By Paul Jeffrey

Managua, 6 November (ENI) - Nicaraguan voters on Sunday turned down a former revolutionary’s bid to retake power in elections that church leaders said were surprisingly peaceful.

“It was a calm, orderly process, with a massive turnout,” said Gustavo Parajon, a Baptist pastor in Managua and former president of the Nicaraguan Council of Evangelical Churches. “It was very democratic. We seem to have finally institutionalized the idea that we can change governments in Nicaragua without having to resort to arms.”

Paul Schmitz, the Roman Catholic bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Bluefields, on the remote Caribbean coast, described Sunday’s vote as “the cleanest elections I have witnessed in Nicaragua.”

Schmitz told ENI that Nicaraguan voters, “who had for weeks told the pollsters what they wanted to hear, went out and voted in a very mature fashion.” Schmitz noted that many voters crossed party lines, voting for one party in the presidential contest while voting for another party for legislative posts.

Schmitz complemented former President Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista National Liberation Front candidate who lost the presidential vote to the Constitutional Liberal Party’s Enrique Bolaños, a former vice president. “I have to give Daniel Ortega credit,” said Schmitz. “He could have called out the masses to protest, and they would have responded. But he accepted his defeat in a very mature, democratic manner.”

With only a quarter of the votes tallied by Monday night, Bolaños was leading Ortega by 11 percent. Finishing a distant third in the presidential race was Alberto Saborio of the Conservative Party, with less than 2 percent of the votes. Under the provisions of a controversial 1999 pact between the Sandinistas and Liberals, other parties were not allowed to participate in this year’s elections.

Ortega, a leader of the revolution that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, won the presidential election in 1984. Yet he lost elections in 1990 and 1996. Many Nicaraguans are avid baseball fans, and following Ortega’s defeat on Sunday many said the Sandinista leader had finally “struck out.”

Until Bolaños crept ahead in the last two weeks of the campaign, Ortega had enjoyed a comfortable lead in public opinion polls. Analysts claimed a key factor in the last minute swing was pressure from the U.S. government, which for months had been plotting behind the scenes to prevent a victory by Ortega.

The Bush administration, refusing to accept Ortega’s claims that he had mended his ways, recently abandoned any pretense of neutrality and engaged in what Schmitz termed “heavy-handed tactics.” U.S. Ambassador Oliver Garza openly campaigned for Bolaños, appearing with him at campaign rally. Garza claimed Ortega had links to Islamic terrorists and warned of dire consequences should Nicaraguan voters chose him as their president.

Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, wrote a Miami Herald opinion piece supporting Bolaños, whose campaign reprinted it in Managua papers under the headline “The brother of U.S. President George W. Bush supports Enrique Bolaños.”

“The U.S. government tried to intimidate and bully Nicaraguan voters,” said Jennifer DeLury, a United Methodist from California who works here with Witness for Peace, a church-sponsored activist group. “The message was, ‘Don’t vote for Daniel Ortega or you’ll suffer the consequences.’ Especially coming from a government that waged a vicious war here, it was totally inappropriate and no way to foster democracy.”

Miguel D’Escoto, a Catholic priest who served as Ortega’s foreign minister in the 1980s, accused the U.S. of “electoral terrorism.”

Most of the country’s Catholic bishops also openly opposed Ortega’s campaign. The archbishop of Managua, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who termed Ortega a “snake” in the 1996 campaign, was only slightly more restrained this time around.

During a November 1 mass attended by both Bolaños and Ortega, Obando y Bravo lambasted the former guerrilla with an appeal to family values.

“When we vote, we should ask ourselves whether the candidate supports marriage, and a family based on marriage, instead of the tendency to equalize true marriage with other forms of union,” declared the cardinal.

Ortega attended the mass with Rosario Murillo, the woman with whom he has lived for decades, though they are not officially married. The other two candidates are married to their wives.

Obando y Bravo also reminded listeners that Ortega faces unresolved accusations of sexual abuse from his stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez. Ortega has insisted the charges are without merit, and his parliamentary immunity has prevented the case from going to court.

“Parents should look at their children as children of God and respect them as human beings,” the cardinal said. “In electing our candidates we should see if they preach with the testimony of their lives, if they have been exemplary in their families.”

Other Catholic leaders campaigned openly for Bolaños. Bishop Bosco Vivas accompanied Bolaños in the closing campaign rally in the city of Leon. Amado Peña, a priest in Managua, said Ortega “would destroy the country” as president. “We will chose between good and evil, between democracy and anti-democracy,” warned Peña, who led Bolaños supporters in prayer at the final campaign rally in Managua.

“Lots of people here have a simple faith, and look to church leaders like the cardinal to be their guides,” said Miguel Vijil, a Catholic activist who served as minister of housing during Ortega’s government in the 1980s. “Unfortunately, the bishops are not thinking of the poor in Nicaragua today, but rather still harping on their difficulties with the Sandinista Front in the 1980s.”

Bishop Schmitz suggested that politicking by church leaders “didn’t have that much to do with how the vote turned out. People voted from their experiences, and Daniel Ortega was too old a face for them.”

Parajon said very few evangelical leaders took a public stand in favor of any candidate. “Evangelicals voted much like other Nicaraguans. There was no such thing as an organized ‘evangelical vote’ in favor of one candidate or party,” he said.

Yet both Ortega and Bolaños had prominent evangelicals in their camps.

Guillermo Osorno supported Bolaños. A former Assemblies of God pastor who founded the country’s Christian Path Party, Osorno took third place in the 1996 elections.

Omar Duarte, a Church of God pastor whose Movement for Christian Unity emerged from frustration among evangelicals that Osorno had lost touch with their interests, supported Ortega. Duarte had reportedly been promised the job of minister of government, which oversees the police and security apparatus, in an Ortega administration.

Bolaños will face enormous difficulties when he takes office in January. More than 40 percent of Nicaragua’s five million people live on less than one dollar a day. The policies of outgoing President Arnoldo Aleman have led to increased foreign investment, but most of the country’s population cannot afford to shop in the new malls and fast food restaurants that have sprung up around the capital.

“Whoever won this election was going to face the same international restrictions, the same structural adjustments imposed by international financial organizations,” said DeLury. “Despite their best intentions to fulfill election promises of more jobs and schools, the international rules of the game are going to make positive change for the poor very difficult to achieve.”