Election Moves

Charges and countercharges

Young soldiers competed to build the tallest human pyramid, and teen-agers danced to recorded calypso music. Children indulged themselves in cotton candy. In a carnival-like atmosphere, 300,000 slogan-chanting Nicaraguans gathered in Managua last week to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the revolution that brought down Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In his address to the crowd, Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra announced that opposition parties would be allowed to hold public rallies and to travel more freely during the campaign for the Nov. 4 elections, the country's first since the 1979 Sandinista takeover. He did not, however, lift the "state of emergency," now extended until Oct. 20, that allows press censorship and curtails civil liberties. Only two days earlier, the Sandinistas had named Ortega as their candidate for President Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramirez Mercado, a novelist who is also a member of the junta, to run for Vice President.

A coalition of opposition parties said at week's end that it had nominated former Junta Member Arturo Cruz, who is expected to return this week from voluntary exile in the U.S., as its presidential candidate. The opposition insists, however, that it will not enter the race until the Sandinistas lift the state of emergency and relax other controls over the country. Reacting to the Sandinistas' announcement, President Reagan declared that "no person committed to democracy will be taken in by a Soviet-style sham election."

The day before, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration had filed an affidavit in a U.S. district court in Miami charging that the Sandinistas had encouraged South American drug dealers to use a 6,000-ft. airstrip, a hangar and a cocaine-processing laboratory in Nicaragua to foster the shipment of drugs to the U.S.

One senior Administration official claims that the affidavit represents "only one case" in a pattern of high-level Nicaraguan involvement in the cocaine trade going back more than a year. The U.S., he says, has substantial although still only circumstantial evidence linking two Sandinista Cabinet ministers to the drug traffic. But so far none of the evidence, which the U.S. says includes tape-recorded conversations and ground and satellite photographs, has been released.

In Managua, Ortega described the accusations as an attempt by the Reagan Administration to revive support in Congress for the contras, who are trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan regime. He called the charges "lies and calumnies."