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Like Alan Garcia in Peru, another former president is running again for the highest office in a Latin American country vowing that he will not do the things he did when he was president before. This approach served Garcia, who in his first time around had thrown the country in economic disarray, to become a serious contender, but not well enough to win over his rival Alejandro Toledo. However, it looks as if Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega may turn his promise that "We're not going to do the same things we did" in the 1980s into a winning formula.
What Marxist Ortega and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) did for eleven years, before and after 1984, when he was chosen president in a non-democratic election, was to repress the opposition, confiscate property and generally rule as a dictator. After he had to give in to the pressure of the contra movement backed by the United States, Ortega was defeated in his bid for the presidency in 1990, and again in 1996. Once more a candidate for next November elections, this time around Ortega is leading in the opinion polls. A nationwide poll in late April showed the Sandinistas leading by 7 points in presidential and congressional elections.
In the surrealistic political environment that prevails in Nicaragua, Ortega found it necessary to meet with John Keane, who heads the U.S. Department of State mission overseeing the elections, to explain that his party's primary election has been fair and clean and to state that there is a possibility that a future Sandinista administration could help in solving the conflict about property rights-there are still properties taken over by the Sandinistas that have not been returned to their legitimate owners-and work out collaboration mechanisms for the fight against drug trafficking.
However, Peter Romero, who heads the U.S. State Department's western hemisphere affairs bureau, said there is no indication from Sandinista rhetoric that "they would behave any differently from the 1980's" if they were to regain power. His No. 2, Lino Gutierrez, a former ambassador to Nicaragua was dispatched to Managua with the purpose of admonishing anti-Sandinista parties to rally around a single presidential candidate to keep Ortega from returning to office.
Gutierrez had his work cut out for him.
Fragmentation is what characterizes the Nicaraguan political scene. Thirty-five political parties participated in the 1996 elections, but most ran as part of one of five electoral coalitions. With nearly 52 percent of the vote, the Liberal Alliance, a mainly conservative coalition of five political parties and factions of another two, won the presidency, a plurality in the national legislature and a large majority of the mayoral races. The leftists FSLN ended in second place with 38 percent. Most other parties fared poorly. A new political party, the Nicaraguan Christian Path (there are five Christian Democratic parties, none recognized by the Brussels-based world organization of Christian Democratic Parties), ended a distant third with 4 percent of the vote and four seats in the 93-member National Assembly.
The traditional alternative to the Liberals, the National Conservative Party, ended in fourth place with slightly over 2 percent of the vote and three seats in the National Assembly. The remaining 24 parties and alliances together obtained less than 5 percent of the vote. Seven of these smaller parties control eight seats in the National Assembly (there are 19 parties represented in the National Assembly independently or as part of an alliance).
Apart from two small religious parties and one backing the long-departed Somozas (the dictatorial dynasty that ruled until 1979), the Conservatives, a middle-class party traditionally opposed to the Liberals, have won the right to participate in the elections.
The two major anti-Sandinista parties did form an alliance three weeks ago in hopes of heading off a Sandinista victory. The Bush administration hopes other parties will join the alliance, whose candidate is Enrique Bolaņos of the ruling Liberal Constitutionalist Party. But already a conflict is developing with its coalition partner, the Conservative Party, over vice-presidential candidates and other issues.
Meanwhile, Ortega is making his own moves. Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the popularly perceived paralysis of the government headed by president Arnoldo Aleman in the midst of transportation strikes, problems within the crucial coffee-growing sector and a lingering economic crisis, the Sandinista candidate is proposing the creation of a tripartite transition commission integrated by his own party and the Conservative and Liberal parties that would in effect take over the government-a "technical coup," as it has been dubbed by an aide to the president.
Both the Aleman government and Liberal candidate Bolaņos rejected the proposal out of hand, but it served the purpose of getting public attention to focus on the shortcomings of the present administration, of which Bolaņos would be a direct heir.
But what lurks in the background of all these political maneuvers is the notion that, while free-market reforms succeeded in stabilizing Latin American economies, ending hyperinflation and restoring investment and growth after years of stagnation, they have not delivered any large improvement to vast sectors of the population.
As the State Department's Romero acknowledged in a speech last month, the rate of poverty is the same as it was in 1979, and more than 150 million people still live on less than $2 a day. That lag, and the weakness of the new democratic systems, offers fertile ground for the likes of Ortega who, as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, have aimed their populist appeals at the poor.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com