Delays in U.S. Aid Hamper Opposition in Nicaragua

Eighteen days after shattering her kneecap, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro has returned to the campaign trail, vowing from a wheelchair on the back of a pickup truck to “bury” President Daniel Ortega in the Nicaraguan elections five weeks away.

But her comeback from surgery, welcomed by enthusiastic crowds in three towns Saturday and two on Sunday, is being overshadowed by delays in the delivery of U.S. aid, something that could cripple her National Opposition Union and leave it without an effective network of poll watchers.

“The campaign is in a slump,” Luis Sanchez Sancho, a spokesman for the 14-party opposition alliance known as UNO, admitted last week. “There was a certain paralysis during Violeta’s absence, but it has more to do with a lack of funds.”

Chamorro, the aristocratic widow of a slain opposition newspaper publisher, is Ortega’s leading challenger in the Feb. 25 election. Since her nomination last September, the Bush Administration has openly touted the 60-year-old candidate as the best hope for ending the Sandinistas’ revolutionary rule.

But her campaign has yet to take off, largely because red tape in Washington and Managua has delayed $3.3 million in American funds committed Oct. 21. The first $200,000 of those funds, channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, was disbursed to the organization only last Friday.

Ortega, whose party is heavily outspending Chamorro’s, is using the challenger’s troubles to try to undermine her biggest asset--popular discontent over a prolonged slump of the war-damaged, mismanaged economy.

“The UNO is going around saying it doesn’t have money for political propaganda,” Ortega told a rally in Matiguas on Saturday. “How is it going to solve the economic problems of the country when it can’t even get money for its own propaganda?”

Speaking to supporters from her wheelchair here, under a canopy of bedsheets that gave it the aura of a throne, Chamorro issued her reply:

“The Sandinistas are claiming that my crutches are a symbol of the UNO. In reality, crutches are the symbol of Nicaragua. The Sandinistas have destroyed her. They have left Nicaragua on crutches.”

To divert attention from the economy, the Sandinistas have stressed nationalist themes and associated UNO with the U.S.-backed Contras. Ironically, UNO was damaged by three months of Sandinista propaganda that accused it of being a “rented opposition” while in reality it was not getting a penny from Washington.

According to officials handling the aid, UNO did not become eligible for the money under U.S. law until Nov. 27, five weeks after President Bush authorized it. That is when budgets and accounting procedures were finally set up to ensure that the funds--restricted by Congress to party structures, civic education and election monitoring--did not go directly into UNO’s campaign war chest.

Another three weeks was lost in futile attempts to find a way to wire the money to UNO through Nicaragua’s central bank, the conduit required by law. This obliged UNO to deposit U.S. government checks in the bank, which it did Dec. 22, and wait the usual two to three weeks for the checks to clear.

Then, on Jan. 9, the Sandinistas barred the Institute for Electoral Promotion and Training, set up by UNO to recruit and train poll watchers, from receiving its share of the U.S. funds--about $1.5 million--on the grounds that it failed to register as a nonprofit organization.

“Congress made things more complicated than they should have been,” said a foreign diplomat. “For the Sandinistas, this was too much to resist. They said, ‘Let’s complicate this even more.’ They were given a golden opportunity to do what they do best--interpret the law any way they want.”

After UNO accused the government of bad faith, Ortega met last Monday with Elliot Richardson, a former U.S. attorney general who heads a team of U.N. election observers, and agreed to disburse UNO’s money.

Antonio Lacayo, Chamorro’s campaign manager, said he has been assured that the training institute will have access to all of its funds by Tuesday, “but it’s almost too late.” The institute needs the money to send poll watchers to 4,394 polling places to verify each of the 1.75 million names on the election rolls and report any fraud by Jan. 29.

Meanwhile, 93 new vehicles purchased last month with U.S. funds to mobilize poll watchers are still awaiting Nicaraguan import permits and license plates. Twenty-one of them are parked in a lot outside UNO’s headquarters, useless until the customs director returns from an out-of-town trip.

On top of those frustrations, UNO officials say that Chamorro’s injury will limit her campaigning mostly to weekends, while the 44-year-old Ortega stumps almost daily.

The challenger, already suffering from osteoporosis, a disease that makes her bones brittle, slipped on the tile floor of her study Jan. 2 and broke her right kneecap. She underwent surgery in Houston two days later and will be in a cast until Feb. 8, then in a brace until after the election.

Perched on her “Violeta-mobile,” with her injured leg propped up and her wheelchair secured to the white Toyota pickup with wooden blocks, Chamorro smiled and waved to about 3,000 supporters here and another 6,000 in Granada, crowds similar to those drawn by the president.

The difference is that Ortega is campaigning more often and spending more money. Sandinista officials say they have received $418,794 in foreign contributions, mostly from pro-Sandinista groups in the West. Foreign diplomats estimate the Sandinistas have spent at least $3 million, at least 10 times what UNO has gathered from private contributors.

Among the items passed out at Ortega’s rally in Matiguas were hundreds of T-shirts and baseball caps, four land titles, 14 certificates exempting landowners from taxes, three saddles, three baskets of food, three volleyballs and three soccer balls.

Chamorro, who dispensed no such largess, told her supporters here: “The Sandinistas are handing out gifts to buy votes. Take them. Your vote is secret. I say take the T-shirt, dip it in chloride, take Daniel’s name off and put your own name on if you want. . . . How can anyone forget 10 years of misery for a T-shirt?”

Lacayo admitted that the disparity between the two campaigns has “demoralized” some UNO activists, while the huge announced U.S. commitment has made it hard to raise contributions elsewhere.

“The American aid has been more trouble than it’s worth,” said Luis Humberto Guzman, an UNO legislative candidate who publishes the news weekly Cronica. “We’ve paid a high political cost without any benefits until 40 days before the election. . . . The paradox of your (American) system is that you could give money to fight the Contra war but not to fight an election the way it ought to be fought.”