March 14, 1987

LEAD: President Leon Febres Cordero said today that ''without shame'' his country had suspended payments on its $8.3 billion foreign debt for the rest of the year and possibly longer.

LEAD: The British opened the nation's first toad tunnel under the lethal Henley roadway here today just in time for the mating season.

LEAD: Chernobyl Prosecutions Those reponsible for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster will go on trial soon in Kiev, a Soviet official said. Page 6.

LEAD: The Air Force and Fairchild Industries announced today that they had canceled their contract for the T-46A training plane. The decision will result in the closing of the Fairchild Republic Company's plant in Farmingdale, L.I., by the end of the year, the company said, eliminating more than 2,500 jobs.

LEAD: A novel chronicling Stalin's terror, ''Children of the Arbat,'' has been excerpted in a Soviet weekly magazine 20 years after its author first tried to bring his painful subject to a Soviet audience.

LEAD: John Gotti was acquitted of Federal racketeering and conspiracy charges yesterday in the Government's first major setback in its recent assault on organized crime.

LEAD: Jan Christiaan Heunis did not seem quite at ease in his makeshift election office on the main street here, far from his spacious offices in the Union Buildings, Pretoria's administrative seat of Government.

LEAD: Many lawyers and prosecutors who followed events in the seven-month trial of John Gotti said the underlying weakness of the prosecution's case was its apparent reliance on turncoat career criminals as key witnesses against Mr. Gotti and six co-defendants.

LEAD: A Federal appeals court today reversed a $2 million judgment against The Washington Post, ruling that a 1979 article in The Post did not libel William P. Tavoulareas, former president of the Mobil Oil Corporation.

LEAD: INTERNATIONAL 2-6 Ecuador has suspended payments on its foreign debt for the remainder of the year and possibly longer because last week's earthquake has halted oil exports, President Leon Febres Cordero said. Page 1 A church-state conflict in Chile was made less intense when the Roman Catholic hierarchy backed away from a bishop's charge that the regime of Gen.

LEAD: Senator Sam Nunn said today that the Reagan Administration should declassify the negotiating record on the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty so the public could evaluate the Administration's assertion that the agreement would allow ''Star Wars'' testing.

LEAD: ''I first have to reconstruct my country before I start paying debts.'' - President Leon Febres Cordero of Ecuador. [ 1:1. ]