Chamorro Asks for Investments in Nicaragua : Diplomacy: President tries to allay fears by promising that democracy and peace will exist. She meets with local leaders.

Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, elected just over a year ago on the heels of a debilitating civil war, on Thursday asked U.S. companies to consider doing business with Nicaragua.

She assured potential investors that she knows “it is absolutely necessary that peace and democracy exist” before businesses would be willing to take a chance on her country.

Chamorro, visiting Los Angeles for the second time in three months, spoke to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and at a news conference, praising her country’s new economic reorganization and stressing that a key brick in the rebuilding is foreign investment.

This was the most recent of her journeys that have taken Chamorro to Asia, Europe and the United States, soliciting foreign investment and help in relieving some of Nicaragua’s $11-billion foreign debt.

“We are convinced that a prosperous economy cannot exist unless there is economic freedom,” she said, adding that she intends to work to guarantee both. “Foreign investment will play an important role in our development.”

To a question about what Los Angeles can do to help, she replied: “I’m not ashamed to say so. . . . You can help in every way. . . . We have a lot of problems.”

Part of Chamorro’s Los Angeles visit was subsidized by California Lutheran University, which Thursday night presented her with its Thomas Wade Landry Humanitarian Medal at a dinner attended by such Hollywood conservative stalwarts as Charlton Heston and Chuck Norris.

The award, named for the former longtime Dallas Cowboys football coach, is given to “exemplary” individuals “who provide leadership and inspiration through strong Christian commitment,” according to the university. Previous recipients include Gov. Pete Wilson, Bob Hope, Times sports columnist Jim Murray and former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

On Wednesday night, Chamorro’s plane arrived four hours late, and she dined with a large group of local Nicaraguans, a warm and festive evening during which she invited her countrymen to “come home.” When the San Francisco delegation had to leave to catch a plane, Chamorro interrupted her speech to hug them and bid them farewell.

Chamorro was the latest among leaders of emerging countries to visit the United States in a search for political support and financial investment. Lech Walesa was here last month, promoting Poland as a good place for business, and Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis arrives today.

“Nicaragua is rich in many things . . . wood, meat, sugar,” Chamorro said at a news conference. “We also have hotels that we cannot manage, companies that are going to be sold. There is a lot to be done.”

Last month in Washington, Chamorro got a pledge from President Bush to help Nicaragua meet its overdue loan payments and to pave the way for Nicaragua to work with the world’s financial institutions.

But House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) warned that the United States’ own depleted pockets make it “difficult to do as much as we would like to do in many parts of the world.”

Borrowing a page from Ronald Reagan’s private-enterprise policies, Chamorro said Thursday: “I don’t see why the U.S. government has an obligation to give Nicaragua one cent or one dollar. . . . I believe the people in Nicaragua should be the ones working to make our land better.”

It was private-sector money that Chamorro was talking about Thursday. She met with business leaders at breakfast, including Dodgers President Peter O’Malley, who said the Dodgers will build a youth baseball field in Managua later this year. “It was a great baseball country” before the Sandinistas, he said, “and it can be again.”

Nicaraguans “are set on strengthening private enterprise, so that the state guides rather than monopolizes, helps rather than exploits, informs rather than conceals, serves rather than dictates.”

That remark seemed to obliquely cover historical ground--the bad feeling from the 1920s when U.S. investment in Nicaragua was protected by an American hold on the economy, the national bank and railroad, and later backed by the Marines.

Asked about her predecessor, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Chamorro said that since the Sandinistas lost the February, 1990, election, Ortega is “a citizen like everybody else. . . . He’s just another Nicaraguan.”

After she sat down to prolonged applause, Los Angeles City Council President John Ferraro, who thanked Chamorro, joked of Ortega: “When I drove up, I saw him taking Peter O’Malley’s car to park it.”