Ortega Polishes His Image for Nicaragua Vote

Waves of heat rose from the crowd that pressed against the stage as “El Gallo” entered the July 19th barrio like a rock star at an outdoor concert.

Cameras flashed and the night trembled with cheers for the mustachioed man in cowboy boots, blue jeans, a paisley shirt and a camouflage cap.

“How are you going to vote?” he cried.

“With the Front!” the crowd roared.

He waved five fingers overhead.

“How are you going to vote?”

“Number five on the 25th,” they called back.

“Who is the president-elect of Nicaragua?”

“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel,” they chanted, as the candidate pulled baseballs out of a bag and thrust them into the waving crowd.

Neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town, President Daniel Ortega has been stumping his way across Nicaragua with a youthful, macho and even sexy election campaign that would make Madison Avenue proud. Once a shy man, Ortega has been transformed into El Gallo, the Rooster.

But although Ortega and his leftist party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, are clearly having fun with the Western-style image campaign, they are dead serious about the Feb. 25 vote.

More than just a selection of the president, the election is a referendum on 10 years of revolution and Sandinista rule. It is an election to end a U.S.-backed Contra war that has taken nearly 30,000 lives, in which voters are being asked to choose between the Sandinistas and their enemies.

The vote also is a choice between political systems: the Sandinistas’ blend of populism and nationalism, or a conservative, pro-American government that puts a premium on private enterprise.

Ortega is No. 5 on the ballot of 10 candidates running for president. His main challenger is Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widowed editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa and matriarch of the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), a coalition that includes many former Contras.

Chamorro, 60, has focused her campaign on Ortega’s weakest issue, the country’s shattered economy. Salaries have eroded by 70% under Sandinista mismanagement, a U.S. embargo and the Contra war. As a result, the Sandinistas have lost support among housewives and urban immigrants in particular.

But public opinion polls have shown that peace is the first concern among many Nicaraguans, and Ortega, in turn, has tried to shift attention to Chamorro’s ties with the unpopular Contras. He is campaigning as the peace candidate.

“Vote for the reconciliation of Nicaragua,” he told supporters in the July 19th neighborhood. “Vote for no more kidnapings by the Contras. Win the Yankee- Somocista war.”

Originally a guerrilla army themselves, the Sandinistas led a popular insurrection that toppled the 40-year family dictatorship of the Somoza family July 19, 1979. Chamorro, whose late husband was a lifelong enemy of the Somozas, joined the Sandinistas in their first revolutionary junta, but she quickly became disillusioned with them and resigned.

Many members of the defeated National Guard of the late Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of the Somoza dictators, took up arms against the Sandinistas in what eventually became the U.S.-funded Contra army. The elections are the culmination of a Central American peace agreement signed in 1987 to stop the fighting and bring the Contras back into civilian life.

While President Ortega urges all Contras and political exiles to come home and vote, candidate Ortega takes shots at the “ Guardia- Contra-Yankee-UNO” campaign.

Using the kind of negative publicity that brought controversy to President Bush’s campaign in the United States, Ortega’s managers published an advertisement with old photographs of 15 UNO candidates for local and national office, all former national guardsmen dressed in uniform.

Ortega campaign director Dionisio Marenco beamed with pride over the ad and seemed bewildered that an unfavorable comparison might be drawn to the Bush campaign.

“Bush won, didn’t he?” Marenco said.

Not all the campaigning has been negative. Besides the rallies, posters, billboards, television, radio and newspaper advertising that are traditional in Latin America, the Ortega campaign is applying some First World gloss to this Third World election with 1.7 million votes at stake:

* It has launched a Nicaraguan direct-mail promotion, and each of the country’s 600,000 households is to receive a hand-delivered letter from the president.

* A new computer chip called “Watson” and a cassette player allow the campaign to automatically dial about 20,000 home telephones with a taped message from “Daniel” asking for votes.

* All 162,000 registered voters born in the month before Feb. 25 are receiving telegrams from the president wishing them happy birthday.

* And, in the most popular gimmick, at each campaign stop Ortega poses with hundreds of boys and girls, one after another, as his aides snap instant photographs to give their parents.

The Sandinistas also have given out tens of thousands of T-shirts, hats, knapsacks and other goodies that are expensive in this poor country.

Opposition leaders point to such handouts as evidence that the Sandinista Front is running a lavish, Mexican-style campaign worth millions of dollars that could only be financed with state funds. They charge that the Sandinistas have used government vehicles and personnel as well as cash.

Officials respond that they are relying on donations from international socialist parties and solidarity groups and on volunteers from their own party organizations.

The Sandinista Youth organization is one. While Ortega is out kissing babies, the Sandinista Youth group seems to have taken campaigning a step further. Its posters show the naked legs of an adolescent couple standing next to discarded blue jeans and a pink rose.

“The first time is beautiful when it’s done with love,” the poster says in a pitch to first-time voters.

“Isn’t it audacious?” asked Lautaro Sandino, head of international relations for the Sandinista Youth.

The youth vote is key to a Sandinista victory, Sandino says. He asserts that Ortega maintains a 3-to-1 advantage over UNO among young voters, and he notes that 52% of the registered voters are between 16 and 29 years old.

Ortega’s own campaign poster shows him cheek-to-cheek with his 2-year-old daughter, Camila, the youngest of seven children he has had with his common-law wife, poet Rosario Murillo.

The remaking of Ortega for the campaign trail has been remarkable. An introverted man with severe myopia, Ortega sported thick glasses and military fatigues until last year. He was stiff socially; he mumbled and rarely smiled.

Daniel, as most Nicaraguans call him, now wears contact lenses and civilian dress--usually colorful shirts with a red-and-black Sandinista bandanna. Now, he seems at home on stage and speaks clearly to crowds in language they seem to understand.

The focus on Ortega, rather than on the powerful Sandinista party, plays into the Latin American political tradition of caudillos , or populist strongmen. Sandinista polls show that Nicaraguans want a president “closely linked to the people,” and that has been the guiding light of his campaign: Ortega rolls up his sleeves and mixes with the masses.

He is also using his power as the incumbent to woo support. In recent months, his government suspended unpopular compulsory military conscription, eliminated income taxes for low-paid workers and released the last of its political prisoners. The president has given out land titles and forgiven bank debts for thousands of small farmers.