Nicaraguans go to polls

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 6

Nicaraguans go to polls

NZPA-AP Managua Nicaraguan voters are going to the polls today to select a President, Vice President, and a 90-member National Assembly from six parties in an election being boycotted by main opposition groups. Officials predicted that 80 per cent of the nation’s 1.58 million eligible voters would vote. Some residents said that they were being pressured by Sandinist militants to vote.

The elections for six-year terms are the first since the Sandinists came to power five years ago after a bloody revolutionary war that ended 42 years of rule by the Rightist, pro-Ameri-can Somoza dynasty. They match the Sandinista National Liberation Front against five small parties, all Leftist or which have co-operated with the Government to some degree.

A sixth small party, the Liberal Independent Party, remained on the ballot, but

its presidential candidate, Virgilio Godoy, announced two weeks ago that he would not participate. He cited virtually the same reasons as the main opposition coalition, the Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinate. They said that the Sandinists did not offer adequate conditions for a free and open election.

A wide-open race would have helped the Sandinists in their effort to improve their prestige abroad and deflect criticism that they are moving toward totalitarianism, and would also have improved their status domestically.

The Sandinist Presidential candidate, and junta co-ordinator, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, has said during his campaign that an American invasion is imminent. United States officials have denied repeatedly that any such plans exist. The Reagan Administration supports rebels fighting the Sandinists in northern and southern Nicaragua.

. The Sandinists maintain “defence committees” in neighbourhoods throughout the country and residents of several cities said in interviews that the militants were pressuring people to vote, in some cases threatening to withdraw ration cards, needed for basic foodstuffs. i; The ballots feature the familiar Spanish initials of the Sandinist front in the centre of an arrangement of the other parties, determined by lottery. The 3028 polling places have facilities for citizens to vote in private, fold their ballots and deposit them in wooden ballot-boxes. ' Today’s election is the first since 1974, when Anastasio Somoza Debayle won a second, six-year term that was cut short by the revolution. Thousands of people' demonstrated at the week-end in West German and Swiss capitals against . United States policy in Central America.

About 35,000 people had

marched through Bonn calling for peace and self-deter-mination for the region, according to the organising Peace Movement. In Berne about 2000 had taken part in a protest outside the United States Embassy, during which paint was thrown and fireworks were set off, the police said. The Berne demonstrators marched under a banner reading, “Peace for Central America and the Caribbean — stop the U.S. Intervention.”

In Bonn speakers, including a former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, strongly criticised United States intervention in the region at the closing rally. Although the demonstration was largely peaceful, a small number of hooded- militants in the front row had to be contained by the organisers’ own officials When Mr Brandt took to. the .stage and had fireworks and other missiles thrown at him.