Divided on Sandinistas : Nicaragua’s Rich: Many Are Staying

The well-to-do have always been a small minority in agricultural Nicaragua, and since the Sandinistas came to power there are even fewer of them.

As would be expected in a revolution dedicated to redistributing the wealth, most of the landowners, members of the business elite and American-educated professionals have left the country.

But a surprisingly large number of upper- and middle-class people have not left. As much as a third of Nicaragua’s elite may still be in the country--some by necessity, some by conviction. The diversity of opinion among those who remain is equally remarkable.

No Means of Support

Some of those who oppose the Sandinistas say they had wanted to leave with their friends and relatives for Miami or Costa Rica but that they did not have the means to support themselves in another country.

Other opponents of the nearly six-year-old government say they believe they should fight for power within the country, rather than abandon it as they feel the Cuban elite did when Fidel Castro came to power in Havana.

But also, many of those who remain from the upper classes enthusiastically support the goals of the Sandinistas and have given up much of their wealth and joined the government.

Many of the well-to-do families are deeply divided. The political convictions they all express are as strong as their will to survive in tense, scarcity-ridden Nicaragua.

Miguel Vijil earned $100,000 during his last year in private enterprise before the Sandinista-led overthrow of the Somoza family dynasty in 1979. Vijil, a civil engineer who managed a large agricultural chemicals company, built a 6,000-square-foot home for his family that was paid for by the time it was completed.

Today, Vijil is a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the ruling party, and is minister of housing, earning less each year in salary than he paid annually in taxes before the revolution. Now he builds housing for the poor, is responsible for expropriating undeveloped lands from the rich and manages the seized properties.

‘A Worthy Cause Now’

“If you ask me if I lived better then than now, I say it depends on how you look at things,” Vijil said. “I am working for a worthy cause now. It means I have fewer material things, but I willingly left all that behind for what we are working for, a new society and a new country,” he said.

Vijil still owns one-sixth of a construction company. But he gave a $50,000 farm to the agrarian reform program, and his brother-in-law lives in the fancy house.

Vijil, 47, a graduate of the Catholic University of America in Washington, speaks fluent English and dresses in American-style casual clothes: beige slacks, an eggshell polo shirt and Hush Puppies.

The father of six said he began to feel dissatisfied with the good life on his 40th birthday. “We had a party at the house and I remember at one point telling Pinita, my wife, that I felt my life had been wasted.”

Not long after that, in 1978, La Prensa newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquin Chamorro was killed by the National Guard of dictator Anastasio Somoza. Vijil, along with many of the country’s businessmen, joined the effort to force Somoza out of power. United with the Sandinista guerrilla army, they overthrew Somoza on July 19, 1979.

It was not long, however, before many of the businessmen, including Vijil’s former friend and post-revolution junta member Alfonso Robelo, parted ways with the Sandinistas. Robelo has joined the anti-Sandinista rebels known as contras who are fighting a border war from Costa Rica against the government. Vijil’s son is a Sandinista soldier.

“Things began to pull apart when people realized that the revolution was not just a change in the people in power, but of the structure. That is what a revolution is. Otherwise it would just be a coup d’etat, “ Vijil said.

“There was a separation. When you work together, but at a 30-degree angle, when you begin to move ahead, you move apart and gradually you get farther and farther apart.”

Andres Zuniga said he acquired his rebelliousness in the United States, where he studied in Mississippi and Missouri from 1955 to 1960.

A microbiologist, Zuniga returned to Nicaragua to run a laboratory that his father bought for him. He criticized the country’s health care system and spoke out against the Somoza regime.

For his protests, Zuniga recalls, he spent the last month of Somoza’s rule in jail, tortured every four days by members of “a brutal, illiterate army.”

He was released from jail after Somoza fled the country and the Sandinistas took power. But today Zuniga is still protesting.

As president of the Confederation of Professional Assns. of Nicaragua and vice president of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise, Zuniga dedicates 12 to 14 hours a day to his opposition to the Sandinista government.

“In Nicaragua, most professionals are just subsisting biologically. As (Sandinista) Cmdr. Bayardo Arce said himself, . . . private enterprise no longer controls the banks, the currency, imports, exports, prices,” Zuniga said.

No Foreign Investment

“No one invests, therefore we are just subsisting. No one is stupid enough to invest and there is no foreign investment either,” he said.

Zuniga, 47, and his colleagues in the business groups spend much of their time in interviews with reporters, U.S. congressmen, religious groups and others in the steady array of foreigners who come to see what is going on in Nicaragua.

The economy is in shambles, Zuniga says. Gasoline is rationed and many foods are hard to find. Because there is no foreign exchange, there are no spare parts for imported automobiles or machinery, no chemicals for his laboratory. Land and businesses have been expropriated and many of his friends have left the country.

But Zuniga says he will remain to fight from within.

“We decided to stay because that is the only way to fight and resist the imposition of a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian government,” Zuniga said. “It is our duty to be here.”

This is the third time that Dr. Roberto Calderon has had to decide whether to leave Nicaragua. The first time was after the 1972 earthquake that, in seconds, killed 20,000 people, left 600,000 homeless and destroyed all of the hospitals in Managua.

Calderon chose to stay.

The second decision came just before the start of the full-scale war against Somoza. Calderon’s children, three of whom were born in the United States while he was a medical student there, felt that they could not get an education amid the repression and conflict and decided to leave.

But, again, Calderon stayed.

And now that the Sandinistas have formed what he calls an “immature” government, with the economy “a complete mess” and the country at war with the contras, Calderon is choosing, once more, to stay.

“Three weeks ago, I was at a conference in Chicago and considering a job proposal,” he said. “But every time I go to the United States, I realize that you have thousands of radiologists who do what I can do, while in my country I can count on one hand those who do what I do. It would be a crime for me to go.”

Contradictions Abound

Living in Nicaragua now is “like driving in a street where you have no faith in the traffic lights,” he said. Confusion and contradictions abound.

“The fact is, you wouldn’t find a proper name legally or politically for this government. There is no way to encase it because there are so many contradictions. The closest you could get to a name is to designate it the biggest disorganization you have ever seen,” he said.

More than anything, he said, he wants definitions, to know where the country is going and what the rules of the game are.

For example, he said, “The law of the land is that the national money is the cordoba and it is approved by authorities at an official price (28 to the dollar).

“But then Telcor (the telephone company) decides by itself that the cost of the cordoba is 9,000 to the dollar. How do they do that? To make a call to Miami is 9,000 cordoba every minute. A normal call to Miami used to cost $2.50 to $3 (for three minutes). That means the cordoba is being valued at 9,000 to the dollar.”

Health care and education are definitely improving under the Sandinistas, Calderon said. They are building schools, increasing housing and water supplies and are supplying vaccinations to many people.

But then there are more contradictions.

“Supposedly, anyone can go to the university, provided you have academic requirements because now it is democratic. But, once there, you may find you have the highest grades, but if you haven’t accumulated enough political ‘points,’ there is no way you can register,” he said.

“So students realize the way to make it is not to get a book and study but to do political activities,’ he said.

Calderon, 59, has a private practice and also works twice a week at the military hospital. He said he still lives well but, like all Nicaraguans, he has been forced to conserve and in some cases to do without.

Calderon attributes many of the government’s mistakes to the leaders’ youth and inexperience.

“You pay a price for whatever you do in life and even to learn, you pay something--which is age and time. For knowing, you have to get older and mature,” he said.

Before the revolution, Virginia Blandon said, 5% of the families controlled 75% of the economic activity of the country. Her husband’s family was one of them.

She had attended Roman Catholic high school and junior college in the United States, then returned to Nicaragua to work as one of the best-paid executive secretaries in the country.

“Then I married Pedro Antonio, who had a name and money and was from an old exporting family from Leon,” she said. “Pedro Antonio’s grandfather was minister of education under Somoza. The two were Masons together.”

The Blandons had a beautiful home and a BMW automobile and took shopping trips to Miami. Their family assets, which Pedro Antonio managed, included cattle ranches, cotton farms and an interest in one of the country’s two largest financial groups.

Today, most of their wealth belongs to the Sandinista government, for which Pedro Antonio Blandon works and which Virginia Blandon wholeheartedly supports. About half of the economy is in government hands now.

Questions on Conscience

Long before the revolution, Blandon said, her conscience bothered her and she immersed herself in charity work to try to compensate for her lavish way of life.

In the late 1960s, the Blandons joined a revivalist Christian church that she said helped them to see the social injustices in the country. The Blandons tried to improve social conditions by improving the pay and housing of their employees, which numbered 300 at peak harvest periods.

In 1974, by then the mother of three children, Blandon entered the university in Leon, where she studied law and met Sandinista youths. Her religion, her university education and her contact with the students converted her politically, she recalls.

Blandon began to participate in marches and demonstrations and she wrote letters to newspapers protesting the killing of students by government security forces.

By 1976, the Sandinistas were talking to the private sector, and her husband and her brother, Miguel Vijil, began to participate in the dialogue.

The Blandons’ activism increased with the killing of newspaper publisher Chamorro.

“We were shocked,” she said. “Until that moment, Somoza had respected our class. Then we knew we really were vulnerable.”

After that, the Blandons decided to support the insurgents and helped to smuggle arms into the country from Honduras.

Hiding in Honduras

Six weeks before Somoza fell, the police came looking for her husband, Virginia Blandon said, but he hid in the home of another anti-Somocista, as those opposing the government were called. She was seven months pregnant with her fourth child when they fled the country to Honduras, where they stayed until the Sandinistas triumphed.

Several of Pedro Antonio Blandon’s brothers were among their contemporaries who left the country after the Sandinistas came to power.

“It’s one thing to support a movement when it doesn’t touch your money,” she said. “It’s another thing when they say you have to divide up your farm.”

The Blandons, she said, turned over to the government a new ranch house, their 230 acres of the family ranch, plus the holdings in the companies that the government confiscated.

But they still live in a nice house with a maid, and their children are in private schools. Pedro Antonio Blandon is a vice minister in the Ministry of Foreign Corporations, and she works for an international human rights organization that works to resettle refugees.

She is a petite, feisty woman who wears shirtdresses and espadrilles and moves easily back and forth from English to Spanish. She is idealistic and nationalistic and tenses with outrage when she says that President Reagan has no right to tell her country how it should be run.

In addition to her job and family, she studies French once a week and has a religious discussion group once a week and a Marxist reading group once every two weeks.

She spends many evenings with her husband representing the government at receptions in Western embassies here and participating in Sandinista activities.

New Government, New Woes

But her commitment to the new government also has produced distress. She sleeps lightly, she said, listening for her diabetic daughter and worrying that the Reagan Administration’s trade embargo will prevent her from getting insulin from the United States.

Blandon said she has written a letter opposing the Roman Catholic Church as a mediator between the Sandinistas and the contras and, as a result, her mother will not speak to her. Blandon, like her government, believes that any negotiations should be with the United States, not the contras, and she does not believe that the church is neutral in the dispute.

In January, her 16-year-old son, already a reservist, will be eligible to be drafted into the army.

“For me, a negotiated settlement with the United States means the life of my son,” Blandon said quietly.

But is she willing to let her son fight to defend the government?

She nodded, with tears rolling down her cheeks.