Nicaraguan election 1990 - 2 March 1990

Throughout the seven awful years in which American foreign policy was bogged down in Nicaragua, the main – and debilitating – argument was over the composition, the purpose, of the Contras, the rebel force fighting the authoritarian regime of President Daniel Ortega.

President Reagan decided long ago that they were an heroic band of men dedicated to democratic aims and the overthrow of a repressive and, as his state department always said, a Marxist-Leninist regime.

He called them, in one soaring sentence, the Nicaraguan equivalent of our founding fathers, the men who broke with Britain and created the Constitution and invented the government of the United States.

The Democratic opposition in Congress called them various things – mercenaries, leftovers from Somoza's army, rebels against an elected government. Ortega had held an election in 1984, five years after he promised one, and had been returned with a thumping majority.

The Contras were, in fact, a very mixed lot. Lots of mercenaries, undoubtedly, many soldiers disillusioned with Ortega's iron rule, peasants and small-town merchants with a genuine desire to unseat Ortega and start all over again with a free election, but also undoubtedly the core of the roving Contra bands were the tough remnants of Somoza's SS men.

Both sides accused the other of torture, murder, the sporadic ravaging of villages. Both sides were right. Conservatives and liberals, in and out of Congress, never could agree either on the character and the political colour of Daniel Ortega. To the Republicans and conservative Democrats, he was an alarming Soviet lackey, great friend of Cuba's Castro – which he was, and is – threatening the security of his neighbours and, in time, who knows, Mexico itself.

To the liberals, Ortega was never a dictator, but a liberal Democrat who, three or four years ago, relaxed his suppression of civil liberties, eventually allowed the main opposition paper La Prenza to publish again, who had tolerated the opposition of the church and done much, as we once used to say about Castro, to bring some help by way of land reform and medical facilities and schooling to the mass of the poor.

A man, anyway, against whom the United States ought not to be financing and training a rebel force, first in his own country and then, when it was driven out, in neighbouring Honduras.

What eventually torpedoed American military aid was the infamous Iran-Contra scandal which, whatever else it showed, proved positively that presidential aides in the National Security Council, with the active collaboration of the CIA, had quietly, and without the knowledge of Congress, sold arms secretly to Iran and with the proceeds financed the Contras in defiance of an Act of Congress.

Two years ago, in February 1988, Congress finally, and it appeared, once for all, suspended all military aid to the Contras. A month after Congress acted, Mr Ortega and the Contras agreed on a 60-day ceasefire. It seemed then that the end to this miserable contest, in which 30,000 Nicaraguans had died, very many of them civilians, was at hand.

But within a month or two, well into the spring of 88, the negotiations broke down. Both sides said they would mount no new military offensives and each side accused the other of doing just that.

During the summer, Mr Ortega accused the United States of still working to upset his government and he expelled the American ambassador and eight other diplomats. The United States retaliated by expelling the Nicaraguan ambassador and exactly eight other of his diplomats.

Eighteen months before these summary dismissals, the President of Costa Rica, Mr Arias, had been quietly and without much success urging the Central American states and the United States to stop giving aid to insurgents of any stripe.

He proposed a regional peace plan for a ceasefire for Nicaragua and El Salvador, America's friend, and Guatemala, to stop imprisoning political enemies, to give amnesty to those in jail or exile, to restore freedom of the press.

Five presidents of Central American countries endorsed the plan for which Mr Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nevertheless, while liberal Democrats in Congress were busy embracing the plan, saying it was the only way out, it was time the United States stopped its perpetual butting-in in Central America, the administration didn't think much of it.

It took two years, from '87 to '89, for everybody, including Mr Ortega, to take the plan seriously. As we noticed, he was getting nowhere with his on-again, off-again ceasefire, and in January of last year, he suddenly announced that his impoverished country must launch an austerity programme. The lives of his people were austere enough but inflation was running headlong, out of control – today, by the way, it's well over 2000%, much like Germany in the early '20s.

A month after Mr Ortega's appalling admission about the economy, he joined the other Central American presidents in a written agreement to commit Nicaragua to democratic change through an early election, in exchange for the disbanding of the Contras, now encamped in Honduras. If the Contras were so disbanded by last December, Mr Ortega said he would hold elections in February of this year. Good.

Now an opposition candidate to Mr Ortega was chosen by the National Opposition Union – the acronym and its slogan is UNO – a rather wobbly alliance of 14 parties. At one end, downright Marxists, at the other end, full-blown Rightists, and every imaginable ideology in between.

When the alliance was formed, only earnest students of Central American affairs and the Nicaraguan desk of the state department had ever heard of the name of the chosen opposition leader. During the organisation of the opposition, the election preliminaries, the early campaigning in the cities, began to get boisterous. When the Contras staged raids out of Honduras, the Ortega men responded. Last November, Mr Ortega lifted the long ceasefire, but, after a week or two, when it seemed we were returning to open warfare, the raids and counter-raids sputtered out.

Two weeks before the December deadline arrived for the disbanding of the Contras, an airplane flying into El Salvador was wrecked. It contained a shipment of missiles which Mr Ortega confessed had been sent by his government. Here, for Mr Reagan (he was still in the White House) was brazen proof of the original charge against Mr Ortega – his supplying with Russian money, Russian arms to the guerrillas fighting America's ally, El Salvador.

It was a bad break, politically speaking, for Mr Ortega. The deadline for disbanding the Contras came and went. By 8 December, the Contras were still there, in Honduras. Twelve thousand of them are there still. And, if he had not been caught out on the missile shipment, Mr Ortega could have legitimately claimed – he still could – that the other side of the bargain, for an election, had not been kept. The Contras are alive and organised.

But, last weekend the election took place. All the polls showed Mr Ortega with a comfortable, in fact with a thundering, 2-1 majority. Then the election and he was defeated soundly by a new name to conjure with – Mrs Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, leader of UNO, widow of the heroic editor of La Prenza whose assassination in the Somoza days touched off the rebellion that brought Daniel Ortega marching into Managua, an event 11 years ago which I well remember had the American press and television letting off hosannas in the name of a new hero, Daniel Ortega.

What happened? What happened to the polls? The notion of one American Congressman who'd been down there the week before the election seems to have been confirmed. In a reasonably free society, voters are not reluctant to say aloud how they are going to vote.

He suspected that very many Nicaraguans were not going to run the risk of retaliation for a known vote. They said one thing and they voted the other. Anyway, the result added a heroine to the rather crowed pantheon of new American heroes.

The old Reagan men and women and the conservatives are all saying that the true heroes are the Contras, that if the Reagan administration had not kept up the pressure, there never could have been a free election. The liberals and the old opponents of Contra aid, who prevailed, say not so, the Contras only prolonged the agony of a people yearning to be free and eager to embrace President Arias's plan when the United States disdained it.

Whatever else the Nicaraguans voted for, they certainly voted against seven years of civil war and the collapse of their economy. And who is to be credited for an election which even Mr Ortega grants was fair enough. He's taken it very well, as well he might – he still controls the army, defence, the police, the secret police.

How about the United Nations, which had an observer corps down there, and an international council of observers? And perhaps, most of all, the hundred-odd observers picked and supervised by Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States.

Even Mr Bush conceded, nay declared, that Mr Carter's enormous labours in roaming the country and watching and checking and policing polling places, computers and so forth, was, the president said, "incomparable".

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