Nicaraguan businessmen leave

Alfonso Robelo Callejas and a group of other Nicaraguan businessmen have gone into exile in Costa Rica, according to a business group in Managua.

Monitor Latin America correspondent James Nelson Goodsell writes that the businessmen's decision to leave may have been prompted by the growing number of opponents to Nicaragua's Sandinista government now gathering in Costa Rica. Just last week, Eden Pastora Gomez, the most popular hero of the Sandinista movement, surfaced in Costa Rica and declared his opposition to his former colleagues in the government.

In addition, a number of other former guerrillas who broke with the Sandinistas after they came to power in July 1979 have taken up residence in Costa Rica. They include the Chamorro brothers, distant cousins of the Chamorro publishing family, and at least six other former commanders in the guerrilla movement.

Mr. Robelo was a major figure in the Sandinista drive that forced the flight of the late dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. He then served nine months in the governing junta, but broke with the junta, claiming it had failed to live up to its goal of a pluralistic society, a mixed economy, and a nonaligned foreign policy.