ANDRES OPPENHEIMER Nicaragua may be on Ortega's radar
If you think the Bush administration has enough troubles in Latin America dealing with leftist autocrats in Cuba and Vene-zuela, consider this: A radical former revolutionary leader may be making a comeback in Nica-ragua.
Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista president who after the 1979 revolution confiscated the mansion of a wealthy businessman in the name of social justice and immediately moved in, recently crushed a massive movement within his party to hold primary elections, and had himself declared presidential candidate for the November 2006 elections.
In Washington, Latin America watchers aren't amused: Ortega -- in a rare power-sharing alliance with rightist former President Arnoldo Aleman, who is facing charges of illicit enrichment -- already controls the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal, the Comptroller's General office and Congress.
Although his negative ratings in Nicaragua are sky-high and his well-organized Sandinista party has historically had a hard time reaching out beyond its 35 percent hard-core support, Ortega could conceivably win next year's elections.
"Right now, he is in a very strong position," a senior U.S. official told me last week. "All he has to do is run against a divided field, and he is in."
Radical rhetoric
Unlike the leftist presidents of Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, Ortega has shifted back to his radical 1980s rhetoric, and to what many describe as vintage Stalinist practices.
Late last month, Ortega staged an internal coup within his party, and expelled popular former Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, who was mounting a challenge to win the party's presidential nomination. Lewites, who was tourism minister during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s and was elected Managua mayor in 2000, is the country's most popular politician.
A recent poll by Borge y Asociados shows that Lewites would win a general election with 40 percent of the vote. Among Sandinista sympathizers, he gets 75 percent of the vote, with 18 percent for Ortega.
Lewites called for a massive Sandinista rally March 6 to protest Ortega's internal coup, but Ortega had a sympathetic court deny him a permit to hold the demonstration. Lewites is challenging the Sandinista expulsion order, and has accused Ortega's goon squads of trying to kill him in a March 3 incident in front of a court where he was summoned to appear.
When I called Lewites last week, I got a message on his cellphone saying, "This is your future president." In an interview later that day, he said his troubles with Ortega started recently, "when Daniel [Ortega] saw that the public squares didn't belong to him anymore, after our massive [pro-Lewites] rallies in late February."
Ortega compared the popular ex-mayor with former Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, who Ortega said had committed "crimes against humanity" by destroying the Soviet Union. Lewites countered by charging that Ortega's hard-line backers had recently sold properties and made other business transactions worth more than $3.8 million.
"Where did they get that kind of money from?" Lewites asks. "Facing these accusations, and knowing that I could prove them, they decided to shut up, and expel me from the party.
Leftist government
"This is a fight between an ultra-radical orthodox wing of the party, and a democratic wing," Lewites says. "We're not denying that we will be a leftist government. But it will be a leftist government a la [Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos, or [Brazilian President Luiz Inacio] Lula da Silva."
Ortega is paying a price for his refusal to hold primary elections. Top Sandinista leaders such as former Comandantes Henry Ruiz, Luis Carrion and Victor Tirado, as well as former Sandinista Vice President Sergio Ramirez are now backing Lewites.
Still, Ortega's ruthless tactics may pay off. While Lewites is ahead in the polls, it's doubtful he could run a successful independent candidacy without the 500,000-member Sandinista party machinery.
My conclusion: If the conservative parties are stupid enough -- or corrupt enough -- to field several candidates, Ortega could win. Nicaragua's democracy is already being kidnapped by a rightist-leftist alliance of mafiosi, and the Bush administration could soon have a major new headache in the region.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.