on the Panamanian island of Contadora in 1983, involve Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala under the mediation of Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela.

The Manzanillo talks, begun at the urging of Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid, have consisted of nine direct meetings between representatives of Nicaragua and the United States.

The United States and its Central American allies want Nicaragua to break its military ties with the Soviet Union and Cuba, stop its aid to leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, reduce the size of its growing armed forces and alter its leftist domestic political system to allow greater pluralism. Nicaragua wants the other countries to end their support of the anti-Sandinista rebels, known as contras, who have been fighting to overthrow the Managua government from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica.

‘The Worst Yet’ State Department officials said the last Manzanillo meeting, in December, was “the worst yet.” They charged that the Nicaraguans showed little flexibility, in part because they see little chance that Congress will renew CIA covert funding for the contras.

The Contadora talks, on the other hand, have shown some fleeting signs of progress. In September, the four mediating countries proposed a draft peace treaty that Nicaragua accepted, but which the United States and its allies rejected. At their most recent meeting in Panama on Jan. 9, the four mediating nations announced that they have drawn up a revised treaty, which they want to present to the Central American governments at a meeting scheduled for Feb. 15 and 16.

The United States charges that Nicaragua is trying to avoid that meeting by insisting that progress in the Manzanillo talks must come first. However, the Nicaraguans have never made that argument publicly and deny the U.S. charge that they have made it in private.

Nicaragua, on the other hand, accuses the United States of trying to block a Contadora treaty because, the Sandinistas charge, the Reagan Administration is attempting to destabilize their government. The Nicaraguans argue that because so much of the Central America problem is based on the U.S.-Nicaraguan conflict, those issues should be dealt with bilaterally as well as in the multilateral Contadora talks.

State Department officials said the U.S. withdrawal from the talks is not irrevocable and will be reevaluated after the next Contadora meeting. “It all depends on how the next round goes,” one said.

But whether the next Contadora session occurs on schedule is itself in question. Costa Rica has threatened to boycott the meeting because it is angry at Nicaragua after a man was arrested when he sought refuge in the Costa Rican Embassy in Managua. Some Central American diplomats said they fear the boycott could be an attempt to derail the conference entirely.