Publisher Chamorro Best Known but Race Still Tight : Sandinista Foes Split on Candidate

After months of being coy about it, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro declared her ambition to become Nicaragua’s next president in dramatic fashion. The announcement filled three-fourths of the front page of La Prensa, her own newspaper.

“Violeta Chamorro is the first name mentioned as a unified (opposition) candidate,” began the story, illustrated by three photos of the silver-haired publisher and a poll purporting to show her 20 percentage points ahead of Sandinista President Daniel Ortega in a one-on-one race.

In a Page 1 interview with the boss, a La Prensa reporter dutifully popped the question: Would you, Dona Violeta, accept the nomination? Answer: “If they decide that I am the best candidate to win the battle for democracy, I couldn’t say no.”

14-Party Opposition

As the 14-party Nicaraguan Opposition Union begins meeting this week to choose its standard-bearer in the Feb. 25 elections, Dona Violeta, the elegant widow of a popular opposition figure slain 11 years ago, is easily the best known of the seven candidates put forward so far.

But if the splashy announcement late last month erased any doubt about her availability, it has failed to establish Chamorro as the clear front-runner in the eyes of opposition leaders, many of whom bristled at its immodesty.

If anything, the race has become tighter. Enrique Bolanos Geyer, a right-wing business leader, and Virgilio Godoy Reyes, the Independent Liberal Party president, are each given a chance at the nomination, and Conservative intellectual Emilio Alvarez Montalvan has emerged as a contender-in-waiting in the event of a deadlock.

Opposition leaders say the nominee will have to rally virtually all anti-Sandinista forces to stand any chance of defeating Ortega’s bid for reelection or gaining a large enough share of power to push the decade-old Sandinista revolution onto a more moderate course.

But the choice of that nominee is the most potentially divisive task facing the coalition known as UNO since it was formed two months ago by 16 anti-Sandinista parties ranging from Communist to Conservative. Two parties have already defected, including a Social Christian faction led by Erick Ramirez, who pulled out to run for president on his own.

UNO’s presidential hopefuls differ more in style than in ideology; Chamorro, Bolanos and Alvarez are Conservatives at heart, while Godoy is viewed as slightly left of center. But the bloc’s founders are so wary of being torn apart by conflicting personal ambitions that they are delaying the nomination to agree first on a program of government.

The candidate is expected to be chosen no earlier than Friday, the kickoff date of the formal six-month campaign.

Meanwhile, an unofficial but intense competition for the nomination has been under way for months, and an unwritten code has been developed to minimize friction.

Partisan Splurge

According to the ritual, a party or group may propose a candidate but may not campaign too conspicuously on his or her behalf. Only if first mentioned by someone else may a candidate discuss his or her ambition, and only then in such terms as “If UNO sees fit to unite behind me. . . .”

Critics of Chamorro say her partisan splurge in La Prensa, which is regarded as the voice of all anti-Sandinistas but has slighted other presidential hopefuls, violated the code and damaged her own candidacy.

A commission was named by UNO to go to La Prensa and tell the publisher to back off, but the self-promotion ceased on its own.

“There was a negative reaction,” concedes Cristiana Chamorro, the publisher’s daughter and editor of La Prensa.

Until then, Violeta Chamorro had been viewed by many as the inevitable compromise between Bolanos on the right and Godoy on the left, neither of whom seemed able to build much support beyond their natural constituencies within UNO.

Bolanos, 61, a U.S.-trained engineer with no party affiliation, is admired for staying to fight the Sandinistas after they jailed him three times and took away his cotton farm. He became a candidate last spring when the Superior Council of Private Enterprise, which he once led, tried to impose a pro-business platform and take charge of the opposition campaign.

‘Barbaric Ultra-Rightist’

Political parties reacted strongly and excluded the council from a direct voice in UNO. The struggle hurt Bolanos’ candidacy. A Conservative leader, Julio Icaza Tijerino, called the businessman a “barbaric ultra-rightist” to his face.

Godoy, 55, the only opposition party leader with a national following, has his own image problems. Trade unions identify him with the unpopular wage controls he enforced as labor minister in the Sandinista government before quitting in 1984.

Last month a brief scandal erupted when a Liberal associate accused Godoy of mismanaging political donations from West Germany. The donor foundation refuted the charge, but the feud underlined criticism of the Liberal leader as an aloof and arrogant man who cannot control his own party.

Godoy admitted that the incident cost him support and blamed a party member who writes for La Prensa with creating it.

“Someone doesn’t want me to be the candidate,” he said in an interview. “When the issue is decided, all this intrigue will stop.”

Chamorro, 60, earned mention as a presidential contender by uniting rival opposition factions at a rally last January in honor of her late husband, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the La Prensa publisher gunned down in 1978 for opposing Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship.

To many Nicaraguans, Dona Violeta is a symbol of what might have been had Pedro lived to see the Sandinistas topple Somoza in 1979 and to influence their revolution. After serving on the first Sandinista junta, she turned the paper into an anti-Sandinista oracle.

By last spring her undeclared candidacy was picking up steam from the Sandinistas themselves. Branding her a Contra supporter, they aired television spots juxtaposing her face with corpses of dismembered children. The Sandinista attacks seemed to make her even more popular. In mid-July, Ortega ordered them toned down.

According to three surveys taken since April by different professional pollsters, Chamorro is at least twice as popular as Godoy, her nearest opposition rival. In two of the polls, she ran even with Ortega when voters were asked to choose among all possible presidential candidates. The only poll that pitted her directly against the Sandinista leader gave her 46% to Ortega’s 26%.

“There is no disputing Violeta’s popularity,” said one-time Contra leader Alfredo Cesar, who has returned from exile to support her. “What is disputed is her capacity to govern.”

“In politics, she is like a fish out of water,” declared Socialist leader Luis Sanchez Sancho. Her critics fear that, if elected, she would remain insulated by a Conservative circle of relatives and La Prensa executives rather than lead a broad coalition government.

Backed by 6 Parties

With all front-runner claims now in dispute, Chamorro’s supporters count six of UNO’s 14 parties behind her nomination, to three each for Bolanos and Godoy. One backer of Bolanos says eight parties favor him. La Cronica, an opposition weekly to the left of La Prensa, puts Godoy slightly ahead.

Against this backdrop of shifting and uncertain loyalties, the National Conservative Party, which now supports Bolanos, decided recently to switch to the 70-year-old Alvarez, a Conservative father figure popular with all opposition groups, if the race becomes deadlocked.

Each party will have one vote in each round of the closed-door nominating session. Three other candidates--Miriam Arguello Morales of the Popular Conservative Alliance, Adan Fletes Valle of the Christian Democratic Party and Andres Zuniga of the Neo-Liberal Party--have no evident support beyond their own parties and are expected to drop out after the first ballot.

Party leaders have agreed in advance to elect a vice presidential candidate who will balance the ticket after the standard-bearer is named. With Conservatives crowding the presidential race, the list of would-be running mates leans to the left: labor leader Alvin Guthrie, former Sandinista economist Francisco Mayorga and Popular Social Christian Party leader Mauricio Diaz Davila.