Nicaraguan group renews bid for power

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Under pink banners proclaiming peace and love, Daniel Ortega is running hard to regain the presidency of Nicaragua more than a decade after a U.S.-backed military crusade helped drive his socialist Sandinista Party from power. \n"With love, we will build the promised land," Ortega pledges in banners that hang over the streets of Managua ahead of Sunday's presidential election. \nA Marxist revolutionary icon when he defied U.S. might in the 1970s and 1980s, Ortega now sounds more like John Lennon than Vladimir Lenin. \nHis campaign posters, with their hand-painted daisies, are more reminiscent of flower power than revolutionary zeal. \nOn the final day of campaigning Wednesday, supporters unfurled an enormous U.S. flag behind Ortega as he spoke of the need to reconcile with former enemies. Indeed, the Sandinistas accumulated many of them from 1979-90. \n"Love is more powerful than hate," Ortega told supporters waving the old-fashioned red-and-black flags of revolution while wearing new pink-toned T-shirts promising peace. \nWhile the old Sandinista anthem called Yankees "enemies of humanity," Ortega's foreign minister-in-waiting, Antonio Lacayo, has promised to work "shoulder to shoulder" with the United States in the war against terrorism. \nOrtega, whose Sandinista governments clashed with the pope, has taken to wearing a prominent crucifix and has adopted an evangelical rhetoric. \n"We ask God to illuminate the conscience of all so that we know how to choose the highest of ideals," he said in one statement of principles. \nPolls released this week show Ortega in a statistical tie with Enrique Bolanos of the governing Constitutionalist Liberal Party, a remarkable political accomplishment given the circumstances. \nOnly congressional immunity has blocked criminal charges involving allegations from Ortega's stepdaughter that he repeatedly raped her while in office. \nAnd when he lost the 1990 presidential election, Ortega left a war-weary nation in economic ruins. A scandal arose over Sandinista leaders' personal confiscation of government-seized properties. \nTo Ortega's good fortune, opinion surveys show that the only person more disliked by Nicaraguans is outgoing President Arnoldo Aleman. And Bolanos, who resigned as Aleman's vice president a year ago to seek the top job, has had a hard time establishing his own identity. \nMany poor Nicaraguans say life was better in the Sandinista era when there were at least make-work jobs and food rations. \nGleaming new shopping malls and McDonald's restaurants only irritate many of the poorest. Some 40 percent of Nicaraguans live on about $1 a day or less. \nBolanos, widely seen as honest, has promised a crackdown on corruption. \nBut he "studiously looked the other way when he was vice president of the most corrupt administration in the history of Nicaragua," said political scientist Thomas Walker of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. \nAleman stopped filing financial disclosure forms several years ago after his declared wealth rose from $26,000 to beyond $900,000 during his first seven years as a public employee. \nCritics note Aleman has properties he failed to include even in those financial reports, and claim his holdings now reach into the tens of millions of dollars. Aleman has denied corruption and says the claims of wealth are exaggerated. \nOrtega has tried to capitalize on the public's revulsion over corruption by naming as his vice presidential candidate the national comptroller Aleman fired for demanding that the president explain his income. \nThat comptroller, Agustin Jarquin, is a prominent Christian Democrat leader and was jailed by Ortega in the 1980s. \nU.S. officials have repeatedly expressed concern about a victory by the Sandinistas, whose massive expropriations of land are still a point of conflict between the two countries. \nU.S. Ambassador Oliver Garza even invited Bolanos to hand out U.S.-donated food aid in a poor village. Garza said Tuesday that Lacayo's pro-American statements did not ease U.S. concerns about Ortega. \nMany critics are questioning the fairness of the election itself. They accuse the electoral board, which is controlled by the two dominant parties, of improperly barring several smaller parties from the ballot. \n"Ortega and Aleman have rigged some of the good institutions of government that were created, ironically, under the Sandinistas," Walker said. \nThe elections leave many Nicaraguans feeling they have little choice. \n"If I vote for Bolanos it's like voting for Aleman himself. They're the same," said Manuel Mendoza, a 36-year-old laborer, wiping fresh paint from his hands. "If I vote for the Sandinistas, that would bring the country even more tragedy. \n"So who am I going to vote for? For nobody"