Ortega Offers to Hold Early Vote in 1990

Nicaragua’s Sandinista leadership, under pressure from Central American neighbors to ease its tight control of the country, offered Monday to hold next year’s general elections at least nine months ahead of schedule.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega made the announcement in a closed meeting with the presidents of four other Central American countries here. He told them that the voting scheduled for November, 1990, will instead take place within the first months of next year.

Manuel Espinoza, the Nicaraguan minister of information, who briefed reporters, said the offer was a “gesture of our intentions to comply in full” with a 1987 Central American peace accord that helped disarm the U.S.-backed rebellion by Contras against Sandinista rule.

Details Still Unclear

Espinoza said that Ortega first raised the possibility of early elections in private meetings with opposition political parties in Managua last week and that details are still to be negotiated.

“The only thing that could upset this plan is if the opposition parties do not go along,” Espinoza said.

The voting will be for president, vice president, a 96-member National Assembly and, for the first time in Nicaragua, municipal councils.

The Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinate, the principal Nicaraguan opposition group, criticized the offer as insufficient but did not reject it outright. More important, they said, is that the government first meet their demands for reforms that would ease Sandinista control of the army, the press and the electoral process.

“If elections are held only to legitimize the party in power, then it does not matter when they take place,” said Carlos Huembes, president of the dissident coalition.

The Sandinistas came to power in a guerrilla insurrection in 1979 and first held elections in November, 1984. Ortega won a six-year presidential term, defeating six other candidates. The Democratic Coordinate boycotted the vote, saying that the rules favored the Sandinistas.

Under the peace accord signed 18 months ago, Central American leaders agreed to try to halt guerrilla wars through democratic reforms that would guarantee free elections. The two-day summit that opened Monday is considered a last-ditch attempt to save the pact from failure.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, author of the agreement, is trying to use the summit to oblige the Sandinista government to ease its political control of Nicaragua and the Salvadoran authorities to reconsider a guerrilla proposal that presidential elections be postponed so that the rebels can take part.

But Arias received a setback when El Salvador refused to discuss the guerrilla proposal here. “The battle is going to be hard,” one Costa Rican official commented during a break in the meeting.

Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, thinned by his fight against liver cancer, opened the summit in a palm-shaded beachfront hotel in this Pacific coastal village. It was his fourth meeting since May, 1986, with Arias, Ortega and Presidents Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo of Guatemala and Jose Azcona Hoyo of Honduras.

With Duarte’s term due to expire in June, and Azcona and Arias to leave office within a year after that, this is expected to be the final gathering of the agreement’s five signers.

“Whoever succeeds us will be less committed to the peace plan than we are,” Arias said before traveling to El Zapote. “That is why we must make a great effort to reach important agreements that will restore the Central American people’s faith that we can soon achieve peace.”

Truce Talks in 3 Conflicts

The 1987 accord led to cease-fire negotiations in the region’s three guerrilla conflicts. Those talks broke down quickly in El Salvador and Guatemala. But in the case of Nicaragua, the talks prompted the U.S. Congress to cut off military aid to the Contras a year ago and led to a truce last March.

Further talks aimed at a final Nicaraguan peace treaty collapsed last June, however, when the Contras accused the Sandinistas of evading their obligations under the regional pact to allow amnesty for political prisoners, press freedom and “total political pluralism.”

Most Contras have since withdrawn to border camps in Honduras, keeping that U.S. ally in violation of a clause in the accord that bars any government from harboring guerrillas trying to oust another government.

Differences over how to untangle the peace process have delayed the summit three times since August. Apparently to minimize public friction, the presidents canceled a series of pre-summit press conferences. At at a brief photo session, only Duarte spoke, expressing vague “optimism” about “favorable conditions for peace.”

Rebels Pledge Restraint

Leftist Salvadoran guerrillas promised to observe a truce during the summit, but the U.S.-backed army did not follow suit and posted a large contingent of soldiers around the meeting site 40 miles southeast of the capital.

Arias is seeking to focus the summit on two issues, one involving El Salvador and the other involving Nicaragua.

In El Salvador, the issue is a rebel proposal to delay scheduled March 19 elections by six months so that electoral guarantees can be worked out for the rebels and their supporters. The rebels have yet to take part in any voting during their nine-year-old war.

Arias met with two Salvadoran rebel leaders before coming to El Zapote and held talks Sunday night with Duarte. A Costa Rican official said that Arias urged Duarte to consider the rebel proposal “as a basis for new peace negotiations” but that Duarte maintained his opposition. Salvadoran Foreign Minister Ricardo Acevedo Peralta told reporters that the issue is “an internal matter” with no place on the summit agenda.

Indeed, the Associated Press reported that El Salvador’s defense minister, Gen. Carlos Vides Casanova, warned of a coup if Duarte agrees to postpone the election.

“If the president retains power beyond the end of his term, the armed forces would be obliged to depose him--either the armed forces or the legislative assembly,” Vides was quoted as saying.

Push for Concessions

The other issue involves efforts by Arias, Duarte and Azcona to push Nicaragua into what they call “democratic concessions” that would satisfy the Bush Administration, bring the seven-year-old Contra war to a formal end and ease regional tensions.

As in previous summits, Ortega came ready to negotiate. Besides announcing early elections, he offered to free about 3,150 political prisoners if Honduras accepts his proposal that it disarm the Contras and dismantle their border camps.

Arias recently said he expects more of the Sandinistas. He has called for abolishing their press censorship powers, giving anti-Sandinista groups a television station and rewriting the 1988 election law to dilute the ruling party’s advantages. Contra leaders have urged Arias to go even further and demand an elected assembly to rewrite Nicaragua’s constitution.

More important to Ortega, who is seeking to normalize relations with the United States, is how each country’s steps toward democracy under the peace accord will be judged for outsiders.

On Monday, he asked the other presidents to allow the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, an arm of the Organization of American States, to report every three months on each country’s record. He also asked that the OAS and the United Nations send observers to monitor elections in each country.