THE ASSAULT ON THE SANDINISTAS

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports that the Sandinistas are

no longer popular even among their own people, and assesses the prospects of an American invasion

Only weeks ago the Sandinista regime looked as if it was here to stay in Nicaragua. The Contras were a lost cause. Inept in battle, as brutal as ever, and un- able to account for mil- l', ons of dollars of humanitarian' aid that had gone astray, they seemed far from winning the trust of Democratic Congressmen. And yet on 25 June, for reasons that have more to do with American domestic politics than anything happening in Nicaragua, and taking the Sandinistas by surprise, the House of Representatives suddenly fell in line with President Reagan's Contra policy. Not only did the House renew military aid to the Contras — which had been cut in 1984 — but it also let the CIA take direct control. The United States is now well on its way to its own Afghanistan. The origin- al argument for backing the Contras was defensive, to maintain the status quo by using them to prevent arms smuggling from Nicaragua to the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. Now the goal is patently offen- sive, to overthrow a consolidated Marxist- Leninist regime.

The American 'declaration of war' has hit the Sandinistas just as they are facing the worst economic crisis since the revolu- tion. Inflation is nearing 600 per cent, real wages have halved, and there is a shortage of most staple foods. For foreigners, cushioned by dollars, it means living on lobster — often the only fare at Managua's restaurants. For Nicaraguans, it means hunting through the markets in search of maize and beans. A group of women, who had been queuing for six hours to buy a cut of meat, screamed at me as they were turned away empty-handed: 'There's no- thing, nothing. You write that down, we're starving to death.' It is not that bad yet, most Nicaraguans still look as if they could lose a stone or two. But the bitterness many feel towards the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) goes beyond shortages of food, or medicine, or buses, which they realise are at least partly caused by war. It has to do with liberty, if one dares raise such an old-fashioned idea. The Sandinistas treat the values of 'bourgeois democracy' with contempt, but they forget that the right to strike, now suspended in Nicaragua, and the right to free labour association, now effectively suppressed, were won at a high cost by the workers of the world. It turns out that even the poorest, in fact especially the poorest, who have nothing but their freedom, resent the coercive machinery of the Sandinista state. They don't like having to join a Sandinista trade union because they know perfectly well it is used to raise output and lower pro- test.

In the capital it is get- ting harder to find any- one who actually sup- ports the FSLN. The kind of people you run into, taxi drivers, wai- 'Everything we just told you is rot, utter rot, every word of it. You see, we're afraid. There are "ears" (spies); you never know.' Then came a barrage of recrimina- tions. They had once been Sandinistas and had taken part in the uprising against Somoza. But the revolution had been corrupted. It had become communist and godless. It had stirred up hatred and divisions. And now there was no food. 'What we want from the bottom of our hearts', concluded one of them, 'is an American invasion. And if that means more bloodshed then so be it.'

Diplomats estimate that only a quarter of Managua's one million inhabitants now supports the government. In the country- side the figure is higher, perhaps a third. It would have been much higher if the Sandi- nistas had not tried to use agrarian reform to stamp out peasant instincts. Seeing 'mercantile production' as the 'seed of capitalism' they have given expropriated land to co-operatives, instead of to single families as the peasants had expected. Moreover, what they gave with one hand they took back with the other. Thc co- operatives were forced to sell their produce to the government at rip-off prices, causing a disastrous fall in output. Lately, how- ever, common sense has prevailed over ideology. In a move reminiscent of Lenin's 'new economic policy' in 1921 the Sandinis- tas are now giving out individual land titles and letting the free market set the price of crops.

There are also peasants who have not been given land. Some work on state plantations, others on private farms that have escaped confiscation. According to the government's own figures their buying power has fallen by 60 per cent since the revolution. The Sandinistas admit this is awful but argue that improvements in housing, health care and education help to compensate. Sometimes they do: some- times they don't. At a coffee farm in the province of Jinotega a group of angry workers told me 'nothing had improved'. As for health care, they pointed to the local clinic, built under the Somoza dicta- torship, and said it was almost defunct for lack of medicine.

Then there is a third tranche of peasants: those who owned their land before 1979. Many live in the strategic mountain belt where the Contras are active. Some have perhaps 30 head of cattle and travel on horseback. Others are poorer and go by foot. But they share a yeoman pride and a suspicion of change of any kind. They are Nicaragua's `kulaks', that is to say, the sort of people Stalin had to exterminate to make way for progress in Russia.

And it is no surprise what they think of the revolution. 'We all support the Contras here,' said a young farmer from Matagalpa as we bounced along in the back of a truck, 'and I tell you, if the Sandinista Front tries to call me up for the (military) reserve, I'll kiss my wife and children goodbye and take to the hills myself.'

The opposition parties have not been able to take advantage of this almost insurrectional mood. It is surprising, perhaps, that they still exist at all since two years ago Bayardo Arce, chief ideologue of the FSLN, was talking privately of 'putting an end to all this artifice of pluralism. If there is a Social Christian Party and a Social Democratic Party etc. which have been useful to us up to now, that time has come to an end.' But the Sandinistas still depend on aid from Europe and Latin America, which demand at least the for- mality of pluralism. In any case they know the opposition leaders, the squabbling remnants of a provincial middle class, are quite harmless. 'They let us keep going,' admits Erick Ramirez, head of the Social Christian Party, 'because they think we're no threat.'

The parties function only in name. In a system where the state controls access to credit, access to fertilisers, even access to food, only a defiant man will put his name on a party list. He may also have to be a brave man. He is likely to be threatened, arrested for supposed Contra sympathies, and, if he lives in a remote and humble village, he could even be assassinated by Sandinista thugs. The independent Liberal Party claims that 160 of its grass-roots activists are now detained, and that the whole of its youth leadership has been drafted, en masse, into the army.

Not even the Catholic Church has been able to hold its own. The FSLN has fostered a rival 'Popular Church', staffed by the liberation theology international brigade, which has preached the brother- hood of Christ and Sandino. The conserva- tive bishops have fought back by expelling many rebel priests from their dioceses, but they have been unable to regain their authority as the sole arbiters of Christian conduct. Catholics may or may not support the Sandinista front, but their choice has little to do with what the bishops say.

True, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo is the most popular man in the country. With his peasant's taste for robes, ritual, and allegory, he captures the mediaeval spirit of Nicaraguan religion. But many of his enemies are practising Catholics, and many of his followers are not. As the most visible, and the least vulnerable, of the government's critics, he has become the symbol of opposition.

He is, however, a head without a body. His base organisations have been closed: his radio station has been silenced: and his best lieutenants, including the vice- president of Nicaragua's episcopal confer- ence, Bishop Pablo Vega, have been thrown out of the country.

The Sandinistas have learnt how to neutralise opposition. This is, after all, a fledgling totalitarian regime, even though it tries not to look like one, and even though it only strikes selectively. Behind the paraphernalia of civilian government is a one-party military state. In its structure, and increasingly in its methods, it is a carbon copy of Cuba. According to the human rights commission there are now at least 6,500 political prisoners in Nicaragua. The interior minister, Tomas Borge, says most of them are Contras or criminals. But in the trials I have witnessed the defen- dants had not committed a crime under ordinary law. Moreover, two of the three judges were Sandinista activists without legal training, and the prosecutions were based on the testimony of the security forces.

The repression is not as brutal as the 'dragnet' death-squad approach of El Sal- vador, but it is more effective. Against an East German-equipped intelligence ser- vice, which is run by former resistance fighters that know every trick in the book, and which has the Sandinista 'mass orga- nisations' at its disposal, there is no par- ticular likelihood of an insurrection in Nicaragua.

Nor do the 12,000 or so Contras, hidden away in their border camps or working as waiters in the Honduran capital of Teguci- galpa, look as if they can topple the regime. 'You can live with parasites and get along OK,' said the defence minister, Humberto Ortega, earlier this year. He felt safe with 60,000 regular troops, backed by another 50,000 militia, and perhaps another 150,000 hard-core Sandinistas who keep Russian AK-47 assault rifles in their houses.

But with the 25 June House vote the picture has changed. America escalation now makes the Contras more than just spoilers. By next year when fresh arms and Green Beret training should have turned them into a presentable army, they may be able to hold a strip of Nicaraguan territory and set up a rival government. That would ease the way towards direct intervention by US forces.

The Sandinistas have warned that if the Yanquis come it will be another Vietnam.

It won't. Nicaragua is small, with hostile neighbours on either side, bound by Amer- ican fleets on both shores, and encircled by air bases in Panama, Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas. The chief of Sandinista military intelligence, Ricardo Wheelock, admits that US spy planes can photograph, tape- record and decypher anything they want and that they know the exact deployment of Sandinista troops. Precision air strikes would knock out Nicaragua's helicopter, tank, and artillery forces within days, says a military analyst, leaving the Sandinistas nothing but street combat and guerrilla warfare.

Then the trouble would start. 'This isn't going to be like fighting on the plains of Europe in WW2,' warns Humberto Orte- ga. 'An American invading force will have to face a very mobile, very irregular form of armed resistance.'

'When an American soldier puts a cup of coffee to his lips he'll never know if he's drinking poison,' says Tomas Borge. 'When he sleeps with a Nicaraguan girl he'll never know if she's going to stick a dagger in his back.'

The truth might be more banal. Obser- vers suspect that in Managua few would put up a fight and some would try to settle old scores. 'I hate to say it,' remarked a diplomat, 'but the Nicaraguans will kick a man when he's down. They turned on I Somoza and they'd probably do the same to the [Sandinista] Front.' If the Sandinis- tas pull back into the mountains, they will find their former terrain has become inhos- pitable since they left. The villagers who once gave them food, in the old guerrilla days, are now scouts, informers, and rela- tives of the Contras.

One analyst, however, says it is silly to speculate about an invasion since the Reagan administration is not going to make life so easy for the Sandinistas. It wants to see the slow, agonising death of the revolution, not another legend. The concept in vogue is the 'low intensity war', using proxy armies to destroy socialist regimes in the Third World, pushing them towards bankruptcy and repression, until they cease to be models for anyone else. It makes sense. American generals, who learnt their polities in the Vietnam war, are known to be shy of any direct intervention that does not have public support, and at the moment 62 per cent of Americans Oppose Reagan's Nicaraguan policy. But on the other hand, as long as the Soviet Union continues to spend half a billion dollars a year to keep the Sandinistas afloat, the Pentagon may conclude that low intensity' is not enough. Besides, if the Sandinistas get any more unpopular, and if they go on losing sympathy abroad, the Reagan administration might find the temptation of settling the Central Amer- ican crisis once and for all just too hard to resist.

For the time being, however, the Sandi- nistas still have patrons in the free world. Although Britain, Germany, and Japan have more or less taken the American line, many smaller countries like Spain, Italy, Holland and Norway, have given gener- ously to Nicaragua. They do not consider the FSLN to be any worse than most Third World regimes, and certainly better than some. They believe, perhaps naively, that patience is the key to success with national- ist movements. 'The best way to stop the Sandinistas joining the other side', says the Spanish ambassador, Yago Pico, 'is to keep up a strong Western presence in Nicaragua.' And above all, these countries are sticklers for the rights of sovereign nations. An American invasion, coming on top of the Libyan bombing, would be disastrous for the Nato alliance. And in Latin America it would cause such ill feeling, that it could conceivably, set off some kind of collective default on the region's $370 million of external debt.

'As a Latin American I'd like to see an invasion,' explained a Colombian aca- demic. 'It would speed things up. It would be the catalyst of the great conflict between North and South. . . you know, the Indi- ans of my country have a way of hunting Jaguars. They dig in their lances and Provoke the beast to attack. It leaps into the air and gets impaled by the force of its own weight. For us, America is the jaguar, and Nicaragua is the spearhead.'