Contras Streaming Into Nicaragua With Arms : Central America: The exodus from Honduras camps appears designed to sidestep the disarmament agreement.

Equipped with food-laden backpacks, guns and grenade launchers, hundreds of Contras have streamed out of their base camps in Honduras and are hiking along mountainous jungle trails back into Nicaragua.

As the U.S.-backed guerrillas hastily empty their sanctuary, some rebels are torching their wood-frame huts and old uniforms in dramatic bonfires--a sign they do not plan to come back. Many of the neat campsites that dotted the steep green hillsides of Honduras’ Yamales Valley, and which for years served as refuge to thousands of Contra soldiers, have become rubble-strewn collections of tattered, abandoned shacks and lean-tos.

In some camps, only women and children remain.

While the Contras have been trickling back into Nicaragua ever since opposition publisher Violeta Barrios de Chamorro defeated Sandinista President Daniel Ortega in national elections Feb. 25, the pace of departures has quickened significantly in recent days. By Sunday, Contra commanders asserted, as few as 1,500 to 3,000 able-bodied rebels remained in the camps. At one time as many as 15,000 Contras were encamped in this country.

The movement appears designed to allow the bulk of Contra fighters to sidestep an agreement signed March 23 that calls for rebels in Honduras to lay down their guns and disband by April 20, five days before Chamorro’s inauguration. No deadline for disarmament was set, however, for rebels inside Nicaragua, where security enclaves are supposed to be established for returning Contra combatants.

Ortega is expected to demand immediate disarmament of the Contras inside his country during a two-day summit of Central American presidents starting today.

The exodus and the partial dismantling of the camps represent the strongest signal yet that the Contras’ presence in Honduras--a sanctuary for the insurgents for more than eight years--is ending. But the arrival of armed Contras in Nicaragua raises the specter of renewed fighting, something both the rebels and Sandinista leaders say they do not want.

“Demobilization cannot happen one day to the next,” said Marcos Orlando Navarro, a member of the Contra high command who uses the nom de guerre Comandante Dimas. “At the appropriate moment, we will hand over our weapons to the new government of Nicaragua, in Nicaragua.”

Even before Contra leaders signed the demobilization accord, which was mediated by Nicaragua’s Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, at least half of their Honduras-based troops had filtered back into Nicaragua, according to rebel leaders and U.S. officials.

Though numbers are difficult to pin down and impossible to verify independently, rebel commanders claim that most of their fighting force--8,000 to 11,000 guerrillas--is now inside Nicaragua or on the way there.

Because of the timing of that shift in Contra concentrations, some critics have charged rebel leaders with signing a demobilization agreement that is, in effect, meaningless. But others have suggested that the Contras will use the agreement to show they are serious about disbanding while buying time, political space and leverage to negotiate terms inside Nicaragua.

Under intense pressure to disband from the United States, Honduras and the Chamorro transition team, the Contras hoped that by signing the accord they would no longer be cast as the major obstacle to peace in the region.

At the same time, Contra leaders argue that rebel fighters still suspicious of the Sandinistas are entitled to protect themselves. Further, they say, disarming in their own country is a matter of dignity and pride for the Contras, who want to be given credit for a role in forcing the Sandinistas to hold free elections in Nicaragua.

“It is better to go back, put down our guns before the new government and say: ‘Mission accomplished,’ ” said Oscar Sovalbarro, head of the Contra negotiating team, who uses the nom de guerre Comandante Ruben.

As the fighters clear out of the camps, an estimated 40,000 wives, children and elderly parents will be left behind. Their fate remains a question: The American program that feeds them ends this month, and no international agency has as yet emerged to take charge of the group.

By April 20, it appears that only a small number of armed rebels will still be in Honduras for what will be a symbolic disarmament ceremony. On Saturday, a spokesman for Honduran President Rafael L. Callejas said that 80 Contras had already turned in their weapons to the Honduran armed forces.

Several Contra leaders last week sought to play down the movement of their troops back into Nicaragua, with some even denying that substantial numbers were leaving.

But on a visit to Yamales during the weekend, reporters saw ample evidence of a significant exodus, despite efforts by Contra intelligence personnel to limit their access to rank-and-file guerrillas.

Interviews with soldiers who were packing up to leave, those who had already started their journey and relatives who were staying behind revealed confusion and anxiety. The soldiers said they were eager to go home but fearful of the unknown, of whether it is really safe for them back in Nicaragua.

On a ridge above a grass-covered ravine, about 50 soldiers from the Guillermo Castro regional command gathered late Friday, minutes before marching toward Nicaragua. Piles of food and medicine were spread out on the dirt for the soldiers, who shoveled bags of sugar, coffee, soap and antiseptics into their shiny new olive-green knapsacks, blazoned with the black initials “U.S.” Loaded, the packs will weigh 70 pounds, the soldiers said.

“I want to go back to Nicaragua,” a 17-year-old veteran said as he oiled his RPG-7 grenade launcher. “But who knows what we’re returning to?”

Later, the group joined a column of about 100 soldiers to begin the march to Nicaragua. Bringing up the rear were half a dozen pack mules loaded with pots, pans and anti-tank weapons. It is a hike of at least two days to the border, and many of the soldiers were girding to walk 20 days or more to reach destinations inside their homeland.

Saturday before dawn, an estimated 500 soldiers from the 5th Salazar and the Ismael Castillo battalions hit the trail, according to the chaplain for one of the units, Reinaldo Reyes Alcancilia.

Reyes said he too would be taking off in the next few days. He said he would carry a Bible instead of a gun but would continue to wear his military uniform.

“It would be shameful for us to arrive in Nicaragua as civilians,” the 27-year-old Pentecostal chaplain said. “It is better for the Nicaraguan people to see our uniforms . . . and understand our sacrifice.”

Later Saturday, troops from the Quilali regional command, one of the principal and--until now--best-maintained campsites, clambered onto four trucks for transportation to Arenales, a village closer to the border. The Quilali camp had been emptying out over the last 15 days, said Rosalio Gomez Martinez, one of a handful of Contras left at Quilali.

Gomez Martinez, a 50-year-old former coffee farmer who fled to the Yamales camps to escape being jailed by Sandinista authorities for collaborating with the Contras, said he was awaiting “further orders” before starting the trip homeward.

At Quilali and the nearby camp that once harbored the 500-member Santiago Meza Battalion, Contras were burning a number of the huts, old uniforms and other articles that they no longer need. Plastic tarps that once covered many of the huts were shredded, and hogs rummaged through the charred debris. At the Santiago Meza camp, a Honduran peasant loaded tree branches that had formed rebel lean-tos on the back of his donkey for use as firewood.

Though Contra commanders have expressed confidence that their renewed presence in Nicaragua will not bring more warfare, some of the rank-and-file have their doubts.

“The way it looks to me, there are still a lot of clashes going on,” said Marcos Antonio Castro as he paused with his AK-47 automatic rifle at a roadside stand. “The idea we have is that they are still out there fighting.”

Under terms of last month’s demobilization agreement, Contra troops inside Nicaragua will be assigned to designated security enclaves that will be guarded by a U.N. peacekeeping force of 800. Contra leaders have said they want the enclaves situated in their traditional theaters of operation: the regions of Matagalpa, Jinotega, Chontales and North Zelaya.

But the accord did not establish how the enclaves would be set up, and there appears to be a wide discrepancy between the amount of land the Contras want and the amount that both the outgoing and incoming Nicaraguan governments are willing to assign for the purpose.

During the weekend, Contra commanders at their strategic headquarters in the center of Yamales worked feverishly over plastic-coated maps in an apparent effort to draw boundaries for their proposed enclaves.

For the thousands of civilian dependents remaining behind, their future is as much in question as that of the fighters.

A $300-million U.S. government aid package includes $30 million for repatriation of Contras and their families, but U.S. officials, the International Red Cross and the United Nations are still trying to find a way for the program to be administered. And the Honduran government is reluctant to have the families declared refugees because such status would entitle them to permanent residence.

Many family members said they believe they will be taken care of. They had been told to concentrate in certain sections of the camps, and most were resigned to waiting.

The five Mejia sisters, young women in bright-colored dresses with half a dozen toddlers in tow, hiked along a rutted dirt road to their camp after gathering supplies. Three of the five women are married to Contra fighters who recently returned to Nicaragua.

“What can I say? He’s a military man, and I have to accept it,” Dora Mejia, a 30-year-old mother of three, said as she balanced a white sack of food on her head. “It will be a problem to feed my children, but what can we do? We are obliged to suffer.”

For 19-year-old Lucia Zamora, waiting is not part of the picture. Dressed in camouflage fatigues, she is marching back to Nicaragua with her two babies.

“They are my children, and I will take them with me,” she said. “God will help us.”

Zamora hit the trail Saturday with a heavy knapsack on her back, a pail of milk tied to her waist, and her 6-month-old daughter slung around her neck in a yellow blanket. She breast-fed the baby as she hiked to join the unit that she will travel with into Nicaraguan territory.

Her friend, a Contra soldier named Vladimir Centeno, carried her 18-month-old son. He too was loaded with knapsacks, and a rooster hung upside down from his belt. Centeno figured they would walk at least 20 days to reach the central Nicaraguan region of Matagalpa.

Zamora, who came to the Yamales camp two years ago after Sandinista soldiers killed her stepfather, hopes to join her husband, a Contra fighter who returned to Nicaragua 20 days ago. But if not, she will try to reach her hometown of Waslala, in the remote north Atlantic region.

A beautiful woman with a deep mahogany complexion and full, high cheekbones, Zamora said she would rather endure the difficult trip homeward than remain in the camps, where she fears the life of a refugee.

As she trudged down a narrow path that would disappear into the hills, her former neighbors shouted their goodbys.

“Adios!” came a voice from one of a line of small shacks.

“See you in Nicaragua!” Zamora called back.