Hard Bargaining Ahead for Chamorro and Sandinistas

After a congratulatory visit from President Daniel Ortega, opposition leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro began preparing Tuesday for two months of hard bargaining with his defeated Sandinista movement over her triumphant coalition’s program for a “government of national salvation.”

The president-elect was immediately confronted with a warning from the Sandinista leadership that its militants will “fight without quarter” to preserve key programs of their 10-year revolution and with a demand for immediate disarmament of the U.S.-backed Contras.

Chamorro named her son-in-law, Antonio Lacayo, to head a transition team that will negotiate with Ortega’s representatives on the scheduled April 25 transfer of power.

The platform of her 14-party National Opposition Union (UNO) calls for dramatic changes that would scale down the army and the revolutionary state built up over a decade of Sandinista rule and give freer rein to private enterprise.

Her margin of victory in Sunday’s upset, 55.2% of the vote to Ortega’s 41.8%, has raised expectations among her supporters that hundreds of Sandinista party officials will be evicted from homes that were seized from the pre-revolutionary order and that Sandinista ideology will be purged from school texts.

But UNO fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed in the National Assembly to make constitutional changes. That means some elements of its program, such as ending the constitutionally protected state monopolies on banking and foreign trade, will require Sandinista consent.

More important, UNO leaders acknowledge that the Sandinistas’ control of the army and their ability to mobilize militant supporters in the streets make it inevitable that Chamorro’s conservative program will be watered down in bargaining over the coming weeks.

“It’s going to be harder than the normal transition,” said Alfredo Cesar, one of Chamorro’s closest advisers and a former leader of the Contras, the U.S.-backed rebel movement that fought to unseat the Sandinistas. “That means the two sides are going to have to sit down and make sure the transition is accomplished in a peaceful manner.”

Ortega began that process by paying a visit to Chamorro at her home Monday night.

“I bring an olive branch of peace,” Ortega told her, kissing her on both cheeks.

“Come here, my darling,” she quipped. “I love you so much.”

She added: “There are neither winners nor losers here.”

That scene, and Ortega’s dramatic concession speech 12 hours earlier, in which he promised to abide by the will of the voters, seemed to offer the promise of peaceful change in a country torn by nearly a decade of guerrilla war and a history of rigged elections.

On Tuesday, Ortega read a proclamation of transition demands by the 104-member Sandinista Assembly, a consultative body of the party’s elite, to thousands of cheering supporters in Managua’s Revolution Square.

The proclamation warned UNO against any reversal of the Sandinista land redistribution program, the sale of banks or mineral rights, cut-backs in benefits to wounded Sandinista war veterans and war widows, or mass firing of civil servants. It vowed to “defend the integrity” of the 70,000-man Sandinista army.

“There will be no steps back from the fundamental conquests of the revolution,” Ortega said.

Opposition leaders took the speech as a warning that the negotiations will be difficult.

“The most important change in Nicaragua is not that UNO won or the Sandinista front went down to defeat but that we are entering a new form of governing, by negotiation rather than imposition,” said Emilio Alvarez Montalban, another Chamorro aide.

Rafael Solis, a Sandinista leader in the National Assembly, said: “These next 60 days, more than the elections, are going to decide the future of this country.”

Ortega has not announced his negotiating team, but it is expected to include his brother, Gen. Humberto Ortega, who is defense minister.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who came here as an election observer and stayed to help kick off transition talks, met Tuesday with Gen. Ortega and Lacayo, a businessman who managed his mother-in-law’s campaign. Carter said he hoped there will be a “small foundation for harmonious progress” by the time he leaves Nicaragua today.

Carter said the most immediate issue is the disarming of the 10,000-man Contra army. About 3,000 are inside Nicaragua and the rest camped in Honduras.

The former American president said the Sandinistas have made “no ultimatum” on the Contras. But Solis made it clear that the Sandinistas will not even negotiate with UNO on the issues of control or size of the army, which UNO pledged to reduce during the campaign, until the Contras are disbanded and return to civilian life.

Honduran President Rafael Callejas, who took office last month, said Tuesday that the rebels must leave his territory now that a non-Sandinista government has been elected.