BY FRANCISCO PICADO

NEW YORK - By winning nearly 49 percent of the ballots cast in the first round of voting, conservative businessman Arnoldo Alemán, candidate of the right-wing Liberal Alliance, won the presidency of Nicaragua October 20.

Two days later, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) agreed to accept the results as tallied by the Nicaraguan Supreme Electoral Council, pending clarification of some "irregularities" during the vote. Daniel Ortega, the FSLN's presidential candidate, had announced the day before his party would not accept the results because of fraud. The FSLN got nearly 40 percent of the vote.

Elections also took place for the Legislative Assembly, municipalities, and for seats in the Central American Parliament. The FSLN and the Liberal Alliance will dominate the Legislative Assembly. The Nicaraguan Christian Party came a distant third, with a little more than 4 percent of the vote.

Alemán, a lawyer and coffee plantation owner, was the mayor of Managua, the capital city of this Central American country of just over 4 million people. Alemán has pledged to end the legacy of the FSLN. His candidacy unified his own Constitutional Liberal Party with the Nationalist Liberal Party, founded by former dictator Anastasio Somoza, as well as an assortment of right-wing groups. Leaders of the Nicaraguan Resistance - better known as contras, the counterrevolutionary army that fought the FSLN government in the 1980s - supported Alemán. Members of the Somoza family were occasionally observed traveling as part of Alemán's campaign entourage. Rise and decline of revolution
The FSLN was named after Augusto César Sandino, a peasant and mine worker who led a seven-year war that forced U.S. marines out of Nicaragua in 1934.

The Sandinista National Liberation Front came to power on the heels of a popular revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in July 1979. During the initial years of the Nicaraguan revolution, the FSLN leadership, despite errors and political hesitations, pursued a course that promoted the organization and mobilization of the workers and peasants of Nicaragua. The new government increasingly used its power to advance the toilers' class interests against the exploiters at home and abroad.

The actions by the workers and peasants regime gave a boost to struggles against the U.S.-backed landlord-capitalist tyrannies in El Salvador and Guatemala, linked up with the revolution in Grenada, and gave a powerful new impetus to political steps forward by the workers in Cuba.

The Sandinista leadership's initial course was in continuity with nearly two decades of revolutionary work by the FSLN, codified in the Historic Program of the organization drafted by Carlos Fonseca and first published in 1969.

This program pledged to destroy the dictatorship's "military and bureaucratic apparatus" and "establish a revolutionary government based on an alliance of workers and peasants and a convergence of all patriotic forces opposed to imperialism and the oligarchy." The new regime would establish broad democratic rights and initiate social, political, and economic measures to "create a Nicaragua that is free of exploitation, oppression, and backwardness."

The program pledged to "expropriate the landed estates, factories, companies... and other enterprises fraudulently acquired by the Somoza family [and] their accomplices"; to "nationalize the holdings of all foreign companies that exploit mineral, forest, maritime, and other natural resources"; to "establish workers control over the management of factories"; and to "plan the national economy, putting an end to the anarchy characteristic of the capitalist system of production."

The Historic Program called for "a massive campaign to immediately wipe out illiteracy" and measures to uproot discrimination suffered by women and by Blacks and Indians living on the Atlantic Coast and elsewhere in Nicaragua.

On international perspectives, the program declared that a workers and peasants government would "actively support the struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America against both traditional and modern forms of colonialism, and against the common enemy: U.S. imperialism." The entire text of this document appears in New International no. 9 (see ad below).

The revolutionary government's steps to organize workers and farmers to carry out this program were electrifying to workers, peasants, and youth throughout the region and even around the world. Washington, having stood behind Somoza to the last ditch and failing to economically pressure the new government to change its course, began by late 1981 training and financing a counterrevolutionary army headed by former members of Somoza's officer corps.

Over the next six years the U.S.-organized contras mounted a murderous war to destroy the revolution.

Despite the toll on the country's economy, the 30,000 lives lost during the fighting, and the tens of thousands of maimed and wounded, the workers, peasants and youth in the Sandinista army defeated the contras by late 1987. But during that period the leadership of the FSLN abandoned the organization's historic program, transforming the FSLN from a revolutionary organization to a radical bourgeois electoral party by the end of the 1980s. Land reform and other revolutionary measures came to a halt and the government forged a "social pact" with landlords and capitalists, demoralizing workers and peasants.

Thus the workers and farmers government was defeated before the February 1990 elections, when the FSLN lost the vote to the National Opposition Union (UNO) -an amalgam of liberal bourgeois forces that had been part of the anti-Somoza fight in the 1970s, conservative politicians and businessmen, contra leaders, and two Stalinist organizations that had opposed the FSLN. The group was backed and financed by Washington.

Alemán pledges to reverse land reform
Alemán was elected mayor of Managua in 1990, as part of UNO's victory that brought Violeta Chamorro to the presidency. The FSLN pledged to lead an orderly transition to the new regime, as part of which several of its leaders remained in the government under Chamorro.

Alemán, as mayor, painted over the revolutionary murals that covered Managua and cut the light and gas service to the tomb of FSLN founder Fonseca, as part of his efforts to erase all signs of the previous revolutionary regime.

Among the most important aspects of Alemán's promise to eradicate the past was his pledge to reverse the extensive land reform carried out - though never finished - in the early 1980s. Toward the end of his campaign, Alemán retreated from a frontal confrontation around this question.

Under Chamorro, the government signed accords with the International Monetary Fund and had been imposing an austerity program aimed at making Nicaragua's market attractive to investors. For the past several years, however, the capitalists in Nicaragua have been unable to break labor resistance to the "stabilization and structural adjustment program" of the IMF. Thousands of peasants have remained determined to keep the land they received during the early years of the revolution.

"If Arnoldo [Alemán] wins, he says he will take our lands," Adalberto Cantalero told a Washington Post reporter in the province of Jinotega. "If I lose my land, I will be the first one to go back to the mountains and pick up a rifle and go to war again." Declining living standards
By late October, Alemán was saying he would continue with the general outlines of the economic program Chamorro negotiated with the IMF. He proposed a program called "Buying Peace," which would compensate landlords who had land confiscated by the workers and farmers government. He estimated the cost at about $500 million, which he said would come from international aid. He also stated that workers and peasants who got small plots of land during the revolution would get titles for their properties.

Nicaragua is already shackled with a foreign debt of more than $10 billion -five times the country's gross domestic product. So many in Nicaragua question Alemán's promises of foreign aid. "It is impossible," said José Evenor Taboada, president of Nicaragua's central bank. "He will not even get $4 million."

Although the Nicaraguan economy reportedly grew 4 percent last year, the economic landscape is desolate for workers and peasants. The country is rated as the second poorest country in the hemisphere, with an average per capital income of $470. Some 60 percent of the working-age population is unemployed or underemployed, and 75 percent of Nicaraguans live below the poverty line. FSLN offered bourgeois program
While many workers and farmers identify Alemán and his Liberal Alliance as representing the interests of the landlords and capitalists, the FSLN did not offer any real alternative. "More coincidence than differences," was the headline of an article in the October 20 El Diario/La Prensa, the main New York Spanish-language daily, comparing the platforms of Alemán and Ortega.

In an effort to shed any revolutionary image, the FSLN suspended use of its anthem that condemned U.S. imperialism and replaced it with the Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" prior to the elections. Ortega chose Juan Manuel Caldera, a conservative cattle rancher, as a vice presidential candidate. Caldera is a longtime member of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), well known for its opposition to the workers and farmers regime in the 1980s.

One of several contra commanders who joined Ortega at campaign rallies was José Benito Bravo, better known as Commander Mack, who was expelled from the contras because of his atrocious record on human rights. Bravo came under a spotlight in 1985 when Newsweek published photos of the grisly execution of a peasant under his supervision.

Ortega promised that his government would make sure there are "no confiscations, no evictions, no expropriations, and will look for a point of equilibrium," on the ongoing property conflicts.

Ortega announced an economic plan drawn up by a former IMF official, praising the primary role of the capitalist market. "Private enterprise will be recognized as the main motor of economic growth," Ortega's program said. "The basic principles of the market economy will be respected."  
 
 
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