Chamorro Joins Ortega in Urging Contras to Disband

President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro joined the defeated Sandinista government Tuesday night in urging the U.S.-backed Contras to disarm immediately and end their eight-year-old rebellion.

“The causes of this civil war have disappeared,” Chamorro said in her first substantive message since her stunning electoral upset of President Daniel Ortega on Sunday. “There is no reason for more war.

“Those who rose up in arms ought to put down their rifles and return peacefully to their families to work for the reconstruction of our country,” she added.

Chamorro broadcast her plea on the radio after Ortega, in a speech to thousands of militant supporters, put the rebels’ disarmament at the top of a list of conditions for a peaceful transfer of power to her 14-party National Opposition Union, known as UNO.

Talks on those issues, including control of the army and privatization of public property, began late Tuesday, after the government’s Supreme Electoral Council formally declared the 60-year-old newspaper publisher the winner of Sunday’s vote. Chamorro’s representative met with Gen. Humberto Ortega, the president’s brother and defense minister.

A similar appeal to the Contras came Tuesday from President Rafael Leonardo Callejas of Honduras, where most of the 10,000-strong Contra army is camped. He said the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat offered “better democratic guarantees in Nicaragua for the quick repatriation” of the rebels.

Contra leaders in Honduras, while welcoming Chamorro’s victory, have rejected that argument so far, saying they want to see if the new government can take effective control of the Sandinista army after her April 25 inauguration.

“We will return to Nicaragua when the Sandinistas abandon power,” the Contra chief of staff, Israel Galeano, told reporters Monday. “We are a cancer that no one wants. That is why we should act with caution in the face of events taking place in Nicaragua.”

With training and assistance from the United States, the rebel army began fighting to topple the Sandinistas three years after they seized power in a 1979 guerrilla uprising.

Their forces have been weakened by a series of Central American peace initiatives that led to Sunday’s election in Nicaragua. The U.S. Congress cut off their military aid two years ago, and the region’s four other presidents joined Ortega last August in urging them to disband before Sunday’s election.

But that accord was ignored by the Bush Administration, which continued to feed the Contras, and never explicitly supported until now by Chamorro and other leaders of her coalition. Some of those politicians, including one of Chamorro’s sons, are former Contra leaders who continued to identify with the rebel cause after returning here from exile.

Her firm endorsement of the regional accord Tuesday night cleared the way for two months of bargaining with the government on her coalition’s program for a “government of national salvation.”

Chamorro named her son-in-law and campaign manager, Antonio Lacayo, to head those negotiations with Humberto Ortega. The two men met for the first time Tuesday night, with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as a mediator. They are to hold another meeting today, with their transition staffs.

UNO’s electoral platform calls for dramatic changes that would scale down the army and the revolutionary state built during a decade of Sandinista rule and give freer reign to private enterprise.

Chamorro’s margin of victory, 55% of the vote to Ortega’s 41%, has raised expectations among her supporters that hundreds of Sandinista party officials will be evicted from homes and lands that were seized from the pre-revolutionary owners.

But in winning 52 of the National Assembly’s 90 seats, UNO fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed 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.

And without the power to change the constitution, Chamorro’s government could be stuck with a Supreme Court made up mostly of Sandinista-appointed justices for most of its six-year term.

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 Contra leader. “That means the two sides are going to have to sit down and make sure the transition is accomplished in a peaceful manner.”

President 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, 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.

Tuesday, however, the Sandinistas dramatized their power by turning out thousands of party militants to hear Ortega’s conditions for a smooth transition.

“A change of government does not mean the end of the revolution,” Ortega declared. Reading a statement from the party leadership, he said it would turn over power to Chamorro’s coalition but still had “the responsibility to watch over and guarantee the continuity of the revolutionary process.”

The statement said the Sandinistas would “defend the integrity and professionalism of the army and the police forces.”

Ortega’s appointment of his brother to head the negotiations underscores the delicacy of the issue of control of those military forces. Both are closely identified with the Sandinista party, and the army is known as the Sandinista People’s Army.

UNO has promised to end compulsory military service and reduce the size of the 70,000-man army.

Carter, meeting with reporters before Chamorro’s announcement, said that Humberto Ortega and Interior Minister Tomas Borge, who controls the police, had agreed in principal to give up their posts but are reluctant to do so as long as the Contras are still fighting.

“They expressed their conviction that (disarming the Contras) has to be done before they are willing to leave the country defenseless,” Carter said. “I think this is a reasonable statement of fact. It’s not an ultimatum or demand.”

The Sandinista statement said the party, as the strongest, most cohesive political force in the country, would also oppose any change in its land redistribution program, the sale of state-owned banks or mineral rights, or cutbacks in benefits to wounded Sandinista war veterans and war widows. It demanded that the jobs of all public workers be guaranteed.

Privatization is a fundamental part of UNO’s economic program. It hopes to reduce the public sector and return inefficient state-owned industries to the private sector. An UNO commission is also studying the cases of hundreds of Sandinista militants who live in state-owned houses and drive state-owned vehicles, many of them confiscated from opponents of the government.

After reading the statement, Ortega emphasized that the party intended to turn over the government to UNO, but said UNO voters would soon discover their mistake.

“Everyone who voted for UNO will vote for the Sandinista Front in the future,” he said. “The ball is in the other court.”

Meanwhile, he emphasized, “there will be no steps back from the fundamental conquests of the revolution,” Ortega said in his speech.

Some opposition leaders dismissed Ortega’s speech as rhetoric. “This is just a drowning man kicking,” said business leader Gilberto Cuadra.

But others took it 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.

In her radio address, Chamorro expressed “my commitment to respect the will of the 40% minority that voted for the Sandinista Front” and “my desire to be president of all Nicaraguans.”

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.”