Sandinistas’ Intentions All Too Clear : Their ‘Concessions’ Are Aimed at Congress and Beating Contra Vote

With peace in Central America and the future of the Arias plan at stake, the forthcoming vote in Congress on aid to the Contras promises to be the most critical.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, skilled in manipulation of both the American media and Congress, has waited until the last minute to make what appears to be significant concessions. He has finally agreed to direct negotiations with the Contras, the lifting of the state of emergency and a general amnesty.

The message that has been presented by the Sandinistas within Nicaragua, however, has made their own true intentions all too clear.

In a speech given to Sandinista party militants last Friday, Commandante Bayardo Arce, head of the party apparatus, condemned the internal civic opposition to the Sandinistas as “marionettes of imperialism.”

Informing the party cadre that if the democratic opponents “go straight . . . we will receive them with a pardon,” Arce made it clear that the Sandinistas had no plans to ever honor Ortega’s recent promise to move into an opposition role if the ruling party ever lost an election. The Sandinistas “will never turn over power because we won’t usurp the right of the people,” Arce said.

On the previous day Arce called out the party’s goon squads--the so-called turbas , or “divine mobs”--to throw rocks and create havoc at a scheduled opposition meeting.

In addition, the Ministry of the Interior arrested and briefly held a group of major opponents of the Sandinistas on the charge that they were forming an internal Contra front.

Some observers have posited a division between President Ortega and hard-liners like Arce and Interior Minister Tomas Borge. If a division exists, it is slim.

Recently Ortega himself accused the internal opposition of trying to forge a Contra front. He branded them all as conservatives, and said that Nicaragua’s “new society” had no need for “rightists.” Moreover, in support of the mob activity, Ortega has called it a legitimate defense by the revolution against its enemies.

“If the opposition parties can demonstrate and insult us,” he said to me last November, “we can respond to them with our own counter-demonstrations.” Of course, the turbas are not spontaneous outbursts of revolutionary fervor, but are carefully controlled shock forces of the state security apparatus that are bused in government vehicles to places like the offices of the democratic opposition, where they attack opponents with clubs and spread terror and fear.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez’s fear, expressed last fall to a delegation from New York City, was that “we may soon see the communist government of Nicaragua using force against workers, students, peasants and intellectuals.” Recent events have proved the accuracy of his prediction.

Contrary to Ortega’s assertion that the Sandinista Front’s opponents are all from the right, the democratic coalition opposing the Sandinistas covers the political spectrum from business interests to trade-union leaders and even to Nicaragua’s old-line communists. The head of one communist-controlled trade union put it this way: “The Sandinistas have achieved the impossible. They have united the opposition against them and turned the popular classes into supporters of the right.”

It was a candid acknowledgment that the very popular forces that supported the revolution of 1979 have turned against the ruling Sandinistas, whom they regard as a group that has given them a roaring 1,800% inflation, a mismanaged economy and political repression.

If the Sandinistas have moved a slight bit, it is only because of the pressure exerted by the growing military and political success of the Contras. The passage of some form of Contra aid--primarily humanitarian, with lethal aid held in escrow for a brief period--is actually a precondition for the type of negotiated solution favored by Arias.

Once a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement are in effect, lethal aid to the Contras should come to a halt. But if Sandinista compliance fails, military aid should then be resumed. Otherwise the Sandinistas will have gained their only desired end, the cessation of Contra funding, without having implemented meaningful steps toward democratization.

Liberal Democrats who call for an end to any aid to the Contras, and who favor in its place negotiations toward a security treaty with Nicaragua, act as if the demands of the Nicaraguan people for liberty should not be our concern. They would make the same mistake with Ortega that their predecessors made with Anastasio Somoza.

The issue is clear. Ortega’s last-minute “concessions” indicate that the Sandinistas have but one goal: to force the cessation of the Contra war, after which they will consolidate their power, crush the internal opposition and cement their military and political ties with the Soviet Union.

Is it wrong to fear that having funded the Contras just as they have evolved into a popular insurgency, Congress will abandon them out of a misguided belief that peace is being served in Central America?