Obando Was Critic of Sandinistas : The ‘Contra Cardinal’: Nicaraguan Peacemaker

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — In the long, bitter feud between his church and the Sandinista government, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo has often played on his humble origin and popularity in the countryside. A widely circulated church poster shows the stocky, dark-skinned cleric in a cowboy hat, riding a burro into a backwater town to say Mass.

Not surprisingly, the image was appropriated by U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels to seek support for their rural insurgency. They added the legends “Christianity Si, Communism No” and “Cardinal Obando Is With Us.”

Until recently, the rebels monopolized the Roman Catholic patriarch as a propaganda symbol while government officials vilified him as the “Contra cardinal.”

Then, two months ago, the government tacked up its own poster of Obando in the rural war zones. It showed him shaking hands with President Daniel Ortega. The inscription appealed to rebel soldiers: “Come home. Accept amnesty.”

The words were deceptive: Obando has not urged the Contras to surrender. But the conciliatory image signaled a dramatic shift for the Sandinistas’ leading critic to a new role as peacemaker in the seven-year-old conflict.

The handshake was photographed when Ortega named Obando head of the National Reconciliation Commission to monitor compliance with the Aug. 7 Central American peace accord. Last week, the government reversed a longstanding policy of refusing contacts with rebel leaders and asked the 61-year-old cardinal to mediate talks on a cease-fire.

Obando, who was accepted at once by the Contras, got the backing of Nicaragua’s other bishops Wednesday to launch his mission. On Thursday, he traveled to Washington, where Sandinista and rebel leaders were gathered separately for the General Assembly of the Organization of American States.

“I am going to sound out the parties in conflict to see if it is possible to achieve a truce,” he told reporters in Managua.

The quickly unfolding peace process is a personal vindication for Obando, whose years of pleading with the government to talk to Contra leaders has been a major source of church-state friction. It has also put him under more government pressure than ever to persuade the Contras, who revere him as a hero, to stop fighting.

Diplomats here list many factors that pushed the Sandinistas to the peace table: a failing economy, Soviet reluctance to pledge unlimited aid, military pressure by the Contras and the threat of renewed U.S. funding for them.

Equally important, the regional peace accord, drafted by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, offered the Sandinistas a recognition of their constitutional order in exchange for press freedom and other democratic reforms that they apparently feel they can live with.

‘Ideal Mediator’

“Before August, the Sandinistas saw Obando as nothing more than a threat, the only man of equal stature who could challenge them,” said a Western ambassador here. “But with the peace accord, he is suddenly their ideal mediator. He lends credibility to a process that gives them legitimacy and could shut off the Contras.”

The talks appear to offer the best hope yet for ending a conflict that has claimed more than 20,000 lives. Working in Obando’s favor is his authority as spiritual leader of Nicaragua’s Roman Catholics, who make up 85% of the population.

The cardinal has remarked privately that he and Ortega have good reason to settle the conflict, because they may hold their current jobs long after Arias, other regional leaders and President Reagan leave the public stage.

“He is very sure of himself,” said Luis Humberto Guzman, an opposition leader. “He knows that if he cannot fix all this, nobody can.”

Obando was born in the mining and ranching town of La Libertad to a gold miner and a peasant woman of Indian descent. It is also the birthplace of Ortega, who is 20 years younger.

The Obando family was poor but scraped to send young Miguel to a seminary in El Salvador. He joined the Salesian order in 1958 and taught for a decade before returning to Nicaragua. He has been archbishop of Managua since 1970.

An outspoken critic of ousted President Anastasio Somoza, the archbishop was called upon twice to mediate when Sandinista insurgents seized large numbers of hostages, first in 1974 at a businessman’s Christmas Party, then in 1978 at the National Palace. The hostages were exchanged for Sandinista prisoners, including Ortega.

Obando had an inflexible rule as a mediator: Once one side made a demand, it could not be changed. Thus, in the 1974 siege, he refused to add Rene Nunez’s name to the prisoner-exchange list when the Sandinistas belatedly realized that Nunez was under arrest. Nunez, now the government official in charge of relations with the church, remained in jail two more years.

After the Sandinistas toppled Somoza in 1979, Nicaraguan bishops issued a letter saying they found no objection to the revolution’s socialist goals.

Against Marxist Teaching

But soon, Obando began to speak out against Marxist teaching in the schools, compulsory military service and government promotion of a “popular church” of pro-Sandinista Catholics who challenged his authority.

Tensions reached a peak last year after Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, a priest of the popular church, charged that Obando’s refusal to speak out against U.S. aid to the Contras made him “the principal accomplice of aggression against our people.”

The cardinal called D’Escoto a devil sent to divide Nicaraguan Catholics. He insisted that condemning Contra aid by itself was a partisan stance that would disqualify him as a pastor.

Obando’s outspokenness has brought Sandinista mobs to harass him. The church printing press was seized and the Catholic radio silenced. After the U.S. Congress voted $100 million in Contra aid in June, 1986, the cardinal’s chief spokesman, Father Bismarck Carballo, and a close associate, Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, were expelled, joining 16 other pro-Obando priests in exile.

Throughout the conflict, Obando has traveled constantly to the villages by burro or jeep, drawing large crowds of faithful.

“He is a man who fears no one,” said Carballo, who was allowed to return to Nicaragua. “He has shown us, the priests, that even in the worst crisis the church has no reason to hide. At his insistence, we have never suspended a single activity.”

Critics contend that Obando has been at least as harsh on dissenters as the Sandinistas. They say he has transferred pro-Sandinista priests out of Nicaragua or out of churches in poor neighborhoods so that they can no longer be near the people they want to help.

Obando’s elevation to cardinal in 1985 was widely viewed as the reward of a like-minded conservative Pope, John Paul II, for his outspoken criticism of a leftist revolutionary state.

But late last year, the Vatican instructed Obando to lower his voice, several diplomats said, and persuaded the government to open negotiations on church-state disputes.

The talks resolved little but eased the tensions. Obando’s homiletic attacks on the regime retreated into oblique biblical allusions.

In its first step to comply with the accord, the government named the cardinal head of the Reconciliation Commission and invited both Father Carballo and Bishop Vega to come home. The Catholic radio was allowed to reopen.

As head of the four-member commission, Obando has steered a neutral course, according to other members. Last week, when the panel drafted a statement recognizing steps taken to comply with the peace accord, some opposition leaders urged Obando not to sign it, but he ignored the advice.

“He was maneuvering to make himself acceptable as a mediator,” said Mauricio Diaz, the opposition delegate on the commission.

The coming cease-fire talks will not be easy. The Contras are expected to seek assurances of full political freedom before they lay down their weapons. The Sandinistas insist that the peace accord calls for discussion only of the technical aspects of a cease-fire.

“The cardinal is the leader of political opposition to the revolution, but his ecclesiastical character requires him to seek reconciliation,” said a Sandinista Cabinet official. “He cannot risk his prestige by going beyond the bounds of the peace accord.”

Obando has given only a general hint of how he will approach the talks. “First we have to achieve a cease-fire,” he said Sunday. “Then we can consider other steps.” He also indicated that he wants to serve as an arbiter, not just a transmitter of messages.

Aristides Sanchez, a member of the Contras’ six-member directorate, said he would be willing to accept any recommendation offered by Obando. “We are convinced that he wants for Nicaragua the same democracy and freedom that we do,” Sanchez said.

But a European ambassador who sees Obando often said the cardinal may be far more willing than the Contras are to reach an accommodation with the Sandinistas.

“Obando’s first interest is the survival of his church,” the diplomat said. “If the Sandinistas offer something that sounds reasonable, he may tell the Contras, ‘It’s that or nothing.’ ”

Said Bishop Bosco Vivas, a close associate of Obando, “He is a person who is interested only in the judgment of God and not the judgment of men.”

Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in El Salvador contributed to this story.