Nicaragua Acts to Halt Renewal of Guerrilla War : Conflict: A special brigade is formed to help disarm ex-Contras and former Sandinista soldiers.

More than 100 former Sandinista soldiers, in combat uniforms with distinctive red and black armbands, marched into this rustic town the other day firing automatic rifles into the air. During a 26-hour siege, they overran police headquarters, kidnaped the mayor and went house to house taking guns from citizens unworthy of their trust.

Two of the Sandinistas were slightly wounded in a shootout with police, but the raid was mostly guerrilla theater. Its chief purpose was to persuade a government delegation already en route to the town to hear the former soldiers’ grievances. After three hours of talks, the invaders turned over the captured weapons and withdrew.

Impoverished and insecure with Nicaragua’s peace, several hundred veterans from both sides of the Contra civil war have taken up arms again and banded into rival guerrilla columns that haunt northern Nicaragua’s hills with reminders of that bloody eight-year conflict. At least 60 people have died in renewed violence in six months.

But what happened in Pantasma is a sign that the resurgent warriors are spending as much time posturing as fighting these days. After months of rearmament by both sides in the rural north, the government has opened talks with both factions and taken steps to pacify the region once again.

Among the steps is a pledge to close 14 of 39 northern outposts of the Sandinista-controlled regular army and incorporate former Contras into the region’s police forces. In turn, leaders of the rival guerrilla groups have agreed to gather their men in separate cease-fire zones and cooperate with a Special Disarmament Brigade now being trained with international help.

“I never tire of talking peace and reconciliation,” President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro said at a Nov. 15 ceremony inaugurating the 300-man brigade, which includes former Sandinista and Contra combatants. “The new reality in Nicaragua is that conflicts will be resolved with dialogue and never through the mouths of rifles and cannons.”

To anyone present when she declared the war over in June, 1990, the ceremony was a case of deja vu. Chamorro, who had ended a decade of Sandinista rule in elections four months earlier, stood on flag-draped platforms that summer, kissing soldiers as they surrendered rifles, which were destroyed and buried in huge pits--a scene now being replayed. Nearly 20,000 Contra guerrillas turned in weapons last year, and the 80,000-member army began a reduction that brought it to 21,000 troops.

But then came the recontras, former Contra soldiers who began regrouping last April and now number about 800. Taking up weapons hidden during last year’s disarmament, they said the government had failed to resettle them on promised farmland or protect them from vengeful Sandinista enemies in the army and police.

Chamorro ordered the military to refrain from attacking the recontras, even after they seized the police station in Quilali on June 25 and assassinated the Sandinista police chief of San Rafael del Norte and his secretary in a July 6 ambush. Angered by those killings, a new and slightly larger group arose--the recompas.

Recompas-- the word is a condensation of companeros, or comrades--are former Sandinista combatants, mostly junior officers, retired from the army last year and now back in arms. Like their enemy, many are peasants who spent nearly a decade of their youth at war. They, too, were supposed to get farms but found civilian life marred by the same threats and broken promises as those who became recontras.

“The recontras have legitimate demands, just as we do, but some of them want to exterminate every Sandinista in the country,” said a recompa calling himself Johnny, at ease with his column along a dirt highway near Pantasma. Two hours earlier, he said, the column had a harmless exchange of gunfire with recontras positioned 200 yards off the road.

Foreign diplomats in Nicaragua say the issue might have been avoided if the regime had addressed the problem of Contra security and tensions with the Sandinistas at the war’s end. It was only after the emergence of the recompas, apparently armed and controlled by the Sandinista leadership, that the government focused attention on the countryside.

“Two months ago they realized the situation was getting uncontrollable,” said a veteran Asian diplomat in Managua. “At first they didn’t understand how deep the problem was, and now it’s going to take some time to resolve because of all the mutual distrust.”

Carlos Hurtado, Chamorro’s minister of government and chief negotiator with both guerrilla groups, said they are not viewed as hostile forces but as products of complex postwar tensions in Nicaragua’s poorest and most violent region. Until the government can guarantee every veteran at least a home, a land title and some bank credits, he said, it would be “crazy” to respond with force.

The Special Disarmament Brigade under Hurtado’s control will try to use persuasion to collect the estimated 80,000 war weapons outside military control.

Francisco Valdivia, the recontra chief of staff known as Comandante Dimas, insisted in an interview this month that his men will stay armed until the Sandinista-led army is disbanded or replaced by soldiers with no war records--a demand previously rejected by Hurtado. If the recontras refuse to disarm, so will the recompas.

Complicating matters is the fragility of Dimas’ control over the recontras. Jose Angel Moran Flores, the recontra who calls himself Comandante Indomable (the Indomitable One), has rejected every accord reached so far and continued to attack Sandinista targets. Dimas acknowledges that Indomable commands at least 70 men.

If Dimas drops his demand and agrees to disarm, “he couldn’t prevent other new comandantes from emerging,” says Santiago Murray, chief of the Organization of American States’ postwar observer mission. “Any Contra can get 30 guys together and become a comandante. Such a fighter is welcomed by the rural people. It’s much easier than civilian life.”

“If the government had acted last May or June when there were only 150 recontras out there, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Murray said. “Now they are reacting, but the situation is more complex. It may be too late.”