Unhappy Contras Rearm, Again Roam the Highlands : Nicaragua: Presence of Sandinista police and soldiers prompts some former rebels to leave their homes.

The Contra war ended formally last June with the last of 17,000 U.S.-backed guerrillas turning in their weapons. But Ciriaco Palacio found no peace.

Returning to his farm in Waslala, he found, instead, that his Sandinista enemies, who had just lost the government in an election, still ran the army and the police. He and other former rebels complained of police harassment. A protest march on Waslala’s police headquarters last Oct. 1 ended with the fatal shootings of four unarmed anti-Sandinistas.

Palacio, who led a rebel squad in the 1980s, reacted the way he knew best. He picked up a rifle, reassumed the wartime code name Sombrerito (Little Hat) and headed back to the hills, creating a sight that Nicaraguans hoped they would never see again.

Sombrerito is part of a growing movement of Contra rebels roaming the rural highlands of northern Nicaragua, rearmed and dressed for combat. Although the “re-Contras” apparently number no more than a few hundred and have yet to confront the army, their presence is a powerful symbol of discontent among former rebels with their treatment during Nicaragua’s year of peace.

President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s 13-month-old government is treating the rebellion as an economic matter--attributing it to the fact that 4,000 former rebels still await resettlement. The government has stepped up the distribution of farmland and equipment to them.

But the rebels insist that the real problem is their personal security.

Speaking to 120 sympathetic farmers in a jungle clearing here the other day, Sombrerito, 27, propped the butt of his AK-47 assault rifle on a log and explained.

“When the war ended last year, I asked, ‘Now who is going to protect me?’ and they said this card is my life insurance,” he began, showing his certificate of disarmament. “While the Sandinistas are still armed, do any of you think I feel safe with just this card?”

“No!” came a chorus of shouts.

“I didn’t rearm myself for the hell of it but because it’s my right, my insurance,” he declared. “The Sandinista army has to be abolished. A new army has to be elected by the people. If the Sandinistas don’t disarm, we will not disarm!

“Is there anyone here who thinks I should give up this rifle for a piece of land?” he asked.

“Nobody!” the crowd replied.

“For a house?”

“No!”

“For a car?”

“No!”

“You’d better keep that little gun, sonny,” chimed in Tonita Suazo, an elderly white-haired woman. “You’ll need it.”

“Well then, I’m not going to turn in this weapon,” Sombrerito concluded. “I’ll turn it in when the people tell me it’s time. I obey the people.”

Standing behind Sombrerito were 16 other armed men, flirting with farm girls and calling themselves the Democratic Guerrilla Columns. Sombrerito leads one of the columns in their wanderings through the northern provinces of Matagalpa and Jinotega.

The overall leader, Augusto Rizo, who fancies the nom de guerre Rojito, claims to command four columns with 275 combat-ready men. He spoke of unidentified superiors with larger commands but said his men lack radio contact with other rebel units and operate on their own.

Interviewed separately, most of the 17 men here said they had taken up arms since February--some by stealing or buying Sandinistas’ rifles, others by digging up secret Contra stockpiles buried before the disarmament ceremonies last year--and organized their columns in mid-March.

One guerrilla said he had never given up his AK-47. The column leader called Fausto was more typical. He said he tried to resume life as a farmer only to be bullied off his land in Matagalpa by a boyhood enemy who grew up to be an armed Sandinista.

Farmers here said a 70-man Sandinista army patrol set out May 1 to pursue Rojito’s men. Neither side has reported combat, but the rebel leader warned that the cat-and-mouse game cannot remain harmless for long.

“We’re not calling for war, man, but we cannot accept the peace the Sandinistas are offering,” Rojito said. “We’re going to set a deadline, and if they are not out of here, we’re going to hit them hard. We don’t want to see a single Sandinista in El Cua.”

Asked to specify his deadline, Rojito stared at his watch for a minute and then looked up. “Ten days,” he declared.

The improvised threat echoes a recent headline in the pro-Sandinista newspaper El Nuevo Diario: “Phantom of War Hovers Again.”

Since discovering the re-Contras last month, Managua newspapers have speculated about gun-running from Honduras and headlined a rebel attack on an army road-building crew. The story proved false; farmers burning a field had accidentally set off two land mines, causing the road crew to panic and open fire.

Government and army leaders have tried to play down the danger, or even deny the existence, of rearmed Contras. President Chamorro said during a recent visit to the United States that she learned of them only this month and didn’t know much about them. Antonio Lacayo, her chief adviser, called them “hot-headed citizens” with no popular support.

Gen. Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista army commander, insisted there is “no possibility of a new war.”

Lt. Col. Rodrigo Gonzalez, an army officer in this region, said the rearmed rebels number no more than 150 and have no support from outside Nicaragua.

But Santiago Murray, Argentine chief of an Organization of American States mission that monitors rebel resettlement, estimated the number of re-Contras at 600 in eight units.

He said their rearmament has been fueled by the Feb. 16 assassination of former top Contra commander Enrique Bermudez in Managua--an unsolved murder that former rebels blame on the Sandinistas--and by more recent killings closer to home.

Tensions in the north, which suffered a large share of the 30,000 war deaths in eight years of fighting, came to a boil April 12.

According to OAS investigators, seven rearmed Contras stopped a civilian transport truck near Wiwili and abducted a retired army lieutenant who was aboard. The army and police responded by attacking a nearby farm and killing a demobilized rebel who was sowing grain. The kidnapers retaliated by murdering the army veteran.

“What they need here is a real disarmament,” said an international official in Managua. “If they want the Contras to turn in all their weapons, they have to get the police away from the resettlement areas, close some army bases, disarm the Sandinista farm cooperatives. What are they waiting for? Another crisis? The government seems incapable of acting.”

Chamorro faced a crisis in the southeast last October when unarmed former Contras and civilians, led by eight elected mayors, blocked the country’s main east-west highway for 18 days to demand removal of Sandinista troops from their towns. The response was slow but decisive: 18 of the 34 army bases there were closed.

The current rebellion is different because it apparently lacks civilian direction or support by top members of an increasingly fractious national Contra leadership. And despite her success in ending the war and defusing the anti-Sandinista protest last fall, the president seems no more powerful or decisive today.

Last month, Chamorro wanted to mark her first year in office by persuading Rene Vivas, the longtime Sandinista police chief, to resign. But he refused, and she backed down. Contras were angered as much by that as by her decision last year to keep Ortega as army chief in the hope of neutralizing the Sandinista opposition.

Oscar Sovalbarro, who heads the civic association of former rebels in Managua, said Chamorro told him weeks ago that she had ordered Minister of Government Carlos Hurtado to remove “unprofessional” police from the former rebels’ settlements, but to no avail.

Here in El Cua, as in other rural municipalities, the government has little civilian authority.

As in war, reporters were led to the meeting with the re-Contra band in conspiratorial fashion, through whispered codes and trusted guides. The trip took an hour from the center of El Cua by jeep and 1 1/2 hours on foot through the jungle.

Two days later, presidential aide Lacayo visited the nearby town of Ayapal to open a dirt road and unload a 10-truck convoy containing 100-pound corn seed bags, kerosene lanterns, rubber boots, shovels, axes and machetes for 1,000 resettled Contras. Holding up a machete, Lacayo declared: “This ought to be used to open roads in the jungle, not for violent acts.”

Rojito and his men were just as eager to prove that people support their cause. They urged the assembled farmers in El Cua to organize a movement to demand Ortega’s retirement and the army’s abolition. Several men in the crowd said a civilian organization backed by armed Contras is a good idea.

But at least one spectator was alarmed by the sight of the rebels. After standing silently during the two-hour meeting, Juan Jose Lopez, 44, walked slowly to the fence post where his horse was tethered.

“We came out of a war and can work in freedom now,” he said. “The army has stopped recruiting our sons. I feel sad to hear this talk of starting up the war again. Our ideology is to work and produce. We’re not enemies of the Sandinista Front, as long as they let us work.

“I never wanted to see another army in these hills,” the farmer added as he mounted for the two-hour ride home. “With either army back here, there’s no security.”