Sandinistas Legalize Property Seizures : Nicaragua: Titles are awarded to 10,000 living in state-owned houses before the election. Ortega and other officials benefit.

A month after being voted out of office, the Sandinistas voted themselves into the former homes of their political enemies Wednesday, legalizing the occupation of about 10,000 residences seized during a decade of revolution.

By a vote of 67 to 2, the Sandinista-dominated National Assembly awarded property titles to anyone who was living in a state-owned house before the Feb. 25 election and had signed a public registry.

Those benefiting from the law include defeated President Daniel Ortega, the eight other comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, hundreds of party officials and many ordinary Nicaraguans now renting from the state.

It was the most controversial of several recent laws to benefit the Sandinistas before they turn over the government and the National Assembly to the National Opposition Union (UNO) of President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro on April 25.

After toppling President Anastasio Somoza in a 1979 guerrilla uprising, the Sandinistas nationalized all properties of his family and closest supporters. Other homes were confiscated under a 1981 law that made anyone absent from the country for six months subject to dispossession. Others were simply seized without legal justification.

Many supporters of Chamorro owned homes now occupied by Sandinistas. They are demanding that the new Assembly overturn the law. But her closest aides, fearing the trouble that homeless Sandinistas could stir up, promised the government Tuesday as part of a broad transition agreement that no one will be evicted.

Parties in Chamorro’s UNO coalition did not take part in Wednesday’s Assembly debate. The Marxist opposition Popular Action Movement raised the strongest objections.

Carlos Cuadra, the party’s assemblyman, argued that mansions seized from Somoza and his supporters “are the patrimony of the Nicaraguan people” and should not revert to private hands.

“Those who call themselves revolutionaries, the first thing they should do is abandon those luxurious houses,” he declared. “I cannot conceive of a single revolutionary who would divide up real estate like war booty.”

To blunt such criticism, the Sandinistas coupled the bill with a less controversial one, giving property titles to about 70,000 other families who built their own homes on land seized by the Sandinistas.

“These laws do not favor only Sandinistas,” said Julio Marenco, a Sandinista assemblyman. “We know that a great many people of UNO are also benefiting.”

Under amendments accepted by the Sandinistas, each beneficiary is limited to one house--most of the comandantes have several--and occupants of larger homes are required to pay.

The prices are a post-revolutionary bargain--$5 per square meter for houses in the 100- to 200-square-meter range, and twice that rate for anything bigger. Cuadra estimated that a house worth $40,000 would go for $2,000.

Former owners will be compensated at the government’s tax-assessed value, a small fraction of true worth.

A presidential spokesman declined to comment on whether Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murrillo, will stay in the $350,000 home seized from Jaime Morales, a banker who was out of the country at the time of the Sandinista takeover.