Bitter Workers Hold Fate of Sandinistas in Election

Roger Garcia, a milk factory machinist, overturned cars and built barricades in his Managua barrio to help the Sandinista guerrillas overthrow a dictator, then waited for the better life they promised the urban poor.

After 10 years of Sandinista rule, he has given up on that promise.

Stooping in a garbage dump behind the Eastern Market, rummaging for food for his family, the 36-year-old Garcia reflected bitterly on a decade in which the buying power of Nicaraguan workers fell by more than 70%. For him, the decline began in 1982 after the state took over and mismanaged the plant where he worked, and it accelerated during the Sandinistas’ war against the U.S.-backed Contras.

“They said the company would belong to the workers, that Nicaragua would belong to the workers, but they fooled us,” declared Garcia, who quit his job two years ago. “They took everything for the government, everything for the military, and left nothing for the workers. They have practically destroyed our standard of living.”

The disillusion of workers like Garcia, once a pillar of proletarian support for the Sandinista revolution, is the government’s greatest liability as it faces national elections Feb. 25. In interviews with pollsters, most Nicaraguans say the economy is the No. 1 issue in the race between President Daniel Ortega and his leading challenger, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

Indeed, the economy is a wreck. Squeezed by U.S. trade sanctions, the government was forced to subsidize rural farmers who were the Contras’ main supporters and to spend heavily for defense, feeding inflation that reached 33,600% in 1988. Then, in the sixth straight year of recession, a severe anti-inflation program threw 30,000 public employees out of work in 1989.

The political damage to the Sandinistas is considerable. Early social gains of the revolution have eroded as malnutrition and infant mortality rise and schools and hospitals close. Equally important, the Sandinista labor movement is shrinking as fired or frustrated wage earners switch to an informal economy of small merchants, craftsmen and assorted hustlers with no organizational ties to the ruling party.

Yet this growing legion of petty entrepreneurs, who make up as much as one-fifth of the electorate, have not united as a solid electoral bloc behind Chamorro’s 14-party National Opposition Union (UNO).

In dozens of interviews with such workers over the past week, a majority said they would vote for Chamorro. But others voiced skepticism that a woman of her aristocratic background really cares about the poor or that her promise of a quick economic revival can be believed.

A central issue in the drive to woo the urban poor focuses on the source of blame for their hardships--Sandinista incompetence or the Contras.

Chamorro’s coalition, claiming that private producers have lost confidence in the Sandinistas, has outlined an ambitious recovery plan that would tame inflation in eight to 16 weeks, without cutting wages, while expanding private production on idle farmland now in state hands. By removing some government controls and inducing skilled professionals to return from exile, her aides argue, a UNO government could expand the economy 10% to 15% in a year with no additional foreign aid.

Recognizing their poor economic record, the Sandinistas have adopted a forward-looking campaign slogan: “Everything will be better.” But their promise is more modest: a gradual, yearlong attack on inflation, and economic growth of 3% to 5%. A convincing Sandinista election victory would finish U.S. aid for the Contras and free resources at home for production, they contend, but any greater expansion would require a massive increase in foreign aid, which is unlikely.

“It’s an illusion to think that the economic situation can be changed overnight,” Ortega warned in a major economic address last week.

Yet a slowdown of the fighting since February, 1988, when Congress suspended the Contras’ military funding, has built up expectations for a dramatic improvement of life among city folk who never felt the war directly.

Instead, they have watched the government wrestle with a hyper-inflationary crisis. On Feb. 14, 1988, with the cordoba trading at 55,000 to the dollar, Ortega tried monetary reform, knocking three zeroes off the currency and fixing an exchange rate of 10 new cordobas to the dollar.

Today, after three dozen devaluations, the new cordoba has plunged below the old cordoba’s value and trades at 65,000 to the dollar. A schoolteacher’s starting salary--1.4 million cordobas, just over $20 a month--is not enough to feed the teacher two meals a day without meat, let alone provide for his or her family.

“People in this country don’t live, we half survive,” said Blanca Sanchez, 31, a street merchant.

Government officials say the austerity program of public spending cuts and layoffs finally began to pay off in 1989, reducing inflation to 1,689% over the year and increasing exports by 25%. But by demanding harsh sacrifices for the promise of stability later, Ortega took an election-year risk.

Some pollsters and political analysts say the government is in a strong position because three out of five urban workers are still employed by the state and are likely to vote for Ortega to save their jobs. But workers in the private sector, especially the informal economy, are less predictable.

In the crowded outdoor markets of Managua and wherever hustlers gather to scrounge for food or work, support for Chamorro’s candidacy runs high.

“We rose up against the (Anastasio) Somoza dictatorship because his family tried to monopolize economic power,” said Garcia, the former milk plant worker. “We cannot let the Sandinistas do the same. It’s time to give another government its turn.”

Garcia now works as an itinerant house painter and construction worker and is busy setting up a food stall among the hundreds competing in the capital’s Eastern Market. Such is the sentiment there that when a reporter tried to take an informal survey, going quietly from one stall to the next, a crowd quickly gathered and shouted a cacophony of complaints against the government.

“Our sons are too malnourished to fight in the army, but they make them go anyway,” said a man shouldering a sack of onions.

“Viva la UNO!” somebody yelled. Others joined in: “Viva Dona Violeta de Chamorro!”

But the mood is different at a corner across town where a few dozen young men gather each day to sell contraband auto parts on the street outside a row of auto parts stores that often don’t have what the client is looking for.

Guillermo Barbosa, 25, who came to this highly competitive trade after his layoff last year by the government, said he is wary of Chamorro because some parties in her coalition supported the repressive Somoza regime.

“All workers have suffered a blow under his government, but there is a more fundamental problem,” Barbosa said. “Dona Violeta is way up there. She’s not one of us. How could she understand our problems? And what is UNO? It represents those who monopolized this country in the past.”

Such doubts about Chamorro are reflected in a nationwide opinion survey of 901 registered voters that was conducted Jan. 13-19 by the American firm Greenberg-Lake for Hemisphere Initiatives, a Boston-based group monitoring the Nicaraguan election.

The poll showed Ortega leading Chamorro by a 2-to-1 margin in voter preference. Of those polled, 54% thought Ortega “has the right approach to the economy” while only 35% felt that way about the challenger. Sixty-nine percent judged Chamorro “too close to the rich and big commercial interests.”

“Two things are very clear,” said Cirilo Otero, a Nicaraguan who helped conduct the poll. “One is that the Sandinistas have mismanaged the economy and hurt a lot of people. The other is that no opposition party has earned the unquestioned authority to speak for popular interests.”

Results Questioned

Opposition leaders have questioned the survey’s validity on the ground that the Nicaraguan polling firm working with Greenberg-Lake is biased toward the Sandinistas. But they admit that the ruling party has them on the defensive in the economic debate.

“The Sandinistas are running against their own record, as if they are opposition, getting people to believe that ‘Everything will be better,’ ” said Luis Humberto Guzman, a UNO candidate for the National Assembly. He said the opposition’s late-starting campaign on its economic platform is just beginning to have an impact.

On the campaign trail, Ortega is speaking far more extensively and authoritatively about the economy than Chamorro, who rarely devotes more than a few sentences to the subject. Tempering his lectures on austerity with a touch of populism, the president has given out more than 4,600 land titles and written off bank debts for more than 2,000 small landowners during his stops.