Nicaragua’s Dual Hostage Dramas Near Peaceful Resolution : Central America: Rearmed Contras free last five captives, and Sandinista gunmen vow to do the same.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua —  A double-barreled hostage crisis that has gripped this country for nearly a week appeared to be coming to a peaceful end Wednesday as Contra rebels in northern Nicaragua freed their last prisoners and Sandinista gunmen in the capital promised to do the same.

After two days of negotiations led by Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, Nicaragua’s highest-ranking churchman, the rearmed Contras released their last five hostages, including two prominent Sandinista legislators.

In Managua, a commando unit of former Sandinista soldiers said they will free Vice President Virgilio Godoy and four other leading conservative politicians they have held since Friday. They were waiting for the arrival in Managua of the Sandinista hostages from the north.

It seemed likely that the leaders of both hostage-taking bands would go free. The Nicaraguan government has generally adopted a policy of amnesty for former combatants in the country’s brutal guerrilla war who have taken up arms again to press their political and economic causes.

At one time, the rival hostage-takers held nearly 80 people, plunging the besieged government of President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro into a crisis that underscored the bitter hatreds that still divide this country three years after the end of the war.

The hostage crisis came as Chamorro’s government has found itself increasingly isolated, attacked from both the left and the right over a range of issues, from its perceived failure to rescue Nicaraguans from poverty to its perceived failure to rein in a Sandinista-controlled military.

Despite the crisis, Chamorro left the country for Mexico on Wednesday. There, she will try to enlist the help of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as a go-between with the Clinton Administration to prevent a final cutoff of U.S. aid, a government official said. The aid is threatened because of suspicions over ties between Sandinista officials and international terrorists.

Antonio Lacayo, Chamorro’s son-in-law and powerful chief of staff, said he hopes that the kidnaping ordeal will shake Nicaraguans out of the deadly polarization that threatens the nation.

“These positions of violence, the use of force, of making demands with guns definitely cannot continue,” Lacayo told U.S. reporters. “It is one thing to say it philosophically, but it is another thing to see it can finish off not only the lives of important people but it can finish off a whole country.”

Lacayo, regarded as the real authority in Chamorro’s government, sought to portray a silver lining in the episode. He said the old enemies, mortified at the extremes of violence that the kidnapings represent, may now see no alternative but to work together.

“This slaps all of us in the face and forces us to see that if we don’t change the path we’re on . . . then the positions of violence are going to end up dominating the country,” he said.

Despite Lacayo’s optimism, there were ample signs that far from national unity, the long-term result of the kidnaping crisis may be an even more profound rupture of Nicaragua’s fractured society. Critics on the right are already accusing the Sandinista Front of masterminding the Managua kidnaping.

The chaos began last Thursday when the Contras, led by a fighter named Jose Angel Talavera, alias The Jackal, seized a government delegation that had traveled to Talavera’s remote mountain hide-out with an offer of amnesty. The Contras demanded the removal of Gen. Humberto Ortega, the Sandinista defense minister, and Lacayo, who is frequently accused of allowing Sandinista influence in the government. Gen. Ortega is the brother of Daniel Ortega, Chamorro’s predecessor as president.

In response, a band of gunmen led by a former major in the Sandinista People’s Army, Donald Mendoza, stormed the Managua headquarters of the largest opposition political party, seizing the vice president and other politicians. Mendoza vowed to hold his captives until Talavera released his.

The two bands of gunmen had been releasing their hostages gradually, but each retained its most important captives until Wednesday night. Godoy and legislator Alfredo Cesar, both outspoken conservatives, were in the hands of the Sandinista group, while two prominent Sandinista legislators, Doris Tijerino and Carlos Gallo, figured among the Contra group’s last captives.

During the last two days of negotiations, Talavera had asked the army to remain out of his area of operation while he released his final hostages, and it was likely that his group would fade back into the rugged countryside.

Mendoza asked to be transported to the northern area of Esteli to join other pro-Sandinista rebels.

Mendoza, who told reporters he has a wife and children in Los Angeles and wanted to visit them, called on Daniel Ortega to guarantee his safety.