NICARAGUA’S unpredictable politics are a perfect match for its earthquakes and smouldering volcanoes, but if Daniel Ortega, the former dictator, returns to power in presidential elections today, it will have more to do with a woman.
The prospect of victory for Ortega has stirred fear among Nicaraguans and, in a repeat of events two decades ago, irritation in Washington at a “domino effect” of resistance to America’s regional sway.
Ronald Reagan’s favourite bogeyman has skilfully exploited a split in the conservative vote for his third attempt to win back power in the impoverished country renowned for its poets, cheap rum and beauty queens.
The leading lady in the drama, however, is Rosario Murillo, the mother of six of his children. Her influence over him has grown considerably since she came home in the early 1990s after a long affair with another man.
Ortega, who spent much of the 1960s in prison — he wrote a poem entitled I Never Saw Managua in Miniskirts — had also strayed from the conjugal bed when, as leader of the Sandinista revolutionary government in the 1980s, he attracted a string of beauties with his rash and muscular defiance of America and dalliance with Moscow.
People were horrified, however, when Zoilamerica Narvaez, his stepdaughter, then aged 30, accused him in 1999 of rape and sexual abuse from the age of 11. She said abuse continued until she left home aged 19.
Instead of backing her daughter, Murillo, a fiery orator and esoteric thinker, accused her of lying. This effectively saved Ortega from jail. He has been beholden to her ever since.
“Murillo has quite a hold over him,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a political analyst.
Indeed, in a remarkable departure from his days as an atheist revolutionary, Ortega wed her in church last year. Until then the couple had lived in sin. The marriage, it seems, was part of a broader strategy by Murillo to make peace with the church and a fervently Catholic electorate.
After seizing power in 1979, the Sandinistas aroused the wrath of the Pope by encouraging priests to exchange crucifixes for guns in the struggle for social justice in Latin America. Miguel Obando y Bravo, the Archbishop of Managua, was made a cardinal thanks to his opposition to Ortega’s regime.
At Murillo’s prodding, however, Ortega, who was voted out in 1990, last year set about making it up with the 81-year-old cardinal. The courtship worked and Obando y Bravo married the couple in Managua’s cathedral.
This new friendship brought with it the blessing of Roberto Rivas, president of the electoral commission and an oddity in tropical Managua because of the pet penguin he keeps in an air-conditioned enclosure at home. A close associate of Obando y Bravo, he appears to have given the Sandinistas a nudge by speeding up the registration process for Ortega voters.
Just as bizarre is the support of former military enemies from the contra war of the 1980s, when the Reagan White House broke the law by selling arms to Iran to finance a rebel army waging war on the Sandinistas. The balding 61-year-old Ortega has picked a former contra leader whose house he expropriated as his vice-presidential running mate.
Instead of haranguing the “Yankees”, Ortega now prefers quoting the Pope. Gone is the olive green: he dresses in white.
Another Murillo touch was evident in the colour of the campaign posters — pink — and choice of a campaign theme tune: a Latino version of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance. Having been accused of turning Nicaragua into a Soviet proxy state in the 1980s, Ortega was last week promoting nothing more menacing than reconciliation.
If the forces of God have helped Ortega, so has American meddling in a country whose aversion to being treated as a US protectorate is rooted in history.
In the 19th century William Walker, an American adventurer and mercenary, briefly made himself president. A century later America occupied the country for more than two decades until a revolt forced the marines to hand over power to the American-friendly Somoza dynasty, which ran the country as a family concern until fleeing the Sandinista advance into Managua on captured army tanks.
Last week the Uncle Sam role was being played by Paul Trivelli, the American envoy to Managua, who put his foot in it earlier this year by saying of Jose Rizo, one of the conservative candidates: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck, it probably is a duck.” Rizo, a silver-haired coffee farmer, has been mocked ever since in the local press as a “duck”, which in Nicaraguan slang also means homosexual.
The envoy’s friends say he meant only to imply Rizo is a puppet for Arnoldo Aleman, the former president known as “the Fat Man”, who is under house arrest for embezzlement. Rizo has denied the claim.
Trivelli has angered Nicaraguans further by telling businessmen not to give money to Rizo’s party and revoking the visas of more than two dozen of its most prominent figures, accusing them of corruption. The Organisation of American States, which is observing the election, has criticised Trivelli by name and even Oliver North, the former “Iran contra” marine colonel, who visited Managua ahead of the voting, urged him to “pipe down”.
The Americans, who prefer Eduardo Montealegre, the other conservative contender, are not the only ones with a favoured candidate. Hugo Chavez, the populist Venezuelan leader who has compared George Bush to the devil, has been supplying Sandinista mayors with cut-rate oil and fertiliser, raising anxieties in Washington about Nicaragua becoming the latest recruit in the regional, anti-American coalition he has styled the “axis of good”.
Ortega, who used to refer to America as the “enemy of humanity”, has said he wants friendly relations with Washington, but officials there who cut their teeth in the contra war have warned that his victory would jeopardise future economic aid.
“Threatening sanctions is counterproductive,” said Sofia Montenegro, a former Sandinista militant upset with Ortega for betraying revolutionary ideals. “It just makes people more sympathetic to Ortega.”
By far the biggest boon to Ortega, however, was the deal he cut with Aleman in which they agreed on a change in election laws so that a presidential candidate could win with just 35% of the vote.
Yesterday Ortega was within a hair’s breadth of that goal, raising fears of a dispute over the results. Worse still is the prospect of a violent backlash if he wins. “I wouldn’t bet on the result,” said Marvin Lacayo, a businessman whose family fled after the Sandinista victory in 1979. “I just pray that Ortega’s lot don’t come back to put us through all that turmoil again.”
