Divided Sandinistas Grope for Identity : Nicaragua: Reformers want to replace the comandantes over the taint of personal enrichment.

Ousted from office in a free election last year, Sandinista leaders consoled themselves with the boast that, in defeat, they had finally brought democracy to Nicaragua. And many vowed to democratize their own party to win the voters back.

But as the Sandinista National Liberation Front prepares for its first national congress, its self-appointed comandantes are resisting a rank-and-file campaign to challenge their supremacy with a secret ballot.

The reformers appear to be short of a majority among the 600 Sandinista delegates who will convene here July 19-21. But their effort, fueled by resentment over some comandantes ‘ personal fortunes, has sharply divided the movement as it gropes for a new identity.

“The Sandinista Front is like the Colossus of Rhodes--with one foot on the side of democracy and one foot on the side of authoritarianism,” said Sofia Montenegro, a pro-democracy delegate to the congress. “To get this statue to move its conservative foot across the breach will not be easy because . . . the average Sandinista mentality is quite rigid.”

As a clandestine guerrilla army with wide popular support, the Sandinistas toppled the Somoza family dictatorship in July, 1979, then ruled for almost 11 years as an elitist revolutionary “vanguard,” modeled after ruling Communist parties of the Soviet bloc.

Worn down by the Contra war and their own political mistakes, the Sandinistas lost the government 15 months ago to an elected center-right alliance led by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Having eased entry requirements and tripled their ranks to 140,000 members, they remain Nicaragua’s largest political force--one that, through control of the military and the trade unions, can make or break the country’s stability.

But in a world without Soviet allies or U.S.-backed Contra enemies, the Sandinista Front has been adrift for the past year, absorbed in an internal debate over its purpose and its course for the 1996 elections.

The discussions, increasingly public and often acrimonious, have pitted orthodox Marxist-Leninists against “pragmatists,” pro-Chamorro collaborators against hard-core oppositionists, and pacifists against agitators unwilling to renounce the party’s tradition of armed struggle.

Seven Sandinista leaders and activists acknowledged in interviews last week that these issues are too divisive to be tackled head-on, much less resolved, by the party congress. Most of the debate, they said, has been reduced to a single issue: the fate of the Sandinista National Directorate.

Under the subservient slogan “National Directorate, give your orders,” the same nine men exercised collective leadership of the movement from 1977 until last year. Then Humberto Ortega resigned his party post under a deal allowing him to remain army commander under President Chamorro. Comandante Carlos Nunez died of cancer.

Defeat and the taint of personal enrichment dimmed the mystique of the other seven as they scattered in different directions trying to cope for the first time with ordinary life.

Former Interior Minister Tomas Borge, the 61-year-old elder Sandinista, is trying to make a career as a celebrity interviewer for foreign newspapers and magazines. Luis Carrion Cruz, 38, plans to work toward a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Comandante Jaime Wheelock runs a 6,700-acre cattle ranch that was state property when he was minister of agrarian reform. Former President Daniel Ortega is building a new house in the face of a bill by the Chamorro coalition’s National Assembly majority to throw the comandantes out of their mansions.

The bill would overturn Sandinista laws that awarded party loyalists tens of millions of dollars in government-owned land, houses and other property in the days before Chamorro’s inauguration.

The bill has drawn a furious reaction from the comandantes and from militant followers who last month seized Managua’s City Hall and exploded several bombs, forcing a vote on the bill to be delayed.

But the conflict crystallized the disillusionment among many Sandinistas with their leaders. Rank-and-file delegates rose at pre-congress meetings to demand an accounting of the booty and a shake-up of the directorate to restore the party’s identification with the poor.

“The distribution of property was legal and legitimate, but there were too many abuses in the way it was done,” said Rafael Solis, secretary of the National Assembly under Sandinista rule. “If the abuses are not corrected, the Sandinistas cannot possibly return to govern Nicaragua.”

Reformers advanced several formulas for changing the directorate. One would expand it by electing 20 new members. Another would relegate the seven comandantes to an honorary status and choose a new executive board. The most radical would start from scratch and force the comandantes to seek reelection by secret ballot, with each voter picking his own slate of 10 or so leaders from a master list of candidates.

“Why deny them the opportunity to be judged?” party activist Melania Vega Rodriguez wrote of the comandantes in Barricada, the official Sandinista newspaper. “To recognize their errors and pay the price would be the correct posture of a true revolutionary.”

But before elected delegates could finish their pre-congress debate, the directorate weighed in with its own formula: All seven comandantes would run as a slate, to be ratified at the congress by a yes or no voice vote. Two Sandinistas already close to the directorate would be added to the ticket--Rene Nunez, its non-voting secretary for years, and Sergio Ramirez, who was Daniel Ortega’s vice president.

That formula prevailed last month at the Managua pre-congress meeting. The vote was 242 to 149, a hint of the balance between “verticalists” and reformers in the congress’ decisive debate.

Two of the comandantes most strongly criticized within the party, Wheelock and Bayardo Arce, said in interviews that the secret-ballot formula would result, unfairly, in the ouster of some directorate members as punishment for decisions taken collectively. They said such revolutionary programs as land distribution to poor peasants were under too great a threat now to break up a directorate that is fighting to preserve them.

“This is not a beauty contest,” Wheelock said. “We’re choosing a collective leadership. A change in that leadership could be interpreted as a questioning of the revolutionary transformations we made in the past. We could end up fragmenting like every other party in Nicaragua.”

Arce, who oversees the substantial publishing and broadcasting empire the Sandinistas managed to retain, called secret-ballot voting “a useful exercise but not indispensable.” A revolutionary, he said, “does not have to wait for an election every so many years to realize whether or not he has support.”

Even some prominent reformers, such as Sergio Ramirez, believe the directorate should remain intact during what they call a “transition” toward full party democracy. Ramirez noted that a new Sandinista assembly of 80 to 120 members, to be chosen by secret ballot at this congress, will in theory become the party’s supreme authority until the next congress in 1994. The assembly will meet every three months and review the directorate’s decisions.

“These are significant advances,” Ramirez said. “We can leave more important decisions for the next congress.”