[EM] Old U.S. Adversary Poised for Comeback - washingtonpost.com

[Allen Smith]

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   Old U.S. Adversary Poised for Comeback
   Nicaragua's Ortega May Be Within Striking Distance of First-Round Win

   By N.C. Aizenman
   Washington Post Foreign Service
   Sunday, November 5, 2006; A20

   MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Nov. 4 -- As Daniel Ortega makes his fourth
   attempt to win back Nicaragua's presidency in elections Sunday,
   citizens across this war-battered nation are grappling with the very
   real possibility that the former Marxist revolutionary could finally
   succeed.

   That prospect has sent shudders through Washington, where Ortega is
   remembered, and reviled, as the bane of the Reagan administration.

   Here in Nicaragua, however, the vote is being viewed less as a
   referendum on Ortega's 11-year rule after his guerrilla forces seized
   power in 1979 than as a chance to end a more recent era of collusion
   between his Sandinista National Liberation Front and the
   Constitutionalist Liberal Party, which holds the most seats in the
   National Assembly.

   Maverick candidates from both camps have pronounced themselves
   disgusted by the unbridled corruption that has flourished under "el
   pacto," or the pact, as the power-sharing arrangement is known, and
   they have formed popular breakaway parties that vow to return the
   focus to Nicaragua's impoverished multitudes.

   Yet this very splintering of his opposition, combined with a rules
   change devised under the pact that allows a candidate to win a
   first-round vote with as little as 35 percent of the ballots and a
   five-point lead, offers Ortega, 60, his best chance at a comeback
   since voters swept him from the presidency in 1990.

   Although the immense affection Ortega earned by toppling brutal
   dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979 was severely eroded by his
   government's human rights abuses, confiscation of property and bloody
   war against U.S.-backed contra insurgents, Ortega still leads public
   opinion polls in the five-way race with as much as 33 percent --
   putting him within striking distance of a first-round victory.

   Now Nicaraguans face a dilemma.

   "Everyone is asking themselves: 'Should I vote for the candidate I
   really want, or should I vote for the guy who I think can beat
   Ortega?" observed Carlos Chamorro, a political analyst and son of the
   woman who replaced Ortega in 1990, Violeta Chamorro.

   Ortega's opponents have weighed in over the past week with a frenzy of
   ads promoting themselves as the most viable alternative.

   Jos? Rizo, 62, candidate of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party,
   blanketed the airwaves with commercials claiming that the massive
   turnout at his closing campaign rally in a Managua square last Sunday
   proved he was the safest bet.

   Eduardo Montealegre, 51, a former foreign and finance minister now
   representing the breakaway Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance, countered with
   spots touting opinion polls that put him in second place.

   "Think of your family and of Nicaragua. Don't waste your vote on
   candidates who can't defeat Ortega," Montealegre, who is favored by
   the Bush administration, urged in a final televised message to voters
   Wednesday.

   By contrast, Edmundo Jarqu?n, 60, an economist who represents the
   breakaway Sandinista Renovation Movement and who trails Montealegre
   and Rizo in opinion polls, argued that the old strategy of lining up
   behind one candidate to defeat Ortega would only ensure the continued
   dominance of corrupt party bosses on the right.

   "The only way to waste your vote is to vote for more of the same,"
   Jarqu?n shouted at an emotional closing rally Tuesday in Managua.

   Former Sandinista commander Eden Pastora is running a distant fifth in
   the race.

   Ortega, meanwhile, sought to answer his critics by casting himself as
   the candidate of reconciliation.

   In place of his old military fatigues, he has campaigned in jeans and
   white shirts to the accompaniment of a Spanish adaptation of John
   Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance."

   Over the last several months he has also reached out to old enemies,
   signing a public "peace agreement" with a former contra group and
   picking as his running mate a former contra negotiator whose house he
   once confiscated.

   Ortega, once an avowed secularist, even courted the Catholic Church by
   supporting legislation last month to extend Nicaragua's already
   restrictive abortion ban to cases in which a mother's life is in
   danger.

   Ortega's transformation has hardly been complete. In a nation reeling
   from widespread unemployment, hunger and frequent electrical
   blackouts, he has spoken repeatedly of taming "wild capitalism" by
   forgiving the debt of poor farmers and requiring banks to lower the
   fees they charge Nicaraguans abroad to wire money to their families
   back home.

   Still, Ortega insisted that he supports free markets, and what few
   references he made to the United States were muted compared to his
   firebreathing past.

   "To those Nicaraguan brothers who still have hate and who launch these
   dirty campaigns full of defamations and lies," Ortega concluded at a
   final rally under a drizzling sky in a Managua square Wednesday, "We
   will respond with the solidarity . . . with the love, with the
   brotherly embrace that all of us Nicaraguans must extend each other."

   Ortega's opponents charged that such statements were merely an attempt
   by Ortega to disguise his true nature. In the closing weeks of the
   campaign, they tried to drive the point home with ads featuring grainy
   black-and-white footage of the mustachioed leader strutting in his
   military fatigues as ominous voiceovers warned that an Ortega win
   could bring back unpopular features of the Sandinista era such as the
   military draft, confiscation of private property and a U.S. embargo.

   "Let us not return to the dark night," ended one spot paid for by
   Rizo.

   The message was echoed by Bush administration officials, including
   U.S. Ambassador Paul A. Trivelli and U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M.
   Gutierrez, who raised hackles among Nicaraguans and international
   observers by making what many interpreted as a thinly veiled threat to
   withdraw aid and impose economic sanctions in the event of an Ortega
   victory.

   U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House International
   Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, has offered
   similar hints.

   Adding to the atmosphere of deja vu has been a series of visits from
   former cold warriors such as Oliver L. North, the Reagan
   administration aide who served as point man for secretly funneling
   money and weapons to the rebels in the 1980s [13]Iran-contra scandal
   despite a congressional ban.

   U.S. alarm over a possible Ortega victory is at least partly due to
   concern that he will prove an eager partner in Venezuelan President
   Hugo Ch?vez's bid to counter U.S. influence in Latin America.

   But Michael Shifter, vice president of Inter-American Dialogue, a
   Washington-based policy group, argued that even if that were to
   happen, the consequences to the United States would be minimal given
   Nicaragua's tiny population of 5.6 million and lack of resources.

   The true source of U.S. officials' anxiety, he contended, was more
   visceral.

   "A lot of people who are now in policy positions" in the Bush
   administration, Shifter said, "got their formative experience in the
   Reagan administration getting rid of Ortega. So if he now comes back
   through an election, that may change the way that this whole period is
   seen."

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