a238  1451  07 Dec 85
AM-Nicaragua-Censorship, Bjt,0670
Sandinistas Intensify Censorship After Emergency Declared
By JUAN MALTES
Associated Press Writer
    MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) - The leftist Sandinista government has
intensified censorship and extended it from the news media to
virtually all publications since declaring a national state of
emergency this fall.
    Publications by the Roman Catholic Church, human rights watchdog
groups and opposition political parties are censored.
    Lino Hernandez, director of the independent Human Rights Commission
of Nicaragua, said he was prepared to disobey a Nov. 14 order to
submit the panel's monthly bulletin for censorship.
    ''As we always have been independent and we search for ways that
human rights might be respected, we now also publish the
denunciations that are presented to our offices by Nicaraguan
citizens who believe themselves persecuted,'' Hernandez said.
    ''We are prepared to not submit for censorship our bulletin,'' he
said.
    On Oct. 15, the Sandinista regime tightened state security with a
decree suspending certain individual guarantees. Government officials
said they needed the emergency powers to combat an insurgency by
U.S.-backed rebels, known as Contras.
    One new regulation was that any organization outside the government
wanting to make any statement public must first submit it to the
censorship bureau.
    The bureau, called the Office for Communications Media, is headed by
army Capt. Nelba Blandon.
    The same day the government issued the emergency decree, troops
entered the office of a monthly magazine called Iglesia, or Church,
which is part of the archbishopric of Managua.
    All employees were evicted, the doors sealed. Cardinal Miguel Obando
y Bravo, the archbishop of Managua, has not been permitted to enter
the office. Like most other prelates, Obando y Bravo has been a
strong critic of the Sandinista regime.
    Soon after that, Communications Media agents dressed in military
uniform entered the church station Radio Catolica and prevented it
from broadcasting homilies given by Obando y Bravo during a
pilgrimage he made around the country.
    The cardinal also must submit his Sunday sermons for censorship if
he wants them broadcast.
    Government spokesmen have accused the church leadership of being
''conservative'' or ''reactionary.'' But the latest steps have
affected leftist critics of the Sandinistas as well.
    The Communist and Socialist parties as well as the far-left Movement
for Popular Marxist-Leninist Action have charged that the government
is trying to stop their periodicals by denying them foreign exchange
needed to buy paper and ink from abroad.
    Hernandez, of the human rights commission, said repression has
increased in Nicaragua since the declaration of the state of
emergency.
    The October bulletin of the commission listed 78 detentions, mostly
of peasants from northern Nicaragua where combat is heaviest between
Sandinista forces and the Contra rebels.
    ''Repression has been felt most against the Catholic church and the
opposition political parties, since in the month of November alone we
received more than 200 denunciations of indiscriminate arrests
throughout the country, without the fate of those arrested being
known,'' Hernandez said.
    ''We have the impression that the government wants to close the
small spaces of liberty that still remain in Nicaragua by not
permitting criticism in any way,'' he said.
    Meanwhile, long-running friction continued between Nicaragua's only
opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and the Sandinistas, and the
government ordered the paper not to publish Saturday and Sunday.
    Publisher Jaime Chamorro recently sought an injunction from the
appeals court in Managua, saying Ms. Blandon threatened the daily's
editors with jail if they kept providing copies of censored material
to foreign diplomats and correspondents.
    Chamorro said Saturday he received a letter signed by Ms. Blandon
ordering the newspaper to close over the weekend. He said no
explanation was given, but he suspects it is over the issue of
distributing censored material.
    The government has closed La Prensa four times since 1982, including
the latest shutdown. On 28 other occasions the paper chose not to
publish to protest what it said was censorship of most of its news.
    
AP-NY-12-07-85 1750EST
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