20 Years After Sandinista Coup, Poverty Prevails

                  By Molly Moore
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  MANAGUA, Nicaragua—At the flashy MetroCenter mall on the outskirts
                  of Managua, the Liz Claiborne store sells linen shirts at $100 each, an
                  interior designer offers oak kitchen cabinets for $5,000 and Pizza Hut
                  peddles two slices of pizza and a soft drink for $2.50. Guillermo Olivas
                  opted for the pizza--and free escalator rides for his two daughters.

                  "It's beautiful to look at; it's good for Managua," said the 35-year-old
                  welder one day last week as he watched his giggling young girls clamber
                  up and down the first escalators they had ever seen. "But it's too expensive
                  for Nicaraguans to buy anything here."

                  Twenty years after the Marxist-led Sandinista National Liberation Front
                  overthrew a dictatorship with some of the hemisphere's most ambitious
                  promises of social and political reform--and nine years after U.S.-backed
                  conservatives were elected on the strength of still more
                  promises--Nicaragua remains poorer than ever and deeply splintered
                  between haves and have-nots.

                  A Central American country with a turbulent history that was central to
                  U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s, Nicaragua had all but disappeared from
                  view in Washington until the devastation from Hurricane Mitch last
                  October elicited a large infusion of money and attention. While the U.S.
                  government funneled more than $1 billion in military aid and other
                  assistance to the anti-Sandinista contra effort between 1982 and 1997,
                  U.S. assistance to Nicaragua had dwindled to about $35 million annually
                  before the hurricane struck, prompting U.S. Ambassador Lino Gutierrez to
                  warn that Washington ignores the country "to our peril."

                  The Sandinista government took control here July 19, 1979, in the
                  euphoria of a broadly supported revolution that toppled the hated Somoza
                  family dictatorship known for cozy relations with the United States. It lost
                  power at the polls in 1990, a bitter political defeat for President Daniel
                  Ortega and the Cuban-style government he led. In between, the country
                  was crippled by a civil war fueled by the U.S.-sponsored contra rebels,
                  undermined by annual hyperinflation of up to 24,000 percent and steered
                  into economic decline by an attempt to plant Marxism in largely hostile soil.

                  During the first six years after the Sandinistas were voted out of power,
                  with the President Violeta Chamorro at the controls, Washington
                  applauded Nicaragua's changed orientation, but poverty levels continued
                  to climb under an unpopular administration seen as ineffective and divisive.
                  Today, President Arnoldo Aleman, a right-wing businessman elected in
                  1996, is struggling to pull the country out of its two decades of turmoil and
                  the Cold War conflict that shaped its image.

                  Aleman has sought to make Nicaragua a country where the MetroCenter
                  can be full of customers. But to many Nicaraguans, who find themselves
                  mired in poverty even as their Central American neighbors are slowly rising
                  to higher economic levels, the new face of Managua does not go much
                  deeper than the colonial-style facade of the mall, renovated six months
                  ago.

                  "It's the illusion of this country," said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, 43, a
                  newsweekly publisher and son of the former president who, like many
                  here, has difficulty reconciling the glitz of new malls, hotels and restaurants
                  sprouting across the capital with a nation whose poverty level is second
                  only to Haiti in the hemisphere.

                  An estimated 70 percent of Nicaragua's population lives in poverty and
                  more than half of the work force is unemployed or severely
                  underemployed. Annual per capita income is $435, compared with $1,200
                  when the Sandinista rebels marched into Managua to the cheers of throngs
                  of poor and middle class alike.

                  Foreign investors, fearful of weak government, corruption, poor markets
                  and massive problems with obtaining legal property titles, have been far
                  slower to move into Nicaragua than into other Central American countries.
                  Private foreign capital investment in 1997 totaled a meager $113 million
                  and only 25 U.S. companies are doing business in Nicaragua, according to
                  U.S. State Department records.

                  Despite its economic morass, Nicaragua on the cusp of the next millennium
                  is a far different nation from the one that spent the 1980s embroiled in a
                  civil war. The battle lines drawn largely by U.S. foreign policy have
                  become obscured, and old enemies have joined forces in a crusade to
                  push Nicaragua into the global marketplace.

                  For example, a former contra political leader, who a little over a decade
                  ago was meeting CIA agents to trade intelligence, now is invited to
                  embassy parties to talk business in his new life as a real estate developer.
                  The contras' chief fund-raiser, once labeled a "beast" who would never be
                  allowed to return to Nicaragua, today is a member of the national congress
                  who--on occasion--finds himself voting with Sandinista fighters turned
                  lawmakers.

                  The U.S. ambassador, whose counterparts in the last decade were
                  engaged in fueling a war, a trade embargo and plotting how to
                  outmaneuver a sovereign nation's government, now spends his days
                  negotiating agreements on intellectual property rights, stolen cars, drug
                  interdiction and luring U.S. businesses.

                  The former vice president of the Sandinista government has bolted the
                  party and last week published a tell-all book about what went wrong.

                  "We have a new democracy that is very fragile," said Sergio Ramirez, vice
                  president in the 1980s and author of "Adios, Muchachos," and most
                  recently, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. "Now there is a
                  different revolution, where ideology doesn't have much importance. It's a
                  fight to respect laws and institutions and fight corruption."

                  In fact, ideology in the Nicaragua of 1999 is sometimes difficult to define.

                  "The country is a democracy," Aleman said in an interview in his
                  presidential office, where shelves are filled with family photographs. "Of all
                  the countries in Central America we are the most secure. There is no fear
                  of crime. We respect elections. The army does not answer to the political
                  parties. . . . There is no hyperinflation and growth is 6 to 7 percent."

                  Aleman has been dogged by repeated charges of corruption and
                  allegations that he has used his office to augment the family wealth acquired
                  before he was elected. It is a subject that prompts an angry denial: "That's
                  disinformation."

                  Even more troubling to many Nicaraguans is the alliance Aleman appears
                  to have formed with his archenemy Ortega, who leads the slowly fading,
                  but still popular Sandinistas and is a member of congress. The two have
                  conducted closed-door negotiations on changes in election laws and other
                  constitutional revisions, which some observers view as a political attempt
                  to preserve power within their own disgruntled ranks.

                  Although his luster has dimmed and many of his strongest supporters have
                  deserted his party, Ortega can still summon hundreds of loyal followers to
                  the streets with a few words. He commands loyalty from the nation's
                  poorest voters in many pockets of the country. Major rallies are scheduled
                  today in Managua and other Nicaraguan cities to commemorate the 20th
                  anniversary of the revolution that overthrew 46 years of Somoza
                  dictatorship.

                  And while more Nicaraguans are far poorer today than they were when
                  the Sandinista revolution began, Ortega, 54, maintains that the movement
                  he led left a strong legacy.

                  "There's frustration on the part of the poor population," Ortega told a
                  group of reporters last week inside the large compound where exterior
                  walls that were once painted in camouflage are now coated in the cheerful
                  pastels of children's drawings. "But we brought the possibility for popular
                  democracy. The people learned to value themselves as human beings
                  through the triumph of the revolution. This has not been lost, and I don't
                  believe it will be lost."

                  His comments differ little from those of Alfredo Cesar, a onetime
                  Sandinista ally who later became a political leader of the contra rebels and
                  now is a Managua real estate developer. "I'm not happy with the situation
                  in Nicaragua," he said. "There was too much effort, too much blood and
                  too much conflict for what we have now. We're worse off economically
                  speaking, but we live in a democracy we didn't have 20 years ago. People
                  have learned to use the vote, and they punish with the vote."

                  Across town, Adolfo Calero, a contra leader who spent years lobbying the
                  U.S. Congress to support the movement, is now a member of Nicaragua's
                  congress and has returned to his house that was confiscated by the
                  Sandinista government in the 1980s and turned into its international press
                  center. The walls are lined with mementos of the war years, including a
                  Sandinista newspaper that brands him a CIA agent and a framed
                  photograph of his appearance before the U.S. Congress during the
                  Iran-contra hearings, inscribed by Oliver North to a "friend, freedom
                  fighter and patriot."

                  "The country is still trying to figure out where to go and how to go about
                  it," he said over the squawks of a pair of caged lovebirds.
 

                           © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company