Nicaragua’s Army Will Be Cut in Half, Sandinista Military Chief Asserts : Central America: ‘Our country cannot support a military budget the size it is now,’ Gen. Ortega says.

Gen. Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista military chief, says he aims to trim Nicaragua’s army to about 30,000 to 40,000 troops, less than half its current size, under a mandate from President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

“Our country cannot support a military budget the size it is now,” Ortega told reporters late Wednesday at a gala inaugural reception offered by Chamorro after she took power from defeated Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, the general’s brother. “We were planning to reduce the army even if we had won.”

The remarks by the general, whose reappointment touched off a storm of protest among Chamorro’s supporters, indicated a common ground on at least one of her major goals--to scale back Central America’s largest army, a force created by Ortega after the 1979 Sandinista takeover and expanded during eight years of war against the U.S.-backed Contras.

But Ortega insisted that the proposed reductions must depend on the outcome of negotiations with other Central American governments to cut the size of their armies as well. El Salvador has 57,000 troops and Guatemala has 43,000; in both countries, the military wields considerable power.

Talks among the five nations are scheduled for May 15 in Costa Rica, but Ortega said an agreement could be difficult because of continuing guerrilla warfare in El Salvador.

The Sandinista army shipped weapons to the leftist Salvadoran guerrillas during the 1980s, but President Ortega agreed, in a regional summit last December, to halt the practice. Bush Administration officials, although they have not reported any such shipments this year, warned Chamorro last week that the clandestine aid might resume if she leaves Humberto Ortega in command of the army.

Without addressing the issue of Sandinista arms trafficking, Ortega said that the Nicaraguan government must work to end the Salvadoran conflict by supporting civilian President Alfredo Cristiani and isolating right-wing extremists in the Salvadoran armed forces.

He said that Nicaragua’s armed forces, which signed a definitive cease-fire with the Contras last week, had 90,000 troops at the end of last year. The figure apparently includes 10,000 to 15,000 combat troops being transferred to the army from the Interior Ministry, which is being completely demilitarized.

In interviews before the Feb. 25 election, Defense Ministry officials said the army had at least 70,000 troops--40,000 in a regular army divided about equally between regulars and conscripts and 30,000 available for call-up at any one time in the militia and reserves.

Since Chamorro’s election, hundreds of conscripts have deserted the army. In her inaugural speech, Chamorro announced an end to obligatory military service and said that all conscripts are now free to go home.

Ortega said he is willing to make additional cuts to scale the size of the army down to that of Honduras, which he estimated has 30,000 to 40,000 troops. Honduran officials, however, put their number at 18,500 troops.

Defense spending consumes about half of Nicaragua’s national budget. Foreign military specialists in Managua say troop reductions and spending cuts are inevitable because of political changes in the Soviet Bloc, the Sandinista army’s chief source of military aid. Because of Moscow’s unwillingness to maintain high levels of assistance, they say, Sandinista artillery and tank units could be reduced for lack of maintenance.

Under Sandinista rule, the army was a party organ, and its loyalty to the newly elected government is still so much in question that Chamorro has accepted the loan of a commando team from Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez for her personal security. But her advisers worked closely with Gen. Ortega to achieve the cease-fire accord and gained some trust in him.

The Sandinista newspaper Barricada applauded Chamorro’s decision to keep Ortega as “an act of sovereignty” in the face of U.S. pressure to dump him. “But it remains to be seen if she has the fortitude to resist further American pressure” on the terms of the army’s reduction, the paper said.

All criticism of Chamorro’s decision has come from within her coalition. Some of its leaders said she may be defeating her own aim of demilitarizing Nicaragua by keeping Sandinistas in control of the army. Contra commanders have suggested in reaction to the appointment that they might not comply with their agreement to disarm by June 10.

“We campaigned throughout the countryside. We told the peasants that once (Chamorro) won, we would get rid of all the Sandinistas,” said Jaime Cuadra, who turned down the Agriculture Ministry portfolio in Chamorro’s Cabinet to protest her decision. “How would I look to all those peasants if I take a post in the government and Humberto is still there?”

At a post-inaugural victory rally Wednesday night, Chamorro supporters shouted, “Humberto must go!”

To deflect such criticism, Chamorro named herself defense minister, the post that Ortega held in his brother’s government, and made it clear that the general’s appointment as army chief would be temporary--until the army is reduced and subordinated to civilian authority and the Contras are disarmed and guns are taken away from the Sandinistas’ civilian supporters.

Asked how long he expected to stay, the general, wearing a light brown dress uniform at the reception and clearly in a good mood, would not say.

“It’s not a question of one man,” he said. “It’s a question of a process of reducing the armed forces and making them professional.”

Under a March 27 transition accord between the two governments, the armed forces are to be “depoliticized.” The hierarchy of the officer corps, which is virtually all Sandinista, must be maintained, but officers can be retired.

Some officers indicate that there might not be much resistance to a reduction of the upper ranks.

“Many of us did not see the army as a career,” a Sandinista colonel said in a recent interview. “We saw it as a necessity to defend the country (against the Contras). The Sandinista army is not a power bloc as in Guatemala or El Salvador.”

All political parties are now, under the transition agreement, free to proselytize within the armed forces, where Sandinista political education is a long-ingrained part of basic training.

The “depoliticization” of the army got off to a slow start. For more than 24 hours after the inauguration, the Defense Ministry ignored Chamorro’s first decree that party banners and other propaganda be removed from all public buildings. It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that the red-and-black Sandinista flag came down from the ministry’s public relations office.

“Not all Sandinista officers have converted to the new democracy,” said a European military observer. “They could become more radical.”

The view of Chamorro’s advisers, he said, is that only Ortega can get powerful war zone commanders to accept demilitarization because the staff officers next in line do not wield the same authority over them.

“If Humberto Ortega orders a zone commander to disarm the farmers in a certain cooperative, he would have no choice but to obey,” the European observer said.