Latin Presidents Agree on Disbanding Contras

The presidents of five Central American countries, ignoring direct appeals from President Bush to go slow, agreed in principle Sunday to start dismantling the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebel army within weeks.

“The presidents have reached a consensus that this plan should go forward right away,” President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua said during a break in the talks in this Caribbean banana port.

Other presidents withheld comment and kept meeting to complete details of an updated regional peace accord, but senior Costa Rican and Salvadoran aides confirmed the decision.

Quick Start to Disarmament

John Biehl, a close adviser to President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, said the process of disarming Nicaraguan rebel troops would start “almost immediately,” as soon as a commission is set up by the United Nations and the Organization of American States and dispatched to the Contra bases in Honduras to supervise the plan.

The disarmed rebels would be repatriated to Nicaragua if they wished or relocated in third countries. How long this process would take is still under discussion, Biehl said, but the issue is expected to be settled before today’s scheduled conclusion of the three-day summit.

The tentative agreement, if signed today, would apparently defeat a White House effort to keep the idled, 11,000-member Contra army intact in its bases until after Ortega’s Sandinista government holds national elections next Feb. 25.

It would also bring pressure on the U.S. Congress to divert what is left of the Contras’ current $47.9 million non-lethal aid package to the exclusive purpose of assisting their return to civilian life.

Bush telephoned Arias and presidents Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo of Guatemala and Jose Azcona Hoyo of Honduras last week to press his view that a large Contra army is the only way to hold Ortega to his promise that the election will be fair.

But some Central American officials said that Bush’s publicized appeal was probably aimed more at soothing his right-wing critics at home than swaying his allies in the region.

“Nobody here was convinced that Mr. Bush wants to continue supporting the Contras,” one official said. “Everybody knows that the Contras are finished as a fighting force.”

Rebel bands began fighting in Nicaragua a year after the Sandinistas seized power in a 1979 guerrilla uprising. They have received U.S. aid and direction since late 1981.

The movement has been steadily weakened by peace accords signed at three previous regional summits over the past two years. Most rebel troops withdrew to Honduras last year after their U.S. military aid was cut off and a cease-fire pact signed with the Sandinistas in March, 1988, broke down over the issue of democratic reforms.

Under the last summit accord, signed six months ago, the five presidents agreed to draft, at the current meeting, a plan for closing the Contra camps in exchange for free elections in Nicaragua nine months ahead of schedule.

Dramatic Gesture

With that trade-off topping the agenda here, Ortega strengthened his hand with a dramatic gesture in Nicaragua on the eve of the summit.

In an all-night session with 22 anti-Sandinista parties that was televised live in his country, he achieved a landmark agreement on political and electoral reforms to ensure a fair campaign.

Among Ortega’s concessions were a suspension of military conscription during the six-month campaign period, abolition of Sandinista police powers to conduct arbitrary arrests and summary trials, and a series of technical reforms making it easier for opposition parties to monitor the February vote.

Opposition politicians in Nicaragua hailed the accord as a vindication of the Contra cause and urged Central American leaders to adopt a plan to dissolve the insurgency.

“The agreement reached in Nicaragua was absolutely decisive,” Biehl said. “It cleared away 90% of the agenda here.”

Ortega arrived here Saturday and handed a copy of the 40-point agreement to Azcona, saying the electoral guarantees “remove all pretexts” for allowing armed Contras to remain on Honduran soil.

Push for Deadline

In the meeting here, Ortega pushed for a 90-day deadline for disarming the rebels and closing the camps.

He won qualified support from Arias, who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for starting the regional peace process and who helped set up the negotiations that produced the election reforms.

Arias said that dismantling the Contras should be gradual “but not conditional on the Nicaraguan elections.”

At first it appeared that Azcona and Cristiani might block the peace plan.

The Honduran leader said the electoral agreement in Nicaragua was “not enough.” He offered his own plan for a lengthy inspection by international observers of political conditions in Nicaragua before disarmament could start.

But that plan was largely abandoned, with Azcona’s acquiescence, when other presidents failed to back it, Central American officials said.

Impatient With Administration

The United States has long depended on Honduras to carry U.S. views in Central America. But Azcona has become impatient over the Bush Administration’s failure to come up with its own plan for getting the Contras out of his country, fearing that they will dissolve into uncontrolled armed bands.

He was also reported to be uncertain whether Washington’s withholding of $70 million in promised economic aid was meant to force him to make an unpopular currency devaluation or to keep the Contras around--either of which would damage his party’s candidate in Honduras’ scheduled November elections.

“Azcona doesn’t want to be remembered as the president who stuck Honduras with the Contras,” an official of another Central American country said in explaining the unanimous backing for an early demobilization.

Like Azcona, Arias will leave office early next year and was eager to see the Nicaraguan conflict settled by then.

Cristiani’s new right-wing government in El Salvador, however, had threatened to complicate a peace accord by insisting that leftist guerrillas in his country be disbanded in tandem with the Contras.

But other presidents rejected any linkage in resolving the two very different guerrilla conflicts. They were reported near an agreement to call for peace talks in El Salvador--the first in nearly two years--as an unrelated item of the final summit accord.