Charges of sexual abuse leveled against Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega swirl atop a power struggle

By TIM PADGETT

mong Nicaragua's leftist elite, it had long been more than a terrible rumor, but always less than a public scandal. Throughout much of the 1980s, many loyalists of the Marxist-oriented Sandinista Party suspected that Daniel Ortega Saavedra, their dour leader and the country's President from 1979 to 1990, was sexually molesting his adolescent stepdaughter Zoilamerica Narvaez Murillo. Aides confided to one another that Ortega, then in his 40s, saw in her many of the same things that led him to marry her mother, the radical poet Rosario Murillo, with whom Ortega has seven children of his own. But no one dared utter such things publicly: the party's socialist mission and the war against U.S.-backed contra rebels outweighed any qualms. Says a Sandinista loyalist close to Ortega's family: "If it was true, then you just regarded her as another harmless concubine." And Narvaez said nothing. Neither did Rosario Murillo.

So when Narvaez, 30, publicly accused Ortega, 53, two weeks ago of sexual abuse, there was the sense of a moral abscess opening in Nicaragua, with explosive political complications. The same day, Rosario Murillo was standing by her man, calling a press conference with a teary-eyed--but silent--Ortega at her side to dismiss her daughter's accusations. Narvaez herself admitted that she had been silent for so many years for "political reasons," fearful of hurting Ortega's career and the Sandinista cause. Even more abject was her husband Alejandro Bendana, 47, a onetime Harvard University lecturer and widely published left-wing author who was one of Ortega's most loyal lieutenants during his years in power. In an open letter to the press last week, Bendana begged his wife's forgiveness "for not doing enough to stop Daniel Ortega in his aggression against you" and for "having participated in the creation of an idol" powerful enough to get away with it. Bendana and his wife separated last June. "I realize now," Bendana told TIME last week, "that I subordinated my conscience to the Sandinista cause."

In a country where family ties and political fealty have long been ensnarled, the plot is still thickening. The accusations of abuse have become the focus of a leadership struggle within the Sandinistas, who remain the chief opposition force in the country. On one side is Ortega, one of the Sandinista founders, and still a doctrinaire leftist; on the other, Bendana, his erstwhile stepson-in-law, makes no secret of the fact that even if he doesn't replace Ortega as leader, he wants to move the party beyond its traditional "culture of war, machismo and abuse of power." The battle will surface formally on May 15, when Ortega must stand for re-election as party secretary-general. His supporters have branded the sex accusations a CIA plot, or at least a spectacularly cynical move by Bendana and Narvaez, who is also committed to the anti-Ortega drive.

Narvaez claims the abuse started as early as 1979, when she was 11 and Ortega had just led the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The molestation continued "repeatedly," she says, until 1990, after Ortega's defeat in presidential elections that year by the moderate, U.S.-backed Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Narvaez, then 22, had married Bendana, who was previously the Sandinista regime's envoy to the United Nations. But even after Narvaez moved out of Ortega's home, she says, he pursued her with lewd nocturnal phone calls. Bendana says he confronted Ortega many times in private, but to no avail. "I realized what a Jekyll and Hyde I'd been devoted to," he says. But he did nothing in public, he says, because his wife wanted to keep the secret.

The turning point came last year, shortly after Ortega had again been defeated in a presidential race. After another telephone call, say friends, Narvaez broke into hysterics that sent her small children screaming through the house. She went into therapy, which eventually "led to the rediscovery of her own identity," says a close friend, and to the decision to go public.

Rosario Murillo insists that the feud should be "dealt with as a family problem." There's no chance of that. The affair has already prompted nationwide soul searching in Nicaragua about the legacy of machismo that no amount of revolutionary rhetoric has altered. In the weeks ahead, as the Sandinista conclave approaches, the Faulknerian saga of sex, untrammeled patriarchal power and divided family loyalties is liable to override most of the issues that the reformers--and doubtless the Ortegas--would much rather discuss.

--With Reporting by Lorraine Orlandi /Managua