Gearing Up for Nicaragua Election : Life After the Contras--Push for Opposition Unity

In this northern province that was once a Contra stronghold, 30 farmers and merchants sympathetic to the guerrilla cause gathered one evening around a blackboard to hear a new strategy for ousting the Sandinista government.

The meeting in the tool repair shed of an anti-Sandinista politician was part of a drive to train a force of opposition poll watchers, about as large as the rebel army, for the Nicaraguan elections next Feb. 25.

“This is where the Sandinistas are preparing to steal the election,” declared the instructor, Fanor Avendano Soza, pointing to the base of a pyramid-shaped sketch of the electoral system and its 4,000 or more polling stations. “This is where we have to stop them. But people like you have to be at every poll and know how to use the law.

“This is a historic opportunity,” the Christian Democratic lawyer from the capital, Managua, added, “our only hope for salvation without violence.”

The three-hour lecture was a sign of an important shift in Nicaragua’s bloody history: Not once was the Contra war mentioned. The fading prospect of its full-scale revival, after 6 1/2 years of combat and 16 months of truces, appears to be pushing the country toward the first election since 1967 to be contested by all major political forces.

The Sandinistas’ civic foes have suspended their divisive quarrel over the legitimacy of the U.S.-armed rebellion and are building a broad electoral front. Some Contra leaders returning from exile as politicians are joining the campaign.

“This is not a normal election,” said Alfredo Cesar, the rebel leadership’s most eager politician, who came home last month to join the Social Democratic Party. “This is a plebiscite with one simple question: ‘Do you, the Nicaraguan people, want six more years of the Sandinistas, or do you want a change for the better?’ ”

Just once in Nicaragua’s history, in 1928, has power passed from one party to another through the ballot. During the 43-year Somoza family dictatorship and the Sandinista revolution that toppled it in 1979, most elections were viewed as rigged instruments to perpetuate the party in power. All but two were boycotted by the leading opposition groups.

Faltering Economy

In recent interviews, 17 leaders representing all opposition factions said they are now willing to challenge the Sandinistas at the polls. Most of them expressed the view that economic conditions have deteriorated so sharply that the opposition can win if the election is clean and if its forces, now allied in a National Opposition Union of 14 parties, stick together.

Unity for the opposition is paramount because there is no second-round ballot. President Daniel Ortega, the expected Sandinista candidate, could win reelection with fewer than half the votes just by outpolling his nearest rival. Also, the opposition cannot hope to control the 96-seat National Assembly or any important mayoral race without a unified slate.

Opposition leaders admitted that a tradition of petty feuds and schisms will be hard to overcome in the weeks ahead as they try to produce a plan of government, a presidential candidate, a campaign structure and a strategy for offsetting the leftist Sandinistas’ superior organization.

One hint of friction came at a recent anti-Sandinista rally in Masaya. After one politician extolled “the miracle of unity” joining 5,000 marchers behind a dozen party banners, a fiery Contra leader named Azucena Ferrey mounted the podium.

Having returned from exile two days earlier, Ferrey was not on the carefully negotiated list of orators. A rival party activist unplugged the sound system before she could grab the microphone.

‘Devoured by the Wolf’

“We are not a solid group,” said Hernaldo Zuniga, a Conservative leader. “Perhaps we have too many ideologies and personal ambitions to contend with. But there is a firm concept developing: If we split up, we are going to be devoured by the wolf.”

Political parties have long played a secondary role in opposing the Marxist-oriented Sandinista revolution. The 1984 elections were marred by the pullout of the main opposition bloc, the Democratic Coordinating Council. Its leaders complained of unfair campaign conditions and staked their hopes on the Contras.

Then, last February, a Central American peace agreement thrust Nicaragua’s civic opposition to the front of the conflict. The 1990 elections were moved forward by nine months in exchange for a pledge to close the Contra military camps in Honduras.

After months of disarray and doubt, opposition leaders have accepted the challenge. They were not consulted in advance about the accord. However, the accord’s two leading sponsors, Presidents Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica and Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela, have pushed them into the campaign, promising diplomatic muscle to keep the election as clean as possible.

The Bush Administration sent a similar message by urging Contra leaders to go home. Opposition politicians said this means that the chance of renewed U.S. military aid to the rebels, suspended since early 1988, is more remote than ever.

‘New Ballgame’

“The general sentiment is that the Contras are finished,” said Enrique Bolanos Geyer, a business leader influential in the Democratic Coordinating Council’s withdrawal from the 1984 election. “It’s time to play a new ballgame.”

In recent weeks the opposition has kicked up a storm of protest against the electoral laws, claiming they favor the ruling party. When amendments by the Sandinista-controlled assembly failed to satisfy them, opposition leaders threatened to stay out of the race.

But the quiet training of poll watchers points to a strategy of contesting the election regardless of how stacked the rules seem.

“We have to assume that there will be fraud and prepare to combat it with our own instruments,” said Adan Fletes, whose Christian Democratic Party is training 4,000 poll watchers, half the number needed by the entire opposition bloc. About 300 opposition monitors covered 4,000 polling stations in 1984.

Fletes said the decision to go to elections was inspired by recent returns in Chile and Panama, where united opposition blocs defied unfavorable electoral rules to outpoll entrenched military regimes.

But the Nicaraguan opposition faces obstacles far greater than those of its counterparts there.

Tainted by Corruption

Politicians in general are discredited in Nicaragua. Many who were not tainted by corruption or accommodation with the Somozas went into exile, a process now repeated under the revolution. Those who sell out are ridiculed as zancudos (big mosquitoes), living off the blood of others.

Despite a formal commitment to political pluralism, the Sandinistas often react to serious political opposition with censorship, arrests or attacks by the turbas , the infamous Sandinista street gangs.

“In our culture, the term fair play is unheard of,” said Emilio Alvarez Montalban, a Conservative strategist. “Eight months is a short time to make up for eight years of persecution, jail, exile and being branded as tools of the CIA.”

The ruling party’s formidable grass-roots network dwarfs the opposition. Despite an erosion in their support, Sandinista base committees function daily, while most opposition activity is limited to weekends.

The mass exodus of Nicaraguans to the United States over the last year is widely interpreted not only as a loss of faith in the revolution but as a vote of no confidence in the opposition’s capacity to offer anything better.

According to an independent poll in May by Itztani, an organization backed by the Jesuit-run university in Managua, the Sandinistas have lost about half their support since 1984, but opposition parties have not gained.

31% Support Sandinistas

In the survey of 1,500 eligible voters in Managua, Masaya and Granada, 31% said they would vote in the presidential race for the Sandinistas, who received 67% of the ballots in 1984. Eighteen percent said they would vote for one of the many opposition parties, and the rest said they were undecided.

The picture changed when people were asked whether they would vote for a united opposition bloc. Thirty-two percent said yes; 49% said no.

Opposition leaders say these results mean that their coalition is greater than the sum of its parts and that their critical task is simply to hang together. The key components are the Conservative, Independent Liberal and Christian Democratic parties, which gather the bulk of the coalition’s activists, and the smaller Marxist and center-left parties with well-organized labor support.

The coalition was created in 1987 to demand sweeping constitutional changes. Now that it is forming an electoral front, tensions often arise between longtime Contra sympathizers and former Sandinista allies who joined the opposition more recently. The division is complicated by personal feuds that have splintered the Conservative, Liberal and Social Christian movements into many factions.

“They have too many petty princes, but no king to unite them,” says historian Oscar Rene Vargas.

Exploiting Rivalries

The Sandinistas exploit these rivalries. After breaking with the Independent Liberals to form his own party, Eduardo Coronado received easy-term government loans for his cattle ranch, salt mine and hardware store. Then, he quit the opposition union to campaign on his own.

By law, Coronado’s Liberals can get the same public financing and television time as a unified opposition ticket. Running with the party name, he could draw away the votes of Somoza-era survivors who instinctively vote Liberal.

“This is a game of images,” said Virgilio Godoy, the Independent Liberal leader. “The Sandinistas are trying to sell the image that the opposition is divided. The group of 14 parties has changed this, but new splinter groups keep popping up. This creates confusion because nobody knows for sure the real weight of any party.”

For the same reason, some of the traditional Conservative vote could go to the Conservative Democratic Party of Clemente Guido, runner-up to Ortega in the 1984 presidential race. Guido stalked out of a recent luncheon for opposition leaders at the U.S. Embassy as the Costa Rican ambassador was urging them all to join forces.

Potentially more troublesome to the coalition is the recent defection of Erick Ramirez, a Social Christian leader with international stature and an organized following.

Worried that “rightist sectors are imposing their view” within the bloc and “polarizing the country into extremes,” Ramirez said he is trying to form a centrist electoral front. So far, those mentioned as possible allies have not joined.

‘Center Does Not Exist’

Luis Humberto Guzman, an assemblyman who publishes the moderate weekly La Cronica, said Ramirez will fail because the Sandinistas have united too many people against them. “The center does not exist,” Guzman declared.

But the main opposition bloc is divided over whether to name a moderate or a rightist standard-bearer.

Business leader Bolanos, 61, an engineer jailed three times and dispossessed of his cotton farm, is the candidate of many on the right. Although close to the largest Conservative faction, he has the advantage of not belonging to any party but is rejected by some as too much a symbol of private business.

Many moderates prefer Godoy, 55, a former sociology professor who was labor minister in the Sandinista government until 1984. He is the only opposition party leader with a national following, but he is often criticized as arrogant and aloof.

The possible compromise choice is Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, 60, who took over as publisher of La Prensa after her husband’s murder in 1978 and, after serving on the first Sandinista junta, turned the newspaper into the principal anti-Sandinista voice. But despite her international prestige, she is a political novice.

None of the three admits publicly to being a candidate. For now, opposition leaders have agreed to put off the choice and work on a campaign platform.

Disputes Over Platform

That, too, could be divisive. Two draft programs are circulating. One, initiated with the Communist Party, is vague on every major issue, including agrarian reform, state ownership of banks and how to control the Sandinista army.

The other, a 67-page “Plan of National Salvation,” was born in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise, which some parties believe should get out of politics. One critic said the council “is trying to turn the election into a referendum on the sanctity of private property” instead of focusing on the Sandinistas’ failures.

NICARAGUA’S KEY OPPOSITION PARTIES NATIONAL OPPOSITION UNION

The main opposition bloc, formerly called the Group of 14, consisting of 14 parties gathered under five labels: Social Christians

Christian Democratic Party--Center-right, led by Augustin Jarquin; split from Social Christian Party in 1987 over leadership dispute. (a)

National Action Party--Center-right, led by Eduardo Rivas Gasteazoro; split from Social Christian Party in 1986 over leadership dispute. (a)

Popular Social Christian Party--Center-left, led by Mauricio Diaz; split from Social Christian Party in 1976 to advocate violent overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza; took part in 1984 election, winning six seats in 96-seat National Assembly. (b)

Liberals

Independent Liberal Party--Center-left, led by Virgilio Godoy; broke with Somoza’s Liberal Party in 1944; withdrew from 1984 election, but not in time to be taken off the ballot, and won nine Assembly seats. (a)

Liberal Constitutionalist Party--Center-right, led by Ernesto Somarriba; split from Somoza’s Liberal Party in 1968. (a)

Neo-Liberal Party--Center-right, led by Jorge Ramirez Acevedo; split from Liberal Independent Party in 1986. (a)

Central American Integration Party--Centrist, split from the Central American Union Party; led by Alejandro Perez Arevalo.

Conservatives

Conservative Democratic Party--Direct heir of the Conservative Party, founded 139 years ago; split in two factions. One is led by Clemente Guido and won 14 Assembly seats in 1984; the other, which opposed taking part in the 1984 election, is led by Hernaldo Zuniga, the party’s representative in the National Opposition Union.

National Conservative Party--Split from Conservative Democrats to boycott 1984 elections, led by Silviano Matamoros; Contra leader Adolfo Calero is a member. (a)

Popular Conservative Alliance--Also split from Conservative Democrats to boycott 1984 elections; led by Miriam Arguello. (a)

Social Democrats

Social Democratic Party--Centrist, formed in 1979 by Conservative allies of slain newspaper editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro; led by Guillermo Potoy. (a)

Nicaraguan Democratic Movement--Centrist, formed in 1978 and led by Alfonso Robelo, who took its leadership into exile in 1982 and became a Contra director.

Marxists

Socialist Party--Formed in 1944, led by Gustavo Tablada; won two Assembly seats in 1984. (b)

Communist Party--Split in 1970 from Socialist Party, led by Eli Altamirano; won two Assembly seats in 1984. (b)

NOTES: (a) denotes parties belonging to the Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinating Council, the hard-line opposition coalition that withdrew from the 1984 elections. (b) denotes parties that collaborated with the Sandinista government under the National Patriotic Front, which dissolved in 1984 when they ran in the election on their own.