Nicaragua’s 2 Hostage Dramas End With All Captives Freed : Central America: Contras and Sandinistas bring crisis to peaceful end after intervention by cardinal.

A double-barreled hostage crisis that has gripped this country for nearly a week came to a peaceful end late Wednesday as Contra rebels in northern Nicaragua and Sandinista gunmen in the capital freed their last prisoners.

Vice President Virgilio Godoy and four conservative politicians emerged from the building where they had been held at gunpoint since Friday, walking into the muggy night air with a large Nicaraguan flag as friends and relatives cheered.

“The big losers here are those who lost the election in 1990,” a feisty Godoy declared to the crowd, alluding to the Sandinista Front, “and a government that gave no signs of being able to manage its own house.”

“The important thing is that this ended without bloodshed,” another of the freed hostages, legislator Alfredo Cesar, said. “There is no violence, no weapon, that can subjugate ideas.”

The men looked haggard but well and complained bitterly of the way in which President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro handled the crisis, saying she did not even bother to telephone the hostages to inquire about their conditions or health.

Earlier, rearmed Contra rebels released their last five hostages, including two prominent Sandinista legislators, following two days of talks led by Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, Nicaragua’s highest-ranking churchman. In the process, the rebels obtained from the government an eight-point agreement that included establishing territory as a security zone, as well as a 60-day truce and a pledge to open a dialogue over political concerns.

The leaders of both hostage-taking bands will probably go unpunished. The Nicaraguan government has adopted a policy of amnesty for former combatants in the country’s brutal civil war who have taken up arms again to press their political and economic causes.

At one time, the rival hostage-takers held nearly 80 people, plunging Chamorro’s besieged government into a crisis that underscored the bitter hatreds that still divide this country three years after the end of the war.

The crisis developed as Chamorro’s government found itself increasingly isolated, attacked from both the left and the right over a range of issues, from its perceived failure to rescue Nicaraguans from poverty to its perceived failure to rein in a Sandinista-controlled military.

Despite the crisis, Chamorro left the country for Mexico on Wednesday. There, she will try to enlist the help of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as a go-between with the Clinton Administration to prevent a final cutoff of U.S. aid, a government official said. The aid is threatened because of suspicions over ties between Sandinista officials and international terrorists.

Antonio Lacayo, Chamorro’s son-in-law and powerful chief of staff, said he hopes that the kidnaping ordeal will shake Nicaraguans out of the deadly polarization that threatens the nation.

“These positions of violence, the use of force, of making demands with guns definitely cannot continue,” Lacayo told U.S. reporters.

Lacayo, regarded as the real authority in Chamorro’s government, sought to portray a silver lining in the episode. He said the old enemies, mortified at the extremes of violence that the kidnapings represent, may now see no alternative but to work together.

Despite Lacayo’s optimism, there were ample signs that far from national unity, the long-term result of the kidnaping crisis may be an even more profound rupture of Nicaragua’s fractured society. Critics on the right are already accusing the Sandinista Front of masterminding the Managua kidnaping.

The chaos began last Thursday when the Contras, led by a fighter named Jose Angel Talavera, alias The Jackal, seized a government delegation that had traveled to Talavera’s remote mountain hide-out with an offer of amnesty. The Contras demanded the removal of Gen. Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista defense minister, and Lacayo, who is frequently accused of allowing Sandinista influence in the government. Gen. Ortega is the brother of Daniel Ortega, Chamorro’s predecessor as president.

In response, a band of gunmen led by a former major in the Sandinista People’s Army, Donald Mendoza, stormed the Managua headquarters of the largest opposition political party, seizing the vice president and other politicians. Mendoza vowed to hold his captives until Talavera released his.

The two bands of gunmen had been releasing their hostages gradually, but each retained its most important captives until Wednesday night. Godoy and legislator Cesar, both outspoken conservatives, had been in the hands of the Sandinista group, while two prominent Sandinista legislators, Doris Tijerino and Carlos Gallo, were among the Contra group’s last captives.