U.S. Charges Sandinistas With Campaign Abuses

The Bush Administration on Wednesday accused Nicaragua’s leftist government of systematically harassing and intimidating opposition politicians during the closing days of the campaign for Sunday’s national election.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said that activists of the National Opposition Union, known as UNO by its initials in Spanish, have told the U.S. Embassy in Managua that government agents “routinely threaten them with loss of job, land, bodily harm or even death.”

She said that recently in the central Nicaraguan region of Boaco, “UNO activists have charged that many UNO supporters in the army have had their voter registration cards confiscated.

“One recent deserter reported that immediately after registering to vote near Matagalpa, approximately 100 soldiers in his barracks were ordered to hand over their registration cards because they were suspected UNO sympathizers,” she said.

“One of the activists who made these charges was himself told that he would lose his land if he continued to work for UNO,” Tutwiler added. “Another has been accosted by a Ministry of Interior official who waved a machete at him and said, ‘You will be sorry you are on our list.’ UNO poll watchers in Boaco, like many of their counterparts in other regions, have been threatened not to show up on election day.”

Tutwiler said that Bernard Aronson, the department’s top Latin America specialist, decided to make public the charges in the hope that the Sandinista government would change its tactics.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Washington will normalize its relationship with the Nicaraguan government even if the Sandinistas win--if the elections are fair.

“If the elections are free and fair . . . and if the Sandinistas respect human rights and quit their subversion of their neighbors, then we would consider a process of normalization,” Fitzwater said.