Contras Ill-Suited for Political Fight : Nicaragua: The rebels are accustomed to field combat, not diplomacy. Their inexperience could pose problems for a peaceful change of power.

When Violeta Barrios de Chamorro trounced Daniel Ortega last month in Nicaragua’s presidential election, few were more surprised than the Contras, the U.S.-backed insurgent force that has fought the Sandinista government for eight years.

Now the Contra leaders are struggling to define their role in a changing Nicaragua and to work out the conditions under which they will put down their weapons and go home.

The difficulty of such an unexpected transition, which so far has been fraught with mixed signals and contradictory positions, reflects a recent evolution in the Contra leadership, according to diplomatic and political sources close to the rebel force.

In part because of a U.S.-sanctioned power play, the Contra leadership is now made up largely of younger veteran fighters, men hardened by warfare but ill-equipped to hammer out complex political agreements.

Many of the leaders, such as Oscar Sovalbarro, who under the nom de guerre Comandante Ruben heads the Dialogue Commission that has begun talks with President-elect Chamorro’s advisers, were uneducated peasant farmers before they took up arms in the early 1980s.

“Sitting down at a table to negotiate bores them,” a longtime Contra adviser said.

The rise of hard-line fighters in the Contra hierarchy--and the absence of more experienced, political-minded negotiators--poses serious problems for the future Chamorro government, as rebel demobilization becomes a major threat to the peaceful change of power in Nicaragua.

Chamorro has asked the Contras to disband, and the outgoing Sandinista government has demanded that they do so by April 25, the date Chamorro is scheduled to take office.

The Contras are of two minds on the matter, but in neither instance does it seem likely that an April 25 deadline will be met.

In the Yamales camps, ranged along the border between Honduras and Nicaragua, where about 8,000 fighters and 40,000 dependents live in dirt-floor shacks, Contra leaders and the rank and file defiantly refuse to give up their guns, saying they will not do so until the Sandinista army and police forces are demobilized.

In Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, Contra negotiators have shown more flexibility. They say they will work to establish guarantees that will ensure the physical safety and economic well-being of fighters who disarm and return home. But finding guarantees that will satisfy the hard-core fighters has proved to be an elusive task.

Before the Feb. 25 election, the Contras “had whipped themselves up to believe that the Sandinistas would never let the opposition win,” said a U.S. official with ties to the rebels. “Then they realized that with (Chamorro) winning, they would have even less political space. Suddenly they realized they had nothing to cling to. . . .

“They had sought military satisfaction and weren’t prepared for political satisfaction. The political solution is much more problematic.”

The changes in the Contra leadership came after years of internal bickering and power struggles. The United States cut off military aid to the Contras in 1988, and as the money began to run out, the Contras’ Miami-based political offices were shut down.

Then, last year, a group of younger Contra field commanders, feeling that their highest military and political leadership had betrayed them, rose up and deposed right-wing Col. Enrique Bermudez, a former officer in dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard and a founder of the Contra guerrilla force.

U.S. officials, eager to improve the image of the Contra leadership as elections approached and apparently convinced that Bermudez had outlived his usefulness, gave their blessing to the coup.

The younger commanders wrested away some of Bermudez’s power last September and then, early last month, they formally abolished his title of commanding general. The Contras are now headed by a 45-member Commanders Council and a seven-member High Command led by Israel Galeano, or Comandante Franklin, a 29-year-old coffee farmer.

According to U.S. officials, Contra fighters had become increasingly resentful of Contra leaders living the good life in luxury hotels and Miami condos with state dinners at the White House. As the fighters saw it, such figures no longer represented their interests.

Bermudez and many of the other English-speaking, U.S.-picked former leaders had steadfastly refused to negotiate with Nicaraguan officials. U.S. officials had hoped that the new generation of rebel leaders would be more willing to strike an agreement with outgoing Sandinista officials and the incoming Chamorro government aimed at outlining their demobilization.

Instead, new problems arose.

The present leaders are stubbornly suspicious of the Sandinistas and fear reprisals by Sandinista militants who will not give up their guns. (The Sandinistas say they have the same fears about the Contras.) They are bitter about not being given more credit for what they see as their role in forcing Ortega to hold elections. And there is lingering, class-fueled distrust among campesino fighters who see the new government-elect of Nicaragua as representative of the oligarchy.

Comandante Franklin, speaking to about 1,500 of his men on a recent Saturday morning, complained that the role played by the peasant fighters, who slept in mud, hiked for days over steep hills and regularly risked their lives, was being ignored in the celebration over the defeat of the Sandinistas.

While Franklin and others admire Chamorro and publicly praise her, they are said to be privately wary of a woman who represents the landed upper classes of Nicaragua--a group as much the traditional enemy of the peasant farmer as, in the Contra view, the Sandinistas came to be.