Issue of Military Draft Exploited by 2 Sides in Nicaragua’s Campaign : Election: Conscription is temporarily suspended. Regime’s foes hope to win votes by vowing to abolish it altogether.

For nearly six years, the appearance of a Sandinista army recruiting squad--even a rumor of one--was enough to send every young man not in uniform scurrying from the streets and the baseball diamonds of any Nicaraguan town.

But lately, since the formal suspension of military conscription, draft evaders have come out of hiding by the hundreds to work in voter registration drives and march behind anti-Sandinista candidates in the Feb. 25 election.

The temporary suspension, which took effect in September, is part of an agreement between the government and opposition parties to free young men to work in the campaign. It is the first halt in the unpopular practice of drafting males aged 17 to 24 to fight the U.S.-backed Contras since two-year tours of military duty became obligatory in December, 1983.

Recent interviews in five provinces indicate that the government has kept its word in the cities and towns while continuing to draft young men in remote rural areas. Opposition leaders also complain that men aged 25 to 39 are still being called for reserve duty, a process the army says was never meant to stop.

By and large, the shadow of the army has faded enough to allow young urban activists to energize the opposition cause. But it is still so ominous that the draft, and the larger question of militarism, has become a central issue of the election.

“It is not easy to throw off our fear, because we see soldiers everywhere,” Rafael Gutierrez, a 19-year-old draft resister, said as he joined an opposition rally in this provincial capital. “But the more of us who come out, the freer we feel to express what we want. And what we want is to stop fleeing (the army) so we can work or study and get on with our lives.”

Seeking to exploit such sentiment, the main anti-Sandinista coalition, the 14-party National Opposition Union, has called for ending the draft permanently, depoliticizing the army and reducing it “according to the economic capacity and social needs of the country.”

While the Sandinistas have slimmed down the military in recent years and talk of further cuts if the Contras disarm, they insist on resuming the draft next spring as a means to impart political education and maintain a strong defense against U.S. intervention.

Divisive Issue

The issue divides the revolutionary government from the pro-American opposition as clearly as any other. Yet, in a country where rulers have been overturned more often by bullets than by ballots, it may not be resolved by the election, especially if an anti-Sandinista civilian authority ends up confronting the Sandinista army.

“Every Nicaraguan is a soldier at heart, a warrior,” says Emilio Alvarez Montalvan, a leading Conservative politician and intellectual. “Until recently, it was inconceivable for a politician to seek power without the use of arms.”

Militarism was ingrained in the culture by the dominant prerevolutionary parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, which for years fielded rival armies to fight for control of the government. Intervening in the late 1920s, U.S. Marines disarmed both parties, paying $10 per rifle, and created a National Guard that was supposed to be above politics.

But Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the first commander, turned the Guard into the army of his family, which went on to rule Nicaragua from the mid 1930s until its defeat in 1979 by Sandinista guerrillas armed mostly by Cuba.

Mindful of Nicaraguan tradition, the Sandinistas dissolved the Guard and built their own army, expanding it and acquiring Soviet weaponry as the United States financed the Contras. The draft, unprecedented in Nicaragua, brought a public outcry and protests from opposition parties.

By 1986, at the height of the Contra war, Sandinista officials say they had 100,000 citizens under arms, another 300,000 ready to take up arms in the event of an escalation and plans to acquire rifles for up to 200,000 more--all this in a poor country of 3.5 million people.

According to Col. Xavier Carrion, the army’s deputy chief of staff, the 100,000-man force was reduced to 85,000 as the Contra threat subsided last year and, as a result of 1989 budget cuts, stands at 70,000 today--40,000 in a regular army made up largely of conscripts and 30,000 on active call-up at any one time in militia and reserve units.

Opposition leaders criticize the army not just for its size--it is still the largest in Central America--but for its intimate ties to the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Its commander is Gen. Humberto Ortega, the president’s brother, defense minister and one of nine directors of the Front. Virtually all officers above the rank of captain are Sandinistas who fought as guerrillas to oust Somoza. Sandinista nationalist ideology is part of basic training, a course taken so far by 150,000 draftees aged 18 to 25.

Opposition leaders have focused on the draft as a key to Sandinista power. They got President Daniel Ortega to suspend it as part of a broad pre-election agreement that helped him win support at a Central American summit last August for disbanding the Contras.

In a later speech on Army Day, however, Gen. Ortega made it clear that the draft is a “permanent and vital necessity.”

But strategists of the 14-party opposition bloc known as UNO say that the relief felt in tens of thousands of homes over the suspension of the draft will translate into votes for its permanent demise.

“Military service is as good as abolished,” declared Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, UNO’s presidential candidate. “From now on, the youth belong to us.”

Opposition parties are now building their youth branches, weakened by the draft and dwarfed by the Sandinista Youth. In its voter registration drive, UNO sent 2,500 high school students door to door, about half of them draft-aged city boys.

Reservists Called

Yet the Sandinistas have kept conscription alive as an emotional campaign issue by stepping up the war, continuing to draft in remote areas and calling up reservists.

Manuel Telleria, a 38-year-old farmer from Saguatepe, a village near the provincial capital of Boaco, said the army was just there “taking everyone by force, young and old. They broke down doors in the night. Many of us had to sleep in the woods.”

In the cities, opposition parties have told their campaign workers to ignore summonses for reserve duty on the ground that such orders violate the spirit of the pre-election agreement.

The Sandinista Youth is bullish in favor of conscription, says Carlos Rivera, 26, a decorated combat veteran who is national vice-coordinator of the 160,000-member movement. He calculates that 18% of all eligible voters are males of draft age, many of them veterans, and will vote overwhelmingly for the government.

Rivera bases his assertion on figures showing that 28,000 of the last 50,000 youths inducted into the army were volunteers, a trend encouraged by his movement’s intense political work. Virtually all veterans, he insists, leave the army with an appreciation of the revolution’s goal of social justice.

But Fanor Avendano, 27, an opposition youth organizer, said surveys by his Christian Democratic Party indicate that no more than 30% of all army veterans remain committed Sandinistas.

Question of Control

In UNO’s platform debate, some parties argued that the real issue is not the draft but Sandinista control of the army. Once an army is depoliticized, they said, universal conscription can keep it broadly representative of society.

“Ending the draft is not the way to build a democracy,” said opposition lawmaker Luis Humberto Guzman. “The problem is that the Sandinistas have given the draft a bad name. They forced us to raise this (anti-draft) banner.”

Sandinista officers are surprisingly eager to turn the electoral campaign into a debate over their army.

“We are not a caste,” Col. Oswaldo Lacayo, a member of Gen. Ortega’s staff, told the opposition newspaper La Cronica in an unusual interview. “If we were, if we refused to debate, if we were afraid of the people, we would have shut ourselves in and created a totally professional army without (compulsory) military service.”

While conceding that the army is dominated by Sandinistas, he said it can evolve into a truly national army “with the participation of all patriotic sectors.” But he warned that if the opposition comes to power and adopts an “anti-popular program,” such as reversing the Sandinista land reform, the army would resist.