Sandinista Vote Sends Mixed Signals in Nicaragua

Struggling to regroup after two resounding rejections by voters that left them with shrinking influence in the country they once ruled, the leftists of the Sandinista National Liberation Front this weekend clung to their top leaders while trying to make their party less threatening to Nicaragua’s emerging entrepreneurs.

During a two-day convention that ended late Saturday, delegates elected two former comandantes--Daniel Ortega and Tomas Borge--to head a 15-member National Directorate that will also include two businessmen. The resulting mixed signals of continuity and change left questions about whether the Sandinistas can reconstruct themselves into a force that can win elections.

Of all the leftist guerrillas who took to the mountains in the 1970s and ‘80s to battle Central American dictators, only the Sandinistas actually came to power. They ruled Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, when voters turned Ortega out of the presidency. He was defeated again in 1996.

Now, like other Central American leftists, the Sandinistas are struggling to change from a guerrilla movement into an effective political party. And they are finding that revolution may have been easier than reform.

Their quandary, evident at the weekend convention, is the starkest example of a problem being felt in varying degrees by insurgents-turned-politicians throughout the isthmus: The blood and sacrifices of the guerrilla days are what unify their movements and give them legitimacy. But the old rebel commanders cannot marshal votes.

“Times have changed,” said Vilma Nunez, a Sandinista loyalist and human rights activist. “The wars of liberation had a cost, and the people who made the revolution have to assume those costs.”

The former commanders were responsible for death and destruction, which ensures that a significant number of voters will never support them, she said.

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union is just beginning to confront that problem. Elections that occurred during negotiations for the Guatemalan peace agreement signed in 1996 are not considered a fair measure of the rebels’ strength because they were handicapped by still being in the mountains.

However, other former rebels with more elections behind them are facing the possibility that their colorful, beloved old comandantes are political liabilities.

In El Salvador, leadership of the ex-guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, has shifted from hard-line Communists to more-conciliatory ex-fighters. Currently, only one of the candidates for the party’s nomination for president in next year’s election is a former comandante.

Several leading candidates are not even party members. When some party loyalists raised objections to the civilian candidates, others took out full-page newspaper advertisements questioning why former comandantes should continue to represent a peacetime political party.

The argument for looking outside the former guerrilla ranks for candidates is bolstered by election results. In last year’s mayoral races, the FMLN formed coalitions with sympathetic smaller parties to elect noncombatants, such as Hector Silva, now mayor of San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas have been far less willing to forge such alliances. They have incorporated into their ranks a few businesspeople and former Contras--rebels against their own regime in the 1980s. But the top party positions and nominations have been confined to the same small group that led the fighting.

Even as the 52-year-old Ortega was once again reelected secretary-general of the Sandinistas, a position he has held continuously since 1980, he held out hope that the party might open up. “We don’t want to insist on a precondition the candidates must come from the [party] ranks,” he said.

But Ortega’s remarks were not enough for reform-minded Sandinistas.

“This is a betrayal,” said Nunez, who decided not to attend the convention when the party leadership opted to let Ortega run unopposed for reelection. “We needed real change at this convention.”

A reformist challenged the 67-year-old Borge for the assistant secretary-general post but lost, 224 to 199.

The decision not to challenge Ortega is at the heart of the party’s dilemma, said political analyst Luis Sanchez.

“The Sandinistas are like a crumbling house that is held up by one rotting pillar, which is Daniel Ortega,” he said. “With Ortega, nothing changes, but without him, it all falls down. If Daniel goes, the party breaks into 20 pieces, but he is completely discredited outside” the party.

As president, Ortega led this country through socialist economic reforms, a civil war with American-backed rebels and a U.S. boycott. Together, they left Nicaragua the second-poorest nation in the Americas after Haiti.

At the same time, critics have accused Ortega and the Sandinista leadership of enriching themselves by taking control of expropriated properties and businesses. Eight years of free-market reforms by subsequent administrations have done little to alleviate an unemployment rate estimated at 60%.

After overthrowing dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, Ortega was elected president in 1984 with 67% of the vote. He lost in 1990 and in 1996. In the same elections, the number of Sandinista congressional representatives dropped from 61 to 39 to 36.