Ortega Fears That Lethal Contra Aid Will Lead to U.S. Intervention

The Sandinista government fears that congressional approval next year of lethal aid to anti-Sandinista guerrillas will set the stage for direct U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega said in a weekend interview.

The Reagan Administration is expected to ask Congress early next year for authority and funds to supply arms and ammunition to the guerrillas, known as contras. Current law allows the Administration to supply them only with $27 million worth of non-lethal “humanitarian assistance.”

Ortega said that he is not worried that lethal U.S. aid could enable the rightist anti-Sandinistas to overthrow his Marxist-led government.

No Chance for Success

“That has no possibility of success,” he said. “The danger in more lethal aid to the contras is that it leaves a more open field for the American Administration to launch increased action against Nicaragua, to commit itself more directly in the action against Nicaragua.”

Asked what kind of action he meant, Ortega said: “Bombardments, air support for the contras, provoking new confrontations with Nicaragua, moving into the confrontations, and invading Nicaragua.”

What Congress does “is going to be decisive,” he said. “If Congress accedes to lethal aid, they are giving a blank check to Reagan to launch direct action against Nicaragua.”

If Congress votes down lethal aid, he added, “the Administration will have to think seriously about negotiations” with the Sandinista government.

President Since January

Ortega, 40, has been president since January and is one of nine former guerrilla commanders who have held power collectively since July, 1979. Seated beside a table in his office Friday night, he answered questions for more than an hour, speaking in soft but rapid Spanish.

The main focus of the interview with The Times was on problems between the Reagan Administration and the Sandinistas, who took their name from Gen. Augusto Cesar Sandino, a rebel leader of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Sandino fought against U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua.

Ortega said that in recent weeks, the Reagan Administration has been increasingly candid about what he called its military plan “to destroy the Sandinista revolution.”

Beginning in 1982, the Administration supplied the contras with more than $80 million in military “covert aid” through the CIA. Congress cut off that aid in mid-1984 but voted last June to authorize the $27 million in such non-lethal “humanitarian assistance” as boots, uniforms, food and medicine.

More Military Aid

The Administration has said that it will seek a resumption of military aid to the contras in 1986. A diplomat said that Administration officials are “reasonably optimistic” about what the contras could do with increased firepower supplied by the United States.

But Ortega said that even with more U.S. military aid, the contras have no chance of taking the initiative in the war. Therefore, he said, the only “military solution” left for the Administration would be direct U.S. intervention.

“We are sure that the American people would not accept this action of sending American youths to die here,” he said. “It is true that this is going to mean more suffering for the Nicaraguan people, but it also will mean suffering for the American people.

“And suffering is not a solution for either the United States or Nicaragua. Instead, we have to seek a peaceful solution, a negotiated solution.”

No Self-Delusion

He added later in the interview: “But we do not delude ourselves that this negotiated solution can be reached immediately. . . . I think negotiations have not yet entered into the Reagan Administration’s logic.”

Washington has often expressed support for the efforts of Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela to mediate in Central American peace negotiations. Nicaragua, however, accuses the United States of blocking the peace efforts of the four countries, which call themselves the Contadora Group.

Nicaragua is now asking the Contadora Group and four other South American countries to mediate between Washington and Managua or, as Ortega said, “to make the United States see the light of reason and seek a negotiated solution with Nicaragua.”

Only Two Options

Meanwhile, he said, “there isn’t anything we can do but continue fighting the way we are against the aggression by mercenary forces. The way we are defeating the mercenary forces, the government of the United States should realize that this is not the way to solve this problem, that the options it is being left with are its troops or negotiation.”

He said that if the United States and Nicaragua can negotiate a settlement of the contra war, the Contadora Group’s plan for peace in Central America could proceed.

The plan, embodied in a draft peace treaty, includes provisions for arms control, the removal of all foreign military advisers and troops from the region and a ban on signatories’ support for guerrilla forces operating in the region.

U.S. troops have been conducting a series of military maneuvers with the local armed forces in Honduras, and U.S. military trainers are assigned to El Salvador to advise the government there in its fight against leftist guerrillas. The United States accuses Nicaragua of aiding the Salvadoran guerrillas, and the Sandinista army receives strong support from Cuban military advisers.

Cuban Role Denied

This month, U.S. Administration officials charged that Cuban advisers are undertaking a combat role in the Nicaraguan war. Ortega denied that.

“There are no Cuban troops in Nicaragua,” he said. “Here the troops that are fighting are the troops of the people of Nicaragua.”

U.S. officials estimate that about 2,500 Cuban military personnel are stationed in Nicaragua. Ortega said that there are fewer than 800 Cuban military advisers--”750 or something like that.”

Whether the number of Cuban military advisers in Nicaragua will increase or decrease “is going to be determined by the development of this whole situation, by the behavior of the United States,” Ortega said.

Report of Cuban Pilots

He declined to confirm or deny reports from Washington that Cuban pilots were among 14 people killed Dec. 2 when the contras shot down a Nicaraguan military helicopter with a SAM-7 ground-to-air missile.

“We have not wanted to accept or reject that because we consider that that is not the problem,” Ortega said. “And besides, it is a right of the Nicaraguan people, in difficult situations like this, to have support to fight this war.”

He said that reports of Cuban pilots are meant to divert attention from the “extremely dangerous escalation” in the use of the shoulder-held, heat-seeking missiles by the contras.

Despite the missiles, he said, the Sandinista army will continue to use Soviet-supplied helicopters for transport and as gunships.

Need for Helicopters

“We need many more helicopters,” he said. “The bulk of our battles, the clashes, the beatings we have given the counterrevolution, have been by ground forces. So if they are thinking that with ground-to-air missiles they are going to take away operating capacity, they are mistaken.”

Ortega said that his government currently is concerned about maintaining the strength of its ground forces as it inducts new soldiers into the ranks to replace thousands who were drafted two years ago, when military conscription was instituted.

“The plan of the American government, of its strategists, is aimed at finding a way to keep the people from filling the vacuum that will be left by the combatants on the war front when they are demobilized,” he said. “That would open the way for the counterrevolution to again take the offensive.”

State of Emergency

That threat, Ortega said, was a major reason for an October decree that broadened the country’s official state of emergency and suspended a series of civil guarantees, such as the right of assembly and freedom of expression.

“The state of emergency is a fundamental necessity for the defense of the country,” Ortega said.

Critics have charged that the state of emergency is part of a Sandinista plan to radicalize the revolution. Ortega acknowledged that the emergency measures “do not permit democratic life to function as it would in normal conditions,” but he added: “There is no radicalization of the Nicaraguan society. There is a tensioning of the Nicaraguan democracy. There are certain restrictions in the Nicaraguan society, a product of the great foreign pressure that we feel.

“But that would disappear at the very moment that the threat weighing on the Nicaraguan society ceased.”