Presidential Race Reveals Bitter Rift in Nicaragua

Businessman Ricardo Bolanos faces a tough choice when he votes in the national election here Sunday: Two of his uncles are running for vice president.

Uncle Henry, as he calls Enrique Bolanos, is the running mate of Arnoldo Aleman, who has led in the polls throughout the campaign. Uncle Nick--Nicolas Bolanos--is the candidate of a party much further back in the field of 23 presidential contenders.

The younger Bolanos’ predicament goes beyond family loyalty. He is weighing factors that have thrown many Nicaraguans into a quandary as they approach the election.

In the confusion, the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, which suffered a surprise defeat in 1990, has staged an impressive comeback.

The Sandinista candidate, former President Daniel Ortega, has deftly overcome the 20-point lead that Aleman registered in an August 1995 poll. A nationwide poll released Sunday by the Communications Research Center in the capital, Managua, put Ortega 2.8 percentage points ahead of Aleman. The difference between the two candidates was less than the poll’s margin of error, essentially leaving them neck and neck.

“What worries me is that the chances of [Nicolas Bolanos’ party] making a significant showing are slim, based on the polls,” Ricardo Bolanos said. “On the other hand, the Aleman campaign is very strong.”

Still, he said, Aleman’s team is being cast as followers of the right-wing Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for four decades until 1979, “and that brings worry.”

Six years ago, when Ricardo Bolanos was exiled in Miami, the choice was easier; his uncles worked together then in a broad-based coalition to defeat the Sandinistas. But as Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the president they elected to unify a bitterly divided nation, leaves office, Nicaragua--the poorest country in Central America--is more torn than ever, analysts say.

The Bolanos family has long been prominent in Nicaragua, particularly in its hometown of Masaya, southeast of Managua. Born two years apart in the 1920s, Enrique and Nicolas, like their older brother, Alejandro, went to the United States to study, graduating from St. Louis University in Missouri. Nicolas and Alejandro married Americans. Enrique’s wife is from their hometown.

Their mother was a Liberal, a member of the party that supported the Somoza dictatorship then and is Enrique’s party now. Their father was a member of the Conservatives--Somoza’s main opposition and Nicolas’ party today.

Nicolas--an avid Cardinals fan--played professional baseball in Nicaragua. Businessman Enrique got the family into cotton ginning in the 1960s. By 1978, they produced 5% of Nicaragua’s cotton and had 1,500 full-time employees.

Today, the gin is idle. Most of the 12,800 acres the family once owned or rented is unplanted. The Bolanoses blame the Sandinistas.

In 1979, the Sandinistas, a leftist guerrilla group named for prominent nationalist Cesar Augusto Sandino, overthrew the corrupt and repressive regime of dictator Maj. Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

The Sandinistas took over a country that was the breadbasket of Central America but where 60% of the children went hungry, according to some estimates. They replaced a dictator who stole half the $32 million in earthquake aid that the United States sent when a tremor devastated Managua in 1972. Most of Masaya strongly supported the Sandinistas.

The Bolanoses had been somewhat against Somoza, but not politically active, Alejandro recalled.

“My relatives were not politicians before,” he said. “The Sandinistas made them politicians.”

Alejandro left for the United States, returning only last year. His son Ricardo, who was born in St. Louis in 1955, was in graduate school in the U.S. when the regime changed, and subsequently lost his Nicaraguan scholarship. Because he has dual citizenship, he was able to stay in the United States until he decided to return in 1993. On Sunday, at age 41, he will vote in Nicaragua for the first time.

Most of his cousins, like many Nicaraguans, joined Ricardo in exile. Other Nicaraguans stayed home and started an armed resistance, called the Contras, that eventually received U.S. support. A few people, like Enrique Bolanos, who was president of a business group called the Private Enterprise Council, criticized the Sandinistas from inside Nicaragua.

In 1985, the Sandinista government confiscated the Bolanos cotton business and converted it to a workers cooperative. Although it was hardly the largest gin in Nicaragua, it was the only one confiscated, the family said.

“It was revenge for Enrique’s outspokenness,” Alejandro said of the confiscation. Shortly afterward, Enrique was arrested.

Nicolas also opposed the Sandinistas. “I had to get involved in politics,” he said.

In an indication of how support for the Sandinistas had evaporated in Masaya, he was elected to Congress for the Conservatives.

The continuing Contra war, combined with a deteriorating economy and Ortega’s rudeness to Pope John Paul II when the pontiff visited this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, increased opposition to the Sandinistas.

By the time of the 1990 presidential election, Enrique was a leading candidate in a coalition formed to challenge the Sandinistas. But in the end, Chamorro--the widow of a journalist whose 1978 murder helped set off the rebellion against Somoza--was nominated in a compromise with small leftist parties.

Daniel Antonio Ponce was a government agronomist when Chamorro took power. “I felt guilty because in the year I worked for this government, I saw that poor peasants could not get credit,” he said during an Ortega rally in a working-class Managua neighborhood this month. “Only those with money got loans.”

He quit and, after a long period of unemployment, is now a night watchman. “The Sandinistas gave us education, health and work,” he said. “I will always be loyal to Commander Ortega.”

Such loyalists will ensure Ortega one-third of the vote, said Carlos F. Chamorro, president of the Communications Research Center.

But the Sandinistas also ran up a $12-billion debt and produced quadruple-digit inflation. The Chamorro government cut spending to correct those problems, but, even after the economy began to grow again in 1994, unemployment has remained between 60% and 70%.

Chamorro also returned property the Sandinistas confiscated, but “what they gave us back was scrap,” said Ricardo Bolanos.

Rusting truck chassis returned by the government still sit on the gin grounds. Electrical equipment was gutted, apparently for parts. The Bolanoses managed to recondition enough equipment last year to gin cotton they grew on rented land; none of their land was returned. They lost money.

Disillusionment has left Chamorro’s coalition far behind in the polls, with barely 2% of voters’ support.

Less than a week from the election, both Aleman and Ortega appear short of the 45% of the vote they would need to win outright and avoid a December runoff.

Ricardo Bolanos, who lives with his wife and four children next door to his father and across the street from his Uncle Henry, said he will probably vote for Aleman. “But I will be watching very closely” until the end of the campaign, he said.