PROFILES OF CONTRA LEADERS

Adolfo Calero

Adolfo Calero, white-haired and brusque, is the civilian commander of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest contras combat unit. He is the insurgents’ chief spokesman and, as such, the man who must face Congress and television cameras when the contras are accused of corruption, human rights abuses and other infractions.

A successful businessman in the Nicaragua of the late dictator Anastasio Somoza, Calero was general manager of Coca-Cola and manager or director of several other enterprises, including a Datsun dealership. He also was a volunteer fireman in Managua for many years.

Calero was a conservative opponent of the Somoza regime. In 1970, he helped found the Authentic Conservative Party, which opposed Somoza’s rule, and in 1978 he was briefly jailed for helping to organize a general strike against the government.

He was also a longtime ally of the most prominent anti-Somoza leader, newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was assassinated in 1978. Unlike the Sandinistas, however, Calero was deeply pro-American. Some U.S. officials say he worked with the CIA even before the 1979 revolution, but Calero denies those accounts.

He was born 55 years ago in Managua, attended high school in Louisiana and studied engineering at Notre Dame University. He received a law degree from Nicaragua’s Central American University and studied at the postgraduate level at Syracuse University in New York.

After the Sandinistas came to power, in 1979, Calero became an early critic of their government. He left Nicaragua in 1982 to join with people who were organizing against the Sandinistas, and he says he is fighting to install true democracy in Nicaragua.

Calero lives in Miami but travels frequently to Washington and Honduras. His brother-in-law, Aristides Sanchez, is the logistics officer of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, based in Honduras. A brother, Mario Calero, helps with financial and supply operations in New Orleans.

Calero is one of three leaders of the United Nicaraguan Opposition, the contras’ umbrella political organization. There have been deep distrust and divisive power struggles between Calero on the one hand and the opposition’s two other leaders. They believe that he and his armed men have too much control over the rebel movement.

Several attempts have been made to reduce Calero’s role, but with the backing of CIA and White House officials, plus the support of exiled conservative businessmen, Calero remains on top.

Arturo Cruz

Arturo Cruz, another of the three leaders of the United Nicaraguan Opposition, is an economist and former banker. Like Calero, he was a longtime opponent of Somoza and was jailed twice, in 1947 and 1954, for political activities.

Cruz was born in 1923 in Jinotepe, not far from Managua, and attended high school at the Nicaraguan Military Academy. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Georgetown University.

Cruz belonged to a Christian Democratic movement called the National Union of Popular Action and later joined the Conservative Party, although he spent most of the last 10 years of the Somoza regime in Washington, where he worked for the Inter-American Development Bank.

In 1977, the Sandinistas asked Cruz to join Los Doce (The Twelve), a group of businessmen and intellectuals pushing for Somoza’s ouster.

After taking power in 1979, the Sandinistas made Cruz president of the Central Bank and, a year later, a member of the Sandinista junta. In March, 1981, he was sent to Washington as ambassador, but he resigned at the end of the year, accusing the Sandinistas of betraying the democratic goals of the revolution.

In 1984, Cruz returned to Nicaragua to run for president as the candidate of a coalition of opposition groups, the Democratic Coordinating Council. But after Sandinista mobs attacked several of his campaign rallies, Cruz withdrew from the race, charging that a free campaign was impossible. The result was a huge victory for Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega. Some members of the opposition and some U.S. officials have since concluded that withdrawing from the race was a tactical error.

In exile, Cruz worked with another Sandinista dissident, Eden Pastora, but split with Pastora and was persuaded by the United States to form an alliance with Calero under the umbrella of the United Nicaraguan Opposition. Cruz lives in Miami but spends a good deal of time in Washington.

The amiable Cruz has lent a measure of legitimacy and credibility to the opposition, particularly with the U.S. Congress. He continues to clash with Calero because he believes that civilians should prevail over the military in the rebel organization. Among ultra-conservatives, there is a basic distrust of Cruz because of his past ties with the Sandinistas.

Alfonso Robelo

Alfonso Robelo, the third member of the United Nicaraguan Opposition’s leadership, was, like Calero, a well-to-do businessman in Somoza’s Nicaragua and the organizer of an opposition party.

But unlike the conservative Calero, Robelo is a moderate socialist--a position that puts him closer to Cruz. Because of that ideological affinity and because Calero is supported by the largest contras military force, Robelo and Cruz are often allied against Calero within the leadership. On several occasions, Robelo and Cruz have threatened to quit the uneasy alliance.

Robelo owned a cottonseed-oil business and was president of the Nicaraguan Industrial Assn. under Somoza. In 1978, after the opposition publisher Pedro Joaquin Chamorro was killed, Robelo formed a social democratic party called the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement.

He was a member of the original Sandinista junta that took power on July 19, 1979, but he resigned in 1980 in opposition to Cuban influence and Marxist-Leninist tendencies in the revolutionary government. He went into exile in 1982 and formed the Costa Rica-based Democratic Revolutionary Alliance with Eden Pastora, the former Sandinista hero known as Commander Zero.

Two years after this, Robelo split with Pastora, who refused to unite with Calero’s Nicaraguan Democratic Force because of its ties to Somoza’s old National Guard. Early this year, Pastora pulled out of the struggle, and his group has disbanded.

Robelo has twice been the target of assassination attempts in Costa Rica. He believes they were carried out by either the Sandinistas or their supporters.

Like Cruz, Robelo is viewed with suspicion by many conservative Nicaraguan exiles because, as a member of the junta, he signed a law confiscating the property of the Somoza family and his backers and helped to nationalize Nicaragua’s banks.

Robelo still advocates agrarian reform, and he believes that if the contras were to come to power, they would not take back the lands that have been distributed to peasants. This is a position that causes grumbling among other contras.

Robelo was born in Leon in 1939. He went to a Jesuit high school in the city of Granada and studied chemical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He is a co-founder of Gracasa, a profitable cooking oil company. He is regarded as a tough, ambitious politician whose moderate political position adds credibility to the contras. He lives in Costa Rica.

Enrique Bermudez

Although the three leaders of the United Nicaraguan Opposition are the most visible rebel leaders, many observers believe that Enrique Bermudez is the most powerful. Bermudez is the chief military leader of the largest rebel army, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force.

He was a colonel in Somoza’s National Guard as well as Somoza’s military attache at the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington.

Bermudez was among the first to take up arms against the Sandinistas after they came to power. He organized a group of former National Guardsmen into the 15th of September Legion, which then received training and money from Argentina and eventually was merged with other rebel groups into the Nicaraguan Democratic Force.

He was born 54 years ago in the provincial capital of Leon, and was trained by Americans, first at the Nicaraguan Military Academy, then at Ft. Gulick, in Panama, and at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.

In 1965 and 1966, Bermudez served as a lieutenant in an inter-American peace force that was sent to the Dominican Republic after U.S. military forces intervened in a civil conflict there. He and his Dominican wife, Elsa, were married in 1965.

When he returned to Nicaragua, he served as an executive in the traffic police division of the National Guard. Among his duties was teaching a traffic safety course on television. He also helped organize Nicaragua’s first corps of women traffic police officers.

Bermudez’s past ties to the National Guard have made him a controversial figure in the rebel leadership, but like Calero he has clung firmly to his position. If the contras take power, it is assumed that Bermudez would have a major role in the government.

In interviews, Bermudez has emphasized that he was a career military officer, not a friend or follower of Somoza. “As a professional military man, I did not serve persons, but a government that was recognized by almost all of the countries of the world, including the United States,” he said in 1985.

Bermudez has three adult children. His wife lives in Miami, but he spends most of his time in Honduras, where his guerrilla army is based.