Nicaragua Playing Politics with Peace

By William R. Doerner

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.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and John Moody/Managua