ELECTIONS-NICARAGUA:
And It's Everyone Against Daniel Ortega
José Adán Silva

MANAGUA,  (IPS) - The possibility of a victory for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua's Nov. 5 elections has unleashed what is virtually an all-out political war against its presidential candidate, Daniel Ortega.

Amidst accusations of foreign interference, the U.S. State Department and the White House have thrown their support behind efforts by the business community and politicians to unite rightwing parties into a single electoral ticket in order to defeat the FSLN, historian Aldo Díaz Lacayo told IPS.

"To the United States, the FSLN is still the main political and organisational force with a real chance of winning the elections, and that's a concern because it thinks Nicaragua would join the anti-U.S. bloc led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, along with Cuba, Bolivia and the other countries where the left is in power," he said.

Five political parties are fielding presidential candidates, who are led in the polls by the leftwing FSLN, which governed the country from 1979 to 1990, after inflicting a military defeat on the dynastic dictatorship of the Somoza family, the culmination of an armed struggle that started in the 1960s.

According to opinion surveys, the FSLN candidate should win the support of between 28 and 37 percent of the country's 3.4 million voters.

Ortega would need just 35 percent of the vote and a five-point lead over his nearest rival for a first-round victory.

The rightwing governing Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) has nominated lawyer José Rizo, under the influence of former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002), who was convicted of corruption. Rizo has poll ratings of between 15 and 20 percent.

Another rightwing party, the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance, led by Harvard-educated banker and former government minister Eduardo Montealegre, is attributed between 17 and 30 percent of voting intention, depending on the survey.

Edmundo Jarquín of the Sandinista Renewal Movement, a dissident faction of the FSLN, has 15 to 20 percent ratings.

Lastly, former guerrilla commander Edén Pastora, estranged from the Sandinistas, is standing for Alternative for Change, and is predicted to get no more than one percent of the vote.

Washington's concern has been reflected by statements against Ortega and the FSLN by the U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli, and other U.S. representatives, as well as by the attempts of several Nicaraguan organisations to consolidate the rightwing vote against the Sandinistas, Díaz Lacayo said.

"In a period of less than two months there were three known attempts to unite both rightwing parties through the influence of people and organisations openly backed by the United States," he said.

In mid-September, the American Chamber of Commerce in Nicaragua called upon the parties to unite behind the candidate with the strongest poll ratings, with the rest pulling out of the race.

This proposal failed. One day later, rightwing intellectuals and leftwing dissidents associated in Unity for Nicaragua urged the parties to set aside their ambitions and unite against Ortega.

In late September, U.S. Republican Congressman Dan Burton, chairman of the House International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, visited Nicaragua to press the same proposal.

Unless the other parties' candidates join together and support Montealegre (Washington's favourite), Nicaraguans will suffer the consequences of a Sandinista government and "difficult" relations with the United States, as well as economic calamity, Burton hinted.

"These insistent urgings are polarising the elections," and their effect is that "the non-Sandinistas lose out because people can spread their votes in various directions, while the Sandinistas have only one ticket," Díaz Lacayo said.

"The United States doesn't forget its enemies and it knows that this Ortega, this FSLN, are the same ones who defied the U.S. in the 1980s and committed a thousand crimes and abuses. That's why they want to get rid of them by any means possible," presidential candidate Pastora told IPS.

Ortega was a member of the Council (Junta) for National Reconstruction which governed Nicaragua in the first half of the 1980s, and later elected president (1985-1990).

In June he was accused of the massacre of indigenous people and the forced displacement of thousands more in 1981-1982. This month the case was taken before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) by the non-governmental Nicaraguan Permanent Commission on Human Rights.

But the IACHR already investigated the case back in 1982, and found against the Nicaraguan state in 1984.

The media have reopened discussion, meanwhile, on another case against Ortega, in which he was accused of sexual abuse and rape of his step-daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, beginning when she was 12 years old.

The case has already been tried by the criminal justice system, and the former president was acquitted by a judge who was a known supporter of the Sandinistas. Subsequently Narváez brought legal action against the Nicaraguan state before the IACHR on the grounds of denial of justice, and obtained a favourable verdict in 2001.

IPS sought comments from the FSLN on these and other allegations for more than two weeks, but only obtained one remark from a press aide: "We will not respond to this hate campaign."

The legal representative of the FSLN, Elías Chévez, has reported the International Republican Institute, an ultra-conservative U.S. organisation, to the office of the public prosecutor for providing thousands of dollars for training electoral delegates of the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance and the Sandinista Renewal Movement.

The FSLN's accusation was countered by another, from its opponents, about Venezuelan funds and oil provided to the Sandinistas.

Sandinista city governments grouped in the Nicaraguan Association of Municipalities signed an agreement in April with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA to form the Alba Nicaraguan Oil Company. On Oct. 7 the first shipment of 304,000 litres of gasoil arrived and was met by Ortega in person. Another shipment of 960,000 litres is on its way from Venezuela.

The Sandinistas have also been accused of infiltrating the Supreme Electoral Council with the purpose of fixing the elections in favour of Ortega.

But the allegations of planned fraud are pure speculation, Roberto Courtney, the head of the non-governmental Ethics and Transparency Group, told IPS. There are more than 12,000 national and international observers monitoring every step of the electoral process, and so far they have not found any trace of irregularities, he said.

"This election is running more smoothly than previous ones," he said. But he was concerned about interference from other countries, especially in terms of campaign financing. "Injections of cash are the worst kind of interference," he said.

"Under the present laws, there is practically no way of getting political parties to account for their funds and donations. The fear is that foreign governments and agents, and foreign companies, may take a hand in financing the campaigns," Courtney said.