Within Contra Ranks, Some Seek a Way Out : Dissenters Being Forced to Stay With Guerrillas, Rights Officials Say

Luis Morales Castro’s last decision as a free man came in April, 1988, when he deserted a Sandinista army training base and began the 100-mile trek toward his mother’s tiny farm in southern Nicaragua.

Three days later he was seized by a rebel patrol and forced to march barefoot in the opposite direction, embarking on an ordeal that has not yet ended.

Today, the 23-year-old Morales, a dark, tranquil-looking peasant who has never seen combat, is counted by the Contras as one of the 11,000 rebels in their sprawling network of camps here at the Honduran-Nicaraguan border.

But according to human rights officials and Contra deserters, he is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of young men and women being forced to remain with an army that is running out of reasons to fight.

Contras’ Future on the Line

The future of the U.S.-backed insurgency was on the line this weekend as the presidents of five Central American countries gathered in Tela, a town on Honduras’ Caribbean coast, to negotiate the conditions and timetable for disarming the rebels under a peace plan that also calls for free elections in Nicaragua.

Contra commanders oppose any move to dismantle their army before the voting next Feb. 25, arguing that only a large belligerent force can hold the Sandinista government accountable for any fraud. They have stepped up recruiting inside Nicaragua and tightened security in the camps to keep their army, mostly idled during 16 months of truces, intact.

In interviews here last week, dozens of young Nicaraguans who have spent their youth on the seven-year war echoed their commanders’ resolve to resume the struggle if the Sandinista revolutionary government is reelected--even if a summit accord costs them their Honduran bases and U.S. funds.

But the commanders’ rigid control of the camps conceals a dissident view.

“I am a prisoner here,” Morales told a reporter in a tense interview that, like the others, had to be conducted in the presence of an officer schooled in psychological operations.

When the officer interrupted to warn him to “watch what you say,” the young man hesitated. Then he declared: “I cannot hide the truth. Here I have no free will. I am tired of pretending to be a Contra.”

The young man’s plight came to the reporter’s attention at the headquarters of the rebels’ Human Rights Assn. in the camp network. He has hidden out there for five weeks since leaving his own assigned tent with the Jorge Salazar IV battalion.

Morales was held formally as one of about 100 prisoners of war from April to December last year, when the Honduran government ordered Contra jails closed. Then he asked to be sent to a U.N.-supervised refugee camp but was assigned instead to the Salazar battalion and given a nom de guerre , El Jefe.

In a second interview, with no one else present, Morales said he wants to go home to his mother, who lives alone and apparently knows nothing of his whereabouts. His superiors have told him he would be persecuted in Nicaragua as a deserter, but he said he is willing to take that risk.

A lawyer with the rights agency, Rodolfo Sandino, said he asked the rebels’ general staff more than a week ago to discharge Morales, but staff officers said they had no record of the request.

“Help me get out of here,” the unwilling soldier, wearing U.S. army camouflage pants and a striped sport shirt, whispered as the reporter left him in the doorway of his plastic-covered shack. “The pressure to put me back in the battalion is tremendous.”

How many others want to quit the guerrilla army is hard to judge, but the number seems considerable.

Estimates 1,800 Escaped

Sandino estimates that 1,800 rebels have escaped from the camps in each of the past two years, only to be replaced by at least that many new fighters, some of them forcibly recruited.

The Contras’ U.S. advisers have tried to discourage conscription by kidnaping. But the politically damaging practice has continued along with the Sandinistas’ harshly applied draft law, which requires two years of military service by all young males.

Sandinista officials assert that more than 3,000 Nicaraguans are in rebel captivity, but that estimate is probably high. Many peasant farmers whose sons willingly join the Contras feel that they must report them as having been “abducted” or face reprisals by the police.

In any case, Sandino estimates that no more than 15% of the rebels are “very clear” about their cause.

“The rest are happy with the clothing and food they get in the camps” at U.S. expense. If the war resumes, he added, “I don’t know what kind of fighters they would be.”

Face Limited Choices

Foot soldiers wanting to quit the Contras now have limited options: return to Nicaragua, live in a crowded refugee camp in Honduras or sneak into a third country as an illegal immigrant.

But if disarmed rebels were to be admitted to third countries, as many as 3,000 would leave Yamales, estimates Marta Patricia Baltodano, the rights agency’s Miami-based director.

That assertion was angrily disputed by Commander Jackson, a psychological operations officer who insists that guerrilla service is voluntary. “Nobody wants to leave,” he said. “Well, maybe five or six or seven, but that’s all.”

Contra commanders are extremely sensitive to suggestions that theirs is an army of captives.

Two years ago, after the Contra rights agency was set up with U.S. congressional support, it quietly located four missing Nicaraguans who confirmed that they had been abducted by the rebels. The high command retaliated by punishing several officers involved in the search.

In response to growing complaints by the Sandinistas about rebel captives, the commanders have recently accepted systematic searches by the agency’s seven-member staff as well as spot searches by the International Red Cross and a pair of American doctors.

One turning point was a stormy meeting earlier this year between the rights agency and the Contra general staff.

Baltodano said she was warned that her efforts were “creating a crisis” that could undermine the Contras’ fighting strength. “We said, ‘You’re the ones creating the crisis by holding people who don’t want to be here,’ ” Sandino recalled.

As a result of the agency’s searches since then, about 300 people on a Sandinista government list of missing have been located in Yamales, and 150 have been interviewed. Seventeen who expressed a desire to leave have been given discharges.

Doctors Interviewed 4

But high-level cooperation is not so easy for outsiders. Tim Takaro and Susan Cookson, the American doctors, were allowed to visit Yamales last March 1 and interview four of the 10 people on a list of alleged kidnap victims from the rural war zone where the couple had worked in Nicaragua.

After three of the four declared they wanted to return to Nicaragua, the commanders persuaded them overnight to recant. The doctors’ visit abruptly ended the next day as rebel leaders accused them of spying for the Sandinistas and working to undermine morale in the camps.

In a report on their mission, Takaro and Cookson concluded: “It is impossible for an individual in these camps to make a free decision. Three of the four (we) examined showed signs of severe stress.

“They have been isolated in a militarized camp with limited freedom of movement and no outside sources of information,” the doctors wrote. “The camp itself seems more like a reclusive religious colony. The cult leaders are fanatical believers. . . . They find it incredible that anyone in their ranks could doubt the rightness of their cause.”

Acting on the report, Baltodano visited the camp two weeks later and located seven of those on the list. Four told her they wanted to go home, and she arranged discharges.

All Cited Rebel Pressure

In interviews in Nicaragua, all four said they had been subjected to psychological pressure by rebel leaders during the doctors’ visit.

“They took me to the headquarters to talk to Pepe (a rebel officer),” said Diego Centeno, 17, a rural health worker. “He said I was making a mistake to go back to the Sandinistas. If I said I was kidnaped, (Congress) would take away the aid and leave (the rebels) starving.”

To a reporter who visited Yamales last week for the first time in seven months, the camps seemed more regimented. Contra leaders are now more insistent on escorting visitors on interviews.

Foot soldiers can and do listen to radio broadcasts from Nicaragua, but mostly they hear political lectures from their own superiors on the impossibility of free elections there and the persecution they would face as repatriates. A July 2 policy statement by the general staff, outlining the procedure for seeking a discharge, was nowhere to be seen. Sandino said it was supposed to be posted.

Girlfriend Chose to Stay

During the reporter’s interview with the Centeno boy’s 16-year-old girlfriend, who was force-marched to the Contra camp with him but chose to stay, a rebel officer stood by and coached her.

Asked why she did not want to return to Nicaragua, the girl, Maria de los Angeles Gonzalez, fidgeted with a key ring and stared at her combat boots.

“Tell him you are not in agreement with the regime,” said the officer, who calls himself Josue.

Maria just nodded.

Later, away from the officer, the teen-ager insisted she was content in the camps, where she flattens corn tortillas for hungry troops. The real reason, it appears, is a new boyfriend, a Contra who calls himself Hawaii and shares her tent.

Legal Officer Intervenes

Apparently displeased by the reporter’s interest in such cases, Contra officials tried to cut short his visit, until Luis Adan Fley, the rebels’ amiable legal officer, intervened.

Fley, a former rebel field commander, said the Contras are quietly debating the question of who will stay in the ranks. He believes a guerrilla force half the current size would be more manageable if it lost its base here and had to operate entirely inside Nicaragua.

But Anroyce Zelaya, the only general staff member in camp last week, disagreed.

“The more men we have in Nicaragua, the better we can run the Sandinistas all over the map,” said the officer, who is known as Commander Douglas. “I am sure 80% of our men would fight. Most of them have been here more than a year without fighting. Anyone who wanted to could have left by now.”