Nicaraguan Police Break Up Skirmish Between Sandinistas and Foes After March

Riot police intervened Sunday to separate dozens of Sandinista and opposition activists who rushed at each other in downtown Leon after a march by 1,200 people seeking the Sandinista government’s electoral defeat.

Nobody was injured or arrested in the few brief skirmishes that occurred, but the incident was a sign that the campaign for national elections next February could be as physical as it is political.

Leon, 53 miles northwest of Managua, was a guerrilla stronghold during the Sandinista-led uprising that toppled the dictatorship of President Anastasio Somoza. The leftist Sandinista Front, which is marking its 10th anniversary in power this month, and the 14-party National Opposition Union had police permits to march along different routes of the city’s cobblestone streets to separate destinations.

The confrontation started when dozens of young Sandinistas strayed from their route and fell in step behind the opposition parade, taunting the marchers.

“We won power with arms in our hands, so we have a right to these streets,” said a 25-year-old Sandinista combat veteran who identified himself only as Manuel. “We are here to repudiate these people, who are trying to deceive the people and bring back Somocismo (the Somoza dictatorship) . “

“What is the vanguard of the people?” chanted Manuel and his companions. “The Sandinista Front!”

But the opposition marchers kept moving, livened by brass bands, firecrackers and insults against the Sandinistas at their heels. “What do the people want?” they shouted. “For the front to go away!”

A brief scuffle erupted when a young woman in the opposition camp tried to grab a red-and-black Sandinista banner, but security people on both sides kept order until the marchers reached a Gothic-style Roman Catholic church at the end of the mile-long route.

There, in the 91-degree midday heat, groups of 50 to 100 people on each side charged at each other until helmeted Sandinista police with shields and clubs intervened. Capt. Ernesto Cuadra, the police chief in Leon, intervened personally to stop at least two fistfights and finally ordered the Sandinista militants to withdraw.

Then, at the urging of the police, an opposition organizer used a police car megaphone to instruct anti-government marchers to withdraw, and both crowds slowly dispersed.

Violent harassment by Sandinista gangs known as turbas marred the 1984 election campaign, prompting the largest opposition coalition to withdraw. Duilio Baltodano, a leader of Sunday’s march, said the return of the turbas shows that the Sandinistas “don’t have the political will to respect the electoral process.”

But another opposition leader, Ulises Somarriba, declared that the marchers had won a victory because “the Sandinistas tried to run us off the streets or to provoke violence, but they failed.”