Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990                   TAG: 9003162733
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NICARAGUA

Ortega didn't say how much power. Since their loss in the Feb. 25 national election, the Sandinistas have been entrenching their positions in the army and elsewhere in the government they've headed for the past decade. At the very least, they intend to survive.

Meantime, the Contras have expanded their military presence in northern Nicaragua and defy calls to lay down their arms. "The Sandinista army is not going to turn in their weapons," one rebel told an American reporter, "so our fight continues."

All this spells trouble for Chamorro in particular and Nicaragua in general. The country needs a respite from bloodshed and political strife. It may instead get more of the same. Chamorro won the presidency as head of an unruly coalition of 14 parties; she will have enough friction under her own roof.

Now it seems that she may also have to deal with a disloyal opposition and two contending armies, neither of which will do her bidding. The paradox is that as president, she would have nominal command over the Sandinista army, but it is the Contras who supposedly fought to get her where she is. And they are not honoring her wish that they disband.

Here lies a key flaw in the Reagan-Bush policy of surrogate war in Nicaragua. If the U.S. government truly felt our national security threatened by the Sandinistas, it could have intervened directly to oust them and then ordered its own troops home when the job was done. The Contras have never been totally under U.S. control and are not now.

Nor have they been simply "freedom fighters" devoted to the ideal of pure democracy. Their leaders have their own goals, some of them conflicting; and while they were all pleased to see Ortega lose the election, they may not be happy with Chamorro's agenda or methods. And they have guns.

Will Ortega deliver on his implicit promise to Quayle? Or did he describe a more likely future in his speech several days earlier to a group of supporters, when he said a failure to disarm the Contras could lead to civil war? In Nicaragua, the babe called democracy could yet be strangled in its cradle.