Nicaragua’s ‘Family’ Style Bridges Political Chasms

The Bush Administration lost its first test of wills with Violeta Barrios de Chamorro when an assistant secretary of state, Bernard Aronson, came here to warn her against keeping Sandinista Defense Minister Humberto Ortega as head of the army.

“But Senor Aronson,” replied the opposition publisher who had defeated the Sandinista revolutionaries in national elections. “Nicaragua is a family. We have to find peace among ourselves.”

That exchange, a week before her April 25 inauguration as Nicaragua’s president, is repeated by Chamorro’s aides to portray her as more than a matriarchal figurehead. The 60-year-old widow may be a political novice, they say, but she is tough-minded in defense of a few guiding principles.

More significantly, the “family” analogy used by Chamorro served to remind her American visitor of the web of blood ties, personal loyalties and business partnerships that spread across the Nicaraguan political divide like so many bridges, even after eight years of war and 30,000 dead.

In a country of 3.5 million people, such networks have as much to do with politics as the polarized labels--Sandinistas, UNO, Contras--that they belie. They help explain the delicate arrangements that eased the first peaceful turnover of power from one political force to another in Nicaragua’s history.

“Sure, people voted to get rid of the Sandinistas, but in the Nicaraguan family the Sandinistas are all mixed up with the others,” said a lawyer who worked first for the Sandinistas, then for the Contras and now for Chamorro. “We are not as uncomfortable with each other as you might think.”

In challenging President Daniel Ortega in the Feb. 25 election, Chamorro ran as the candidate of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a 14-party alliance embracing everyone from Communists to former Contras. Many politicians and the rebels who remain armed see her margin of victory--56% to 41%--as a mandate to sweep the Sandinistas off the stage.

But in the Nicaraguan tradition of presidential supremacy, Chamorro quickly spurned the coalition. Like the Somozas and the Ortegas who preceded her, she rules with a team of family advisers.

Foremost among them is Antonio Lacayo, 43, her son-in-law and chief of staff, who shunned revolutionary politics while thriving in agribusiness with Sandinista partners. Her political strategist is Alfredo Cesar, 38, who is married to Lacayo’s sister. A master of shifting allegiances, Cesar fought with the Sandinistas against Somoza, then directed Contra strategy against the Ortegas.

More intent on reviving the war-battered economy than bashing the Sandinistas, the two men, both U.S.-trained civil engineers, quietly negotiated a pact with the outgoing government to minimize abrupt changes and conflict.

In the new order, the Ortega brothers keep temporary control of a reduced army while a more radical Sandinista faction gives up the police. Chamorro’s forces dominate the elected National Assembly but Sandinistas share its leadership posts and are ready to make alliances. Most Sandinistas retain their civil service jobs and confiscated homes. After flexing its muscles with strikes just before Chamorro’s inauguration, the Sandinista labor movement is restraining itself.

Chamorro aides involved in the pact are, like the Sandinista comandantes, men in their 30s and 40s. They supported the 1979 Sandinista guerrilla takeover, then turned against the revolution’s leaders but remain on good terms with many who stayed loyal.

“Our generation are the moderates of this country, the ones who told our parents, ‘Calm down, don’t be such thieves,’ ” said one aide. “We made the previous revolution and now we are making this one.”

Carlos Hurtado, Chamorro’s minister in charge of the police, “is not going to put us all on planes to Cuba,” said Vanesa Castro, a comandante’s wife who recruited him into the Sandinista movement in the 1970s.

Luis Sanchez Sancho, a Chamorro power-broker in the new Assembly, is the son of prominent Sandinista lawmaker Luis Sanchez Salgado. A photo of father and son embracing on the assembly floor last week was published by newspapers here as a symbol of cooperation.

When Daniel Ortega went to Chamorro’s house to concede the election, he found one of his ministers, Alejandro Martinez Cuenca, already there and chatting amiably with Lacayo, a high school classmate.

“We have a clandestine coalition, a secret understanding to keep the country going,” said Dionisio Marenco, a Sandinista from the same class.

Lacayo is a cousin of Maj. Gen. Joaquin Cuadra and Col. Osvaldo Lacayo, Sandinistas who are second and third in the army chain of command behind Humberto Ortega--a relationship that helped Ortega win Chamorro’s trust.

Family ties help explain another controversial Chamorro decision--to let the leftist guerrillas of El Salvador keep an office here for political activity. Two of the president’s four children are Sandinistas and are close to the Salvadoran guerrillas.

“In Nicaragua, families continue to be more important than ideologies,” said a commentary in La Cronica, a weekly newspaper. “The close family relations between the parties in conflict at least make it possible for them to be cordial and lower their voices in private discussions.”

The loudest conflict in Nicaragua today is between Vice President Virgilio Godoy and the Chamorro camp. Chamorro ignored objections by UNO’s political council, which Godoy leads, to keeping the army in Sandinista hands. After he sniped at the decision, she barred him from setting up offices alongside hers in the Casa Presidencial.

The feud has split the UNO coalition into two factions, with eight of the 14 parties supporting Godoy, and threatened to undo the Contras’ agreement to disarm their forces, now observing a truce, by June 10.

“The National Opposition Union will continue being the opposition, because this is not a new government but simply a new facade,” Godoy declared. “They don’t realize that to leave Gen. Ortega in place is to leave a spider that will trap them in its web.”

In a country that traditionally changes governments by force, Chamorro’s aides acknowledge the risks of such a pact. But they repeat an old Nicaraguan dictum that has defused potential civil wars before: Better a bad deal than a good fight.

“This is a transition government,” one aide said. “The first fully democratic government will be in 1996 (when Chamorro’s term ends). This is just a bridge.”

Chamorro’s 13-man Cabinet is dominated by businessmen and technocrats with few ties to organized politics. Just one minister is an UNO party leader, while four are former Sandinistas. Health Minister Ernesto Salmeron is a pediatrician who treats the children of Sandinista comandantes and Chamorro’s grandchildren.

Not represented at all is the Superior Council of Private Enterprise, a traditional business group, led by militant anti-Sandinistas. Businessmen in the new Cabinet come from newer, more conciliatory power centers--the Commission on the Recovery and Development of Nicaragua and the Harvard-affiliated Central American Management Institute.

“This sector of the bourgeoisie, rather than reject everything that smells of Sandinismo, sees many of the revolutionary transformations as the basis for a new kind of capitalism for the year 2000,” said a serious analysis in the humor magazine Semana Comica that was headlined, “All Power to the Yuppies.”