Despite allegations, approval rating soars

 GLENN GARVIN
 Herald Staff Writer

 MANAGUA -- It's not at all uncommon to hear readers here exclaim ``I don't
 believe it!'' as they open their morning newspaper -- the Nicaraguan press, after
 all, specializes in tales of exorcisms, ghosts and giant vampire bats. But a story
 last month seemed especially fantastic: A new poll showed that two-thirds of
 Nicaraguans approve of the way President Arnoldo Aleman is doing his job.

 ``That's crazy!'' said one business executive, dismissing the paper with a snap of
 her hand. ``I don't trust those numbers.'' Added another: ``Don't believe it. . . . The
 president is in a lot of trouble. Everyone knows it.''

 The reactions make Aleman cackle, but what he really would have liked is to have
 seen the reaction when the editors who have been so stridently critical of him at
 the daily newspaper La Prensa got their first look at the results of the poll they
 commissioned.

 ``It must have killed them to print that,'' Aleman says, his mouth turning upward in
 a wicked grin.

 In a paradox that parallels the recent political history of President Clinton, whose
 poll numbers went up and up as the Monica Lewinsky scandal grew deeper and
 deeper, Aleman seems to draw strength from the charges that fly through the air
 here as wildly and regularly as bullets once did.

 The poll, conducted by the respected Costa Rican firm CID-Gallup, appeared just
 after a round of searing criticism in the Nicaraguan press over Aleman's trip to
 Miami for an engagement party as a volcano rumbled in northern Nicaragua.

 ``President Arnoldo Aleman left Nicaraguans to the grace of God yesterday,'' the
 story in one newspaper began. COUNTRY LEFT WITHOUT CABINET, a headline
 screamed; in another, EVERYONE WENT TO ALEMAN'S PARTY. Barely
 mentioned were the facts that the handful of peasants who lived near the volcano
 had already been evacuated; that Aleman was gone for just 24 hours; and that
 Vice President Enrique Bolaños stayed in Managua the whole time.

 Poll rating rises

 But if anything, the controversy over the engagement party seemed to have made
 Aleman more popular. The poll showed that his approval rating had jumped  eight
 percentage points since the last survey.

 ``It doesn't surprise me one bit,'' Aleman said. ``Everyone here knows better than
 to pay attention to the press. My government has built so many bridges and
 schoolhouses and highways, but you don't read stories about that in the
 newspapers. They don't print positive news.

 ``I've asked reporters about it, and they tell me they believe that if they don't
 publish strong criticisms of the government, they won't sell papers. It's not news if
 a dog bites a man, they tell me, only if a man bites a dog. All the progress we've
 made has become routine and boring, I suppose.''

 The scandal stories have become routine, too.

 Some are absurdly trivial: The president's fiancée praises Honduran furniture
 makers. (An insult to Nicaraguan artisans!)

 Some appear serious and then burst like soap bubbles: A borrowed airplane in
 which the president flew tests positive for cocaine. (The amount turned out to be
 so tiny that it could have been tracked in on a mechanic's shoes.)

 Others backfire on Aleman's critics: Comptroller General Agustin Jarquin charged
 that $500 million had disappeared from the central bank, then had to concede that
 he had made an accounting error.

 Variety of criticisms

 But other stories, fairly or not, have lingered:

   A firm whose incorporators included Aleman's son-in-law won $1.8 million in
 highway-repair contracts without competitive bidding in the wake of Hurricane
 Mitch.

   Newspapers accused Aleman of buying two large ranches and using state
 funds to improve them. They also implied, not very subtly, that the land had been
 purchased with money pilfered from the public treasury.

   The president's fiancée, Miami schoolteacher Maria Fernanda Flores, turned up
 on the public payroll as a consultant. So did her father, as the Nicaraguan consul
 in New York.

   After running stories critical of Aleman, La Prensa and Nicaragua's largest
 television station, Channel 2, found themselves embroiled in long tax audits that
 made it difficult for them to import parts and supplies.

 President's reaction

 Aleman has denied -- often pugnaciously -- any wrongdoing in any of the
 scandals, and little evidence has surfaced to contradict him. And his supporters
 note that even if he were guilty of everything he is accused of, the acts are petty
 compared to those of any other Nicaraguan government over the past 70 years.

 Corruption -- and brutality as well -- flourished under the old Somoza dynasty that
 governed Nicaragua for four decades, under the Marxist Sandinista regime that
 replaced it, and, to a lesser extent, even in the democratically elected government
 of Violeta Chamorro that preceded Aleman.

 ``Look, I don't know anything about Aleman and those ranches,'' said Adolfo
 Calero, a congressman from the rival Conservative Party who nonetheless
 generally votes with Aleman's Liberal Party. ``But I don't know why we're getting
 excited that maybe the president bought  some land. We've mostly had
 governments who just stole  land.''

 But comparisons to the bad old days no longer impress some Nicaraguans.
 ``Look, Aleman has made some great strides in modernizing the Nicaraguan
 economy and pushing it toward the 21st century,'' said Arturo Cruz Jr., a political
 scientist. ``But at the same time, he's trying to reimpose the old political model of
 the caudillo, the boss, the strongman. We're beyond that, and we resent it.''

 Insiders' views

 Even some of the president's aides, while they believe that most of the president's
 actions can be justified, concede that some of them look bad and should have
 been avoided.

 ``The president's fiancée is very smart, and probably did a fine job as an
 educational consultant,'' one aide said. ``But putting her in the job was just plain
 stupid. Stupid! . . . The president has never lived in the United States; he doesn't
 understand that in the modern world you have to look clean as well as be clean,
 but some of his advisors do, and they need to tell him so.''

 Aleman insists that none of the scandals have any substance. The ranches, he
 says, belong not to him but to a company that numbers his brother and sister
 among its shareholders. ``Is it a crime for my family to buy land?'' he asked. The
 highway-repair contracts, he says, were granted in accordance with Nicaraguan
 law, and his son-in-law had merely lent his name to the company's incorporation
 papers as a favor to a friend.

 ``The problem, I think, is that in our country -- in all of Latin America, really --
 there has been a tradition of corruption when it comes to public finances,'' Aleman
 said. ``So you have a syndrome that, when someone enters public office,
 anything he acquires is immediately assumed to be stolen fruit, something he got
 by robbing the state. . . .

 ``But if the only officeholders are going to be people who've never been able to
 make any money, you're going to have a lot of mediocre officials.''

 Tax issue persists

 The accusation against Aleman that many here find most disturbing is that he
 uses the Nicaraguan tax collection agency -- as widely feared here as the IRS is
 in the United States -- to bludgeon his enemies into silence.

 True or not, the charge is almost universally believed by Managua business
 people, even those who support Aleman. And those who don't support him are
 extremely reluctant to say so publicly. None of the half-dozen interviewed by The
 Herald for this report would permit his name to be used. ``I just can't afford it,'' one
 said. ``Those audits aren't just a nuisance -- they can destroy my business.''

 Aleman, however, firmly denies that politics has anything to do with the audits.
 Business people are squawking, he says, simply because his government is the
 first one in decades to crack down on tax scofflaws.

 ``We're not the only country that takes taxes seriously,'' he said. ``Al Capone
 didn't go to prison for murder or robbery or selling liquor. He went to prison
 because he tried to cheat Uncle Sam. Nicaraguans have to learn to be loyal to
 their country by paying taxes.''

 `Everybody has to pay'

 Byron Jerez, Aleman's chief tax collector, said he has been systematically
 auditing all the country's newspapers and radio and TV stations, not just those
 that criticize the president. And the next one on the list is La Noticia, a daily
 paper owned by Liberal Party businessmen that is strongly loyal to Aleman.

 ``Everybody has to pay,'' Jerez said. ``Nobody believes that, but it's true. At the
 end of the first year of the government, there were three cabinet ministers who
 hadn't paid any income tax. They said they weren't going to, because they never
 had to before. And I sat right in the president's office as he called them one by
 one and said, pay by Friday or go out the door.''

 Meanwhile, true to his word that he doesn't let the press get him down or control
 his every move, Aleman is going ahead with his Italian honeymoon in late October
 -- coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Mitch and the massive
 Casitas mudslide that killed 2,000 people here.
 e-mail: ggarvin@herald.com