Profile : Sandinista-Basher Supreme : Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo, Managua’s mayor, is bent on sweeping members of the past government into full retreat.

On the gray concrete wall surrounding former President Daniel Ortega’s sprawling residential compound is a warning in red letters: “Aleman, this is not Berlin.”

The defiant message is aimed at Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo, the new mayor of Managua. Soon after taking office May 4, Aleman gave the Sandinista leader three days to tear down a section of the wall that encloses part of a city street.

When the deadline passed unheeded, the mayor threatened to demolish the 10-foot-high barrier himself. Ortega mocked him by having workmen raise it a few inches. Sandinista partisans rallied, decorating the wall with revolutionary art. Some vowed to protect it with their lives.

A real showdown has yet to occur--and probably won’t. The government of President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, saying it faces more urgent problems, has ignored Aleman’s repeated requests for 100 riot police to shield a municipal wrecking crew from the comandante’s militant supporters.

Yet the crusade has established the 44-year-old mayor as the most visible Sandinista-basher in a government guided from the top by a credo of conciliation. A little-known lawyer and coffee grower with no previous political experience, he has become the point man for hard-liners bent on using Chamorro’s Feb. 25 landslide election as a “big broom” to sweep the likes of Ortega into humiliating retreat. In the Sandinista press, Aleman is denounced as a “fascist,” cartooned as the devil and vilified as much as any other counterrevolutionary “ogre” since Ronald Reagan.

Aware of the limits on his power--Managua lacks its own police force and depends on the national treasury for half of its income--Aleman relishes the attention, even the notoriety. He seems driven as much by the challenge of managing one of Latin America’s poorest, dirtiest and fastest-growing cities as by a compulsion to make waves against Sandinismo .

“Mr. Ortega claims he is of the people, but he is afraid to let the people see how he lives,” the mayor said in an interview in his office. “We have to tear down the walls of injustice, and I believe it’s unjust for one person to enjoy a privilege no one else has.”

Later, over lunch at his favorite seafood restaurant, Aleman was more blunt: “Some of the comandantes don’t seem to realize that they lost the election. Part of my job is demonstrate that they are no longer in power.”

As Managua’s first popularly elected mayor, with some autonomy from the central government, Aleman is finding modest ways to make that point. A heavy-set man with dark curly hair, he goes about his rounds with forceful oratory and a flair for showmanship.

Facing down an angry assembly of Sandinista-led union activists chanting “Not one step back!” he put 145 of the municipal construction company’s 1,600 idled workers on 30-day dismissal notice to control the city deficit--a provocative step in an administration that is trying to minimize layoffs.

He has fired the Sandinista director of the municipal dance school and suspended its classes. He is selling off money-losing enterprises--two motels, two restaurants, a sewing collective, a cannery and a bakery--used by his Sandinista predecessor for political patronage.

And he is trying to abolish a Sandinista-led retailers association at the Eastern Market, Managua’s biggest, on the ground that it protects unlicensed, tax-evading vendors. To do this, he organized a referendum among licensed retailers, counted the votes himself in a public ceremony and declared a huge mandate against the association. Sandinistas called the vote fraudulent.

Each of these efforts has stirred enough resistance to complicate the city’s woes. For example, the electric company, still in Sandinista hands, has stopped levying a 2% tax once used to finance garbage collection in Managua, a city of 1.3 million people and only nine functioning garbage trucks.

The Sandinista minority on the 20-member city council accuses Aleman of being a dictator. He failed to hold a vote, they said, before raising his salary from $600 to $1,750 per month.

“The mayor’s job lends itself to consensus building,” said Carlos Carrion, Aleman’s low-keyed Sandinista predecessor. “Everybody wants better housing, better schools, better services. This is not a job for an impulsive, big-mouthed ideologue like Arnoldo Aleman.”

Aleman rejects such criticism. He says his 14-hour days--much of them spent receiving visitors while hunched over two telephones that he often uses simultaneously--are devoted mainly to raising funds for the biggest project of his six-year term: building 50,000 new houses. Carrion, he claims, left just $2,500 in the municipal treasury and 115,000 shack dwellers squatting illegally on community land--much of it occupied with police acquiescence during the Sandinistas’ lame-duck days.

With each new dwelling costing the city $4,500, the success of the housing campaign will depend in part on Aleman’s persuasiveness with foreign donors. He flew to Venezuela recently and sent two of his aides to Washington in search of funds.

But he wonders if he’s just spinning his wheels. The flow of rural migrants into the city is “frightening,” he says. “It’s Dona Violeta’s problem. I cannot resolve it. She has to talk to her minister of government and tell him to put on his pants and make the police stop all these squatters from seizing more land.”

As he gazed out his office window one day at the Motastepe Hill, which towers over western Managua, Aleman’s thoughts turned from the homeless to another way to put down the Sandinistas.

After Sandinista guerrillas toppled the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, they hauled white concrete slabs up the hillside to form the huge letters FSLN--the Spanish acronym for Sandinista National Liberation Front. Noticing that the bottom of the L has fallen down, Aleman said he will send workmen to remove the S, leaving the word FIN, Spanish for “end.”

“The end of the FSLN!” he exclaimed.

Whether the Sandinistas are finished, or remain a political force to be reckoned with, is the fundamental question that divides the conciliatory camp of technocrats around Chamorro from the sizable hard-line faction of the National Opposition Union coalition that got her elected. The hard-liners, politicians for the most part, are led by Vice President Virgilio Godoy.

Maneuvering deftly between camps, Aleman first supported Chamorro and won her backing to be the coalition’s mayoral candidate over a rival backed by Godoy. Pledging only an honest administration, he waged a vigorous campaign well-financed by Miami-based Nicaraguan exiles and rode into office on a tide of anti-Sandinista sentiment. He won 52% of the vote in the urban center of revolutionary power.

Once in office, Aleman alarmed Chamorro’s circle by joining the Constitutional Liberal Party, an ideological kin of Godoy’s Independent Liberals, and filling city hall posts with the vice president’s allies. While claiming to be on excellent terms with the president and the vice president, he says he admires Godoy’s “hardball” politics.

“What’s dangerous about this is that Virgilio is counseling him to confront the Sandinistas in every possible way,” complained a presidential aide. “Violeta has told (Aleman) to calm down, but he ignores her.”

Aleman’s political militancy was shaped by two bitter experiences. His father, an education minister during the Somoza dictatorship, died during the seven months Aleman was jailed in 1980 on charges of organizing a counterrevolutionary cell--an accusation he still denies. Then last year, Ortega, to silence criticism by the coffee grower’s association headed by Aleman, confiscated the family’s three farms while Aleman’s wife was dying of cancer.

“This wasn’t the road he chose,” said Roger Solorzano Marin, a mayoral adviser. “He was a lawyer, and the Sandinistas arrested him. The law became meaningless. So he became a coffee farmer, but they took his land away. They made him what he is--a politician.”

With $8,400 in confiscated money returned along with his 400 acres after the election, Aleman rented the pool deck of the Inter-Continental Hotel for an inaugural bash featuring former Somoza-era National Guard officers, Contra leaders and anti-Castro Cubans among the guests. “Rivers of whiskey and vodka flowed,” the Sandinista newspaper Barricada reported.

Answering criticism of his guest list, the mayor commented: “The Sandinistas want reconciliation, but only with them. I pardon those who were Somocistas as well as those who were Sandinistas, even though the Sandinistas did more damage.”

Notes on Managua

Population: 1.3 million (out of a national population of 3.6 million).

Growth rate: 5% a year.

Major economic activity: more than half the force employed by the government or state-owned industry. About 10,000 people are unlicensed street vendors.

Unemployment: about 25%.

Housing: 115,000 people live in 20,000 shacks in 110 squatter settlements. City authorities say 80,000 new houses are needed to offer decent living conditions to the city’s population.

Water: Shortages have led to rationing; water is shut off two days a week in most neighborhoods. 300,000 people have no potable water at all.

Biography

Name: Arnoldo Aleman Lacayo

Title: Mayor of Managua

Age: 44

Family: Both parents were lawyers, as are three of his four siblings; the other is a doctor. Married 17 years to Maria Dolores Cardenal Vargas, who died last October, leaving him two sons and two daughters.

Education: Studied two years in a Roman Catholic seminary of the Christian Brothers order in Honduras. Law degree from the University of Leon in Nicaragua.

Quote: “You have to play political hardball with the Sandinistas. Some of these technocrats being appointed (by the president) have been out of Nicaragua for 10 years and don’t understand reality. They get frightened if four Sandinista union activists gather and start shouting.”