But Will It Work?

Long before the polls closed, the people knew what they had done. Before the radio began reporting returns, before the platoons of international observers were totting up their "quick counts" and the battalions of reporters were frantically calling in the news, the word had spread across Managua. "We're going to win!" shouted a woman tending a bubbling cauldron in front of her house in one of the city's poorest barrios, thought to be a stronghold of the ruling Sandinistas. The Sandinistas? she was asked. "No, not those sons of bitches," she spat back. "The Dona. Dona Violeta."

In another startling turnaround in an age of startling surprises, democracy burst forth where everyone least expected it. Given the chance to vote in an honest and secret election, Nicaraguans decisively repudiated the Sandinista government, which the U.S. had been struggling to overthrow for a decade.

Conservatives and liberals in Washington are already arguing over who should claim credit for the Sandinistas' defeat. But nobody really "won" Nicaragua. If the election of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro as President last week reflected anything, it was the people's rejection of the pain they have endured for a decade. Give us a chance, they said. End the war. Save the economy. The immediate target of their wrath was the Sandinistas, but the U.S. too bears a share of responsibility. It now owes Nicaragua generous help if it wants democracy to flourish.

Latin America's history is filled with government reversals, but rarely at the ballot box. Coups, revolutions and invasions -- often organized by Washington -- are more common means. Ever since the trauma of Viet Nam, the U.S. has sought a less direct and costly method to have its way. Where military force could still do the trick cost effectively, the U.S. was willing to use it, as in Grenada and Panama. But in Nicaragua, wittingly or not, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves. For Americans, the cost was minimal. True, bruising annual battles over Central America splintered Congress, and the Iran-contra scandal hobbled Ronald Reagan's second term, but hardly any U.S. soldiers were dying.

The real burden fell on Nicaragua. The U.S. strategy proved excruciatingly slow and extremely expensive, and it inflicted the most pain on the wrong people. The past ten years have savaged the country's civilians, not its comandantes. Since 1985 Washington has strangled Nicaraguan trade with an embargo. It has cut off Nicaragua's credit at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The contra war cost Managua tens of millions and left the country with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms. The impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua was a harrowing way to give the National Opposition Union (U.N.O.) a winning issue.