Nicaragua at
the Barricades — and a Crossroads
Nicaraguan immigrants living in Costa Rica demonstrate in
support of Nicaraguans protesting against government's pension reforms during a
vigil at Democracy square in San Jose, on April 21, 2018.EZEQUIEL BECERRA / AFP
/ GETTY IMAGES
June 25, 2018
On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua’s
capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more
effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the
country’s most precious repository of biodiversity.
Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and
then spread across the country. Thousands of Nicaraguans added a second demand
to the first: for President Daniel Ortega to revoke his recent changes to the
country’s social security law, which had simultaneously raised social security
taxes (upsetting private enterprise) and cut benefits to seniors (angering many
ordinary people). In the ensuing clashes, close to 200 Nicaraguans have died,
hundreds have been arrested, and thousands have been injured, almost all at the
hands of anti-riot police, unidentified snipers, or gangs of pro-government
thugs on motorcycles. Today, this movement of auto-convocados (self-conveners)
articulates two key demands: justice and democracy — justice for those who have
died at the government’s hand and a return to democratic governance for
Nicaragua.
Why should we care? In a world where the US
president proclaims his desire to see his people
“sit up and pay attention” to him the way North Koreans do for Kim Jung-Un;
where his attorney general tore children from their parents’ arms;
where the United States plans to initiate the militarization of
space (despite our endorsement of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws exactly that) — in such a
world, why should people care what happens in an impoverished Central American
nation thousands of miles from the centers of power?
Because there was a time when Nicaragua’s
imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a
people might shuck off the bonds of US dominance and try to build a democratic
country devoted to human well-being. I know, because I saw a little of that
example during the six months I spent in Nicaragua’s war zones in 1984, working
with an organization called Witness for Peace. My job there was to report on
the US-backed counterrevolutionary (Contra) military campaign to overthrow the
Sandinista government, which had replaced a vicious dictator in 1984. The
Contras employed an intentional terrorist strategy of torture, kidnapping, and
murder, targeting civilians in their homes and fields and workers in rural
schools and clinics.
Some
(Abbreviated) History
Nicaragua sits dead center on any map of the
Americas and, in the 1980s, small as it was, it also occupied the center of the
political imaginations of many people. In that country lay the hopes of
millions living beyond its borders, hopes that a people really could become the
protagonists of their own nation’s story or, in the words of the Sandinista anthem, “dueño de su historia,
arquitecto de su liberación” — directors of their own history, architects of
their own liberation.
Before the fall of its Washington-supported
dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, very few people outside Central
America had given a thought to Nicaragua. It was the poorest, most illiterate
nation in the region. Indeed, Somoza is reported to have said, “I don’t need
educated people. I need oxen!” (Or, as our own president put it during his 2016 campaign, “I love
the poorly educated!”) In the years following the dictator’s ouster, Nicaragua
became a symbol of hope for people on the left globally.
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Somoza had treated Nicaragua like his own
private hacienda, leasing out its hillsides for clear-cutting to US and
Canadian lumber companies and, along with an oligarchic class of landowners and
businessmen, squeezing every dollar out of the people he ruled. He maintained
his power thanks to a regime of intimidation, torture, and assassination. His National Guard functioned
like a private army (and would eventually form the nucleus of the Contras after
many of its members fled to neighboring Honduras when the Sandinistas came to
power).
In 1979, however, after a year-long insurrection
fought in the mountainous areas of the country by a guerrilla force armed with
AK-47s and in the cities by ordinary citizens wielding homemade bombs thrown
from behind barricades, the Somoza regime collapsed. By the time he fled, after
a brutal final round of aerial bombardment, no sector of the country
backed him. Erstwhile allies like the big landowners, private industry, and the
Catholic Church, along with the press of all stripes, had all turned on him. So
had the majority of Nicaraguans, the rural campesinos (a word
inadequately translated as “peasants”), and the country’s tiny urban working
class. In the end, even his patrons in Washington abandoned Somoza as a
hopeless cause.
A group called the Frente Sandinista (the
Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN) stepped into the vacuum he left.
Founded in 1961, it took its name from Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla
leader who had fought against a US occupation of Nicaragua decades earlier. In
1978, despite internal disagreements, the group united around four basic
principles of governance: political pluralism; the formation of a mixed
economy, including private ownership, state-owned enterprises, and collectives;
popular mobilization through a variety of mass organizations; and a foreign policy
of nonalignment.
In July 1979, when Somoza resigned and fled the
country, the FSLN assumed power with long-established plans to improve the
lives of the rural and urban poor. The party established health clinics,
promoted free public education, and offered a “canasta básica” (basic
food basket) of affordable staple foods, quickly reducing the endemic
malnutrition in the country. Through a national vaccination campaign, it
eliminated polio in 1981. It also brought in laws that protected poor farmers
from losing their land to banks and instituted agrarian reform, transferring
land titles to thousands of previously landless campesinos.
In 1980, 90,000 people, two-thirds of them
middle-class high school students from the cities, took part in a national literacy campaign. In the process,
those young students spent five months living with campesino families,
learning about the hardships (and joys) of subsistence farming. In return for
such hospitality, those students taught their host families to read. Today, my
partner sits on the board of a Nicaraguan development NGO, several of whose
organizers began their lives of community engagement as teenage participants in
that literacy campaign.
Of course, the Sandinista government was not
perfect. Some of its worst policies reflected the country’s endemic racism
against indigenous groups and English-speaking Nicaraguans of African descent.
Existing conflict between the Sandinistas and Miskito Indians was further
exacerbated by the government’s imposition of a military draft in response to
the Contra war. Many Miskitos were members of the pacifist Moravian church, but
the Sandinistas interpreted their resistance to the draft as complicity with
the enemy, and so opened the way for successful CIA infiltration of the group.
The military draft became deeply unpopular
throughout the country and its enforcement was sometimes heavy-handed. More
than once, I sat on a bus stopped at a Sandinista roadblock, waiting for
soldiers to check the papers of all the young men on board to be sure none of
them were draft dodgers.
The Sandinistas also created and consolidated
government structures, including a presidency and national assembly. When the
party swept the 1984 elections with 67% of the vote, and Daniel Ortega became
president, no one doubted that the result represented the will of the
overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans.
In 1986, the National Constitutional Assembly
approved a new constitution, which granted abundant rights to Nicaraguans,
including women and LGBT people. One of its articles even called for absolute
equality between men and women and the full sharing of housework and childcare.
(Let’s pause here to remember that the US Constitution has yet to include any
kind of Equal Rights Amendment, let alone an article
requiring men to share equally in domestic labor!)
Among the new constitution’s provisions was a
six-year fixed term for the presidency.
However, Nicaraguans were not stupid. They knew
that, as long as the Sandinistas ran the government, the US would continue its
Contra war. So, in 1990, Nicaraguans replaced the FSLN with the UNO party run
by Violeta Chamorro in a result that shocked many people outside Nicaragua,
including the Sandistas’ US polling firm. The people had spoken, and the
Sandinistas accepted their verdict.
And that was momentous in itself. For the first
time in history, a victorious revolutionary party allowed itself to be voted
out of office, relinquishing many of its hopes, but preserving the democratic
structures so many Nicaraguans had died to create and maintain.
Nicaragua in
US Hearts and Minds
While Nicaragua was having its revolution, back
in the United States we were enduring our own: the Reagan
Revolution. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1980
presidential victory marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s successful
attack on the New Deal structures still embedded in American life. The Reagan
administration undermined unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated vital industries from banking
to health care (with disastrous results still felt today),
attacked social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid,
and turned perfectly respectable words like “welfare” and “entitlement” into
code for African American moral turpitude. AIDS was ravaging gay communities,
but the president refused to even say the word in public until the first
year of his second term. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration escalated Richard
Nixon’s “war on drugs” into a full-scale assault on poor communities. In 1986,
the president signed a drug law requiring guaranteed — and long
— prison sentences even for minor, non-violent drug offenses.
In other words, things in the US were pretty
grim. That made it tempting indeed to adopt someone else’s ready-made
revolution, especially one that had already achieved so much and had such a
great soundtrack: the music of the brothers Luis and Carlos Mejía Godoy,
including the Sandinista anthem mentioned above and the beloved “Nicaragua,
Nicaragüita,” with its final line, “Pero ahora que ya sos libre,
Nicaragüita, yo te quiero mucho más.”(“But now that you are free, little
Nicaragua, I love you so much more.”)
And Nicaragua was indeed free, although also
under attack. The United States had always been its biggest trading partner. In
1985, however, President Reagan embargoed all trade with the country and
cut off air and sea transport to and from the US. Other nations, including
Soviet bloc countries, Cuba, and the European Union, along with many thousands
of American individuals and organizations, stepped in to offer material aid,
technical assistance, and in the case of Witness for Peace, accompaniment in
the war zones. Such volunteers risked their lives — young engineer Ben Linder actually lost his — for the
privilege of being part of this experiment in liberation.
In my six months there, I met Nicaraguans who
had never been more than 50 kilometers from the tiny villages in which they
were born, but had a vision of change that would spread across Central America,
Latin America, and — as in my case — even reach the United States. Over and
over, people told me, “Americans can stop Congress from voting for aid to the
Contras this year; you can stop it next year, but until you make a revolution
in your own country, nothing will really change. We will always be confronted
by US power.”
Heady stuff. And it turned a lot of heads, not
always in the most helpful ways. Some visiting Americans became ever more
convinced that their own left-wing party back home was destined to become the
vanguard that would bring revolution to North America. Some became more rojinegro (red
and black, the colors of the FSLN’s flag) than the Sandinistas themselves and
would hear no criticism of the party or its leaders. Others simply lived for
the day when they could abandon the United States, with its hopeless,
politically backward population, and make the permanent move to Nicaragua, and
its highly conscious (or in today’s language, “woke”) people.
And some of us reluctantly acknowledged that,
much as we loved Nicaragua’s brilliant green mountains, our real work lay in
our own country. We came home believing that if we could not find a way to love
the United States, despite its maddening intransigence, we would never find a
way to change it.
Trouble in
Paradise
Like everything in Nicaragua, its post-1990
history has proven complicated indeed. As a start, some of the elements in the
FSLN most committed to popular democracy left to form smaller Sandinista-style
parties, but without significant success at the ballot box. Meanwhile, in the
months between the election and the transfer of power, many Sandinistas took
part in the Piñata— a wholesale appropriation of state-owned property,
companies, vehicles, and cash. In the process, Daniel Ortega, his wife Rosario
Murillo, and other high-ranking party members began amassing personal fortunes
and rebuilding their political power. The couple even underwent a
well-publicized conversion to a charismatic form of Roman Catholicism (which
helps explain why Nicaragua today has one of the world’s harshest anti-abortion
laws).
By 1999, Ortega had made a pact with the
notorious right-wing politician and then-president, Arnoldo Alemán. He and his
PLC party, which drew its support from the oligarchic class that once supported
Samoza, had beaten Violeta Chamorro in the 1996 election. Alemán was later
convicted of corruption on a grand scale and sentenced to years of house
arrest.
In 2006, with his wife Murillo as his running
mate, Daniel Ortega was again elected president. Having himself weathered a
number of personal scandals, including his stepdaughter Zoilamerica’s credible
accusations of years of sexual abuse, he would gradually grant Alemán complete
clemency.
In the 12 years since his second election,
Ortega has consolidated his own power, placed family members in important (and
lucrative) positions, and achieved full control of the FSLN party apparatus. He
engineered constitutional changes that now permit him to serve an unlimited
number of terms; that is, he granted himself a potential presidency for life.
In spite of the increasingly autocratic nature
of his rule, Nicaragua has seen substantial economic development in the last
decade, from which many have benefitted. Ortega’s is an authoritarian
government that has nonetheless provided real material benefits to Nicaraguans.
Furthermore, whether because of a lingering esprit de corps in the police and
army or thanks to Ortega’s mano dura (harsh hand), or a combination
of the two, the country is not suffering the plague of drugs and
government-by-cartel that has terrorized the peoples of much of the rest of
Central America and Mexico.
Today, the United States is once again
Nicaragua’s largest trading partner and the Ortega
government is on good terms with international lending agencies like the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
At the
Crossroads
In towns and urban neighborhoods across the
country, people have once again built barricades, as Sandinista supporters did in
the 1979 insurrection against Somoza. Once again, they are pulling up the
concrete paving blocks once produced in Somoza’s own factory — this time to
prevent the Sandinista police from entering their towns and neighborhoods.
Envío, a digital
magazine put out by the University of Central America in Managua, calls this
uprising an unarmed revolution. “Unarmed” is a modest exaggeration, since
defenders at many of the barricades have used homemade mortars (steel tubes which hold
hemp fuses attached to bags of gunpowder), but the demonstrators are massively
outgunned by the government’s regular army and the police, as well as the turbas
—organized gangs of thugs.
For longtime Nicaragua-watchers, it has been
strange to see COSEP,
the country’s private industry council and inveterate Sandinista opponent,
joining with university students and campesinos to create a
Civil Alliance for Justice and Democracy. In late May, leaders of the Alliance
agreed to a dialogue with the government, mediated by the country’s council of
Catholic bishops. The talks have been on-again, off-again ever since.
Although leftists around the world hailed
Ortega’s return to power, his is not the revolutionary government of the 1980s.
Perhaps because they wish it were, some Ortega supporters here and elsewhere
are treating the present uprisings as if they were a reprise of the Contra war,
a right-wing coup attempt orchestrated in Washington. I don’t think that’s
true, although I have Nicaraguan friends who disagree with me.
To blame everything that happens in the country
on puppet masters in Washington denies Nicaraguans their own agency. As student
leader Madelaine Caracas told the German news
network Deutsche Welle:
“It’s us Nicaraguans who are in the streets. Not
a political party, not liberals, not conservatives, not the CIA. It’s an
awakening, an exhaustion with seeing our brothers murdered.”
Y Ahora,
Qué? (Now What?)
When Somoza left power, the FSLN was waiting,
ready to govern. As far as I can tell, today there is no such organized force
on the left that could fill the vacuum left by Ortega, for example, by
successfully campaigning in any new elections. If, however, Ortega refuses to
leave office, the alternatives are at least as painful to consider: his successful
repression of a genuine uprising of popular anger through yet more killings,
beatings, and jailings (with the continuation of an autocratic government into
the unknown future), or a turn from a largely unarmed and, when armed,
defensive, resistance to a full-scale civil war, with all the horrors that
entails.
The only thing I am sure of is that Nicaragua
always does better when the United States is looking elsewhere. So let’s hope
Trump keeps his focus on infuriating his allies and courting his enemies in other parts of
the world.
Many years ago, I sat in a hotel room — really
more of a cot in a shed — in the tiny town of San Juan de Bocay, talking with
my Witness for Peace travelling companion and a young Sandinista soldier. The
soldier’s pet chipmunk sat on the windowsill chewing sunflower seeds. We
discussed what the revolution meant to him and his country, and his hopes as
well as ours that Nicaragua’s seeds of liberation would spread through the
Americas. In that warm, dim light, revolution almost seemed possible.
Maybe I should have paid more attention to the
chipmunk’s name. It was Napoleon.
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Rebecca Gordon is
the author of Mainstreaming Torture, which has been hailed as a
"morally challenging" and "courageous work" that reveals
how torture has been "sanitized" in the US. She teaches philosophy at
the University of San Francisco. Prior to her academic career, Gordon spent
decades working as an activist in peace and justice movements in Central
America, South Africa and the United States.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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