Conservative Takes Lead in Nicaragua Vote

Arnoldo Aleman got into politics to defeat the Marxists who confiscated his coffee fields while his wife had terminal cancer and who held him in jail when his father died. He succeeded Monday. With votes still coming in from outlying precincts, he took a lead that virtually assured him victory in this nation’s presidential election.

Aleman--a burly, right-wing populist--dashed the bid by Daniel Ortega, the onetime rebel commander, to regain the power that Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front narrowly lost in 1990. With just over half the vote counted Monday afternoon, Aleman led Ortega by a little more than 9 percentage points, taking 48.5% of the vote.

The rest of the vote was divided among 21 minor-party candidates.

Ortega demanded a recount, claiming irregularities in the reporting of votes from distant precincts as well as other problems. Police arrested a man here accused of having six ballot boxes in his house, and international observers noted a host of delays and irregularities. But U.S. officials and European Union delegations said the irregularities would not affect the outcome of the election.

“There are no conquerors or conquered,” Aleman told cheering supporters before dawn Monday, as first returns showed him with a decisive lead. “The only winner is Nicaragua.”

He offered his “outstretched hand to all Nicaraguans to join us in forming a national government of all the country’s forces.” He specifically extended that invitation to the Sandinistas, who led the revolution that overthrew the Somoza family dynasty in 1979 and who ruled a Marxist Nicaragua for almost 11 years, fighting a U.S.-backed civil war.

The conciliatory victory speech contrasted sharply with the combative rhetoric that thrust the 50-year-old lawyer onto the national political scene six years ago and kept him there as the feisty mayor of Managua. Aleman became point man for Sandinista-bashers. He picked fights as President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro negotiated an alliance with the Sandinistas--who still controlled the armed forces and important labor unions--that allowed her to govern this deeply divided country.

Aleman, for example, threatened to--but never did--tear down a wall that Ortega had built around his house, blocking a public street. Aleman did engineer a symbolic victory against the Sandinistas. Throughout the 1980s, the party had its initials--FSLN in Spanish--dominating the hills above Managua, much as the Hollywood sign rises over Los Angeles. After the tip fell off the L in 1990, Aleman sent city workers to tear down the S, leaving the sign to read FIN--Spanish for “the end.”

When not squabbling with the Sandinistas, Aleman gave a face lift to a capital that had never recovered from a devastating 1972 earthquake. He built libraries, parks, fountains and a new boardwalk on the expansive shores of Lake Managua.

Aleman is the son of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s education minister. As a college student, Aleman was active in the youth division of the Liberal Party that supported the late dictator, ties that the Sandinistas mentioned continuously during the campaign.

“I am not a Somocista because I have not stolen and I have not killed,” Aleman said in an interview. “That is slander.”

As a lawyer, he represented clients whose property was confiscated by the Sandinista government. He was jailed for seven months in 1980. He also battled the Sandinistas as president of the Coffee Growers Union; his own fields were confiscated in 1989, a month after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died the same year.

Like many other business leaders, Aleman entered politics to throw Ortega and the other Sandinistas out of office. He joined the Liberal Party a decade ago and ran for mayor in 1990. Despite his relatively short career in public office, politics seems to come naturally to him. With his professorial glasses and double chin, the curly-haired father of four is hardly handsome, but he has the charm of the ward boss and deal maker that both admirers and detractors say he is.

“Aleman is a pragmatic man in the worst sense of the word,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a political analyst and the current president’s son.

Aleman will need to be pragmatic if he is to accomplish anything in a country where the National Assembly, which his party probably will not control, can override a presidential veto with a 51% vote, analysts noted.

But Aleman’s proposal for reconciliation already threatens to provoke another confrontation--with countries that give aid to Nicaragua. The biggest dispute still lingering from Sandinista rule during the 1980s is over confiscated property, a problem that Aleman estimates could be solved by paying off property owners at a cost of about $500 million.

And where will that money come from? “Where did the $11.5 billion come from to make war?” Aleman replied. “If, in the past decade, a group of incompetents got so many billions to make war, we are going to scour the world for just $500 million to buy the peace.”

Brian Atwood, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as the U.S. government mission to observe the elections, said he discussed the subject with Aleman when they met Monday morning.

“I said we would like to work closely with him to spur economic growth in Nicaragua if he is elected,” said Atwood, refusing to elaborate.

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The Vote Count

Results of the Nicaraguan election, with just over 50% of the votes counted:

Arnoldo Aleman: 48.5%

Daniel Ortega: 39%

Others: 12.5%

Note: To avoid a runoff election, a candidate needed to win 45%