Contras Supply Flights Halted, Nicaragua Says

The downing of an American-piloted cargo plane last month has brought a halt to contras arms supply flights out of neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, a Sandinista army officer said Thursday.

Capt. Ricardo Wheelock, chief of intelligence for the Sandinista Popular Army, told reporters at a press conference that the U.S.-backed rebels have since tried to send supply flights from Costa Rica, but he did not indicate whether they have been successful.

In a separate interview this week, a Western diplomat who monitors the contras war agreed that the downing of the C-123 transport plane “has been an awful damper on air resupply.”

Two American pilots and a Nicaraguan radio operator were killed when a Sandinista soldier brought down their aircraft full of small arms and supplies Oct. 5. An American air cargo specialist, Eugene Hasenfus of Marinette, Wis., was captured and is now standing trial before a Nicaraguan Peoples Tribunal on terrorism and related charges.

Wheelock identified the Nicaraguan radio operator for the first time Thursday as Freddy Vilchez Blandon and charged that he had trained at a Honduran military base with about 450 contras. Wheelock showed photographs of Vilchez allegedly undergoing military training at the 2nd Airborne Battalion in Tamara, about 12 miles northwest of Tegucigalpa.

The Honduran military has been known to train contras. Soldiers at the Honduran army’s 5th Battalion near Mocoron, in eastern Honduras, told two visiting reporters in August that several dozen contras from the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN)--the largest rebel organization--in the Kisan Indian rebel group were training there.

Wheelock claimed that there are only about 2,300 contras inside Nicaragua, 1,500 of them in the south-central region of the country where the supply plane was shot down last month. He said those contras, in the provinces of Chontales and Zelaya, are dependent on aerial resupply.

According to Hasenfus and documents found aboard the C-123, the main contras supply operation was run by Americans out of bases in El Salvador and Honduras. Hasenfus said he had flown on 10 such missions, and flight logs from the dead pilot Wallace Blaine Sawyer Jr. indicate scores of other flights.

Hasenfus said the contras had only a couple of planes of their own in Honduras and they were not in good working condition.

“Since the downing of the C-123K airplane, there have not been any supply flights to national territory from Honduras or from El Salvador,” Wheelock said.

“But there have been transfers of arms, ammunition and military supplies to Costa Rica and, with helicopters flying very low and small planes, they have tried to supply the FDN units that are in the south of Nicaragua. The Achilles heel of this force is the aerial supply,” Wheelock added.

At the People’s Anti-Somocista Tribunal, where Hasenfus is standing trial, Tribunal President Reynaldo Monterrey agreed to a prosecution request for a four-day extension to continue submitting evidence.

Monterrey denied a defense request to allow Hasenfus’s wife, Sally, to testify, saying no one may testify on behalf of a spouse in a trial.

Defense attorney Enrique Sotelo Borgen submitted a written statement by Sally Hasenfus in Spanish in which she pleaded for mercy for her husband.

Sally Hasenfus said her husband’s detention would cause “harm beyond description” to her family of three children. She says she could not make her house payments alone, keep her children in parochial school and support the family on her salary as a real estate saleswoman.