Distrust of Sandinistas Tempers Many Nicaraguans’ Hopes for Peace

Drawn by rumors of peace, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans journey up the Pan American Highway to this border crossing each Saturday to be reunited with relatives who fled the guerrilla war or joined the rebels fighting Sandinista rule.

“You cannot imagine the joy I feel!” a tearful Alma Ramirez Morales exclaimed amid the crowd as she hugged her son, Uriel, 23, for the first time in seven years. “This mother’s cry is a cry for peace!”

Under a Central American peace accord signed Aug. 7, Nicaragua began last month to open its border every Saturday and to appeal on the radio to 100,000 refugees in Honduras to come home.

The emotional family reunions, stretching more than a mile into Honduras along the steep mountain road and adjacent coffee plantations, display on a massive scale the hopes that have been raised by the agreement.

Best Chance Seen

Nicaraguans across the political spectrum say the accord offers their best chance for ending more than five years of guerrilla war and emergency rule. But many say their hopes are tempered by deep distrust of the country’s Sandinista leaders and skepticism about their pledge to carry through with the reforms that have just begun.

Like all but a few dozen refugees who have embraced their families here, Uriel Morales is not ready to come home yet. His days as a contra foot soldier are over, he said, and he is eligible for amnesty in Nicaragua. But he is wary.

“Listen, brother, I will return only when there is a total change, when the Sandinistas fulfill every word they signed,” he said. “If they do that, only God knows how long they will last.”

The peace accord applies to all five countries whose presidents signed it--Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. But the expectation of change is highest in Nicaragua, higher, perhaps, than at any moment since the Sandinista National Liberation Front fought its way to power in 1979.

The accord requires the Sandinistas to arrange a cease-fire, offer amnesty, lift all press restrictions and guarantee “total political pluralism.” In turn, other nations must stop supporting the contras.

All nine directors of the Sandinista Front, who regard themselves as Nicaragua’s revolutionary “vanguard” and who have severely restricted opposition activity, are making public pledges to comply fully with the accord. They have been warning party militants that the price of peace is a wide-open ideological struggle.

“We are going through extremely important moments,” Jaime Wheelock, a Sandinista director, said in one speech. “A few months ago, the future of the country was more aggression, but today a new possibility has been opened.”

With the accord due to take effect Nov. 7, the government has begun to make room for dissent.

The only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, is back on the streets 15 months after the government ordered its presses stopped. Father Bismarck Carballo has returned from forced exile to reopen the Roman Catholic radio station, which was ordered off the air in January, 1986.

The government has not revived 22 radio news programs banned since 1982 or acted on an opposition request to operate a television station. It still holds more than 9,000 political prisoners, most arrested under a state of emergency that suspended civic freedoms and that remains in force.

But since the harsh crackdown on a demonstration eight days after the accord was signed, the Sandinista police have eased restrictions and allowed political opposition groups to hold outdoor marches.

In a reference to the vast changes that the Soviet Union has undertaken under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Mauricio Diaz, an opposition politician, said, “We are witnessing a kind of a Creole perestroika .”

Diaz, who represents the opposition on a National Reconciliation Commission set up to monitor the accord, added, “Obviously, the most orthodox Sandinistas are uncomfortable, because this will weaken the hard-line regime that, with the pretext of the war, they were trying to build.”

The strong initial doubts harbored by many opposition leaders about the accord have given way to a cautious endorsement of it as the only hope for ousting the Sandinistas without prolonging a war that is estimated to have killed more than 20,000 Nicaraguans.

“We still don’t trust the Sandinistas to keep their agreements, but we are forced to be optimistic because there is no other choice,” said Ramiro Gurdian, vice president of the Democratic Coordinating Council, the largest anti-Sandinista civic coalition.

The roots of distrust date to 1984, when the Sandinistas and the Coordinating Council negotiated an agreement on a cease-fire and political freedoms to permit fair national elections. The accord broke down amid mutual recriminations, the council withdrew from the race and the Sandinistas defeated an array of minor parties.

Many Nicaraguans give the current peace initiative a better chance because of its backing by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last Tuesday for shaping the accord, and other Central American leaders.

But Arias has warned that the accord faces two serious obstacles: President Reagan’s decision to seek $270 million in new funding for the contras and the Sandinistas’ refusal to negotiate a cease-fire with leaders of the Nicaraguan Resistance, the contras’ umbrella organization.

On Thursday, the exiled rebel leadership announced that three of its six members will soon fly to Managua in an attempt to force President Daniel Ortega to negotiate. Ortega threatened to jail them.

Despite such obstacles, leaders of the internal civic opposition are moving to test what they consider a markedly freer political climate. Boisterous anti-government marches in the cities have drawn up to 2,000 dissidents.

Meanwhile, a quieter but equally significant challenge to Sandinista authority has arisen in small towns in the war zones.

To urge contras to surrender, the ruling party last month asked leading non-Sandinista citizens in more than 100 towns to form local peace councils and publicize its amnesty offer.

Grievance Channels

Many of the councils, led by Catholic or Protestant clergymen, have also become channels for local grievances. They have demanded that the Sandinistas end military conscription and extend the amnesty to cover prisoners as well as rebels who lay down their arms.

At a recent peace council meeting in the town of Nueva Guinea, Ramiro Zeledon, 65, stood up and spoke for hundreds of angry farmers. They had been forced from their villages into squalid resettlement camps in an army operation against would-be contra supporters.

“If the war is ending, why can’t we go back to our villages now to plant corn?” he asked, stroking his long white beard. “We cannot keep living like prisoners.”

A Catholic catechist charged at the same meeting that the Sandinista police had arrested two armed contras who were on their way to the local peace council to surrender.

Such complaints are rarely aired in small towns, where Sandinista control is so tight that opposition parties do not operate.

“There is a growing awareness that the peace councils can speak up for people’s rights,” said a Roman Catholic missionary in Nueva Guinea. “The Sandinista Front is unable to manipulate them.”

In Managua, the reappearance of La Prensa has raised the level of dissent heard randomly on the street from people fed up with Sandinista abuses and the deprivations of a wartime economy.

Offering news that neither of its Sandinista-controlled rival newspapers finds fit to print, the paper sells 115,000 copies a day and surpasses them both.

It has reported specific allegations of torture in Sandinista prisons and an analysis concluding that much of Nicaragua’s $11-billion foreign debt cannot be accounted for. Another story said that a Miskito Indian officially identified as a surrendered contra chief was really a government agent.

“La Prensa makes people feel freer to speak out, and this is changing the direction of Nicaraguan history,” said Luis Lecano, 30, who was reading the paper in a line outside a Managua movie theater. “But I don’t know how long we will enjoy this freedom. The government always has the last word.”

Just how far the Sandinistas will let the opposition go is a matter of intense speculation.

President Ortega, visiting the United States this month, said flatly: “If the people of Nicaragua, through their votes, said that we should not be in office, then we’d be willing to give up office. We’d be the opposition.”

‘Revolutionary Process’

But Carlos Nunez, another member of the Sandinista directorate, told reporters in Managua the same day that the ruling party is willing to make concessions “as long as they do not weaken the revolutionary process.”

Nunez is moderator of a “national dialogue” that the peace accord requires the government to hold with “all unarmed opposition groups.” The opposition wants to use the dialogue to demand new elections and an end to Sandinista party control over the armed forces and state security apparatus.

Substantive talks have been delayed, however, because the government will not give the Democratic Coordinating Council more than one seat at the table. The coalition demands separate representation for each of its 14 political parties, labor unions and business groups.

“The Sandinistas know that if they fully honor this agreement and make real concessions, they could be swept from power,” said Virgilio Godoy, an opposition member of the National Assembly. “If they do not comply at all, they risk more war. So they are complying with half-measures. There are so many contradictions in the air that nobody really knows what is going to happen.”