New Freedoms--and Hardships : Contra War Changing Life for Nicaraguans

As the U.S. Congress nears a decision on the fate of the Contras, their insurgency is changing Nicaragua. In nearly seven years of fighting, Nicaraguans say they have never endured so much hardship or enjoyed so much freedom as they do today.

Since New Year’s, a string of war-related circumstances has hit the country with severe shortages of gasoline and electricity. The squeeze is being felt as the Sandinista government lifts restrictions on civil liberties in an effort to persuade Congress to cut off aid to the rebels.

Switchboards Closed

Managua, long a scene of wartime bleakness, is plunging into unpredictable blackness. With the conflict still fought in distant jungles, electricity is being rationed here in the capital for the first time, but the power cuts rarely take place as scheduled. For as many as five hours a day, blackouts shut down factories, water pumps and telephone switchboards in different parts of the city.

Night games of baseball, the national sport, have been canceled for the season. Intestinal disease is spreading as Managuans drink stagnant water saved in barrels. People abandon their work to inch their cars along in all-day lines for five gallons of gasoline, the maximum purchase allowed.

Nicaraguans are exhausted, tense and bitter over these deprivations, yet freer than ever to blame the government.

“Things have never been so depressing here,” Sonia Berrios, a 50-year-old secretary, said the other day as she waited to buy gasoline. “The Sandinistas promised us something better and didn’t deliver. Unless they change their program of government, nothing will stop this chaos.”

Such complaints are echoed in the strident headlines of La Prensa, the opposition newspaper that was allowed to reopen Oct. 1, and by three popular anti-Sandinista radio stations just authorized to broadcast news and commentary.

By lifting a six-year-old state of emergency last month, the Sandinistas also gave the unarmed civic opposition freedom to organize, demonstrate and strike. By law, political prisoners may no longer be held without charge for more than three days or be hauled before so-called revolutionary people’s tribunals, which convicted 90% of those tried.

The new freedoms are far from being tested, however, and they appear to have created conflict within the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front. The climate of liberalization is now overshadowed by the threat of a new political crackdown and a war-induced economic collapse in the event of renewed U.S. support for the Contras.

Indeed, the vote set for today in the House of Representatives and for Thursday in the Senate is awaited with suspense here, by both the government and its foes, as a watershed event in a conflict that has cost more than 25,000 lives.

The Contras depend heavily on U.S. military aid, and the vote is the clearest test of that support since mid-1986. If the aid is cut off, most observers here believe, the rebels would be hard pressed to find similar assistance elsewhere, and their 10,000-man force would be greatly reduced and lose the initiative it has gained on the battlefield over the last year.

“We are living the most important moment in our history since the triumph of the Sandinista revolution,” said Rafael Solis, a Sandinista lawmaker in the National Assembly. “We are either about to achieve peace in Nicaragua or peace is about to vanish like a ghost and not reappear for many years.”

Support Eroding

The Sandinistas enjoyed broad popularity in 1979, when they overthrew the American-backed government of dictator Anastasio Somoza and installed a revolutionary government inspired largely by Marxist-Leninist ideals. But their attempt to impose state control of the economy under single-party rule has eroded their support and fed the insurgency.

Under military and diplomatic pressure, the party has shown flexibility. In recent years it turned many state collective farms over to peasants as private property and granted a degree of autonomy to rebellious Indian communities on the Caribbean coast. In some rural war zones, the standard school textbooks that exalt Sandinista organizations have been abandoned.

More significant is the political opening now being offered by the Sandinistas in compliance with a Central American peace agreement that seeks to end the region’s guerrilla wars with the promise of democracy.

Since President Daniel Ortega signed the accord last August, 14 political parties and four labor federations have formed the broadest anti-Sandinista bloc ever in order to challenge the ruling party’s control of the army, judiciary and electoral process.

Coalition Holding

The government has refused to submit the coalition’s proposed constitutional reforms to the assembly. It has failed in efforts to divide the coalition, which includes a conservative businessmen’s council as well as the Communist and Socialist parties.

To the Sandinistas’ frustration, most opposition leaders have used their new freedom to question the government’s long-term commitment to democracy rather than take a stand against U.S. aid to the Contras.

“The Sandinistas are making these concessions under enormous military and diplomatic pressure, not because they are real democrats,” Enrique Bolanos, president of the businessmen’s council, said in an interview. “Everything they have given can be taken back once the pressure is off.”

Won’t Relinquish Power

The opposition has reason to question the Sandinistas’ good faith. The day Ortega wrote to President Reagan last month promising to give up power if defeated in an election, Bayardo Arce, a member of the all-powerful Sandinista directorate, told a political rally that the Sandinistas are the “people’s vanguard” and therefore “will never turn over power.”

Arce asked the crowd of tens of thousands of Sandinista supporters, who had been bused to Managua’s Revolution Plaza with scarce fuel, whether they accepted the opposition’s constitutional demands. “Nooooo!” came the collective reply. “Then the constitution will not be reformed,” Arce declared.

As Ortega was lifting the state of emergency, policemen sent by Interior Minister Tomas Borge arrested 12 opposition leaders for having met abroad with Contra representatives. Days later, a rock-throwing Sandinista gang broke up a peaceful rally of people demanding amnesty for their imprisoned relatives.

These events have given the appearance of a split in the nine-man directorate between Ortega, who publicly supports the peace accord’s formula for national reconciliation within a pluralist system, and hard-liners like Arce and Borge, who often speak as if the peace process is doomed.

Ortega Under Pressure

Many diplomats and critics of the Sandinistas believe that Ortega has kept the directorate formally committed, for now, to the peace accord but is coming under strong pressure to reimpose emergency rule if Congress approves more aid to the Contras.

Ortega himself has given mixed signals about what would happen in that case. In an interview last month, he promised new restrictions, including censorship of La Prensa. But in a later interview he said that would not necessarily happen.

Guillermo Jimenez, a 22-year-old Sandinista army veteran who heads the national student federation, described two currents of thinking in the ranks of the ruling party.

“The challenge of the opposition has energized the Sandinista front, and that is good for the country,” he said in an interview. “But rightist groups have taken advantage of this while supporting the Contra war. Theirs is a treasonous attitude that no government in the world can tolerate.”

Although no anti-Sandinista politician dares to voice support for the rebels, many are perceived by the ruling party as pro-Contra because they refused to speak out against U.S. aid to the Contras. The more important issue, opposition leaders say, is what Nicaraguans want, not how Washington votes.

Returing to Normal

“It will be difficult for the Sandinistas to carry out their threats,” said Mauricio Diaz, an opposition assemblyman, “because politically, despite all our troubles, the country is returning to a normal course. People think of La Prensa as a necessity, and the Sandinistas are learning to absorb its blows. The real test of their democratic vocation will come if the Contras do get more aid.”

One such trial will come in the courts. Borge’s security police, who interrogate suspected rebel supporters, can now be challenged by writs of habeas corpus if they do not free them or take them before a judge within 72 hours of arrest.

Judges, in turn, have 20 days to try anyone charged under the security law, including 740 cases transferred from the just-abolished people’s tribunals. The cases involve nearly half of the 3,300 political prisoners the government says it is holding.

Deadlines Suspended

The deadlines were suspended under the state of emergency, and civil rights lawyers have been slow to react since it was lifted Jan. 20. Nicaragua’s opposition human rights commission says it will file the first 70 writs this week on behalf of prisoners held too long without a charge being brought against them.

Borge told reporters recently that Nicaragua’s legal curbs on the police are “the most restrictive in the world” but promised to heed them, even though they will “evidently affect the quality of investigations.”

In an early test case involving the Sandinista army, six detained activists of the Social Christian Party were denied their day in court. Seized en route to an opposition rally, the young men were inducted into military service. When their lawyer attempted to get them tried for draft evasion instead, a judge refused to intervene.

Power of Arms, Law

“In a democratic atmosphere the principle of legality is all-important, but in Nicaragua the power of arms is much stronger than the power of the law,” said Alberto Saborria, president of the Nicaraguan Bar Assn.

Supreme Court President Alejandro Serrano insisted in an interview that the judiciary is “making important efforts toward institutional normality in a climate of war.” But he said that new Contra aid will “stimulate the war and undermine everything.”

A potentially more volatile challenge, sparked by the country’s economic crisis, is emerging from the ranks of organized labor.

Leaders of the four opposition union federations, which group a third of the organized labor force, plan a march next week to press demands for an end to government wage controls and to special privileges for Sandinista-led unions. If that does not work, they say, they might call an unprecedented anti-Sandinista general strike.

Workers Protest Wages

Last week, hundreds of construction workers marched on the Labor Ministry demanding a ten-fold increase in their 20-cent daily wage, eroded by price increases averaging 50% a month.

With hyper-inflation fueled by deficit spending on defense and production crippled by the army’s manpower requirements, the Sandinistas say they cannot begin to rescue the economy until the Contras go away.

Nicaragua’s chief benefactor, the Soviet Union, froze current non-military aid levels by agreeing last month to send $300 million over the next three years. The Soviets have resumed crude oil shipments, after the year-end shortage that is still being felt, but refused to increase them to cover Managua’s growing war needs.

To the beleaguered populace, officials blame electricity shortages on Contra bombings of power installations and breakdowns of aging generators for which proper spare parts can no longer be acquired because of a three-year-old U.S. embargo.

‘Yankee Aggression’

But Nicaraguans are increasingly unwilling to accept “Yankee aggression” as the only explanation for their woes. “The workers are suffering, but the comandantes at the top don’t have any problems,” said Rolando Velazquez, a construction union organizer.

The Sandinistas have yet to prove they can manage serious economic discontent without emergency powers. But the power of organized labor is eroding along with real wages as workers quit their jobs to become black market merchants. Even so, a march in November by dissident union activists forced the government to pay a Christmas bonus it had threatened to cancel.

“We are not asking the Sandinistas to disappear,” said Socialist labor leader Carlos Salgado. “We are just warning that unless all political sectors confront this crisis together, the government might fall without any help from the Contras.”