Chamorro, Allies Have Their First Spat : Nicaragua: Now that the Sandinistas are defeated, what can the 14 parties in the new coalition find to agree on?

In her first act as president-elect, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro appointed her son-in-law, Antonio Lacayo, to negotiate a smooth takeover of power from the defeated Sandinista government.

That decision produced the first spat within her victorious National Opposition Union, the coalition of 14 parties that is supposed to run Nicaragua starting April 25.

Party chieftains met Wednesday to complain that they were not consulted. Then they named their own transition boss, Vice President-elect Virgilio Godoy, to join Lacayo in talks with Sandinista leaders and insisted on greater authority for Godoy.

“Antonio Lacayo can be master of ceremonies, he can invite the dignitaries and decide where everyone sits at the inauguration, but Godoy is going to be in charge of the political negotiations,” Jaime Bonilla, a member of the coalition’s political council, declared Thursday.

Not so, asserted Ernesto Palazio, an aide to Chamorro. “It’s too early to tell what Virgilio’s role in the transition will be,” he said. “Violeta needs someone with whom she can communicate easily. Antonio Lacayo fulfills that role.”

While neither faction considers it severe, the quarrel is a sign that Sunday’s stunning upset victory at the polls has not healed the divisions that threatened the opposition during the six-month campaign. Now those rifts could complicate its task of choosing a government.

It is also a likely sample of the many ways post-revolutionary Nicaragua will be different. Unlike the Sandinistas--disciplined former guerrillas who concealed divergent “tendencies” behind a common cause of survival and layers of official secrecy--the new order lets its differences hang out.

The political council led by Godoy and the Chamorro camp have set up separate offices. The running mates speak in two different tongues--hers conciliatory, his confrontational. Now, apparently, there could be two different transition teams.

“This is going to be a natural part of democratic politics here,” a Western diplomat said. “Are they going to keep fighting like that? Sure they are. Is that anything to worry about? I don’t think so. But it only makes the process of governing very inefficient, wastes a lot of time.”

Among the strengths of UNO, as the coalition is called, was its single-minded determination to oust the Sandinistas. That cause attracted Communists, socialists, social democrats, Christian democrats, liberals and conservatives--an extraordinary diversity that in victory becomes a weakness as Chamorro tries to pick a Cabinet without offending any of the 14 parties.

UNO did manage, early in the campaign, to cobble together a blueprint for a so-called “Government of National Salvation.” It would end compulsory military conscription, decree a general amnesty, scale down the state bureaucracy and give freer rein to private enterprise.

The task of agreeing on a presidential candidate was more difficult. For that reason, party leaders reached outside their own ranks for Chamorro, the 60-year-old widow of a respected victim of the struggle against the pre-revolutionary dictatorship.

“She was a compromise candidate,” said Palazio. “The parties thought they could control her. But as the campaign developed, Violeta became a force of her own.”

Party leaders agree that Chamorro herself was largely responsible for UNO’s victory and is no longer dependent on them for her prestige. But if the bargaining over Cabinet posts produces enough defectors and they align with the Sandinistas, they warn, she might lose control of the National Assembly.

UNO won 52 of the unicameral legislature’s 90 seats, to 37 for the Sandinistas and one for an independent faction of the Social Christian Party.

Politicians close to Chamorro believe she will look beyond the parties for competent technocrats. For example, Francisco Mayorga, a Yale-trained economist without a party, is expected to become economics minister.

“They are thinking of appointing people who are capable of doing the job rather than fulfilling the political allegiance,” said Arturo Cruz, a former central bank president and civilian director of the Contra guerrillas who is now returning from exile and is often mentioned as a possible Cabinet choice.

Emilio Zambrana, a Communist Party leader, said splits in the coalition are bound to result if some parties are left out. He said the Communists will insist that each party be represented in the Cabinet and that only those who took part in drafting the plan of government be eligible.

Other politicians doubt that UNO will break up because its margin of victory was so wide that all its front-line leaders won seats in the Assembly or municipal government posts. UNO gained control of Managua and every provincial capital except Esteli and Leon.

If anything unglues the coalition, it is a legacy of personal feuds that surfaced during the campaign.

While bridging the ideological differences within the alliance, Chamorro created friction by ignoring the party council in favor of her personal advisers, many of whom are tied to her family and La Prensa, the newspaper she publishes.

Lacayo, her 42-year-old campaign manager, is married to one of her two daughters, Cristiana Chamorro, who edits La Prensa. He is an industrial engineer and businessman who had little political experience before the campaign.

Chamorro’s chief strategist is Alfredo Cesar, 38, who is married to Lacayo’s sister. He was reconstruction minister and central bank president in the Sandinista government until resigning in 1982.

Like Cesar, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Barrios, the president-elect’s elder son, served as a civilian director of the Contras and returned from exile to become a campaign adviser.

But Cesar’s personal ambitions remain the subject of deep distrust among traditional party leaders. Elected to the Assembly, he aspires to be president of that body, and many believe he dreams of being president in 1996.

“The political council would permit collective suicide before letting Cesar run the Assembly,” said a council member. “He is not a builder of coalitions but a destroyer.”

He said Cesar is powerful enough to keep his enemies on the council out of the Cabinet.

Those in Chamorro’s inner circle focus their suspicion on Godoy, 55, the veteran Liberal Party leader who as a young firebrand tried to assassinate President Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1956. He is viewed by some of her aides as maneuvering to serve as a shadow president.

A lawyer and sociology professor, Godoy was the labor minister in the Sandinista government before joining the opposition in 1984. His bitterness toward the Sandinistas is often criticized by Lacayo, who as a businessman tried to work with the ruling party.

On one campaign stop, Godoy pointed to a squad of helmeted Sandinista riot police and ridiculed them. He was rebuked by Lacayo, who told the crowd that UNO needed the police officers’ votes.

One UNO assemblyman described the two men’s relationship as one of “cordial animosity.” Their rivalry is certain to carry into the new government, where Lacayo is expected to serve as his mother-in-law’s chief of staff.

The other most frequently mentioned candidates for the Cabinet are, like Lacayo, moderate and pragmatic. They include veteran Conservative Party ideologue Emilio Alvarez Montalban, who is widely mentioned as the likely foreign minister; Socialist leader Luis Sanchez Sancho and businessman Enrique Dreyfus.