TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.040

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 5KB | 94 lines

WORLD, Page 49

NICARAGUA

Playing Politics with Peace

Headed toward elections, Ortega blows his cool


    As the time for the official campaign for Nicaragua's national
elections approached, the ruling Sandinistas faced a unique
prospect for a Marxist regime: the chance of winning a new term in
office through open and honest balloting. President Daniel Ortega
Saavedra had been nominated for re-election in a splashy party
convention, and he launched a surprisingly effective grass-roots
campaign, while opposition candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro
got off to a pathetic start. Best of all, the 10,000-man army of
insurgent contras, deprived of U.S. military support, was skulking
in Honduras under a regional peace accord ordering them to disband
in early December.

    But Ortega had been known to blow advantages in the past.
Remember his spectacularly mistimed trip to Moscow only days after
Congress voted to cut off aid to the contras in 1985? Last week he
did it again. Ortega announced the cancellation of a 19-month-old
cease-fire with the rebels and thereby raised the possibility that
the elections, scheduled for February, might be scuttled. With that
one action he managed to put Nicaragua back on the U.S. agenda,
outrage his Central American neighbors and renew the prospect of
war in his worn-out nation.

    Ortega lobbed his bombshell during ceremonies celebrating the
centenary of democracy in Costa Rica two weeks ago. He accused the
contras of murderous ambushes, and as a result, he was thinking of
canceling the cease-fire. Ortega's announcement visibly angered
President George Bush. The "little man in a military uniform," said
Bush, had behaved like "an unwanted animal at a garden party."

    Ortega's final decision to call off the cease-fire was
apparently dictated by the murder following his return to Managua
of four civilians at an agricultural cooperative in San Miguelito,
southeast of the capital, an attack the government pinned on the
contras. At a sunrise press conference the next morning, an
emphatic, often stinging Ortega insisted that his government
"cannot continue being patient" in the face of contra "terrorism"
and would "hit the contras hard." The Nicaraguan President blamed
Washington's refusal to disband the contras for the resumption of
fighting and hinted darkly that U.S. backing of the rebels could
affect whether or not Nicaraguans go to the polls. Warned Ortega:
"It's up to the U.S. whether there will be elections or not."

    The Sandinista leader insisted that his own government was
still committed to the February ballot. His intention in canceling
the cease-fire, he said, was merely to hold the U.S. and Honduras
to the terms of the accord signed last August to dismantle the
rebel operation by Dec. 5. The U.S., to guarantee that the vote
takes place, has supported the contras in their refusal to disband
until after the Nicaraguan elections, though it has prohibited
offensive operations. In this regard, Ortega's ploy may have
worked. Sandinista and rebel leaders appear likely to hold new
talks soon.

    Actually, Ortega's main motivation may have been domestic
politics. Nothing assures votes like a patriotic stance, and the
Sandinistas have long fared well by whipping up war fears.
Nicaraguans resent dying in this long-drawn-out conflict, and more
of them blame the contras than the Sandinistas for the latest surge
in countryside attacks.

    In military terms, the impact of lifting the cease-fire remains
unclear. Throughout the cease-fire, government troops continued to
break up the contras' support network in the provinces, and rebels
staged sporadic attacks against the army. Now those occasional
engagements could escalate. At least 2,000 contra guerrillas are
inside Nicaragua, and there is little doubt that more have been
infiltrating the country during recent weeks. On Friday the
Sandinista army said it had begun offensive operations against the
rebels in nine of the country's 16 provinces.

    In any case, the contras cannot count on a rebound of U.S. aid,
even though some of the sharpest U.S. reaction to Ortega's move
came from liberal legislators who have long opposed U.S. aid to the
guerrillas. Said one of them, Wisconsin Congressman David Obey:
"Daniel Ortega is a fool and always has been." Despite Bush's
initial outburst, the Administration's response otherwise remained
low-key. That was due in part to a realization, as a senior
Administration official put it, that "there's not the remotest
chance Congress will okay the restoration of lethal aid." Congress
abolished such assistance in February '88, later approving $49
million for food and medicine.

    Why, then, did Ortega venture so much opprobrium abroad to
score points at home in a race that, by most accounts, he was
already winning? The answer may lie in a poll published two weeks
ago by the Nicaraguan Institute of Public Opinion. With nearly 90%
of Nicaragua's 1.97 million voters registered, large numbers of
them as the result of a Sandinista campaign, Ortega led the
opposition by 26% to 21%. Yet the Institute's sample showed that
46% remained undecided -- more than enough to make any candidate
for office extremely uneasy.