Chamorro Government Outlaws Strike, Setting Up Showdown With Sandinistas : Nicaragua: Public employees are warned to be back on the job today or face dismissal.

This nation’s new government, heading for its first major showdown with the Sandinista opposition, outlawed a growing strike by public employees Monday, threatened to dismiss any striker not back at work today and ordered the police to break up picket lines.

“He who doesn’t show up (to work) will be firing himself,” Labor Minister Francisco Rosales declared at a nationally broadcast news conference after reading a decree declaring the four-day-old strike illegal.

But after he spoke, hundreds of bank clerks, telephone operators, bus mechanics and construction hands joined about 40,000 workers already on strike, and defiant Sandinista union leaders vowed to expand the walkout day by day until President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro agrees to negotiate personally their demands for 200% wage increases and job security.

“As long as there is no settlement, we will not disarm,” union leader Lucio Jimenez told a crowd of cheering strikers at the headquarters of his Sandinista Workers Central, under the gaze of huge portraits of Marx, Lenin and Sandinista hero Augusto C. Sandino.

“Not one step back!” the crowd chanted.

The walkout, which has shut most government ministries, began after Chamorro decreed a temporary suspension of the civil service law. Passed under Sandinista rule, the law had made it hard for her government to dismiss senior Sandinista holdovers from policy-making posts. It also permitted strikes by government employees, a contradiction of the labor code.

Her action brought on Chamorro’s first serious conflict with the Sandinistas since her center-right coalition of 14 parties took office April 25, ending more than a decade of Sandinista rule. On Saturday, the eight-man Sandinista National Directorate issued a statement telling “working people” that, since they were not consulted about the measures, they “have a right to reject them as unconstitutional and anti-popular.”

The Sandinistas are still the largest single political force in Nicaragua. They dominate the labor movement, the armed forces, the police and the Supreme Court. By suspending the civil service law by decree, Chamorro has prompted Sandinista lawyers to challenge her in the courts, on the grounds that she bypassed the legislature.

And by declaring the strike illegal, the government appears to be setting up an awkward conflict between Sandinista labor militants and police recruited and trained by Sandinista officials. Rosales said that workers who return to their jobs today “can be sure that the police will guarantee there will be no pickets.”

But Monday, the police failed to move against pickets at the Economy Ministry and the Construction Ministry to enforce an order to let in top government officials. And they took more than an hour to break a chain lock and escort Agriculture Minister Roberto Rondon into his office through a hostile crowd.

“I hope the police act with wisdom and sanity,” said strike leader Jose Angel Bermudez. “We are not going to abandon the picket lines. They can arrest and put us in jail, but the people will have the last word.”

The dispute erupted after Chamorro’s economic advisers, inheriting what they called a bankrupt economy, devalued the cordoba by 50%, forcing a doubling of prices for most things. The government itself has doubled water rates, tripled electricity rates and raised telephone rates by 1,300%, while removing subsidies on transport.

After Rosales announced a 60% wage boost, Sandinista unions demanded 200%. Rosales offered to negotiate a new increase if the unions called off their strike, but the talks broke down Sunday night when they refused.

“In no country in the world do (governments) negotiate under pressure,” Rosales declared. “And during the 10 years of their government, the Sandinistas never negotiated with a strike going on. Now they want to change history.”

Last week, the strike had little effect on the public except for closing the Nicaraguan-Honduran border, where customs agents walked off the job. But Monday, the banking system was shut down after noon, a mechanics’ strike forced many buses off Managua’s streets and telephone service was partially disrupted.

Vowing to escalate the strike little by little, Jimenez said: “We are not going to shoot all our ammunition this week. We want to give Violeta a chance to negotiate.”

But so far, the president has insisted that unions deal with Rosales, a Paris-educated lawyer and combative former Sandinista now branded by his one-time comrades as “enemy number one of the working class.”

In Washington, meanwhile, the Bush Administration used Chamorro’s increasing economic difficulties to prod Congress into acting on a long-stalled bill to provide aid to Nicaragua and Panama.

Bush called House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) on Monday morning to read him the text of a cable he had received from Chamorro appealing for the funds, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

The cable was “an urgent request for assistance” that mentioned the current public employee strikes, Fitzwater said. “She has a government that’s being put together in very difficult circumstances, and the President expressed to the Speaker his strong feeling that the Congress has toyed with this bill and has ignored the real problems in Panama and Nicaragua long enough.”

The bill, which would provide $800 million to the two countries, has been tied up by wrangling over unrelated provisions.

Times staff writer David Lauter, in Washington, contributed to this story.