Leftist Ortega poised for a return to power

BY JIM WYSS
MANAGUA

Polls show Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in a position to win Nicaragua's presidency and return to the office he once took by force.

For 16 years, Daniel Ortega has been trying to regain at the ballot box what he once seized through a revolution -- the presidency of Nicaragua.

After toppling the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979 and leading the nation for more than a decade as the head of the Marxist Sandinista party, Ortega has lost the last three elections.

But now, a confluence of forces -- from a fractured opposition to the unexpected death of a chief rival -- seems to be giving the Reagan-era icon of the left a fighting chance of winning the Nov. 5 presidential race.

Sitting on the patio of the walled-off home that doubles as his campaign headquarters, Ortega, 60, does the political math: Twice during the past three elections, he has won more than 40 percent of the votes.

However, thanks to changes pushed through the National Assembly by his party in 2000, 40 percent -- and not a simple majority -- will be enough to avoid a runoff in this year's five-way race.

''I'm convinced we are going to win the first round,'' he told The Miami Herald, still sporting the black mustache he wore at age 33, when he led the Sandinista guerrillas to power. ``I don't see any problem hitting that 40 percent mark again.''

Ortega, whose government enforced radical Marxist economic policies in the 1980s, now says he wants to give the state a larger but not dominant role in the economy of this deeply impoverished nation.

All of the major polls have Ortega leading the race, ahead of Eduardo Montealegre, a banker and former finance and foreign minister whose center-right Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance has emerged as a U.S. favorite.

FRAGMENTED CONTEST

It's not that ''El Comandante'' is particularly popular, but that the opposition is fractured, said Victor Borge of the Costa Rica-based polling firm Borge y Asociados.

''Daniel is no stronger than he has been in the past, and the anti-Sandinista vote remains firm,'' Borge said. ``The new phenomenon here is that we no longer have a two-party race. That's unprecedented.''

In the past, Ortega's foes have lined up behind the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, or PLC. But Montealegre and the emergence of the center-left Sandinista Renovation Movement, known as MRS, have splintered the antiOrtega vote.

To complicate the scenario even further, MRS presidential candidate Herty Lewites died of a heart attack July 2. The folksy former mayor of Managua was a Sandinista dissident and vocal critic of Ortega, but he also was seen as the primary suitor for some of Ortega's core left-leaning supporters. Now, it's unclear where those orphaned voters will end up.

None of the major polling firms has released results since Lewites' death. One pollster privately predicted that about two-thirds of MRS supporters would eventually drift back to the Ortega camp. But others expect that many will stick with Lewites' less charismatic but highly respected vice-presidential candidate, Edmundo Jarquín, now the MRS' presidential hopeful, or even jump to Montealegre's camp.

''For [MRS voters] to head back to the Sandinista Front would be a betrayal of everything Herty stood for,'' said Manuel Orozco, Central America director for the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. ``If anything, they are closer to Montealegre's position than Ortega's.''

LESS POLARIZED

But where some see an opposition in disarray, Ortega sees a maturing democracy. The fact that there are so many viable candidates is a sign that Nicaraguans have lost their Cold War views and may be ready to judge him on his platform, he argues.

''The problem here is we've never had normal elections,'' he said. ``We've always seen totally polarized elections -- Sandinista or anti-Sandinista.''

Ortega points to his reconciliation with his former nemesis in the Catholic Church and with Yatama, a Miskito Indian organization that took up arms against the Sandinistas during the CIA-financed contra war in the 1980s, as signs of progress.

''The reconciliation process in Nicaragua is much further along,'' he said.

A VIEW OF HISTORY

But while many voters may have forgotten or may be too young to remember Ortega's revolutionary past -- Marxist economic policies, alliances with Cuba and the Soviet Union, harsh media censorship and a dreaded military draft to fight in the contra war -- they haven't forgotten his more recent political shenanigans, Orozco said.

Particularly damaging was the deal he cut with former president and PLC strongman Arnoldo Alemán to share control of government branches such as the judicial system. That relationship -- called el pacto -- helped split the Sandinista party internally between reformers and hard-liners, and has continued even after Alemán was sentenced to 20 years on money-laundering and embezzlement charges.

''The people haven't forgotten the anti-democratic, corrupt and somewhat dirty methods the Sandinista Front has used to stay at the center of power,'' Orozco said. ``Those memories are still fresh.''

Ortega claims that the deals he cut with Alemán, a rabid anti-Sandinista, were in the interest of political stability.

Otherwise, ''we would be changing governments all the time like they do in Bolivia and Ecuador -- where the government doesn't hold up,'' he said.

Ortega came to prominence in 1979 after playing a leading role in the Sandinista Front guerrilla movement that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. As Ortega led the country ever more leftward, the Reagan administration fueled a bloody civil war by backing the contra guerrillas. In 1990, under pressure on the battlefield and struggling under a crippled economy, Ortega called for -- and lost -- free elections.

The days of the communist bloc are gone, but Ortega makes no bones about wanting to be a part of the revitalized Latin American left, led by such presidents as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Evo Morales of Bolivia.

Among his proposals -- sure to rile Washington -- are plans to push for government control of ''strategic sectors,'' including telecommunications and power plants. He also said he plans to ''investigate'' the privatization process that put many state assets into the hands of national and international investors over the past decade.

''The neoliberal economic model is a source of corruption, and to talk about privatization is to talk about corruption,'' he told The Miami Herald. ``We need to investigate [privatizations] and look for the problems and the crimes, if they were committed, and then take corrective measures.''

A CHANGED MAN?

The tough talk plays well in this country, the second-poorest in the Western Hemisphere, where 50 percent of the nearly 5.6 million people live below the poverty line and where free-market reforms have been accompanied by painful price increases.

But it has also given ammunition to his opposition. Montealegre has called Ortega a ''puppet'' of Cuba and Venezuela who would scare investors away with his socialist policies.

Ortega maintains that he is not opposed to free markets as long as they are just, and that he is willing to work with any nation -- including the United States -- that has the best interest of Nicaragua in mind.

After all, he says, it was for Nicaragua that he took to the hills to overthrow Somoza, and it's for the country that he has been so insistent about regaining the presidency.

''To take power through the electoral process would close a cycle in Nicaragua's revolutionary struggle,'' he said. ``And of course it would be the beginning of a new cycle.''