COLUMN ONE : Election: a Truce for Families : Whatever the political outcome of Nicaragua’s vote, the challenge will be to mend emotional scars of a war that pitted brother against brother.

Eight years had passed since Cesar Antonio Chavarria left his farm to join a band of peasants fighting with pistols and shotguns to oust the Sandinista revolutionary government.

Chavarria had become rebel Comandante Dumas, a leader in the Contra army that surpassed 12,000 fighters under the tutelage of the United States. His sisters, meanwhile, farmed land given them by the government and sent sons into the ballooning ranks of the Sandinista Popular Army.

In those bitter years, the blood of 30,000 war dead rained on the Nicaraguan countryside. Among the casualties were three of Chavarria’s nephews, two Contras and a Sandinista soldier. His father died, too, “from worry,” his sisters said.

But those deaths and violent political differences seemed to fade for a few hours last week when, after renouncing armed struggle, Chavarria returned home as a civilian to embrace his divided family.

“I feel as if my son has been born again after so long and so much suffering,” his 78-year-old mother said, shaking with emotion.

“If all the Contras would come home like this, we would be happy,” said his sister, Genara. “It is very painful to have your sons fighting against your brother.”

Chavarria, 40, and four other high-level Contra commanders accepted a government amnesty to return to Nicaragua so they could vote in Sunday’s national election, which pits Sandinista President Daniel Ortega against Violeta Barrios de Chamorro of the U.S.-backed National Opposition Union (UNO).

For the winner of Sunday’s election, the challenge will be to reconcile a country of divided families like the Chavarrias, who are looking to the vote as a way to end the war. The new president must negotiate to bring home thousands more Contras in Honduras and exiles who still want to come back. But most difficult of all, he or she must persuade all Nicaraguans to forgive a history of political violence.

Ortega signed a Central American peace agreement in 1987 that has culminated in this election. In the process, the Sandinistas allowed Chamorro to reopen her opposition newspaper, La Prensa, which was closed in 1986 after the United States approved $100 million in military aid to the Contras. The government released all political prisoners, including members of deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza’s defeated National Guard. A battlefield truce was made and broken, but still the Contras were allowed to return.

Chavarria’s homecoming offered a promise of peace and a glimpse of the difficulties. While welcoming their brother, the Chavarria sisters insisted that he had been wrong to join the Contras. His return reaffirmed their faith in the Sandinistas.

“They pardoned the life of my brother,” Genara said.

The former commander said he did not regret his role in the war or his decision to leave it.

“Nicaragua cannot continue like this,” Chavarria said. “My sisters believe very strongly in the Sandinista Front. We have to learn to live with each other.”

Speeches and Rhetoric

After more than six years of combat, Sandinista and Contra leaders sat face to face at a truck inspection shed in the southern border town of Sapoa on March 21, 1988. The historic meeting, three weeks after the U.S. Congress cut military aid to the rebels, was tense at first, filled with speeches and fiery rhetoric.

Still, the enemies were meeting with words rather than bullets. Among them were Gen. Humberto Ortega, defense minister and brother to the president; Contra political leaders Adolfo Calero and Alfredo Cesar; Deputy Foreign Minister Victor Hugo Tinoco, and Contra commanders with the noms de guerre Fernando, Rigoberto and Tonio.

“The string of hatred generated by the war began to break with Sapoa,” Tinoco recalled. “It was the first time we talked. You could see your adversary was a human being with arguments, even if they were on the wrong side of history. You could see Fernando, get to know him, debate him, and realize that although he was a Contra and many people had died, he was a sincere person.”

The talks lasted three days. At the end, the two sides reached an agreement for a cease-fire, press freedom, prisoner release and negotiations to disarm the Contras. While Tinoco hammered out details of the accord with a Contra politician, Gen. Ortega, Calero and Cesar huddled in a hallway.

“They were exchanging ideas. That was the moment when I had a sensation of the possibilities,” Tinoco said.

Alfredo Cesar remembered the moment well. The three were discussing how to proceed to the next phase of negotiations.

“That was the day in which national reconciliation opened up in Nicaragua,” Cesar said. “It was the first time both sides were committed to really, seriously finding a political solution to the war. It also was a moment we were totally alone, Nicaraguans making decisions among Nicaraguans.”

Cesar subsequently resigned from the Contra leadership and returned to Nicaragua, to visit and then to stay. His first trip home eight months ago was uncertain; immigration officials viewed him suspiciously, and he was nervous with them. He felt like a foreigner in his own land.

“About my third trip back, I finally felt I had come back home,” he said.

Cesar is now a chief adviser to Chamorro’s presidential campaign and a candidate for the National Assembly. Win or lose, Cesar said, he will stay in Nicaragua for good.

Brothers at War

On a hot Sunday afternoon in Matagalpa, Sandinista army Lt. Jorge Fley relaxed in the living room of his parents’ modest house and reflected on the painful irony of civil war.

Fley’s brother Francisco is a captain in the Sandinista army. Another brother, Luis Adan, was a Contra commander who accepted amnesty last month after eight years of combat. A third brother, Enrique, died in the war, a soldier killed in a Contra ambush.

“We have agreed that inside the front door of this house, we won’t talk politics,” Jorge said. “That way, we avoid contradictions that raise tempers and split the family.”

If the brothers agree on anything, it is that neither side is likely to convert the other. They tried that once.

In 1988, Francisco and Luis Adan met in the hills of central Nicaragua in an effort to persuade each other to stop fighting. Francisco, then a first lieutenant, went with another officer in search of Luis Adan, the commander of 1,200 Contras in that zone. The Sandinistas were quickly taken prisoner by the rebels and held incommunicado during an eight-day march through the mountains.

Throughout that week, the Fley brothers reminisced about their youth and argued politics. In the end, neither had changed his mind. Luis Adan released his prisoners to a village preacher, and each brother returned to his troops.

Last month, Luis Adan, 38, decided to renounce his role as Comandante Johnson. He returned to Nicaragua under U.N. protection with a government letter exempting him from obligatory service in the Sandinista Popular Army.

Now Luis Adan is campaigning for opposition UNO candidates. In doing so, he says, he runs a risk of attack not only from angry Sandinistas but also from his one-time Contra buddies. The commanders who remain in Honduras were against his return and threatened to kill him if he did.

“They are hard-line people who believe war is the solution to the problem, and they are going to continue the war no matter what,” Luis Adan said. “I believe the armed struggle has already borne its fruit, that it has forced the Sandinistas into a process of democratization and elections.”

Luis Adan is convinced that Chamorro will triumph at the polls. His brother Jorge, 29, is certain the Sandinistas will win. Each believes that the election will vindicate his decision to take up arms.

Although the Fleys have exchanged weapons for electoral politics, wounds remain. One of the deepest is the death of their Sandinista brother, Enrique.

“We forgive, but we do not forget,” Jorge said. Four former Contra commanders were on hand Feb. 9 when the Sandinistas freed more than 1,000 jailed rebels and 39 National Guardsmen imprisoned since the Sandinistas toppled Somoza. When Sandinista Comandante Franco Montealegre introduced the rebel leaders at the ceremony, the prisoners greeted them with cheers and victory signs.

“It was satisfying that they realized we are working for them. We don’t want them to think we sold out to the Sandinistas,” said rebel commander Dumas.

More important, perhaps, was the reaction of Sandinista militant Tinoco, who also attended the ceremony.

“It is their social base. And if the prisoners see the comandantes there, they see that peace is possible,” Tinoco said afterward.

Tinoco’s recognition that the Contras have grass-roots support represents a major change in Sandinista thinking and a step toward reconciliation. For years, the Sandinistas viewed the Contras only as stooges of the United States.

Now, although it still pains them to say it, and they do so using verbs in the conditional voice, the Sandinistas concede that some of the Contras might have had reason to fight.

People like Comandante Fernando, Tinoco said, “became a Contra in the first years of the war because of errors that might have been committed. And they felt military confrontation would solve things. It became a problem when the United States started backing them.”

The Contra leaders also have begun to acknowledge that their troops might have committed some of the violent human rights abuses for which they have been internationally condemned. They may have trusted too much in the CIA, which ultimately took sides against them in an internal power struggle that they lost.

For many longtime Sandinistas, the release of the imprisoned guardsmen was the bitterest pill to swallow. Although convicted of some of the most brutal pre-revolutionary crimes, the guardsmen were unrepentant over their role in the Somoza family dictatorship.

Doris Tijerino, a 20-year veteran of the Sandinista Front, was jailed three times under Somoza. During a two-week interrogation, she says, she was beaten, subjected to electric shock and raped. The guardsman who allegedly oversaw her torture was among those freed this month.

“I heard Daniel (Ortega) announce it on the radio,” Tijerino said. “It made me sad. It made me think that peace costs too much.”

Today, Tijerino, 46, is head of the Sandinista women’s organization and is the ruling party’s National Assembly candidate for Matagalpa.

“We understand these measures (the release) are necessary to achieve peace,” she said. “We accept them. It doesn’t mean we have to embrace them.”

Reconciliation

They hadn’t seen each other since the insurrection. Both had been members of Nicaragua’s upper class, but they chose opposite sides after Somoza fell. She backed the Sandinista government, and he fled to Honduras in protest. Later, he became a Contra.

They don’t want their names used because . . . what if? What if the elections go sour? What if the war does not end? What if things don’t work out between them?

Each was married to someone else before, but the war ravaged their lives. They both have grown children now, and both are alone.

He called her as soon as he came back from exile last month. They met, had dinner, talked of old times. They had a wonderful evening.

She showed him pictures of her son who had served in the Sandinista army. He was surprised. In all these years, he’d never put a face on the enemy.

Neither had she.

“I sat next to him, and I thought of all the boys who died,” she said. “I thought, ‘He is a Contra.’ But I couldn’t feel any hatred. I couldn’t feel anything.”

He called her the next day. He’d had a dream, he told her. He dreamed that she was not a Sandinista.

“But I am,” she said.

Yes, he knew that, he said. But anyway, could they get together again?