By Stephen Marks
MANAGUA â Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro used her Armed Forces Day address on September 3 to announce that the head of the Sandinista Popular Army, General Humberto Ortega, will be sacked early next year, plunging the country into a constitutional crisis.
The Nicaraguan army has its origins in the Sandinista revolution which defeated the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and mobilised Nicaragua's workers and farmers in defence of their interests.
Since then, Nicaragua has faced the unrelenting violence and sabotage of imperialism and its Nicaraguan agents. While the 1990 elections gave the right-wing government power, workers and peasants led by the Sandinistas maintained important political, economic and social influence.
Much of this influence is legalised by the 1986 constitution. The revolutionary constitution was adopted after a series of popular assemblies discussed and amended a final draft which was put to the National Assembly.
While this constitution enshrines the president as the head of the armed forces, the army general command has the power to nominate the day-to-day commanding officer. Chamorro utilised a loophole in the constitution to foreshadow the dismissal of Ortega in 1994, but the current likely replacement is one of his former comrades in arms from the Sandinista guerilla columns. This prospect does not please the right wing.
The army and the police have pledged to continue to uphold the constitution and laws but insist that the government do the same in appointing a new army chief.
The right wing lacks the votes in the National Assembly to change the law and the constitution. The FSLN won over 40% of the vote in the 1990 elections and, thanks to Nicaragua's very democratic electoral process, holds 42% of the seats, thus depriving the right of the 66% plus one majority it would need to overturn the constitution.
The ultraright have been largely boycotting the National Assembly anyway, and instead call for a constitutional assembly to draw up a new constitution. They are also absurdly insisting that the eight members of the UNO Centre Group, who broke with the ultraright, be expelled from the National Assembly. The FSLN is unlikely to agree to either demand.
The government's course is to try for a negotiated solution through its long-running series of national dialogues. The FSLN has responded favourably to this process and has indicated willingness to have all issues on the table, while the ultraright oscillates between ambivalence and hostility. Negotiations would minimise the role which foreign influences could play, and their main base of support lives in the United States.
The government has launched its own propaganda offensive and has called in observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS) to protect it from a supposed military coup.
A Somalia-type invasion by "UN troops" is the favoured option of the ultraright. They have piously played to the hilt the discovery of a series of arms caches used by Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerilla movements.
The ultraright are the chief beneficiaries of the spiral of kidnapping, violence, crime and recontra attacks. Evidence points to both Vice-President Godoy and former National Assembly president Alfredo Csar as having organised the recent kidnapping of the government peace commission, which included two Sandinista members of the National Assembly. Both had met with the recontra leader involved, the Jackal, just prior to the kidnapping. The retaliatory kidnapping by pro-Sandinistas upset this plan.
While an "international peacekeeping" force might look the other way if the ultraright tried to systematically slaughter the worker and peasant revolutionaries of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the Nicaraguan army, the Sandinista Popular Army, as it is presently constituted, certainly would not.
The FSLN sees the move to sack Ortega as a clear breach of the transition accords which Chamorro signed with the outgoing FSLN government in 1990, but has been careful to not give the OAS or UN pretext to send in troops.
FSLN leader Daniel Ortega has accepted the right of the president to sack any government official but only when done in strict accordance with the constitution and the law and not because of blackmail from external sources. The US Senate is presently considering, once again, whether to continue holding up the latest "aid" package to Nicaragua.
The move to sack Humberto Ortega received immediate and widespread diplomatic support and is a political victory for the government and the right wing. Their next demands are likely to be for the heads of the progressives in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Electoral Council.
The Nicaraguan electoral system as established by the FSLN government was so fair it brought the opposition to power by constitutional means for the first time in Nicaraguan history. The ultraright would dearly love to control the electoral process to prevent any chance of an FSLN victory in the 1996 elections.
Violeta Chamorro is currently basking in new-found favour with her old friends from the days when they were all together supporting the contras. Sugar workers who have been on strike and camped out in front of the National Assembly for some months now have written, perhaps prophetically, on a nearby wall, "If Humberto goes, Violeta will follow".