Contra Leaders Back From Exile for Talks

Contra leaders returned from exile to the seat of Sandinista power Friday night to open talks on a political settlement of the six-year Nicaraguan conflict.

“Look, the stars are still in the sky; they did not fall,” quipped Adolfo Calero after stepping off a charter plane at the head of a 45-person rebel delegation.

Interior Minister Tomas Borge, a powerful Sandinista figure, once vowed that stars would fall and rivers would reverse their flow before leaders of the U.S.-backed rebels walked the streets of the capital again.

But on March 23, weary of a war that has claimed 26,000 lives, the rival factions signed a preliminary peace accord at the southern border post of Sapoa, Nicaragua. It called for a cease-fire through May while rebel leaders come to the capital to negotiate terms for disarming the insurgent army.

“This is a political triumph for the Nicaraguan Resistance to be here today,” boasted Alfredo Cesar, a former Central Bank president and one of four rebel directors who made the trip. “We shot our way to Managua.”

Beside Cesar and Calero, a former Coca-Cola executive who wore a Notre Dame baseball cap for the arrival photographs, the Contras were led by Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, son of a slain former opposition newspaper editor, and Azucena Ferrey, who left the country a year ago and came back bearing a large Nicaraguan flag.

The government sent no official to welcome the Miami-based rebel leaders at the airport but put them on tour buses straight to a nearby hotel, waiving customs and immigration checks.

If the rebels expected to be greeted by large crowds of anti-Sandinista demonstrators, none materialized. Hundreds of Sandinistas did gather to repudiate them, but police kept those demonstrators more than a mile from the airport and the hotel.

Gen. Humberto Ortega, the defense minister and chief Sandinista negotiator, chided the rebels for postponing the talks nine days and then arriving four hours late for Friday’s meeting. There were unconfirmed reports that a bomb threat delayed the flight from San Jose, Costa Rica.

“We know well the efforts that the forces of U.S. imperialism have made to boycott the peace agreement,” Ortega said. “But now that (the rebels) are here, let us work as many hours, as many days as necessary to achieve the definitive peace our people are demanding.”

Calero said the negotiations “will be a long process.” He said his delegation plans an initial stay of just three days and will use the visit to make extensive contact with anti-Sandinista businessmen, labor leaders, politicians, civil rights activists and journalists.

Government officials are determined to limit the Contras’ stay as much as possible to the negotiations. They said they would allow the rebels to leave their hotel only to meet with Roman Catholic bishops and editors of the opposition newspaper La Prensa.

In an editorial Friday, La Prensa hailed the return of the rebel leaders “with the joy of one who welcomes home a distant traveler, a relative, a friend.”

In the negotiations here, rebel leaders are expected to demand an end to absolute Sandinista control over the army, judiciary, electoral council, television broadcasting and other levers on power before their 10,000 troops lay down their arms.

But before those political issues can be addressed, the two sides must finish negotiating the details of how to separate their military forces for a formal cease-fire that was to have started April 1.