Ex-Chief of Nicaraguan Rights Panel Defects, Assails Sandinistas

The former head of Nicaragua’s government-operated human rights commission has defected to the United States, accusing Sandinista authorities of refusing to allow his office to investigate most abuses in that country, according to U.S. government documents.

Mateo Jose Guerrero, former executive director of Nicaragua’s National Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, told U.S. interrogators after his defection that Sandinista officials increasingly view the panel as a tool to improve Nicaragua’s image abroad.

The commission was established five years ago as an autonomous government agency.

Guerrero went to Miami four months ago, telling Nicaraguan authorities he wanted to go there for English lessons, U.S. sources said Tuesday. Once in Miami, he requested and was granted political asylum.

Copy Obtained

A four-page U.S. government summary of the story he told U.S. officials (a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press) included the following allegations:

--The commission, established in 1980 for the purpose of investigating human rights abuses, has come gradually under the control of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, which has tried to convert the office into a government propaganda arm.

--The ministry’s secretary general, Alejandro Bendana, has monitored the commission’s activities since late 1983. Early this year, he told commission leaders not to investigate allegations of abuses concerning the forced relocation of several communities in northern Nicaragua. If the leaders did otherwise, “they would only get themselves into trouble,” the summary said.

--Bendana told two commission officials last January that the panel was going to help the Nicaraguan government establish liaison with foreign human rights groups. The purpose would be to draw international attention to abuses committed by anti-government rebels, called contras. “The commission leaders were told to stop investigating any abuse committed by the government of Nicaragua and to concentrate their efforts on the anti-Sandinistas,” the summary said.

--When two U.S. lawyers visited Nicaragua last year to investigate abuses by the anti-Communist contras, the commission paid their three-month hotel bill, totaling $2,777, and provided them with office space and transportation.

--Since 1982, commission members have not been permitted to investigate abuses in Nicaragua’s prison system. The Interior Ministry’s chief of prisons, Raul Cordon, “has delayed or refused to meet with commission officials and has torn up commission letters in front of the officials without reading them. . . . Cordon has rejected all of the commission’s requests for the release of prisoners.”

--Of the nine commissioners appointed in 1983, six place the political goals of the Sandinista government above the human rights interests of the commission.

Discussion Rejected

Reached by telephone Tuesday, Guerrero said he preferred not to discuss his defection in a phone conversation. In any case, he said, his views were adequately spelled out in the summary.

(Guerrero’s new allegations reflect an abrupt reversal of his public position since February, 1984, when he told Times staff writer Dan Williams that reports of disappearances in Nicaragua have been manipulated by the enemies of the revolution” to make the Sandinistas look bad.

(“Someone makes an announcement that people have been buried alive and we find the people alive and above ground,” he said in an interview in Managua. “This kind of propaganda is inflammatory.”

(With no prompting, Guerrero defended at length the government’s behavior in rights matters, Williams reported. Guerrero conceded that there had been abuses by the Sandinista army in the early days after the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979, but he said these were part of “difficult days of reprisals that were out of Sandinista control.”)