Big Sandinist win forecast

Press, 6 November 1984, Page 8

Big Sandinist win forecast

NZPA-AFP Managua The candidates of the governing Sandinist Front appeared to have won Nicaragua’s election yesterday, judging by the first few thousand votes tabulated by the Supreme Electoral Council. These votes were from six provinces in various parts of the country. The initial returns also indicated that more than 80 per cent of the country’s 1.6 million eligible voters cast ballots, said officials. The independent Liberal Party was well behind in the vote count, but was leading five other opposition parties, including the communists. A detailed report on the results was unlikely before this morning, according to electoral council officials. Meanwhile in Managua, supporters of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Party began celebrating victory with fireworks last night, before

the results bf the country’s first election in 10 years. Mariano Fiallos, the Supreme Electoral Council president, said that preliminary . returns indicated a turnout higher than that forecast by Sandinist officials, who had predicted more than 80 per cent of registered voters would go to the polls. The Sandinist junta leader, Daniel Ortega, Saavedra, was considered certain to be elected president inspite of the competition of six small parties ranging from communists to conservatives. Hundreds of Sandinist supporters gathered at Managua’s Plaza of the Revolution to dance in victory. Mr Fiallos said that 11 of Nicaragua’s! 3892 polling E laces had been disrupted y violence, nine of them in the north-east comer of the country and two in the north-west. “But up to now, we only

have to be sorry for the death of one policeman,” he said. Lines formed at polling places throughout the country before they opened. Many waiting to vote wore T-shirts, hats and other items of clothing emblazoned with the red-and-black insignia of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The major opposition parties boycotted the elections, complaining of restrictions. The Government radio said that the big turnout was a rebuff “to the abstentionist policy of United States imperialism and its spokesmen in this country.” (Three conservative parties urged citizens not to vote, contending that the election conditions were not fair.) Several people said that they were obliged to vote to avoid persecution by their Sandinist neighbours or because they feared difficulties in obtaining food ration

tickets. But in the city of Leon, 10 members of one family in a voting queue said that they were all going to vote for Sandinist candidates because a member of their family was killed when American financed guerrillas ambushed a truck. Journalists saw long, quiet queues of citizens outside voting places. Youths aged 16, old people and militiamen in olive green uniforms patiently waited their turn. The anti-Sandinist guerrillas on the northern and southern fringes of the country generally observed a ceasefire which they had declared for election day. But the border post at Penas Blancas in the southwestern corner of Nicaragua was fired on for half an hour. Five hundred guerrillas tried to capture the village of Jalapa near the Honduran border on Saturday, but

were repulsed, said officials More than 400 foreign observers were on hand for the election, some of them invited by the Nicaraguan Government. The United States, Canada and Britain did not send official observers. The Sandinist party came to power at the end of the 1978-79 revolution which overthrew the Right-wing leader Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinists were considered a cinch to win the presidency, vice-presidency and most of the 90 seats in a new National Assembly. But there seemed to be little chance the victory would give the Sandinists the credibility they seek to counter declining support among Western nations. They blamed the Reagan Administration for that declining support and accused Washington of trying to taint the election’s legitimacy by encouraging opposition parties to sit it out.