Ortega's slippery comeback
DANIEL ORTEGA returned to power in Nicaragua, but not because of any great leftward turn there. He has paid assiduous attention to the details of political organizing and struck a corrupt bargain with his chief adversary on the right. And he got lucky -- his only viable opponent on the left died of a heart attack. Ortega shouldn't take this vote as a mandate but as an opportunity to mend the great rift in Nicaraguan society. The United States should continue aid to Nicaragua as long as Ortega does not revert to his old authoritarian ways.
Ortega, president of the country after the Sandinista revolution in 1979, lost unexpectedly in 1990, getting 41 percent of the vote. He lost again in 1996, with 38 percent, and again in 2001, with 42 percent. Last Sunday, he won, with 38 percent, because of the deal he made in 2000 with Arnoldo Aleman, lame-duck president and leader of the Liberal Party. They divvied up control of the Supreme Court and the Electoral Council and changed the law so that a run off was no longer required in presidential elections where the leading candidate failed to get a majority.
Aleman thought he had guaranteed his influence after his term as president was complete. Little did he realize that Ortega, through the Sandinista takeover of the lower judiciary, would throw him in prison for corruption. Aleman deserved the sentence, but his blatant corruption split the Liberal Party in this year's election.
Ortega, through his obsession with power, has antagonized most of the idealistic Sandinistas. They thought they had found their presidential candidate in Herty Lewites, former major of Managua, but Ortega maneuvered him out of the party last year. Lewites was still in the running for president, and might have taken enough votes from Ortega to ensure a runoff, but for his death in July.
Ortega today is offering a new image as a conciliator and an advocate of free trade. He is also an inveterate anti-American, an understandable attitude given the US support for the anti-Sandinista Contra insurgency, but not a useful policy for a country that is in the economic orbit of the United States.
Ortega will be tempted to join Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's anti-American coalition, but he should not. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promises a wait-and-see attitude, but people on the far right of the Republican Party are ready to wage an economic version of the Contra war. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, asked the Homeland Security Department to make contingency plans to cut off the $800 million in remittances that Nicaraguans working in the United States send home every year.
The remittances shouldn't stop. Nicaragua, second-poorest nation in the hemisphere, needs that money, as well as $220 million in aid the United States is providing, and all the increased economic activity to be gained from the Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA .
Most of all, Nicaragua needs a resolution of the split between those who supported and opposed the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s. This division within Nicaragua promotes a tolerance for corruption. Voters forgive much if their candidates are on the preferred side of the ideological divide. Sandinista voters even ignored allegations of sexual abuse by Ortega's stepdaughter in 1998. His victory last week gives him a second chance at a historical legacy. Ortega can be known as the wily and corrupt Sandinista survivor -- or the healer of his country. 