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A loyal ambassador quits

Francisco Fiallos Navarro, 36, has been faced with a daunting task: defending the interests of Nicaragua's Marxist-led Sandinista government to a hostile Administration in Washington. For ten months the unassuming Ambassador to the U.S. performed the job loyally and, according to State Department officials, well. So well, in fact, that few people knew of Fiallos' growing misgivings about the onetime revolutionaries who hold power in Nicaragua. Last week, however, the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry announced that Fiallos was being reassigned to other unspecified duties. Fiallos' version was that he had quit, becoming the second Nicaraguan Ambassador to the U.S. in two years to do so out of disillusionment with the Sandinista regime.*

The cause of the imbroglio was an example of just what Fiallos had been worrying about. In late November the Harvard-educated lawyer gave an unusually outspoken interview to Managua's independent daily La Prensa, in which he urged the Sandinistas to make a "dramatic change" in their policies if they want to maintain international credibility. But the government promptly banned newspaper publication of the interview, scheduled to appear Dec. 10. As Fiallos told TIME Correspondent Ross H. Munro last week, "During my frequent visits to Nicaragua, I saw the deteriorating situation in our country and transmitted my worries to the junta. I told them that they had to change course and win back the support of the people, but I realized that no matter what I said, and what other people said, things would not change."

Specifically, Fiallos had urged that the Sandinistas call "free, just and honest" elections. Although the increasingly un popular government has promised to hold free national elections in 1985, many Nicaraguans doubt that it will. Fiallos also said that the Sandinistas should lift their nine-month-old state of emergency, which allows press censorship and arbitrary detention, and that they should end the "illegal and unjust" confiscation of property. Fiallos strongly defended the politically moderate Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, whom he described as "one of the bravest men in Nicaragua." The prelate has been highly critical of the Sandinistas, although he still defends the spirit of the 1979 revolution that overthrew former Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Said Fiallos in the suppressed interview: "The revolution began with a social transformation based on a love for the people. Nevertheless, some fanatical sectors have introduced hate into it."

Fiallos' remarks echo those of many other critics, but they were particularly stinging to the Sandinistas because the diplomat was for several years a loyal revolutionary. A deeply religious man with close personal ties to Obando y Bravo, he secretly joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1978, when the movement was still an armed underground force. During the anti-Somoza insurrection, he secretly stored and transported arms for the guerrillas' organized clandestine rebel meetings. Washington has authorized Fiallos, who has not yet decided whether to return to Nicaragua, to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. Said he last week: "For the moment I want to rest and think and then I will decide what course to take."