BY GLENN GARVIN

 MANAGUA -- The political ambitions of the Somoza clan, trying to regain a
 foothold in Nicaragua two decades after the family's 43-year rule was toppled by a
 Marxist insurgency, was dealt a blow Tuesday when two prominent family
 members were expelled from the political party they were helping to reorganize.

 Brothers Alejandro and Luis Sevilla Somoza were expelled by the same National
 Liberal Party (PLN) that was the vehicle for the presidencies of their grandfather
 and two uncles.

 ``The political message being sent to Nicaragua by their presence in the party
 was the wrong message,'' said Leonel Teller, the party's secretary for international
 relations. ``The PLN wants a progressive government for Nicaragua, not a return to
 the past.''

 The decision to expel the Sevilla Somoza brothers was by a unanimous vote of
 the 17-member PLN board of directors, Teller said.

 The Somozas have pumped undisclosed amounts of cash into the PLN in recent
 months, as well as bringing more than 10,000 new voters from a small political
 party the family organized last year.

 Refurbishing the PLN was part of a general push by the family to reclaim
 confiscated properties and reestablish the family in the political and social fabric
 of Nicaraguan life. The effort has been spearheaded by so-called third-generation
 Somozas, who were in their 20s when the family dynasty collapsed in 1979.

 Alejandro Sevilla Somoza -- who with his brother Luis has been the most
 prominent of the family members to return to Nicaragua from exile in the United
 States -- said Tuesday afternoon that he had not been notified of the expulsion
 and didn't believe it was legal.

 ``They can't do something like that without a vote of the party members, and I
 think we'll win a vote like that,'' he said. ``Our presence in the party has been a
 tremendous symbolic boon.''

 But Teller said the brothers weren't entitled to an appeal because technically they
 weren't being expelled. Rather, their applications for party membership, made
 several months ago, were rejected.

 PLN party officials have been urging the Sevilla Somozas for months to keep a
 lower profile, to no avail. And many officials were dismayed when a Somoza
 family dispute with Nicaragua's Catholic church became public.

 The Somozas are threatening to go to court to reclaim the land under and around
 Managua's new cathedral, which they say was illegally confiscated from the
 family by the Marxist regime that took power here in 1979. The family has offered
 to let the church keep the land under the cathedral if it returns the rest to the
 Somozas, but so far Catholic officials have resisted any compromise.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald