Gloom but Not Yet Doom

By George Russell

Beset by war and weariness, the ruling Sandinistas are struggling

As a revolutionary road show, the event was unmistakably a flop. While visiting members of Nicaragua's Sandinista government waited on a wooden dais in a baseball stadium in the northwestern town of Chinandega last week, an estimated 4,000 local supporters filed dutifully onto the dusty grounds below. Hoping to add both life and numbers to the disappointing crowd, Sandinista organizers urged the audience to march through town as a way of drawing attention to the May Day rally. The demonstrators complied. When the parade returned some 30 minutes later, however, only half of the participants returned with it. The reduced crowd of 2,000 faithful remained to hear Nicaragua's agrarian reform minister, Jaime Wheelock Roman, heap scorn on Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy for suggesting that the government should negotiate with the U.S.-backed contra guerrillas, who are waging hit-and-run warfare along the country's borders. Yet the generally desultory nature of the festivities was one more indication that the Sandinistas may be losing their grip on the popular imagination.

On the same hot afternoon in Managua, the capital, a vastly different drama was playing to a packed house. Some 4,000 Nicaraguans crowded into the modernistic Don Bosco Church as the new head of the country's nine-member Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference, Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, used harsh language to describe the plight of his flock under the Marxist-led Sandinistas. Said Vega: "The tragedy of the Nicaraguan people is that we are living with a totalitarian ideology that no one wants in this country." While the priest spoke, nearly a dozen military Jeeps circled the building. Says a church spokesman, the Rev. Bismarck Carballo: "Our relations with the Sandinistas have totally deteriorated."

The lack of interest at Chinandega and the defiance at Don Bosco are aspects of a drastic change in mood that las descended upon Nicaragua's 2.9 million people. Only a few months ago, citizens eagerly rallied by the thousands to listen to the exhortations of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.). The reason: a willingness at that time to defend the 1979 revolution hat ousted Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle against the increasingly bold attacks of "Yankee imperialism," embodied in the contra forces trained and supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Sandinista rhetoric about the U.S. and the contra threat remains as shrill as ever. But as U.S. pressure has intensified, so has a deep sense of demoralization and frustration within Nicaragua that affects even the secretive Sandinista leadership. Among many Nicaraguans, there is a growing sentiment that their country faces an economic and military debacle that can be blamed as much on the Sandinistas as on the Reagan Administration--or even more. Says a prominent former F.S.L.N. supporter in the capital: "The one big difference these days is that people everywhere are now saying the Sandinistas are through, and no one is sorry to see them go."

That view is still wishful thinking. The Sandinistas, led by their nine-member National Directorate, retain an awesome monopoly of force in Nicaragua. They command a combined army and militia of some 100,000, well-equipped by Cuba and the Soviet Union. A network of neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committees gives the regime a pervasive system of surveillance and social control. Ever since March 1982, the regime has governed under a state of emergency that forbids political meetings and gives the Sandinistas sweeping powers of press censorship and arbitrary arrest. Those sanctions have been used this year against scores of obstreperous members of Nicaragua's opposition political parties and many other citizens accused of "counterrevolutionary activity." Says a Western diplomat in Managua: "The comandantes are not about to board a plane for Havana."

Nonetheless, the Sandinistas profoundly underestimated the dimensions and consequences of the CIA-backed guerrilla attacks. The 12,000 to 14,000 contras have not scored spectacular military successes, but they have become a distracting force that has shaken Nicaraguans psychologically far more than the Reagan Administration might have imagined. The Sandinistas announced last week that a fishing trawler sank in the Pacific port of Corinto after striking a mine that was left by CIA-directed operatives in the Administration's controversial program, now abandoned, of harassing Nicaraguan shipping. The Sandinistas also claimed that they had repelled two contra speedboat attacks at Corinto. Meanwhile, in the north of the country, contra units continue to show their ability to roam deep inside Nicaraguan territory (see following story).

Economically, Nicaragua is reeling. Commodities from soap to cement are in short supply; factories are steadily closing down due to the lack of raw materials. Of some 500 Nicaraguan manufacturing firms operating in 1979, only about 80 are still functioning. Government food-rationing rules now permit the weekly purchase of only one chicken and 2 lbs. of beef per family of four--when supplies are available.

During his Chinandega speech, the F.S.L.N.'s Wheelock warned that "economic shortages will go on for many years because of the imperialist aggression on our borders from the U.S." But increasingly, Nicaraguans are reluctant to accept that explanation for the failure of the economy. Among other things, the Sandinistas' imposition of price controls has helped to bring about the shortages that plague Nicaragua, while their erratic policies of expropriation have destroyed incentives for investment. Says a concerned mother in Managua: "This is not what we thought the revolution would be like when we tore up streets to make barricades to fight Somoza."

A more troublesome result of the covert war has been a domestic backlash against Sandinista military policies. Nicaraguan mothers are angry at the drafting of up to 40,000 young people, many of whom are being trained in special counterinsurgency units and sent to fight in remote border areas. When their sons were drafted, the women were told that the youths would be kept near major cities. Many of the soldiers have since deserted. The Sandinistas have tried hard to placate the mothers with neighborhood meetings explaining the government's actions. But within the past two months, in an uncommon demonstration of dissent, maternal protest marches against the draft have been held in several Nicaraguan towns, including the central city of Matagalpa.

The deepest pitfall of the covert war is one that the Sandinistas have dug for themselves: a loudly announced but nebulously described intention to relax their grip on power. That policy, known as apertura (opening), reached new rhetorical levels in February, when the Sandinistas declared that they would hold democratic presidential and legislative elections on Nov. 4. In March the Sandinistas produced an electoral law that, among other things, banned the contra leadership from participation in the contest. In subsequent weeks Managua buzzed with reports that the Sandinistas would lift the notorious state of emergency on May 4, a step that would be essential for free electoral competition. The day arrived, however, and nothing happened.

The inaction reinforced suspicion in Washington and elsewhere that the Sandinistas' democratic intentions are merely cosmetic. Locked in confrontation with the Reagan Administration, the Sandinistas are trying hard to rally dwindling Latin American and West European support for their regime. A facade of political liberalization would help in that effort. Says Jesuit Father Xavier Gorostiaga, a leading Sandinista adviser: "My impression is that the internal dynamics of this country don't require us to have elections. The elections are much more for external benefit. They are a symbolic gesture."

Another view of the Sandinistas' plight is that they no longer have any choice about reaching a democratic accommodation. Asserts a West European confidant of the Sandinista leadership: "Neither Cuba nor the Soviet Union can help militarily or economically to the extent that they can solve Nicaragua's problems. The Sandinistas must keep the revolution acceptable to countries like Mexico and those in Western Europe. They have to risk their power in order to maintain it."

The Sandinistas have also been coming under heavy diplomatic pressure from some nearby countries. Costa Rica, which has tried to remain neutral toward its northern neighbor, last week asked Mexico to arrange a meeting with Nicaragua after Costa Rican security forces traded fire with Nicaraguan troops along the border. Costa Rica now describes its differences with the Sandinistas as "very, very grave."

Particularly painful measures against Nicaragua have come from the recently elected government of Venezuelan President Jaime Lusinchi. Reversing Venezuela's previously tolerant attitude toward the Sandinistas, Lusinchi has suspended all but formal relations with Nicaragua. That has meant a cutoff of economic assistance worth more than $100 million to the Sandinistas. An important reason for Lusirichi's abrupt move was a deep Venezuelan skepticism about the apertura, or intention of sharing power through elections, and about Sandinista intentions in general. One Venezuelan diplomat referred to the Sandinistas' lectures on the superiority of their political system to that of Venezuela as "insufferable." A Latin American diplomat in Nicaragua put the problem more brutally: "In Cuba and the Soviet Union, there are elections too. You cannot have democracy where there is no personal liberty at all."

By some accounts, the National Directorate is now deeply divided over the liberalization issue. Some Sandinista intimates describe the group as being split into self-described "realist" and "revolution" wings, with the former accepting the idea of compromise and the latter advocating a hard-line course regardless of the cost. In the Directorate's closed-door deliberations over the F.S.L.N.'s official candidates in the Nov. 4 elections, the realists, led by Daniel Ortega Saavedra Nicaragua's governing junta coordinator appeared to have the upper hand. By one account, the leadership voted 8 to 1 in favor of making Ortega its presidential candidate. It passed over the leader of the revolutionary faction, hard-line Interior Minister Tomas Borge Martinez, who nominated himself for the job. By the same margin, Borge was snubbed as the prospective vice-presidential nominee in favor of Sergio Ramirez Mercado, another governing junta member and a prominent novelist.

The Reagan Administration, however, insists that any true liberalization in Nicaragua would offer such features as freedom from censorship and the right of all opponents of the regime, including the contra leadership, to participate in elections. So far, the only serious challenger within Nicaragua to the Sandinistas has been the Roman Catholic Church. In a pastoral letter issued on Easter Sunday, the nine Nicaraguan bishops used some of the strongest language ever uttered publicly against the Sandinistas. The bishops blamed the regime for "young people's dying on the battlefield, abuses of power, use of schools for materialistic [i.e., Marxist] education, displacement of peasants and manipulation of family grief." They called for a direct dialogue between the government and the contras. "If this does not happen," the bishops wrote, "there will be no chance for an agreement, and our people, especially the poorest among them, will continue suffering and dying."

The Sandinistas allowed Nicaraguan newspapers to publish the letter, but then counterattacked by calling the authors of the episcopal document "false prophets." Church-state relations have sunk so low in Nicaragua that the country's Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo last week traveled to Rome for Vatican consultations.

Privately, the Sandinistas concede that Nicaraguans have grown tired and disheartened in the course of the revolutionary crusade. So, they confess, have they. The former guerrilla fighters describe the current period as one of the hardest they have ever faced in their frequently grim revolutionary careers. They claim that no matter what they do, almost no one outside Nicaragua seems to believe them and that in Washington, the Reagan Administration seems unwilling to give in on any point at all. At times, the comandantes even lapse into the past tense when referring to their revolution. At a Directorate meeting last week, the Sandinistas wearily asked Cuban revolutionaries whether the early years of the Castro regime were as difficult and frustrating. The Cubans said nothing specific in reply, but offered their condolences.

A Western diplomat in Managua describes the current foundering of the Sandinistas as "not a political vacuum, but the air is being sucked out." Yet he also warned that "their decline is not yet marked by the rise of anyone else's fortunes." Under those conditions, the Sandinistas will probably remain in power for the foreseeable future, but the pall of gloom over Nicaragua is likely to grow deeper. --

With reporting by William McWhirter