In Nicaragua, Opposition Sees an End Run - NY...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Magistrate Sergio Cuarezma, a member of the Supreme Court, spent Oct. 19 like any other Monday, quietly catching up on e-mail and fingering through stacks of rulings by sunlight when the court’s power went down, as it tends to do without explanation here in Central America’s poorest country.

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Times Topics: Daniel Ortega | Nicaragua

Despite lingering in his office most of that day, he said, he was never informed of an afternoon session in the court’s constitutional chamber, of which he is a member. Six judges from the governing Sandinista party, including three who were summoned as replacements when opposition magistrates did not attend, met at the end of the day and unanimously decided a constitutional ban on re-election did not apply to President Daniel Ortega, who is seeking to run again in 2011.

In his office on a recent afternoon, Mr. Cuarezma said he was powerless to change the ruling, which he considered illegal.

“I feel the whole world is backward,” he said. “The Sandinistas control everything. What can I do?”

Mr. Ortega, a former rebel leader who was president during the 1980s, has been among the most calculated in the region in stymieing opposition to his bid to maintain power. He has solidified his party’s control of the courts, the electoral tribunal and the police, and he has manipulated the system, his critics say, to turn Nicaragua into a place where whatever he says goes.

Though critics say the re-election issue should have been taken to Congress because it required constitutional reform, Mr. Ortega has said the ruling was “written in stone” and unchallengeable.

Nicaragua’s Constitution bans consecutive terms and limits presidents to holding the office only twice. Still, Mr. Ortega’s backers spent much energy this year pushing for constitutional changes in Congress that would have allowed his re-election.

But opposition lawmakers resisted, prompting Mr. Ortega, who lost an election in 1990 and regained power only after 16 years and three failed electoral campaigns, to turn to the courts. Most of the magistrates in the Supreme Court’s highest chamber are now Sandinista appointees after Magistrate Guillermo Selva died of a heart attack in May, weakening the opposition and further brightening Mr. Ortega’s prospects for a favorable outcome. The Sandinistas have since delayed replacing him.

The ruling is headed to that chamber, but Mr. Cuarezma says that as a strategic move, magistrates from his party, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, will try blocking the Sandinistas from using their one-vote edge to pass a resolution giving the ruling an “air of legitimacy.”

Ortega supporters have confronted opponents to the ruling by hurling rocks and fireworks at their gatherings, in the same fashion they dealt with opponents who raised accusations of electoral fraud last year. The American ambassador to Nicaragua, Robert J. Callahan, who said the Supreme Court ruling was “improper,” was not spared.

Sandinista protesters vandalized the United States Embassy here last month, tossing rocks and fireworks, breaking signs and spray-painting the embassy’s walls until the police belatedly dispersed them with tear gas. A day later, Ortega supporters surrounded Mr. Callahan at a university fair, forcing him to dash to his sport utility vehicle in a hasty getaway that was televised locally.

Sandinistas have maintained tight control of the streets since last year’s elections, pounding rivals each time they try assembling, and spray-painting “Daniel Forever” over the graffiti-tattooed capital. Opposition protests last week to observe the anniversary of the country’s electoral crisis last year, in which Mr. Ortega was accused of rigging the vote, were met by Sandinista caravans that chased protesters into a Managua police station, shattering its windows with rocks. Sandinista leaders denied reports of a leaked party memo detailing plans to ship supporters to the capital and supply them with homemade weapons to obstruct a march scheduled for next Saturday. The party’s former spy boss, Lenin Cerna, said the memo was fabricated by adversaries running local media outlets.

José Torres, who rode in the bed of a pickup filled with fatigues-clad Sandinistas wielding homemade mortar launchers in Leon, called his foes “a bunch of cowards, nowhere to be seen.”

The constant street clashes have provoked fissures in the Sandinista party, said Rafael Solís, a close adviser to Mr. Ortega and vice president of the Supreme Court.

“I’ve said we should let opponents protest in the streets; some Sandinistas have criticized me for that,” said Mr. Solís, also a former Sandinista ambassador to Washington. “Protests are getting out of the party’s control.”

Mr. Solís was accused by critics of participating in a decade-old pact between Mr. Ortega and his rival from other end of the political gamut, Arnoldo Alemán, when the Supreme Court overturned Mr. Alemán’s 20-year corruption sentence in January.

Judges from the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, including Mr. Cuarezma, voted to free their party chief, Mr. Alemán — who was ranked the world’s ninth most corrupt leader in a 2004 Transparency International report — when enough Sandinista judges were out of town. Mr. Solís publicly cursed the ruling, though critics suspect he was in on the deal, which freed Mr. Alemán but did not stop other continuing corruption investigations of him. “No one believed me when I voted against freeing Alemán,” Mr. Solís said.

Mr. Solís said the ruling on re-elections applied to Mr. Ortega and 109 Sandinista mayors who filed an injunction seeking exemption from the Constitution’s ban; any opposition candidates seeking re-election must file their own petitions.

Mr. Cuarezma, who also denies suggestions that he participated in the deal between Mr. Ortega and Mr. Alemán, now finds himself in the role of defeated dissident. “They dismantled constitutional order in an hour,” he said of last month’s ruling.

Mr. Cuarezma jotted a chronology of the ruling on a whiteboard in his office. The 24-page ruling was gingerly prepared by Sandinistas before swift approval, he said, without properly informing opposition magistrates, in a late session after most court employees had gone home.

“You spend your life thinking the whiteboard is white. But they tell you it’s black, even though it’s white,” he said, now wearily dropping his head to look at the re-election ruling on his desk. “And they keep telling you it’s black.”