Sandinista Foe Wins Fight to Emigrate

One of the Sandinista government’s harshest legislative critics left Nicaragua as a political refugee Friday after a nine-month asylum in the Venezuelan Embassy.

Felix Pedro Espinoza, a wealthy cattleman who was elected as a Conservative to the National Assembly, boarded a flight to Panama, en route to Caracas, with a safe-conduct pass from the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry.

Espinoza, 45, took refuge in the embassy last July 15 after the government accused him of hiring two men to burn his ranch house to make him appear a victim of Sandinista harassment.

He denied the charge but was stripped of his assembly seat, convicted by a court and sentenced to five years in prison.

Members of his party said the government let Espinoza go to avoid embarrassment at a meeting of the World Inter-Parliamentary Union scheduled to be held in Managua this month. A human rights panel of the 115-nation body had agreed to study his case here.

The Foreign Ministry confirmed his departure without comment.

Espinoza belonged to a five-member faction of the Conservative Party that fully opposed the leftist course of Sandinista rule. He clashed vigorously with Sandinista legislators in opposing a land redistribution program, press censorship and the military draft.

Foes of the government point to the Espinoza affair as proof that its stated commitment to pluralist parliamentary democracy is a sham.

By appointing a pro-Sandinista deputy to replace him in the assembly, the government deprived the hard-line Conservative faction of the number of signatures needed to introduce legislation.

The Sandinistas hold 61 of the 90 seats in the one-house assembly. It was convened in 1985 after an election that was denounced as unfair and boycotted by three major opposition parties.

Six parties from the Conservatives to the Marxist left ran against the Sandinistas and have used the assembly to voice dissent. But they have never been able to divide the Sandinista bloc or seriously challenge the government’s programs.

Espinoza said he suspected Sandinista sympathizers of setting the fire at his ranch last May 10, trying to drive him to bankruptcy as punishment for his dissent.

Before a Sandinista-led parliamentary panel voted to strip him of his immunity to stand trial, the lawmaker scaled the fence around the Venezuelan compound and slipped into the building.

The Venezuelan government supported his bid for political asylum, and its vice foreign minister, German Nava Carillo, made a personal appeal here to President Daniel Ortega in January to let the lawmaker leave the country.