Nicaragua Talks Stall on Christmas Truce Terms

The first round of talks aimed at ending the Nicaraguan war reached an impasse Friday after the Sandinista government rejected the mediator’s terms for a proposed Christmas truce.

The mediator, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, Roman Catholic primate of Nicaragua, said that government negotiators sought to modify his truce proposal with conditions that were unacceptable to the U.S.-backed Contra movement.

“It seems we have reached a deadlock,” the cardinal told reporters after two days of separate meetings with both sides. “But it is necessary to keep working.”

In a lengthy report on the 5 1/2 hours of talks, Obando said the rebels had accepted his proposal, and he blamed the Sandinista government for the lack of an agreement. He said he would urge Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to accept face-to-face talks to speed up peace efforts.

Government Proposal

Nicaragua’s chief negotiator, Victor Hugo Tinoco, later rejected direct talks, leaving the next step unclear. Obando said he would “reflect” on whether to continue his mediation effort and, if he does, he will set a date for new meetings. The government negotiators proposed a second round of indirect talks Dec. 17 and 18.

Bosco Matamoros, a spokesman for the rebel delegation, called the outcome of the talks “a missed opportunity.” He added:

“We are ready to meet again whenever the cardinal chooses.”

The talks stem from an Aug. 7 peace accord signed by the five Central American nations. The agreement says that cease-fires in the region’s guerrilla wars are to take effect simultaneously with other steps: democratic reforms, amnesty for rebels and a cut-off of their outside aid and sanctuaries.

The impasse here seems to result from the difficulty of orchestrating all these steps at once in Nicaragua, where more than 20,000 people have died in six years of warfare.

Obando proposed that the government act first. As conditions for a truce, he asked that it allow unrestricted press freedom, grant amnesty to all political prisoners and lift a wartime state of emergency that suspends most civil liberties.

He called for a 36-hour truce for the Roman Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Dec. 7 and 8 and another truce from Dec. 22 through Jan. 6, the Feast of Epiphany.

During that month, which marks the lengthy Christmas season in Nicaragua, he urged both sides to negotiate the details of a permanent cease-fire.

In accepting the proposal, the rebels agreed to postpone their demands for far-reaching political concessions and not to make them a condition for a temporary halt in the fighting.

But the Sandinistas, citing the regional peace accord, asked Obando to add two conditions to the proposed Christmas truce--that the Contras stop receiving aid from the United States and using bases in neighboring Honduras.

Obando said the rebels were willing to do that only if the Sandinistas acted first to “begin an irreversible process of democratization” in Nicaragua.

“A truce will be difficult because my proposal was not accepted by the government,” the cardinal said.

The cardinal and the Sandinista delegation returned to Managua in separate planes Friday evening, while the rebel negotiators were expected to fly to Miami today.

This seaside Caribbean capital was named as a compromise site after the Sandinistas proposed talks in Washington and the Contras called for them in Central America.

Obando, aided by two bishops and a lawyer-priest from Nicaragua, held the peace talks at headquarters of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, across from Santo Domingo’s 473-year-old cathedral, the oldest in the Americas.

He met there Thursday night with the four-man Contra delegation and Friday morning with the four-man Sandinista group. The enemies stayed several miles apart during the talks. Fifteen minutes after the Sandinistas left Friday, the rebels came for another session, and during those talks the cardinal consulted by telephone with the Sandinistas.

Speaking to reporters in an archway of the Spanish colonial archdiocese building, the black-robed Nicaraguan Catholic leader said that he was in a hurry to settle the conflict by Christmas and that direct talks would speed things up.

“I ask that we pray so we can find the path to peace and end a war that is spilling so much blood,” he said. “I am afraid that Nicaragua is running out of dirt to cover so many graves.”

But Tinoco, who is Nicaragua’s deputy foreign minister, said after the talks ended Friday: “This is a process that is not simple and easy. After so many deaths and millions of dollars invested by the United States in this war, it is difficult to change the situation in two days.”

Rejecting the idea of face-to-face talks, Tinoco said it was the absence of the Reagan Administration as a participant in the talks that was delaying a settlement.

He repeated the Sandinista position that Managua will hold direct peace talks only with “the chief of the Contras, Ronald Reagan.”

“The Reagan Administration is trying to negotiate with us without showing its face,” Tinoco said. “It is hiding behind this fourth-rate delegation of mercenaries. Nobody can say the (Con1953653085Washington.”

Jaime Morales, chief of the rebel delegation, denied that the U.S. government had a hand in its proposal. He said the Sandinistas’ insistence on indirect talks with the rebels was “like a doctor trying to do brain surgery by consulting with other doctors on the phone.”

“We’re not afraid to sit down with the Sandinistas, or Mikhail Gorbachev or Fidel Castro or whoever we have to talk to in order to make peace,” he said.