Chamorro Takes Nicaragua Helm : Inauguration: The new president stirs controversy by keeping a Sandinista as her armed forces chief. She promises to demilitarize the country.

Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, assuming Nicaragua’s presidency from a defeated revolutionary government in an unruly ceremony, announced plans Wednesday to demilitarize this war-weary nation and assigned the chief of the Sandinista army to retain his post until the process is complete.

The controversial appointment of Gen. Humberto Ortega, brother of the departing Sandinista president, strained Chamorro’s 14-party coalition and prompted two of her advisers to quit hours before they were to be sworn into her Cabinet.

Her decision, greeted with howls of protest from her supporters in a crowd of 20,000 in Managua’s baseball stadium, also stiffened resistance by the U.S.-backed Contras to a week-old armistice accord that obliges them to disarm by June 10 after eight years of war.

But Chamorro made it clear that the scheduled Contra demobilization will be accompanied by two steps that rebel leaders have demanded--an end to the military draft, which was decreed Wednesday, and a reduction of the 70,000-strong Sandinista-led army through spending cuts. All army conscripts, who number about 30,000, will return home “as soon as possible,” she said.

“This new stage of our history demands that we reduce the army, reduce the defense budget that asphyxiates our economy,” she said in a 30-minute inaugural speech. “We have to melt the arms and sell the metal to buy machinery for farms and factories.”

The new president spoke to a bitterly polarized crowd of Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas, who shouted at each other from opposing outfield bleachers, jeered many of the 11 visiting heads of government and threw water balloons at her and Ortega.

“Blessed Nicaragua,” she told them. “Instead of burying its sons in a fratricidal war, will bury its weapons forever. . . . Reconciliation is much more beautiful than victory.”

She announced that she is keeping the defense portfolio herself and ordering Gen. Ortega, who held that post under Sandinista rule, “to continue in his job (as chief of) the army and establish an orderly program for reducing the armed forces and guaranteeing (their) subordination to civil authority.”

Aides to Chamorro said that meant Ortega’s appointment will be temporary, perhaps for six months to a year.

The status of the Sandinista People’s Army, the main power base of the one-time guerrillas who deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza in July, 1979, and went on to rule Nicaragua, has been Chamorro’s most difficult decision since her upset victory over President Daniel Ortega in the Feb. 25 election. Nearly all army officers above the rank of captain are members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Under a March 27 agreement between the incoming and outgoing governments, all army officers were required to resign their party posts, and about 30 of them, including Gen. Ortega, a member of the nine-member Sandinista directorate, did so. But nearly every leader of Chamorro’s coalition urged her to retire the general anyway because he symbolizes Sandinista militarism and would seek to keep his party in control of the army.

The coalition’s political council, headed by Vice President Virgilio Godoy, warned Tuesday that it would not support a reappointment of Gen. Ortega “nor be responsible for the consequences.” U.S. officials had told Chamorro that the army under the general’s control might continue giving aid to leftist guerrillas in nearby El Salvador.

The president’s son-in-law and chief adviser, Antonio Lacayo, argued that keeping Ortega would forestall a series of strikes by pro-Sandinista unions and possible insubordination by the army itself.

Jaime Cuadra, who was to become agriculture minister in Chamorro’s government, and Gilberto Cuadra, who was to be the construction minister, protested the decision and chose not to join the Cabinet.

After the Cabinet was sworn in, Godoy commented: “I respect the decision of the president but I am not happy.”

The other sensitive Cabinet post is the Interior Ministry, led until this week by Sandinista founder Tomas Borge. Chamorro named Carlos Hurtado, a former civilian adviser to the Contras who returned from exile this year, to succeed Borge, and charged him with demilitarizing his security forces under a renamed Ministry of Government.

Most of Chamorro’s other key appointments are technocrats without strong party ties. They include Francisco Mayorga, her chief economic adviser, as president of the Central Bank; Enrique Dreyfus, foreign minister; Silvio de Franco, economy minister; Francisco Rosales, labor minister; Sofonias Cisneros, education minister; Emilio Pereira, finance minister; Roberto Rondon, agriculture minister; Jaime Icabalceta, construction minister, and Ernesto Salmeron, health minister. Lacayo will serve as minister of the presidency.

Chamorro, a 60-year-old newspaper publisher and widow of an opposition activist who was slain during Somoza’s rule, became the first opposition leader to win and take office peacefully in Nicaragua’s 156-year history.

At the stadium, Nicaragua’s first woman chief executive stood on a platform behind home plate and took the oath from Miriam Arguello, the new president of the National Assembly. Daniel Ortega placed the blue and white presidential sash over her left shoulder at 11:57 a.m., and they kissed each other’s right cheeks.

Invoking the memory of her late husband, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the new president said: “This is the hour that his blood has born the fruit of his dreams. We have reached the promised land. This is the Nicaragua sought by the poor to get out of their misery. This is the Nicaragua sought by the exiles expelled by dictators. This is the Nicaragua without tyrants, without ideologies that destroy reality, without lies that conceal our history.”

She proposed a general amnesty for all political crimes, including those of her husband’s accused killers, and decreed the removal of partisan banners from all public offices and monuments. While promising to respect the land titles of peasants who benefitted from Sandinista land reforms, she vowed to review measures that legalized the seizure of other properties.

The ceremony capped a two-month transition in which Chamorro’s advisers worked closely with the Sandinista leadership to try to control violence on both sides and minimize abrupt policy changes. Sandinistas were allowed to plan the ceremony and write the oaths of office taken by her and Godoy, which included a pledge to “defend the principles of the country and the revolution.”

Another sign of collaboration came late Tuesday in the first meeting of the National Assembly, when moderates in her coalition joined with the Sandinista minority to elect their own mixed slate of leaders, defeating all of the candidates of Godoy’s hard-line political council except Arguello.

But the mood in the baseball stadium was far from conciliatory. Sandinista activists, seated in the left-field bleachers and behind the third base line, jeered most of the visiting dignitaries, including U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle, and traded insults with the larger crowd of Chamorro supporters in right field and behind first base.

Riot police of the largely Sandinista Interior Ministry, now nominally under Chamorro’s control, made no move against a Sandinista activist who raced into left field with a party banner. But they moved in force against Chamorro supporters who followed suit.

When President Ortega walked in from center field, he headed toward right field but quickly retreated under a hail of water balloons and other thrown objects. To chants of “People Power! People Power!” from the Sandinistas, police charged into the bleachers and scuffled with Chamorro supporters while Ortega walked to the inaugural platform via left field.

Nine minutes later, Chamorro rode in from center field on a white pickup truck, wearing a white suit and standing on crutches because of a kneecap she fractured in a fall during the election campaign.

As the announcer welcomed her as “president of all Nicaraguans,” she rode past the jeering Sandinista crowd, dodging scores of water balloons hurled at her.

A score of police officers moved between the truck and the crowd, leaping to block the missiles while Chamorro raised both hands in a victory sign.

The hostile spectacle visibly upset Ortega, who waved a finger at an aide to try to calm his supporters.

“We will be a constructive opposition,” the 44-year-old Ortega later told the crowd in his last speech as president. “The tasks that weigh on the new government are tasks that all Nicaraguans must share. . . . We are not obliged to think the same way, speak the same way, laugh the same way, get mad in the same way, but we are obliged to work for peace in the same way.”

Searching for points of consensus, he kept getting rebuffed by the crowd.

“Are there any Somoza supporters here?” he asked, expecting a unanimous “No.” Instead, many in the pro-Chamorro crowd stood and pointed across to the Sandinistas.

At another point, the Sandinistas chanted: “Daniel, Daniel, we won’t give up our arms!”

The departing president saved tough language for the Bush Administration, warning it not to oppose his brother’s army appointment or other compromises between his party and the new government.

“Stop dictating policies to the Nicaraguans,” he said. “We will decide our policies ourselves. If we fight here, it’s our own fight, and we will resolve it among Nicaraguans.”

NEVER SAY DIE--Sandinista supporters locally refuse to call it quits. B3