Nicaragua: At War With Itself

By John Borrell/Managua

The stout pine coffin containing the body of Miguel Sotomayor Urbina was brought out of the family's wooden shack and carried through the dusty streets of Managua's Villa Cuba neighborhood. There was no honor guard and no red-and- black flag draped over the coffin, as there usually is for young conscripts killed in action against the U.S.-backed contras. And the cortege, passing beneath flowering cassia trees, headed not for the military cemetery but for an overgrown burial ground on the banks of a rubbish-strewn gully. "He hadn't wanted to go, and dodged the draft for months before he was caught," said Jose Manuel Alvares, a family friend. "This is the family's way of protesting his call-up."

As the coffin was lowered into the earth, the protest grew more voluble. "You sons of bitches are killing us like dogs!" yelled a tearstained pallbearer, pointing his finger at an official of the local Sandinista defense committee. "Just leave us alone."

The outburst was steeped in the emotion of the moment, but it seemed a cry from the heart of a confused and unhappy country, where the promise of the revolution is depreciating as rapidly as Nicaragua's plummeting currency. Whether the country has been let down by the revolution or, as some would argue, the revolution has been let down by the country, Nicaragua today seems to be a betrayal of all the earnest vows swapped in the sticky July heat of 1979 when Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was finally toppled.

In a country where independent opinion polls have been banned since 1981, any estimates of how many Nicaraguans still support the government are suspect. Yet there is growing evidence that the revolution is down to the hard core of its constituency and still losing friends. "The Sandinistas came to power with the support of 80% to 90% of the population," says a Nicaraguan intellectual who was once a fervent believer. "Now they would have to scrape to come up with 40%." The draft and 1500% inflation are eroding the bedrock of support in poor neighborhoods like Villa Cuba. "They have taken all our rights, even the right to toilet paper," says a 20-year-old draft dodger, referring to frequent shortages of basic commodities. "People are tired of their empty slogans and want change."

Those who still believe in the slogans see their faith tested daily. By every economic measure imaginable, the country has become considerably poorer since 1979. The purchasing power of the average person with a job has declined to less than 20% of what it was in 1980. Food and fuel are tightly rationed. A few weeks ago the gas allowance, obtained with coupons bearing a portrait of Che Guevara, was cut from 20 to 17 gal. a month. Earlier this year, the government-subsidized rice ration was reduced to 1 lb. a person a month, down from 5 lbs. three years ago. "A pound of rice might feed a small family for a day," complains Jose Romero Arana at Managua's sprawling outdoor Eastern Market. "What are we supposed to eat for the rest of the month?" Even some of the revolution's early gains in health care are vanishing. "Medicine is supposed to be free," says Maria Arriaga Castilla, nursing a baby in her arms near the town of Ocotal. "But you have to wait so long to see a doctor, and the right drugs aren't always to be found."

While the government blames the war for its economic ills, many Nicaraguans blame a centralized economy modeled after the Soviet system. Though Managua controls only 40% of the economy, prices and wages in the private sector are also set by the Sandinistas. The Soviet Union has underwritten most of the direct costs of the war against the contras, but it has been less willing to fill what might be called the Micawber Gap, the expanding gulf between income and expenditure. Exports have fallen from $636 million in 1977 to an estimated $230 million this year. Imports have remained fairly constant at about $750 million a year. One result of the trade imbalance: Nicaragua's foreign debt has risen from $1.6 billion when the Sandinistas came to power to more than $6 billion. Moscow, in a move seen as signaling its concern over Nicaragua's growing inability to pay its way, has announced a cutback in oil deliveries of nearly 10%.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy grows only more cumbersome. Nicaraguans complain about having to be screened by their local Sandinista defense committee before they can even apply for a driver's license or passport. "We need a visa to leave the country," says Maria Fernandez Bermudez, on the way to visit relatives in Costa Rica. "And then we need permission to return again. Imagine having to get a visa to return to your own country."

Glimpses of daily life like this invite comparisons to Poland or Czechoslovakia, Angola or Ethiopia, Libya or Iran. It is a question of style as much as of substance, and the style is apparent upon arrival at Managua's Sandino Airport. The traveler is confronted by immigration officers in high, completely enclosed wooden booths with thick glass windows and heavy curtains. Out of sight, the officer rustles mysteriously through what seems to be a thick book. Then he appears to scribble furiously for a minute or two. After a final scrutiny of the traveler's face, the passport is pushed back. "Welcome to Nicaragua," says the officer, hitting a switch that opens the electronically operated exit doors. If the Sandinistas do not admit to being Communists or Marxists, they certainly understand the etiquette.

The ride from the airport to downtown Managua calls to mind those almost forgotten revolutions in Africa, from Angola through Zaire, where the rhetoric has marched quickly away from reality. An aging Chevrolet Impala with a cracked windshield and an oil light that glows menacingly in the dark rattles down a potholed road. Bouncing headlights pick out clumps of stoic people waiting for buses that arrive infrequently and full. The bus fleet, local wisdom has it, has almost been run off the road because its mechanics are employed fixing the army's Soviet T-54 tanks. Many people resort to walking, and after dark, shadowy figures flit ghostlike through a heavy shroud of exhaust fumes created by engines vigorously protesting the shortage of spare parts.

The fare for the 20-minute ride is just under $10 but involves counting out 80 1,000-cordoba notes. The government's measures to cope with inflation include printing three additional zeros on its 20-cordoba bills in order to provide a denomination of some practical use. There are so many exchange rates that a visitor sometimes feels trapped in a hall of mirrors. For external debt, the rate is 70 cordobas to the dollar. The official rate for visitors is 9,500 cordobas to the dollar, while the flourishing black-market rate is up to , 18,000. A briefcase is needed to collect the exchange on a $100 bill -- unless the exchange is in small-denomination notes, when a suitcase might be more useful. "The Sandinistas have made all of us millionaires," jokes a vendor at the Masaya bus terminal in Managua, pocketing a 5,000-cordoba bill for two lemonades. "The trouble is, even millionaires can't make ends meet here."

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra occasionally tries to reconcile his rhetoric with the spirit of the Guatemala accord, but the message is not always clear. FORWARD WITH THE FRONT, shouts the party's official 1987 slogan from billboards and walls around Managua. HERE NO ONE SURRENDERS. The government has in fact surrendered some ground since signing the peace agreement, but the real issues at the root of the conflict have not been addressed. Nicaragua is at war with itself, as it has been before in a history as violent as the tropical storms that sweep across the isthmus. It is not just a war in the mountains between guerrillas and soldiers, but a much larger struggle among Nicaraguans over the destiny of their country.

The Sandinistas, by calling upon the Reagan Administration to disband the contras, are behaving just like the Somozas and the clutch of tyrants and oppressors before them who always looked to Washington for a solution to their problems. "We'll talk to the circus owner and not the clowns," Ortega has said when asked why he will not deal directly with the contras. Though he modified that stance last week, those words still reflect a profound inability to recognize what the Sandinista-contra dispute is all about: a domestic disagreement over the future of the land.

Thus Nicaraguans continue to kill one another, one side getting guns from Moscow, the other side from Washington. Meanwhile, the armored knights of the revolution continue to clank noisily in the halls of power, shouting anti-U.S. epithets. Only last month Tomas Borge, the powerful Interior Minister, told a gathering in Managua that the U.S. was the "enemy of humanity" and vowed never ending battle. As he spoke, several Sentinels of the People's Happiness, as the ministry's police are officially called, stared fixedly ahead.