But Will It Work?

By Johanna McGeary

Long before the polls closed, the people knew what they had done. Before the radio began reporting returns, before the platoons of international observers were totting up their "quick counts" and the battalions of reporters were frantically calling in the news, the word had spread across Managua. "We're going to win!" shouted a woman tending a bubbling cauldron in front of her house in one of the city's poorest barrios, thought to be a stronghold of the ruling Sandinistas. The Sandinistas? she was asked. "No, not those sons of bitches," she spat back. "The Dona. Dona Violeta."

In another startling turnaround in an age of startling surprises, democracy burst forth where everyone least expected it. Given the chance to vote in an honest and secret election, Nicaraguans decisively repudiated the Sandinista government, which the U.S. had been struggling to overthrow for a decade.

Conservatives and liberals in Washington are already arguing over who should claim credit for the Sandinistas' defeat. But nobody really "won" Nicaragua. If the election of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro as President last week reflected anything, it was the people's rejection of the pain they have endured for a decade. Give us a chance, they said. End the war. Save the economy. The immediate target of their wrath was the Sandinistas, but the U.S. too bears a share of responsibility. It now owes Nicaragua generous help if it wants democracy to flourish.

Latin America's history is filled with government reversals, but rarely at the ballot box. Coups, revolutions and invasions -- often organized by Washington -- are more common means. Ever since the trauma of Viet Nam, the U.S. has sought a less direct and costly method to have its way. Where military force could still do the trick cost effectively, the U.S. was willing to use it, as in Grenada and Panama. But in Nicaragua, wittingly or not, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves. For Americans, the cost was minimal. True, bruising annual battles over Central America splintered Congress, and the Iran-contra scandal hobbled Ronald Reagan's second term, but hardly any U.S. soldiers were dying.

The real burden fell on Nicaragua. The U.S. strategy proved excruciatingly slow and extremely expensive, and it inflicted the most pain on the wrong people. The past ten years have savaged the country's civilians, not its comandantes. Since 1985 Washington has strangled Nicaraguan trade with an embargo. It has cut off Nicaragua's credit at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The contra war cost Managua tens of millions and left the country with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms. The impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua was a harrowing way to give the National Opposition Union (U.N.O.) a winning issue.

No one will ever know if a less hostile American approach or regional peace negotiations or the inherent flaws of Marxism might have done the trick more quickly and painlessly. But it does seem evident that the Sandinistas risked the uncertainties of the ballot box only after the U.S. stopped financing the contra war and began suggesting that Managua might profit by behaving more democratically. George Bush, to his credit, steered the U.S. into the peace- and-elections program formulated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez. If one man deserves acclaim for masterminding this moment, Arias does.

By then the Sandinistas had little choice. Nicaragua had been devastated by a 40% drop in GNP, an inflation rate running at 1,700% a year and constant shortages of food and basic necessities. At least 30,000 people had been killed in the war, and 500,000 more had fled. The Soviet Union had not yet withdrawn its $300 million annual subsidy, but even a fanatical Sandinista could see that Moscow was retrenching both financially and politically. Benefactors such as Spain and the Scandinavian countries also predicated desperately needed financial help on the holding of a free and fair election.

The Sandinistas agreed because they thought they would win. That they lost should not be so surprising. They had thoroughly mismanaged an economy that was one of Central America's more prosperous when the Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.) took power in 1979. They wasted scarce resources ! backing other revolutionary movements in the region. They drove out Nicaragua's middle class with their quirky brand of Marxist economic dogma. In reaction to the contra threat, they severely repressed civil liberties. In the end, Nicaraguans voted like most people -- with their stomachs. "There is not an incumbent government in Latin America," said William LeoGrande, political science professor at American University in Washington, "that could have won re-election with this kind of economy."

To many, the election result was simply further proof of the collapse of communism. This was, after all, the first time that indigenous Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power submitted themselves to the ballot box -- and lost. But the lesson may simply be that dictatorial systems invite their downfall when they open up to the democratic process. The same thing happened to the right-wing regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

Washington might do well just to accept the boon as another in a happy series of democratic surprises and get on with the business of making Chamorro's remarkable victory stick. She is inexperienced and untested, head of a patchwork coalition of 14 parties that stretch across the ideological spectrum and share little except their opposition to the Sandinistas. In addition to reviving the economy, Chamorro faces extraordinary challenges: how to disband the contra forces safely, how to gain control of the military and security apparatus from the Sandinistas, how to soothe the bitter divisions of the past ten years. Her fragility places a greater burden on the U.S. to ensure that her election proves more than a momentary triumph.

The greatest danger -- to Chamorro and to the U.S. -- comes from the Sandinista People's Army and the internal police. Hard-liners in the F.S.L.N. are balking at turning over control of the security forces to Chamorro, and many fear vengeance from the contras who still roam the countryside. The Sandinistas want the rebels to disband first. The contras in turn have expressed reluctance to put down their weapons until after Chamorro takes power on April 25.

President Bush made it clear that the war is over as far as the U.S. is concerned. "There is no reason at all for further military actions from any quarter," he said. But if power in Nicaragua is to change hands peacefully, the military standoff must be resolved before inauguration day. A violent confrontation would present Bush with an appalling decision on how far to go & to support the candidate the U.S. helped elect. Washington might serve its own interests better by persuading the contras to demobilize immediately, as both Chamorro and the Sandinistas have asked, but only after the Sandinistas offer firm guarantees that they will not pounce once the opposition is disarmed.

The U.S. must also recognize that the Sandinistas are not going to fade away. They remain the largest and best-organized political party in the country, and some still see them as social reformers. Bush's habitual low-key reaction to stunning change was welcome last week, in contrast to years of shrill U.S. rhetoric. Administration officials were publicly gracious to outgoing President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, careful to praise his commitment to fair elections and his apparent reasonableness -- so far -- in defeat.

Washington seems prepared to accept the Sandinistas in the role of loyal opposition. "There is space in a democratic Nicaragua for the expression of all political points of view," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. Robert Pastor, Jimmy Carter's chief Latin American adviser, suggests that Bush go further, for example by inviting Sandinista ministers to Washington along with the new government to work out the terms of U.S. aid. "The Sandinistas should be given as many incentives as possible for cooperation," he says.

The fundamental challenge to Chamorro, and the most urgent claim on the U.S., remains Nicaragua's economy. "The country needs to be completely rehabilitated," says Sol Linowitz, former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States and co-negotiator of the 1977 Panama Canal treaty. According to a 1986 World Bank study, the Nicaraguan economy will need $1.3 billion a year for the next ten years just to keep ahead of the country's growing population. The U.N.O. has called for at least $2 billion in U.S. aid -- $200 million immediately and $600 million annually for the next three years. Oklahoma Democratic Congressman Dave McCurdy labels that request "outrageous."

The Bush Administration, caught off guard along with everyone else, has not yet unveiled a coherent plan to help Chamorro consolidate her victory. Bush has promised to let the five-year trade embargo lapse when Chamorro takes office, and he will no doubt agree to restoring Nicaragua's credit at the international lending institutions. He will resume full diplomatic relations. But his aides have been quick to dismiss the notion of a cash windfall. "It will not be anywhere near what some of the Nicaraguans are asking," said an Administration official. The U.S. is strapped for money for its own domestic needs and swamped by requests from other emerging democracies. Bush appears likely to limit himself to general promises, saying he wants time to study the problem before he commits to any dollar amount. He will try to persuade Japan and Western Europe to contribute funds, but they too are oversubscribed by the needs in Eastern Europe. Bush may even quietly encourage the Soviet Union to continue its nonmilitary cash subsidies, plus 25,000 tons of free grain and 70% of the oil Nicaragua consumes.

Nicaraguans are bound to resent niggardliness from the U.S. They feel that their proximity and the long years of damaging American involvement entitle them to go to the top of the aid list. The U.S. in recent years has had a bad habit of spending millions on wars but little on peace; yet the few millions Washington contributed to this election proved a far better investment than the hundreds of millions sent to the contras. U.S. help to the opposition during the election has raised high expectations that its victory will automatically bring a huge infusion of aid.

The Sandinistas' defeat and the capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega have removed two of the most divisive and destabilizing factors in U.S. relations with Latin America. With El Salvador's leftist guerrillas likely to be undercut by a halt in support from Nicaragua and Cuba isolated as never before, the U.S. has an opportunity to move beyond its 30- year struggle with Marxism in the region. It can stop using Nicaragua as an ideological battleground and start treating it like a needy neighbor. But to turn this electoral triumph into something substantial and lasting, Washington will have to do something it has not done for a while: think big and act fast.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington