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The Sandinistas suffered some embarrassments of their own last week. After five years of warnings, the Society of Jesus expelled Fernando Cardenal Martinez when the priest refused to resign as Nicaragua's Education Minister. Jesuit officials in Rome cited a 1983 canon law that forbids priests to hold posts that carry civil powers. In a 19-page open letter, Cardenal defended his job as a "pact with the poor." There was no word from the Vatican on the three other priests in the Nicaraguan government, including Foreign Minister Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann.
Three days after Cardenal's expulsion, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Jr., editor of La Prensa, the country's only opposition paper, announced that he had temporarily moved to Costa Rica. Chamorro charged that censorship and travel restrictions had grown so severe since last month's national elections that life had become "impossible." It is a measure of the task facing the contras that they have so far been unable to turn discontent like Chamorro's into support for their own cause. —By James Kelly.
Reported by Ricardo Chavira/Tegucigalpa and Ross H. Munro/Washington