Bush Blasts Ortega as ‘Shameful’ : Latin America: The President compares Nicaragua’s leader to ‘an animal at a garden party’ for threatening to resume the war with U.S.-backed Contras.

President Bush on Saturday denounced Nicaragua’s decision to resume warfare against the Contras, calling the move by President Daniel Ortega “shameful” and “outrageous.”

Ortega announced Friday that his Sandinista government will unilaterally end a 19-month cease-fire in the war with the U.S.-backed rebels.

In a press conference Saturday, however, Ortega appeared to back off his threat slightly, saying that he would reconsider the decision to resume offensive operations this week if the United States moves to cut off its remaining assistance to the guerrillas.

“We are proposing a way out,” Ortega said. “If the U.S. government . . . says ‘we will assign these funds to demobilize the Contras,’ then we will immediately renew the truce,” Ortega said.

A U.S. spokesman rejected that proposal. The remaining U.S. aid to the Contras is “humanitarian,” said Roman Popadiuk, White House deputy press secretary. Demobilization of the Contras, he added, has to be a “voluntary decision” by the rebels.

At a press conference Saturday, Bush said that an end to the cease-fire would “change the equation 180 degrees” in Nicaragua.

But with typical caution, the President refused to say what the United States might do if Nicaragua’s army begins an all-out offensive against the Contras.

“I don’t want to get out ahead of where I think things may be right now,” Bush said, noting that fighting in Nicaragua had not yet actually intensified. “We didn’t come here to have a contretemps with this little man showing up in his military uniform at a democracy meeting.”

In his opening statement at the press conference, Bush called Ortega’s action “a shameful blow to democracy.” He also said the decision to announce the end of the cease-fire here was “an offense to the president of Costa Rica,” who had invited hemispheric leaders here for the summit. “It is the most outrageous use of a meeting on democracy that I can think of.”

Likening Ortega to “an animal at a garden party,” Bush predicted that an end to the cease-fire would “bring down on (Ortega) the outrage of every president.”

Ortega, responding to Bush just before boarding his airplane to leave Costa Rica, said “the tone of the (President’s) statement was not in harmony with the spirit of the summit.”

Ortega’s decision shocked participants at the summit. Friday night, during a gala dinner for the heads of government, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez and Venezuelan leader Carlos Andres Perez spoke to Ortega and “gave him a hammering,” a participant at the dinner said.

“Ortega seemed to pull back from a confrontation,” the source added.

As the leaders entered the dinner, a large crowd of Costa Ricans cheered Bush but jeered Ortega. The crowd seemed to be reacting more to Ortega’s decision to wear a military uniform in this demilitarized country than to his announcement of an end to the cease-fire, which had not yet received wide publicity here.

On Saturday, Sergio Gomez, 30, who works in Costa Rica’s social security administration, said that Ortega was “not respecting the customs of Costa Rica. It’s an insult that he comes to a very democratic country with military clothes on.” Gomez was one of tens of thousands of Costa Ricans who jammed the new Democracy Plaza for the summit’s closing ceremony.

Ortega was one of only two of the 16 summit participants to skip the ceremony. Even though a sheet of bulletproof glass protected the presidents’ box on a stairway of the National Museum overlooking the plaza, Ortega’s aides cited “security concerns” for his absence.

The other absentee, President Jose Sarney of Brazil, had to depart for home before the ceremony.

At his press conference, however, Bush did clearly rule out one option, saying that he would “encourage the Contras in every possible way not to engage in military action.”

“I don’t think the Contras ought to attack,” he said.

In fact, a Contra spokesman said, because of the cutoff early last year of U.S. military supplies, the rebel forces have virtually no chance of standing up to an assault by the Sandinistas.

“The situation is very grim,” rebel spokesman Bosco Matamoros said. “Ortega could deal the final blow to the resistance because of the position of the Administration.

“We’ve lost any confidence in dealing with the Americans,” he added. “They have brought the resistance to the edge of annihilation.”

In February, Bush abandoned the Reagan Administration’s policy of arming the rebels, agreeing with congressional leaders that the United States would supply only food, clothing and medical supplies to rebel forces in their Honduran base camps while concentrating on support for Ortega’s domestic opposition.

Bush held his press conference after a breakfast meeting with Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the presidential candidate of the main opposition coalition in Nicaragua. Chamorro’s alliance is receiving several million dollars in support from Washington. The election is scheduled for next Feb. 25.

Ortega’s announcement is “most worrisome,” Chamorro said after the meeting. “It is clear that he doesn’t want democracy.”

Before Ortega’s announcement of an end to the cease-fire, White House aides had portrayed Saturday morning’s meeting, which also included leaders of the opposition to Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, as the main event of Bush’s participation in the two-day hemispheric summit here.

But the meeting--indeed the summit itself--largely faded into the background amid the prospect of renewed warfare in Nicaragua.

In his press conference, Ortega rejected criticism of his decision, accusing the international community of hypocrisy in overlooking the deaths of Sandinista soldiers killed by the Contras.

“The United States government wants to keep the Contras around indefinitely to exert pressure against Nicaragua,” Ortega said. “This is a source not only of continuing criminal attacks against the Nicaraguan people (but) in the face of inevitable Sandinista victory in the coming elections, the Contras are trying to torpedo the voting process.”

In the 19 months of the cease-fire, he said, the Contras have killed 736 government soldiers and civilians and wounded 1,150 others. U.S. officials have challenged those numbers but do not flatly deny them.

Noting the stunned reaction to his announcement here, Ortega said that “we did not find the same concern, the same alarm when 19 Nicaraguans were murdered” in a rebel attack on a Sandinista militia convoy a week ago.

Contra spokesman Matamoros said he could neither confirm nor deny that the rebels committed that attack.

Several leaders here joined in the criticism of Ortega.

“We profoundly lament that this has happened,” Costa Rican Foreign Minister Rodrigo Madrigal Nieto said.

“We are making many efforts so that this situation may be saved,” Madrigal added, but Ortega’s announcement came “at a particularly inopportune moment.”

El Salvador’s president, Alfredo Cristiani, said in an interview on CNN’s “Newsmaker Saturday” program that he was “very disappointed” with Ortega’s announcement.

A renewal of fighting would show that Ortega “really is not looking for a peaceful solution but some means of staying in power beyond democracy,” Cristiani said.

During Friday’s summit session, Cristiani had challenged Ortega to cease shipments of arms to the Marxist rebels who are fighting the Salvadoran government. At his press conference, Ortega was less than categorical in denying that such aid efforts continue, but he demanded that Cristiani show proof.

In his press conference, Bush supported Cristiani’s position and said that El Salvador had made “dramatic improvements” in its human rights situation. Independent observers have challenged that position, saying that death squad violence in El Salvador has increased this year after several years of decline.

Bush also repeated his contention that efforts to bring down Panama’s Noriega will eventually prevail.

“It’s a question of when, not if,” Bush said. “It is the judgment of history. The day of the despot, the day of the dictator--over, finished.”

Before beginning the meetings, Bush took time for some recreation, playing a doubles tennis game with Baker against Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem and Rodrigo Borja Cevallos, the president of Ecuador. The leaders had jokingly said Friday night that they would wager their respective national debts on the outcome of the match.

“We blindsided those guys; we totally destroyed them,” Bush joked later to a gathering of American residents of Costa Rica at the U.S. Embassy.

The match had ended with the U.S. team ahead when Borja injured an ankle.