Nicaragua Orders Expulsion of 2 U.S. Envoys

The Sandinista government accused two U.S. diplomats Thursday of encouraging labor unrest and ordered them to leave Nicaragua.

The action was a sharp setback to what officials of both countries had hoped would be an improvement of relations under the Bush Administration. It reflected the Sandinistas’ concern over a wildcat strike by teachers and the prospect of growing labor upheaval in the months before the February, 1990, Nicaraguan elections.

Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto announced the expulsion orders after meeting with John Leonard, the U.S. Embassy’s charge d’affaires.

“The American Embassy has increased its activities to promote and incite opposition groups and unions to make disturbances and disorders with the double purpose of impeding an economic recovery and the normal development of the election process,” said a diplomatic note handed to the American official. He denied that any U.S. diplomat had acted improperly.

Joel F. Cassman, the embassy’s economic and commercial attache, was declared persona non grata and given 72 hours to get out of the country. Kathleen W. Barmon, a labor attache based in Honduras and also accredited to Nicaragua, was given 48 hours to leave.

The government gave contradictory accounts of what they had done. The diplomatic note said they had met Wednesday with teachers in the northwestern city of Chinandega and “incited” them to join about 1,500 teachers on strike in a four-day-old wildcat action in scattered parts of Nicaragua.

Barricada, the official Sandinista newspaper, published a front-page photograph of the diplomats amid a crowd of men it identified as teachers. A banner headline read: “Yankee Interference in Chinandega.”

However, D’Escoto said he knew nothing about any meeting with teachers. He told reporters that two diplomats attended an opposition labor assembly in Chinandega and promised union leaders financial support if they would “unify among themselves and cause disorder, discontent and street demonstrations” against the revolutionary government.

Allegations Rejected

“We reject those allegations completely and totally,” Leonard said as he left the Foreign Ministry. “They were doing what diplomats normally do, meeting with people and learning about what is going on in Nicaragua. . . . Their actions were completely within diplomatic norms.”

Cassman said he and Barmon held an “informal meeting” with farmers at headquarters of the Labor Unification Central, a federation affiliated with the Social Democratic Party.

“We were on a fact-finding trip,” he said. “We were listening to their complaints about how hard life was, how they had been wiped out by inflation.

“Then we saw this Barricada photographer hiding in a tree.”

Relations between Washington and Managua, deeply strained by the Reagan Administration’s backing of the Contra insurgency here, hit a low point last July when U.S. Ambassador Richard Melton and seven other American diplomats were accused of encouraging anti-government street protests, and expelled. In response, the United States sent home eight Nicaraguan diplomats from Washington, including Ambassador Carlos Tunnermann.

The day President Bush took office, Nicaragua offered to end the mutual blockade on visas for new diplomatic personnel, but it wasn’t until early this month that new visas were granted--three for Nicaraguan diplomats and four for Americans.

Cassman arrived here May 15 to take up his post. Barmon came this week on a temporary assignment, embassy officials said.

The two countries have not yet agreed to exchange ambassadors.

D’Escoto charged that the Bush Administration is “moving slowly in the direction of normalizing relations” and blocking a three-month-old Central American peace accord. He said that a May 15 deadline for a plan among the region’s presidents to close Contra military camps in Honduras had passed without action because Washington insists on keeping the now-idled rebels there as a potential military threat until after the Nicaraguan election.

“Everything shows that we were too optimistic about Bush,” the foreign minister said. “Much smells the the same. Reagan is gone, but the stench has not gone away.”

The ambassador of another Central American country who closely monitors the political opposition said he doubted that the Sandinistas’ charges against the two American diplomats are true. Rather, he said, the Sandinista action seemed a reflection of “tremendous insecurity” in the government about its ability to manage an anti-inflation program that has cost 29,000 government jobs in a country of 3.5 million people since Feb. 1.

“Any time they are faced with a conflict with the working class, they’re getting into a very, very sensitive area,” the diplomat said. “Anything can happen.”

President Daniel Ortega and other officials Thursday warned the nation’s 36,000 teachers, who belong to a Sandinista-led union, that they cannot be granted a significant wage increase because it would refuel inflation, which was running at 100% per month at the end of 1988 but was cut to 12% in April.

Teachers seeking wage increases of several hundred percent have broken with the union leadership and walked off the job this week in Managua, Chinandega and the coastal town of San Rafael del Sur. Hundreds of other teachers, who earn the equivalent of $10 to $13 per month in primary school and up to $30 per month in high schools, have threatened to join the strike.