Visa for Ex-Sandinista Official Delayed

The State Department had not yet granted a visa Wednesday for a former Sandinista official now serving in Nicaragua’s new government, infuriating faculty members at Southern California universities where he was scheduled to speak this week.

“This is vicious harassment,” said Prof. Michael Emery, head of the journalism department at Cal State Northridge. “I have been calling since last week and could only find out that no decision had been made.”

Emery had invited Alejandro Bendana, general secretary of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, to address a conference at the Northridge campus today. Bendana also was to appear this evening at Occidental College and on Friday at USC, UCLA and Los Angeles Valley College.

Emery said that he had anticipated no problems with the trip because Bendana had visited Washington and New York in March and April before the inauguration of the new coalition government of Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

But the professor said he learned last Friday that the State Department is seeking extensive details about Bendana’s planned itinerary and could give no assurance when or if the process would be complete.

A State Department spokesman who requested anonymity confirmed that the agency is still subjecting members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front to extra scrutiny, even if they have been accepted in Chamorro’s government. Members of non-Sandinista parties in the governing coalition are exempt from such review, the spokesman said.

Bendana has held the same foreign ministry position under both the Sandinistas and Chamorro’s new government.

Emery, who has traveled to Nicaragua five times and met Bendana during the February elections in the Central American nation, said the former Sandinista official submitted his visa application May 4.

Officials of friendly governments normally are not required to submit detailed itineraries, a procedure generally reserved for countries that place restrictions on U.S. diplomats. Nicaragua no longer requires visas for U.S. citizens.

During the last year of Sandinista rule, reductions in U.S. Embassy personnel caused the State Department to impose a minimum processing period of 15 days on visa applications from Sandinista officials.

Former Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega angrily canceled an appearance at the United Nations General Assembly last October because visas were not processed quickly enough to admit his large entourage.

Further cuts after the U.S. invasion of Panama last December left the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua with no consular staff. Since the installation of the Chamorro government last month, however, the appointment of a consul general and one consular aide have made it possible to grant visas in a relatively short time.

Granting a visa to Bendana, however, “is a decision which has to be made upstairs,” the State Department spokesman said.

“We’re still concerned about whether the Sandinistas have really had a change of heart,” he said. “They promised to hold off strikes for 100 days to give the new government a chance to get its feet on the ground and they’ve already called off the honeymoon.”

Emery said the episode looks like “more evidence that some of our government officials really don’t want Mrs. Chamorro to succeed and wouldn’t mind if she had a brief tenure as president.”