Sandinistas Reelect Ortega in Nicaragua : Central America: Choice of hard-line ex-president as leader deals a blow to the leftist party’s reform-minded moderates.

A bitterly divided Sandinista Front reelected hard-line leader Daniel Ortega to head the party Monday in a major defeat for moderates who had sought to reform an organization that won a revolution 15 years ago but today is struggling to return to power.

Ending a four-day convention, Sandinista delegates chose a 15-member National Directorate, or executive council, dominated by orthodox leftists and former guerrilla commanders. Tomas Borge, the lone surviving founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, was elected to the No. 2 position behind Ortega.

The failure of the moderates, who advocated modernizing the party and broadening its appeal beyond the revolutionary left, raises questions about its future as it charts its course for 1996 presidential elections.

With Ortega as president, the Soviet-backed Sandinista Front ruled Nicaragua throughout the 1980s and fought a war with U.S.-backed Contras that claimed about 30,000 lives. In 1990 presidential elections, Ortega and the Sandinistas were upset by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and a loose coalition of conservative parties.

As the Sandinistas plot their return to power, deep divisions have been exposed in a party whose disciplined unity was once legendary. Ortega and the hard-liners maintain that the moderates are selling out to the right and betraying the goals and achievements of the revolution. The moderates say they want to make the party more democratic and less dogmatic.

The majority of the approximately 500 convention delegates, most of whom are the product of party machinery, sided with Ortega.

Sergio Ramirez, the Sandinista intellectual and legislator who spearheaded the reform movement, became the most prominent casualty when he lost his position on the National Directorate.

“The radical wing of Sandinismo has control of the party, absolute control of the party,” an angry Ramirez said as he left the convention hall after the vote. “There is no balance on the directorate.”

Ramirez was a member of the original ruling junta that took power after the Sandinistas ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, and he was Ortega’s vice president in the 1980s. Ramirez, a respected writer, has long represented a moderate current in the Sandinista Front. His defeat also jeopardizes his role as head of the Sandinista bloc in Parliament.

Ortega turned aside the critics, saying the debates had been healthy but that now the party must unify.

“This has been a democratic process,” he said after his election as secretary general, which came Monday morning at the end of a marathon 24-hour session. “It would do no good to the Sandinista Front if companeros leave here saying this wasn’t democratic just because things didn’t turn out the way they thought they should.”

The convention was only the second the Sandinista Front has ever held, and it was the first time that Ortega was challenged as party leader. Henry Ruiz, another former guerrilla commander, opposed Ortega for the secretary general position, with Ramirez’s backing.

With his victory, Ortega will now position himself to be the Sandinista presidential candidate. Yet public opinion surveys have ranked Ramirez as the most electable Sandinista leader.

“With this convention, the Sandinista Front has made the decision to lose in ‘96,” said Carlos Tunnerman, former Sandinista ambassador to Washington and now a vocal party critic.

In addition to the directorate, delegates chose a 114-member Sandinista Assembly, a policy-making body. According to the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, about 65% of the assembly members who were elected also represent the hard-line faction, suggesting a broad sweep.

For the first time, the Sandinista leadership also allowed women to be members of the directorate. Until now an all-male, nine-member body, the directorate was expanded to 15 seats, and five women were among the members elected, including a former guerrilla commander and health minister, Dora Maria Tellez.