985 Political Prisoners Freed by Sandinistas

The government of Nicaragua reported freeing 985 political prisoners Sunday in a gesture aimed at ending the war against U.S.-backed rebels. It was the largest single pardon in eight years of Sandinista rule.

At a ceremony on a prison farm here, Alvaro Guzman, chief of the country’s penitentiary system, told most of those being pardoned that they were released under terms of the Central American peace accord of Aug. 7.

“The Nicaraguan people are seeking peace,” he said, “and from now on, you are carriers of this peace.”

The prisoners, many of them peasant farmers accused of aiding the rebels, stood in formation under a hot sun and burst into applause at the end of Guzman’s speech. Then they scrambled to embrace waiting relatives.

Prayers and Tears

Aristides Anastasio Esquivel, 41, an alleged collaborator with the U.S.-backed Contras who spent three years in prison, dropped to his knees in the dusty field with five members of his family and led them in prayer.

“Praised be the Lord, and may He bring us Nicaraguans together,” Esquivel prayed with tears in his eyes.

The prisoner release was the first result in Nicaragua of a disputed political amnesty required by the vaguely worded peace accord, which was signed by the five Central American presidents.

Guzman said 612 inmates held in prisons near Managua were freed at the ceremony here, 14 miles east of the capital, and another 173 were released elsewhere.

He said 3,039 people accused or convicted of security offenses are still imprisoned. The non-government human rights commission puts the number between 8,500 and 9,000.

The leftist Sandinista government has offered amnesty to any rebel combatant who surrenders, but it refuses to extend a blanket amnesty to prisoners until other Central American countries stop aiding the Contras, as the peace accord requires.

Even then, the government says, anyone jailed before 1981 would not be eligible for amnesty. That would exclude the 2,000 or so imprisoned members of former President Anastasio Somoza’s disbanded National Guard, which was defeated in an insurgency that brought the Sandinistas to power in 1979.

According to the Sandinistas’ logic, an amnesty that would forget the Somoza regime’s crimes would undermine the legitimacy of their revolution; amnesty for the Contras could be permitted because it would be aimed at settling a conflict that arose after they gained power.

For now, the Sandinistas have adopted a policy of selective pardons, agreeing to consider appeals on behalf of National Guardsmen and other prisoners who are not accused of killing. About 200 guardsmen were freed Sunday.

But that policy is under attack by Nicaragua’s Roman Catholic bishops and opposition political parties. They say the peace accord requires all prisoners to be freed. Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo repeated that position Sunday in a homily at his Mass.

While praising the pardons, Obando said he would “keep insisting on a broad amnesty.” He criticized an anti-amnesty campaign by an organization of Sandinista women whose relatives died fighting either Somoza’s National Guard or the Contras.

Cardinal Cites History

“Our history is full of blood,” the cardinal said. “If we continue saying, ‘I don’t forgive,’ then a few years from now, history may change and other mothers will say, ‘I don’t want amnesty for these mothers of today.’ ”

Obando’s views on amnesty are significant because he is expected to mediate cease-fire talks between the Sandinistas and the Contras, and rebel leaders have made total amnesty a condition for stopping the fighting.

Because the pardons were in the works long before the peace accord was signed, opposition party leaders minimized them Sunday as a mere gesture in the peace process.

The Sandinistas have pardoned about 2,000 prisoners in the course of their revolution. But popular demand for pardons grew last December after Eugene Hasenfus, an American gun runner whose Contra supply plane was shot down over Nicaragua, was pardoned and freed. Nicaraguans with relatives in jail sent hundreds of petitions for pardons to the National Assembly.

After intense lobbying by opposition parties, churches and a women’s group of prisoners’ relatives, an amnesty committee in February recommended 618 pardons. But the government refused to act on them until after signing the peace accord. Then it took 416 prisoners off the list and added 781 names of its own choosing, including about 50 Sandinista soldiers and policemen jailed for human rights abuses.

The Sandinista-dominated legislature approved that list, with minor changes, on Friday.

Criteria for Pardons

Carlos Nunez, Sandinista president of the Assembly, said the criteria for most of the pardons were old age, illness or good behavior. Others were freed because they had served a third or more of their sentences, he said.

Random interviews with 15 freed prisoners Sunday indicated that the vast majority had not been convicted of anything.

Ten of those interviewed said they had been awaiting trial for 11 to 39 months on charges of giving food, shelter or information to the Contras. Some said they were innocent. Others said they were forced to collaborate.

Six men and two women said they had been beaten under interrogation at army or security police detention centers but were well treated in the regular prison system.

One such victim was Jose Santos Cruz, a 76-year-old farmer from the war zone town of Rio Blanco. He was arrested in March, 1986.

“Collaborators of the state security denounced me for being a Contra, but it was all false,” he said. “I was tortured the day of my capture with punches and psychological threats. Then they brought me to the Zona Franca (prison) and didn’t torture me anymore.”

Julio Cesar Castro Baltobano, 48, said he was arrested in July, 1979, on the testimony of a spiteful neighbor who accused him--falsely, he said--of being an undercover agent for the Somoza regime. Though he was not mistreated, he said his imprisonment under a 30-year sentence was “like being buried alive.”

Baltobano, a mechanic, and others said they worked for wages in prison and were offered government jobs upon release. Others said they wanted to go back to their farms and be left alone by both sides in the conflict.

Luis Ramon Gonzalez Acuna, 53, freed from a 30-year sentence for belonging to the National Guard, said he was trained as a shoemaker in prison and was paid to make boots for the Sandinista army.

Asked about the Sandinistas’ policy of keeping most guardsmen in jail, he said: “Many of my ex-companions in the guard are fighting today as Contras. It would be a good thing if all the guardsmen were freed, so President Reagan could see there is really a change here and so Nicaragua can have peace.”