Quayle Assails Cuba, Panama and Nicaragua

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras —  Vice President Dan Quayle sharply denounced “the axis of Cuba, Nicaragua and Panama” on Monday, warning that the three nations pose a threat to the region’s struggling economies.

Using particularly blunt language, the vice president expressed skepticism about elections that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government has promised to hold next February, saying they could be a “sham.” He said he will tell Contra military commanders that their return to Nicaragua to take part in the political process is an option available to them, but he would give them no recommendations on what course to follow.

“You have to look at the past track record of Ortega. It hasn’t been a good one,” Quayle said.

The vice president visited Guatemala and Honduras on Monday, the first stops on a three-day tour of Central America. The trip is his second to the region as he assumes a leading role in the Bush Administration’s low-visibility effort to make progress in an area that vexed the Reagan Administration for eight years.

At stops in Guatemala and Honduras, Quayle met with elected civilian Presidents Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo and Jose Azcona Hoyo, who are struggling to maintain fledgling democracies. He stressed the need to adhere to the course of open political systems, while seeking to drum up regional pressure against Nicaragua and Panama.

‘No Time for Dictators’

“The hemisphere no longer has time for dictators of any stripe,” he said, lumping Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega and the Marxist leaders of Cuba and Nicaragua together. “The axis of Cuba, Nicaragua and Panama threatens peace and democracy in this hemisphere.

“That axis would work very much to the economic decline of this region,” he said.

With the Bush Administration stymied in its ongoing effort to remove military strongman Noriega from power, Quayle met for 90 minutes late Sunday evening upon his arrival in Guatemala City with Guatemalan Foreign Minister Mario Palencia. Palencia and the foreign ministers of Ecuador and Trinidad-Tobago are members of a special mission of the Organization of American States that is trying to negotiate a resolution to the Panamanian crisis.

Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force Two as he flew Sunday evening from Washington to Guatemala, the vice president said he will tell the Contra military commanders this morning that if they are “comfortable” with the idea of abandoning their camps in Honduras and returning to Nicaragua, they will be encouraged to follow such a course. But he added: “I don’t have to tell them what Danny Ortega’s track record is.”

Quayle’s meeting with the Contra figures this morning at the U.S. Embassy here will be the first such conference between a senior U.S. official and the field commanders who have been fighting the now-stalled guerrilla war against the Sandinista government.

Asked what he would tell the Contra field commanders if they ask whether a resumption of the war is one of their options, Quayle said, “I would say that is currently not policy.”