Nicaragua
Revolution Permanent or Impermanent?
The incredibly rich and complex revolutionary experience of late twentieth-century Nicaragua, a small Central American country then inhabited by three million people (almost six million in 2015), merits careful study by students of popular protest and revolution. The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nactonal (FSLN—Sandinista National Liberation Front) led the fierce insurgency of 1978–79 that brought down the Somoza dictatorship. This triumph initiated a decadelong revolutionary process. It was a process that brought many gains to the country but also hardships, and ultimately it failed to realize the far-reaching goals that its initiators and supporters had envisioned. In 2006, sixteen years after being dislodged, a new FSLN government took power through elections—generating controversy about its very nature. To understand both triumph and failure, as well as the later controversy, one must explore not only the FSLN but also much larger forces that have shaped and limited it.
I. The Sandinista Revolution
To comprehend the roots and historical context of the Nicaraguan Revolution, one must go back to the early nineteenth century and even before.
The earliest roots can be found in the impact of the mercantile capitalism of the Spanish empire that colonized most of Latin America, including what is now Nicaragua, at the expense of indigenous peoples—most of whom became blended with the Spanish to form a mestizo majority, which became the bulk of the large peasantry and the small working class. When Nicaragua became independent from Spain in the early nineteenth century, its social structure was that which had been forged by the colonial experience. At the top was a local ruling class of landowner capitalists and merchant capitalists, whose decades-long feud with each other would be reflected in the competition of their respective political groups, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. This divided elite rested on top of the laboring majority of Nicaraguans. Also, each upper-class faction at various times sought to gain assistance from the British and then the US capitalists and governments in order to enhance wealth and secure state power in Nicaragua, which introduced another key element in the coming of the Nicaraguan Revolution.1
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was unquestionably the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, but the so-called Open Door foreign policy precluded US government and business leaders from seeking to make Nicaragua an outright colony. Rather, they sought to advance their interests by ensuring the existence in Nicaragua of friendly governments through “gunboat diplomacy” that involved frequent military interventions throughout much of Latin America and the Caribbean.2
It was in reaction to such US military intervention that the plebian radical nationalist Augusto César Sandino led an immensely popular and very successful guerrilla war in the 1920s and early 1930s. His troops were made up of peasants and workers. Influenced by diverse ideological currents, Sandino explained to mine workers in 1926 “the sad fact that we were exploited and we ought to have a government really concerned for the people to stop the vile exploitation by the capitalists and big foreign enterprises.” Sandino was able to outfight and confound US military forces, becoming a hero throughout Latin America and an international symbol of anti-imperialism.3
The most perceptive and influential foreign policy-makers in the US government concluded, by the 1930s, that such direct intervention into the political life of countries such as Nicaragua was becoming counterproductive. The so-called Good Neighbor Policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a reflection of this change, but it had been initiated earlier under the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover, whose State Department personnel fashioned a new policy mandating an independent and constitutional Nicaraguan government, in which a stable two-party system (with the Liberal and Conservative parties) would be established, US military forces withdrawn (as Sandino demanded), the US interventionist pattern terminated, and a US-trained Nicaraguan National Guard established to maintain law and order and political stability. Then a durable “Good Neighbor” relationship could more effectively maintain US economic interests in the region.4
What happened was that (1) Sandino agreed to accept the new Nicaraguan government, (2) the US-trained head of the National Guard, Anastasio Somoza, had Sandino and many of his followers murdered, and then (3) Somoza kicked out the traditional Liberal and Conservative politicians and established his own family’s forty-five-year rule of the country—thanks to its control of the National Guard—while always maintaining the facade of the US-arranged constitutional government. Although he was careful to adapt to and support all major aspects of US foreign policy, Somoza was not simply a US puppet. The US government was never happy with the way he had shunted aside the traditional bourgeois politicians in favor of his own dictatorship. But policy-makers in Washington, having abandoned the norm of direct military interventionism and understanding that Somoza had established political stability and on all major questions would be pro-U.S., concluded that Somoza was acceptable. As Roosevelt is said to have put it: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”5
By the 1940s, the United States secured 95 percent of Nicaraguan exports (chiefly bananas, tropical produce, mahogany, gold) and furnished 85 percent of its imports. The US-created Export-Import Bank loaned money for projects in Nicaragua, under imposed conditions of US control of them, and the Somoza regime encouraged agricultural and small industrial enterprises that fit into, and would not compete with, North American enterprises.
Just as Somoza was not a US puppet, neither was he a puppet of Nicaragua’s capitalist class. Enjoying considerable autonomy and assuming a posture of being above the divisions in society, the dictator nonetheless ensured the stability of capitalist property relations and facilitated the rapid development of the capitalist economy. The Somoza family’s strength always rested on their absolute control of the powerful and vicious National Guard. But they were accepted by the upper classes in part because they kept down the living standards of the masses. As old “Tacho” Somoza warned those among the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie who were not happy with him: “My opponents should remember that we, the better people, are only 6 percent; if trouble arises, the 94 percent may crush us all.”6 The upper classes in general, and leaders of the traditional opposition, were therefore generally prepared either to support, to compromise with, or at least to soften their opposition to the Somoza regime. This upper-class fear of generating popular unrest remained even in the face of the utter corruption and gangster-style business tactics represented by the regime of the final Somoza, known as Anastasio II, or “Tachito,” which caused the relative autonomy of the regime to be replaced by resentful isolation even among the country’s upper 6 percent.
Crystallization of Revolutionary Conditions
Yet the post–World War II economic development of Nicaragua generated a process of proletarianization that, in turn, created a social force capable of challenging the Somoza dictatorship. A basic economic infrastructure was created: electrification, highways, communications, port works, financial structures. This laid the basis for the intensive cultivation of cotton, a cash crop geared for the world market, which transformed Nicaraguan agriculture in the 1950s. Cotton quickly surpassed coffee, livestock, and sugar as the country’s main export. There was also a significant expansion of light industry, especially chemicals, textiles, metal processing, and food processing.
Not only was there a growth in both the industrial and service sectors of the working class, but peasants were increasingly pushed into supplementing their income through wage labor. There was a dramatic increase in urbanization, with a growing informal sector that combined unemployment with occasional wage work plus petty commerce (selling chewing gum, lottery tickets, flowers, even plastic bags of water, etc., on the streets), sometimes traveling back and forth from city to countryside. The repressiveness of the Somoza regime—systematically violating civil liberties, holding down unions, failing to provide for the impoverished majority badly needed social services (health and sanitation, education, electricity, and so on)—increasingly alienated and radicalized growing sectors of the population.
By the end of the 1970s, 46 percent of the labor force was agricultural, of which about 70 percent was semi-proletarian (needing to supplement small land-holdings with part-time wage work) proletarian (full-time, rural wage workers), or sub-proletarian (landless workers without stable employment). Among the economically active population in nonagricultural sectors, 9.6 percent were property owners (large, middle, and petty bourgeoisie) while 90.4 percent were non–property owners (18 percent constituting a relatively well-off, white-collar, and professional sector, and 73 percent consisting of more or less proletarian layers).
Analyst Carlos Vilas once termed these layers as Nicaragua’s “working masses,” stressing that those who made up this entity were far from being a traditional factory proletariat. Consider such different occupational categories as small landowner, agricultural worker, urban artisan, urban wage worker, unemployed worker, domestic servant, street vendor. Not only would one family contain all of these, but at different times one individual might be each of these things. The class realities in Nicaragua were fluid and complex. On the one hand, this could facilitate a certain cohesion among the so-called working masses of Nicaragua. On the other hand, it could contribute to a fluidity, a diversity, a greater range of contradictory qualities in their consciousness.7
The fact remained that for every layer of the working masses, living conditions were very difficult. According to studies by the United Nations, the standard daily caloric requirement for a human being is 2,600. In the 1970s the poorest 50 percent of Nicaragua’s population (which enjoyed only 15 percent of the nation’s income) averaged 1,767 calories a day—more than 800 below the requirement; the next 30 percent of the labor force (with 25 percent of the income) averaged 2,703 daily calories, a bare 100 above the minimum requirement. Taken together, roughly, this 80 percent constituted the working masses. The richest 5 percent of the population, with 28 percent of the total income, averaged a whopping 3,931 calories per day, with the “middle sectors”—15 percent of the population—getting about 32 percent of the wealth with an average of 3,255 calories per day. Only 1.1 percent of the Nicaragua population had completed all the years of primary education, and half the population lacked any formal any education at all. Of every ten deaths, six were caused by infectious diseases—that is, curable diseases. Forty percent of health care expenditures served less than 10 percent of the population. Workers who tried to form unions, peasants who tried to defend their interests, those in the barrios (poor neighborhoods) seeking better services, students organizing for educational reform—all could find themselves targeted for brutally repressive action by Somoza’s National Guard.8
Revolutionary Leadership, Revolutionary Mobilization
It was the mobilization of these growing numbers and increasingly discontented working masses that brought down the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. This did not happen spontaneously. In the 1960s, and with increasing effectiveness through the 1970s, the Sandinista National Liberation Front posed an alternative to the Somoza dictatorship, to the reformist Conservative and Liberal oppositions, and to leftist groups, particularly Nicaragua’s pro-Moscow Communists of the PSN (Nicaraguan Socialist Party), inclined to compromise with bourgeois parties. In fact, FSLN founders Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borge broke from the PSN precisely because that organization resisted applying to modern Nicaragua either the revolutionary tradition of Sandino or the more recent example of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.9
Formed in 1961 and evolving in an increasingly dynamic manner over a period of fifteen years, the FSLN drew from diverse ideological sources. Essential were the perspectives of Marx and Lenin, blended with the inspiration of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and especially the plebeian radicalism of Sandino. Other influences among the Sandinistas were the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, as well as—for many—the radical Christian perspectives associated with “liberation theology” and, for some, the views of such revolutionary Marxists as Leon Trotsky. The first decade and a half of the FSLN was by no means overwhelmingly promising, particularly as efforts to apply the strategy drawn from Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare and popularized in Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution—the creation of small groups of revolutionary warriors in the countryside—resulted in initial disastrous losses. This eventually led to a serious split in FSLN ranks. Fonseca, Borge, and Henry Ruiz represented the Prolonged People’s War tendency, based on the notion that a patient strategy of rural guerrilla warfare concentrated in the mountains would be the key to bringing down the Somoza dictatorship. Jaime Wheelock, Carlos Nuñez, and Luis Carrón led an opposition, the Proletarian tendency, which argued—in more classical Marxist fashion—that patient organizing around social and economic issues among rural and urban workers made more sense than armed struggle in the countryside.
In the same period, there was emerging a substantial bourgeois-led opposition to Somoza, which formed a liberal reformist coalition (in which almost all anti-Somoza organizations including the Nicaraguan Stalinists of the PSN participated) from which the FSLN remained independent. The coalition’s most effective leader, La Prensa publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was murdered in 1978 by Somoza’s henchmen—bringing further discredit to the regime and pushing more people, including significant sectors of the business community, into the overtly revolutionary struggle. The new opportunity intersected with yet another split in the FSLN—an Insurrectional tendency headed by Humberto Ortega, Daniel Ortega, and Victor Tirado López. They argued that patience was no longer a virtue, that a broad alliance of social and political forces were ready to support an armed insurrection capable of bringing down the dictatorship in the very near future.
This three-way split initially had a devastating impact on FSLN cadres. “The split and the process of reuniting were difficult times for us,” Dora Maria Tellez remembered later. “An organization which many of us thought indestructible fell apart right before our eyes.” She added: “Perhaps the division wasn’t necessary, but the process that gave rise to it was—the internal discussion of our problems, our line, our strategy and its application to our people’s struggle.”10 The fact that such internal discussion could not take place without splits relates to the top-down organizational structure and lack of democratic process in the FSLN, later criticized by some of the group’s militants as “verticalism,” which would also create problems between 1979 and 1990. The fact that there were three factions of the FSLN pursuing different orientations, however, turned out to have positive consequences. As Humberto Ortega commented: “Actually the efforts made by the three separate structures were furthering a single strategy for victory.”11 This fact led to an FSLN reunification in the months before the final victory, with a central leadership—the nine-person National Directorate—consisting of the three leading personalities from the three different tendencies.
The specifics of the FSLN’s winning strategy had not been blueprinted beforehand but rather evolved from practical experiences in the course of the struggle, which actually involved a diverse number of struggles. In urban areas there were struggles of poor neighborhoods for utilities and social services as well as a proliferation of protests by students and youth, organized women, nurses, journalists, teachers, public employees, and construction and factory workers. Of special importance were peasant conflicts over the problem of access to land. All of this was increasingly interwoven with the work of the FSLN, involving the guerrillas in the countryside as well as armed fighters and clandestine organizations in the cities. Also essential in the forward surge of the struggle were a number of mass organizations, in many cases organized by FSLN militants and sympathizers—neighborhood councils, women’s organizations, organizations of students and youth, trade unions, and peasant groups—all pushing for meaningful reforms while interlinked with forces pressing for revolutionary change. “With the development of the mass organizations, social hegemony began to change and Sandinismo replaced Somocismo as the legitimate force in the eyes of the Nicaraguan people,” FSLN theorist Orlando Nuñez later commented. “The questioning of Somocismo waged by the mass movements had an important voice in the organized journalists of all the national media. This questioning began with a democratic character and progressively became revolutionary.”12
The coherence of these diverse struggles in 1978–79 was ensured by the leading Sandinista militants, who were determined to maintain FSLN hegemony during and after the revolutionary process in order to move the revolutionary in a socialist direction. This was not evident to many observers and even some participants, who assumed that the influence of the Insurrectional tendency, with its commitment to broad-based alliances, meant a move away from revolutionary radicalism and toward a more moderate pragmatism. The Insurrectionals’ founding document of 1977, asserted that “Nicaraguan capitalism, unlike that of Europe and other highly developed and industrialized nations, does not facilitate the immediate establishment of socialism,” but it went on to say: “The fact that we do not immediately establish socialism does not mean that we support a bourgeois-democratic revolution.” The document explained:
The present struggle against tyranny should lead us to a true democracy of the people (not a bourgeois democracy) that will form an integral part of the struggle for socialism. Our struggle should never be left midway, even if conciliatory, bourgeois forces should strive for such a goal. The popular democratic phase should be, for the Sandinista cause, a means used for consolidating its revolutionary position and organizing the masses, so that the process moves unequivocally toward socialism. The necessary popular-democratic revolutionary phase, to be fulfilled once the tyranny is toppled, should not lead us to capitalism, reformism, nationalism, or any other development.13
This orientation guided the Sandinistas as they mobilized for the final victory. This was a victory won at a very high cost, however. The Somoza regime—fighting for its life against what seemed increasingly like an insurgent population—unleashed an incredible amount of military violence on the country’s people and resources. Before the fighting had ended, there were as many as fifty thousand dead and several hundred thousand maimed or wounded. Before Somoza and a few others fled to Miami, they had left one-fourth of the people homeless and a good part of Managua’s industrial district bombed out. On July 19, 1979, however, the FSLN and its masses of exultant supporters took possession of Nicaragua with high hopes for a better future.
Evolution of the Revolutionary Regime
When the Somoza dictatorship was finally demolished, the Sandinistas formed a revolutionary regime that at first included an alliance with the bourgeois liberal opposition. Violeta Chamorro, widow of martyred La Prensa publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and millionaire businessman Alfonso Robelo joined with top Sandinista leaders to head the government. It quickly became clear, however, that the Sandinistas—basing themselves on the new revolutionary army and the popular mass organizations—were intent upon maintaining real political control. It also became clear to the would-be bourgeois allies that their own liberal-modernization orientation was incompatible with an FSLN ideology that blended the revolutionary nationalism of Sandino with the revolutionary socialist perspectives of Marx and Lenin (and a substantial dose of Castro and Guevara). The Sandinistas also saw their effort as part of an international revolutionary process that would soon triumph throughout Central America and beyond. As this process advanced, their long-range goal of bringing socialism to Nicaragua would be realized.
Chamorro and Robelo left the government to become leaders, respectively, of the peaceful, legal wing and the armed struggle wing of the anti-Sandinista opposition, which came to include a broad array of forces: veterans of the old Somoza National Guard; major sectors of the Catholic Church (although many Catholics, partly inspired by “liberation theology,” were solidly pro-Sandinista); conservative businessmen and landowners; a narrow but vocal minority in the trade union movement aligned with the traditionally anti-Communist leadership of the AFL-CIO in the United States; oppositional politicians indignant at being pushed aside by the new regime; liberal reformers who believed that the Sandinistas’ leftist goals and opposition to US foreign policy would place Nicaragua in a no-win situation in the “real world.” Some of these oppositionists established close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency and received enormous quantities of money, while US politicians debated whether such aid should go primarily to the legal opposition or to the murderous contras seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas through violent civil war.
Jaime Wheelock asserted in December 1979, five months after the revolutionary victory, that “the state now is not the same state, it is a state of the workers, a state of the producers, who organize production and place it at the disposal of the people, and above all of the working class.” Similarly, in 1983 Tomás Borge commented that “here political power is not in the hands of the businessmen,” that “they will not resign themselves to losing political power,” but that “this is a revolution of the working people. It is not a revolution of the bourgeoisie.”14
We have seen that the FSLN fostered the growth of a number of mass organizations during the period of revolutionary struggle. In the period after the victory of 1979, these mass organizations became consolidated and initially enjoyed substantial popular participation. They became dominant in what was originally the central organ of the new government, the Council of State. Together with the FSLN, these pro-Sandinista forces controlled between 60 and 75 percent of the seats in that central governmental body. In the early period, the Sandinistas functioned in a National Patriotic Front, which included the Popular Social Christian Party, the Independent Liberal Party, and the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (the name of the country’s old-line Communist Party). The rival Democratic Coordinating Committee rallied anti-FSLN forces—concentrated in the Nicaraguan Social Christian Party, the Social Democratic Party, and elements aligned with the Superior Council on Private Enterprise (COSEP)—ensuring that sharp debate, and some subsequent compromises, marked the deliberations of the Council of State.
Yet political debate became increasingly polarized, and critics of the FSLN regime predicted that it would seek to establish a one-party state similar to what had come into being in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. While there were some violations of civil liberties in this period—often due to the difficult conditions created by the US-sponsored contra war—there was more freedom of expression, greater political openness, more opportunity for popular involvement in the political process, and even greater opportunity to maintain critical and oppositional activity than ever before. The first honest elections in decades were organized in 1984 under the Sandinistas, with sharp critics of the FSLN, in six opposition parties on the left as well as the right, competing with it for the popular vote. Voter turnout was massive—all citizens sixteen years or older were eligible to vote, over 94 percent of whom actually registered, and 75 percent of these voted—with 67 percent of valid ballots cast (and 63 percent of all ballots) going to the FSLN.15 This support was given, it can be argued, because the Sandinistas, through their statements and policies, represented the hope for a better life to large sectors of the working people and the poor of Nicaragua.
Serious campaigns were launched to provide health, education, and other much-needed social services to all sectors of the population, especially to those who had been excluded in the past. The concept of a “social wage” was advanced—the notion that all who were part of the country’s “laboring masses,” in whose interests the revolution had been made and whose labor was essential to the country’s future, must with their families be assured the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, health care, cultural opportunities. There was a commitment to land reform and to the creation of public sectors of the economy—both policies having problematical aspects, but representing to many very positive moves in the right direction. Unlike previous regimes, the Sandinista government seemed committed to drawing the masses of people into discussions and debates about the future of the country and to giving them greater control over their communities. The army and the police, previously alien bodies that inspired fear throughout the population, assumed a popular character. Just as important, as we have seen, the government encouraged the endeavors of mass organizations: trade unions in the various urban workplaces and among agricultural workers, unions of peasants and small farmers, neighborhood committees, organizations of women and youth, and so forth, which possessed, and in some cases realized, the potential to give what had been oppressed sectors of the population a voice and an opportunity to take action for advancing their own interests.
The Sandinistas’ economic orientation involved creating a “mixed economy” in their tiny country. This consisted of three ownership categories: state or collective property (accounting for 25 percent of agriculture, 40 percent of industry, 38 percent of internal trade, 100 percent of public services); a purely capitalist sector (accounting for 17 percent of agriculture, 30 percent of industry, and 12 percent of internal trade); and a sector of small and medium producers, in many cases organized into cooperatives (accounting for 58 percent of agriculture, 30 percent of industry, and 50 percent of internal trade). Of Nicaragua’s gross domestic product, the state and collective property sector accounted for 45 percent, the capitalist sector accounted for 25 percent, and the small and medium producers accounted for 35 percent.16 While much of the economy was in private hands, the government controlled all the banks, all access to foreign currency, and all jurisdiction over imports, and it set production quotas and designated priorities, leaving businessmen with far less power over their enterprises than had been the case in prerevolutionary times.
Capitalism was by no means overturned. The FSLN leadership believed that the Nicaraguan economy would unavoidably remain tied to, and dependent upon, the world capitalist economy for some time to come—and that, with the refusal of the Brezhnev regime and of the Gorbachev regime in the USSR to provide massive aid, it would not be feasible to take the Cuban road of rapid and generalized nationalization of the economy. Given this reality, the functioning of the Nicaraguan economy would in large measure continue to be dependent on the willingness of at least some Nicaraguan capitalists (and also foreign companies) to be involved in maintaining their enterprises. This need to maintain a mixed economy introduced sharp contradictions in the policies of the Sandinista regime and in the life of the Nicaraguan people.
Ultimately, the leaders of the Nicaraguan Revolution believed its success depended on the spread of revolutions beyond the borders of Nicaragua. Sandinista spokesman Omar Cabezas explained in 1986 that his government was in fact trying “to buy time and give time to our brothers and sisters in Central America [and undoubtedly elsewhere] to deepen and advance their revolutionary movements…. The most important thing,” he stressed, “is to preserve power so that those [capitalist] socio-economic structures can be overturned at an appropriate time in the future; at a time [when] the objective and subjective conditions in Nicaragua and Central America are gathered.”17
The Contra War
Another feature of Nicaraguan economic life under the Sandinistas was the US government’s sustained assault on it. This included organizing and funding a massively destructive contra war, plus a nonmilitary legal opposition, in order to dislodge the Sandinistas. The US government also orchestrated a fairly effective effort to damage the economy through a blockade and the cessation of trade and assistance from many other countries and institutions that are part of the world capitalist economy. This, combined with the problems inherent in maintaining a mixed economy, increasingly eroded the quality of life of the masses of the people, as well as undermining the ability of the Sandinistas to maintain, let alone extend, the sweeping social reforms that had characterized the first years of the triumphant revolution.
Surveying the damage after Somoza’s overthrow, the World Bank had observed: “Per capita income levels of 1977 will not be attained, in the best of circumstances, until the late 1980s.” The World Bank initially recommended that “it would be highly desirable for the country to receive external assistance,” adding that “any untoward event could lead to a financial trauma.” The Reagan administration soon persuaded the World Bank to reverse its recommendation, and the administration also labored diligently to pile one “untoward event” upon another in order to traumatize the Nicaraguan economy.18
There was also the ongoing threat of a US military invasion, enhanced by official US statements as well as troop and fleet deployments in the region, and also by the successful US invasion of what had been the revolutionary island of Grenada. The Central Intelligence Agency oversaw the organization of a Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary army (the contras)—a project that by 1984 had absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars.
The contras, numbering more than ten thousand, had demonstrated (according to human rights organization Americas Watch) that they “were capable of controlling neither population nor territory for any significant period of time; they did not enjoy popular support, nor did they represent any serious threat to the stability of the Nicaraguan government.” Economic losses from the contra war totaled around $3 billion. By 1985 more than half of the Nicaraguan government’s budget was being diverted into defense spending. By 1984, more than 7,400 people had been killed. By 1990 the casualties had risen to almost forty thousand—including twenty thousand killed. The terror of contra operations was enhanced—in the words of the London-based Catholic Institute for International Relations—by “the torture and killing of civilians and the disgusting mutilations of the bodies of the victims.” The contras especially targeted social services—health, education, rural cooperatives—through which the FSLN had generated popular support.19
In addition to devastating economic losses and the terrible loss of life, there were widespread and profound physical and psychological injuries. The Nicaraguan government argued before the World Court that “the impact of such a policy on a small, impoverished nation is simply incalculable.” In fact, the World Court itself sharply criticized US policy: “The right to sovereignty and to political independence possessed by the Republic of Nicaragua, like any other state of the region or of the world, should be respected and should not in any way be jeopardized by any military and paramilitary activities which are prohibited by the principles of international law.”20 This resulted in the United States simply withdrawing from the World Court’s proceedings in righteous indignation.
There was considerable truth, however, to the World Court’s accusations. “We were a proxy army, directed, funded, receiving all intelligence and suggestions, from the CIA,” one contra leader, Edgar Chamorro, later commented. “We had no plan for Nicaragua, we were working for American goals.” Some US officials closest to contra operations complained, on the other hand, that contra leaders were “liars and greed and power motivated…. They are not the people to build a new Nicaragua.”21 But the point was not actually to build “a new Nicaragua.” The primary goal was simply to engineer the erosion of popular reforms, the decline of living standards, the implementation of unpopular military conscription, and possible restrictions on civil liberties, which in turn would increase popular discontent and dissent inside the country. A US diplomat summarized the purpose of the contra war this way:
The theory was that we couldn’t lose. If they took Managua, wonderful. If not, the idea was that the Sandinistas would react one of two ways. Either they’d liberalize and stop exporting revolution, which is fine and dandy, or they’d tighten up, alienate their own people, their international support and their backers in the United States, in the long run making themselves vulnerable. In a way, that one was even better—or so the idea went.22
From this standpoint, the US-perpetrated contra war—much of it carried on secretly, illegally, and in violation of decisions made by the US Congress—was quite effective.
The high-water mark of Sandinista strength and popularity was reached in 1984, as indicated by several realities: the proliferation of mass organizations, combined with their institutionalization and integration into a radical-democratic Council of State; the campaigns and policies to advance the health, educational, economic, and cultural benefits of the “social wage”; and the embrace of the democratic elections of 1984, which seemed to provide the FSLN with a decisive victory and mandate.
Yet amid the electoral enthusiasm there was a deepening political polarization leading to the erosion of FSLN alliances with growing sectors of the country’s sociopolitical culture. By the early 1980s, as already noted, there was a break with the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy that had, initially, been remarkably sympathetic to the Sandinista Revolution. The 1984 elections saw new breaks with political parties initially aligned with the FSLN—the Independent Liberal Party, the Progressive Social Christian Party, and the Nicaraguan Socialist Party. Even though the FSLN won a decisive electoral victory, a process had advanced that was destined to accelerate dramatically in coming years.
Also, as we have noted, this moment saw a dramatic escalation of US government hostility and a consequent intensification of the contra war, which would take an incredible toll on the country and destroy the initial socioeconomic gains of the 1979 Revolution. As these gains deteriorated, so did an important aspect of popular support for the FSLN.
Furthermore, there was a freeze and reversal of revolutionary developments in Central America and the Caribbean, on which the future of the revolution had depended. When the FSLN had swept to victory, there was also a revolutionary victory led by Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement on the small island of Grenada, and in El Salvador a revolutionary coalition, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), seemed similarly poised to replace an unpopular regime with radical and anticapitalist forms of “people’s power.” In 1983, however, there was a violent split in the New Jewel Movement leading to the shocking murder of Bishop and his closest comrades, creating sufficient confusion to allow a US military invasion of Grenada that established a pro-US regime. And throughout the 1980s, massive US military and economic aid were poured into El Salvador in sufficient measure to ensure a bloody stalemate in which the FMLN could not be defeated but also could not take power. On top of this, the late 1980s erosion and collapse of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe, ultimately culminating in the fall of the USSR, closed off possibilities of assistance from a once-significant adversary of US power.
There were, in addition, profound socioeconomic developments within Nicaragua that had an impact on FSLN prospects. We have noted that a process of proletarianization had led up to the 1979 revolution. By the late 1980s, an antithetical de-proletarianization process had been greatly advanced. This process involved some agricultural workers and impoverished peasants receiving land and shifting increasingly to a small-farmer mode of life and consciousness as opposed to a proletarian one. Also, the economic deterioration in the cities led to many workers losing their jobs and becoming more dependent on petty commercial activity through the informal sector. Indeed, the gains for the masses of the laboring poor that had been won in the 1979–84 period—improved health care, consumption, and living standards—were destroyed by inflation (which fluctuated between 1,000 and 37,000 percent), shortages, and austerity measures designed to shift resources toward economic revitalization. Increasingly, the inspiring rhetoric of the revolution began to seem empty.
The close connection between the government and the masses of working people dramatically eroded, and it was not only because of disappointment over deteriorating living conditions. To a large extent, the Sandinista-led mass organizations no longer remained instruments of popular expression but instead were used by the government to mobilize support for the war effort against the contras as well as contain militant class-struggle sentiments that could jeopardize relationships between the capitalists and the regime that were necessary for maintaining the mixed economy. Therefore, poor peasants might find the regime and the peasants’ union aligned in opposition to the peasants taking over the large estates of rich landowners. Workers might find their union repeating exhortations of the FSLN’s top leaders to demonstrate their patriotism and their loyalty to the revolution by working longer and harder, by avoiding strikes, by forgetting about wage increases, and so on.
The Sandinista regime seemed to feel that it could nonetheless keep the revolution on course, making necessary decisions and providing popular justifications for them, safeguarding (when appropriate) the radical principles that would once again be used to rally the people, and maintaining formal democratic trappings that—although not really giving power to the people—would be good for public relations. Despite all of the revolutionary rhetoric and all the formalized electoral machinery, the working masses were increasingly removed from meaningful decision-making.
The problem of verticalism—a top-down approach to governing—was not simply a product of the contra war. It was related to the top-down and undemocratic internal structure of the FSLN itself. Not long after the 1979 revolutionary victory, this approach created serious complications on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast regarding the new regime’s relations with indigenous peoples (the Miskito, Rama, and Suma peoples) and with Creole communities, which thereby created a base for contra activity. It also gradually eroded FSLN support among sectors of the peasantry, with similar effect. Verticalism also reared its head more than once in regard to women’s rights, with the all-male comandantes overruling the efforts of their feminist comrades in deference to conservative social and cultural pressures.
Verticalism inevitably played out in abuses of power, ranging from personal arrogance to bureaucratic mismanagement to outright corruption, with some leaders using their political authority to accumulate material privileges. Such practices were especially problematical in a political movement purporting to represent the notions of power to the people and social equality. To the growing extent that such developments manifested themselves, the morale, credibility, and popularity of the FSLN were bound to suffer.
As an apparent countervailing tendency, the FSLN leadership fostered a wide-ranging national discussion on the development of a new constitution designed to create a relatively traditional form of parliamentary democracy. In fact, this was at best a development with mixed intentions from the standpoint of actual “rule by the people.” It had already been preceded, in 1985, by the replacement of the Council of State, which was based on the visions of radical-democratic mass organizations—by a National Assembly consisting of representatives elected on a geographical rather than a class basis. This earlier development actually stemmed from the mass organizations having withered and become transmission belts for government policy rather than vibrant entities existing “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Harry Vanden and Gary Prevost, summarizing the work of a number of analysts, have argued that such traditional democratic forms as the National Assembly outlined in the new constitution are “only meaningful if real popular power lies below the form of representative democracy.”23 The gradual decline and evaporation of radical-democratic mass organizations threatened to give to Nicaraguan political life the same quality that characterizes the politics of many other allegedly democratic countries—expensive campaign glitziness, hollow sound-bite rhetoric, and politicians’ remoteness from genuine popular control.
The decline of the mass organizations of the initial revolutionary period also had the effect of tending to channel dissatisfaction with the status quo into those organizations that stood in opposition to the FSLN. In spite of this, the FSLN enjoyed greater popular support than any other party in the country. But by the 1990 presidential and parliamentary elections, fourteen other political parties—left, right, and center—had joined together in a broad coalition to vote the Sandinistas out: the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), with its attractive symbolic leader, Violeta Chamorro, running for president against the FSLN’s Daniel Ortega. It was no secret that the US government was intimately involved in supporting and advising UNO, and US leaders made it clear that if Chamorro won, US economic pressures and threats of military aggression would cease. An Ortega victory, it was made clear, would have the opposite effect.
The FSLN leadership was convinced that its legitimacy would be validated by holding elections in 1990, which—according to what turned out to be faulty opinion polls—the FSLN was widely expected to win. The cost of preparing and administering the elections exceeded $15 million, and the Sandinistas spent $7 million on a fancy campaign in an effort to compete with the UNO campaign that was financed not only by Nicaraguan business and oppositional sources but also by the US government, which spent $12.5 million. All of this stood in stark contrast to the impoverished conditions faced by a majority of Nicaraguans, contributing to growing popular alienation from the FSLN. A campaign poster showing FSLN leader Ortega holding a child and looking visionary proclaimed: “Everything Will Be Better.” More credible for many were such UNO assertions as “there will be no peace under a Sandinista government,” and “only UNO can end the economic crisis.”24
The election of February 25, 1990, brought an end to the revolutionary process that had culminated almost twelve years before. Although the FSLN leadership had expected yet another decisive victory, it was the UNO coalition that was swept into power. Chamorro secured 55 percent of the votes for president, with UNO taking fifty-one out of ninety-two seats in the National Assembly, and 102 of the country’s 131 municipal councils. The election returns found the Sandinistas reduced to 41 percent of the vote—a critical drop of 22 percent since 1984—with only thirty-nine National Assembly seats going to FSLN delegates.25
Aftermath of Revolutionary Defeat
The FSLN declared, in accepting the UNO victory, that it would “support the government’s positive steps” but promised “a firm and unwavering opposition to any measure intended to destroy [revolutionary] achievements and all that affects popular interests.” It also indicated an intention—through revitalized mass organizations—of “governing from below” and predicted that “the change of government in no way means the end of the revolution.”26 The UNO victory did bring an end to the contra war, as promised, but its market-oriented, neoliberal policies did not fulfill the deep desires of the Nicaraguan poor and laboring classes for economic improvement. This seemed to offer opportunities for a revitalized FSLN.
In 1991, the FSLN held the first democratic convention in its history, where a rhetorical consensus formed around a condemnation of verticalism, losing touch with the masses, undemocratic practices, arrogance, corruption, and so forth. At the same time, the Ortega brothers and others around them—who were targets of criticism for those universally condemned sins—successfully maintained control of the organization, with the deflection of critical discussion and organizational reforms resulting in a number of militants leaving the organization, some charging that the principles of Sandinismo had been betrayed. Along with this development, what remained of the mass organizations embarked to a dramatic degree on a trajectory of radical independence from FSLN control (although, as it turned out, they found it difficult to sustain themselves into the twenty-first century as independent entities).
Within the FSLN’s top echelon, leaders articulated divergent commitments to revolutionary socialism and to global capitalism (to be humanized by modest social reforms). When the diverse UNO coalition inevitably disintegrated, the FSLN moved to secure a practical political alliance with pro-capitalist technocrats around Violeta Chamorro. Despite its expressions of concern over the continued decline of social and economic conditions for the majority of the Nicaraguan people, the FSLN no longer represented a revolutionary alternative to the status quo (an alternative that seemed to be precluded by the new international situation of the 1990s). This continued to be so when the re-constituted Constitutional Liberal Party—headed by an extreme conservative and former Somocista, Arnoldo Alemán—won 50 percent of the vote and the presidency (compared with Daniel Ortega’s 38 percent of the vote). Alemán’s administration went further than Chamorro’s in reversing social and economic policies beneficial to the working masses, and it was marred by incredible corruption, yet the approach of the FSLN tended toward pragmatic accommodation. In fact, the Constitutional Liberals and FSLN, the country’s two largest parties, cooperated closely in marginalizing other political parties to their mutual benefit.
It cannot be argued, however, that the radical spirit of Sandinismo vanished from Nicaragua as the twentieth century was coming to an end. “Like social movements across the Americas, Nicaragua’s (formerly) Sandinista popular/mass organizations were adjusting to a reality characterized by the multiplication of social demands on an increasingly unresponsive state,” write scholarly observers Pierre La Ramée and Erica Polakoff. “Confronted by the neoliberal state and the inexorable rollback of the modest gains in social justice and development experienced during the 1980s … the leaders and activists of the popular organizations are … the true ‘Sandinistas’—the living legacy of the revolution, regardless of their current party affiliation.”27
In 1991, a surprisingly positive assessment of the Sandinista Revolution was offered by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, who had been a sharp critic of the Sandinistas for being “by many standards undemocratic” (although he acknowledged that they had “never resorted to the kind of savagery common in nearby countries” by regimes backed by the US government). His comments merit consideration in any evaluation of the revolution:
By destroying the repressive apparatus of the Somoza family, the Sandinistas at least provided a basis on which a genuine democracy could be built. They made it possible for Nicaraguans to go peacefully to the polls and choose the kind of government they wanted, something unthinkable in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. Had they done nothing more than that, they would deserve a place of historic importance.
Sandinista leaders could claim other successes as well. They encouraged Nicaraguans to take pride in their nationality and their heritage. They destroyed the rigid class structure that had confined Nicaraguans since time immemorial. And their policies … were based on the premise that government’s greatest responsibility was to the poor and dispossessed. No Nicaraguan regime to come, even the most avowedly anti-Sandinista, would be able to ignore those advances.28
It is likely, however, that there will be ambiguity about the legacy of the Sandinista Revolution as long as the fate of the poor and dispossessed remains unresolved.
II. Nicaragua in the Twenty-First Century (2015–17)
In the twenty-first century, the ambiguities about the legacy of the Sandinista Revolution have certainly increased, just as the fate of the poor and dispossessed have remained unresolved. Neither efforts by dissident Sandinistas to establish a substantial political presence nor the various mass organizations that some projected as “the living legacy of the revolution” have proved to be particularly durable. On the other hand, in a remarkable turnabout, after sixteen years of disappointment and suffering among the great majority of Nicaraguans, and after sixteen years of persistent organizing and shrewd maneuvering, Daniel Ortega’s FSLN took power in 2006 after he won the presidential elections with a 38 percent plurality. In his inaugural address, Ortega proclaimed “the second stage of the Sandinista revolution.” In the 2012 elections, the FSLN secured a 62 percent majority for the presidency, and a decisive majority of the seats in the National Assembly. “The Sandinista Revolution Continues!” read the headline of one news story. Another insisted: “Daniel Ortega Is a Sandinista in Name Only.”29
To find one’s way through the ambiguities, one must look at what happened to the revolutionary vanguard as well as at the underlying social and economic realities shaping Nicaragua’s destiny.
The New FSLN
The FSLN suffered serious of splits in the 1990s, as Daniel Ortega labored to reimpose a verticalist internal regime and realize his vision of retaking power and this time holding it. His orientation blended a rhetorical leftism with a ruthless pragmatism that could not afford or tolerate the internal debate and questioning inseparable from a truly democratic FSLN. Combined with this was what many saw as a material corruption related to “la piñata” (a slangy reference to a distribution of “goodies” and what one militant later termed “the original sin” of the defeated Sandinistas). After the 1990 electoral defeat, but before the FSLN government stepped down, there was a debate inside the upper circles of the FSLN. Should they be prepared to defend the state and cooperative property, initially created through confiscations from wealthy contras (valued at $1.5 billion), from a now-inevitable privatization to be inaugurated by the incoming Chamorro government? Or should they transfer as much property as possible to leading FSLN personnel? The second course was followed, justified by a rationale that the property would be transferred to the FSLN itself for safekeeping until a revolutionary regime returned to power (a plan never realized, as it turned out). The enriched pragmatists around Ortega also “assumed that in order to survive the Sandinistas had to employ the same means and morality as their opponents,” as one critical comrade later put it. In the face of all this, there were brushed-aside protests, flurries of angry resignations, and waves of expulsions, through which a new FSLN was forged.30 Some of the most prominent FSLN dissidents formed the MSR (San-dinista Renovation Movement) but, suffering from a lack of political clarity, they proved unable to build a coherent force—not able to “recruit the poor, the peasants, the workers, nor mount a significant electoral challenge.” Such were the observations of Orlando Nuñez, who made his peace with Ortega and for whom he became a prominent ideologue. The bitterness among anti-Ortega Sandinistas was no substitute for a clear political program. After several ineffectual years attempting to orient to the FSLN from the outside, the MSR moved in the direction of forming alliances with forces that had been longtime Sandinista foes (including some fairly conservative groups, such as the Independent Liberal Party), which caused some militants to pull away. As it turned out, the Ortega-led FSLN would make compromising alliances no less dramatic, but they showed more impressive results than those shown by the dwindling MSR.31
As Nuñez noted, it was Ortega’s organization, with its mass base and substantial resources, that proved capable of actually vying for power. But this was certainly not the force that had made the 1979 revolution. Veteran FSLN militant Mónica Baltodano, who broke both from and the FSLN and the MSR, explains: “The FSLN itself is just an electoral franchise. Nicaragua no longer has an organization of revolutionaries with critical thinking, a leftist organization. This particular mutation has been very profound: the autocrat has used money to subject the leaders of the past and present, making them submissive.” The internationally renowned revolutionary writer Eduardo Galeano would refer to the Ortega’s FSLN loyalists as those “who were once capable of risking their life [but] are now incapable of risking their positions.” Baltodano concludes: “With that they liquidated the philosophy and ethics of Carlos Fonseca, who had proclaimed ethics as a heritage handed down by Sandino to the FSLN leaders.”32
A Strategy for Taking and Keeping Power
Yet Ortega and those around him definitely had a multifaceted plan for retaking—and retaining—power. And in this he proved more astute and capable than critics from the left and the right. As Sergio Ramírez, FSLN vice president in the revolutionary “good old days,” wistfully mused, “Ortega outsmarted us all.”33
One facet of the plan involved an understanding of the nature and dynamics of the bourgeois opposition that would replace the FSLN government, and the negative achievements of which it would be capable once it took power, reversing FSLN policies that had been beneficial to substantial numbers of Nicaraguans. Maintaining the FSLN’s organization and its mass organizations would be essential for taking advantage of the popular dissatisfaction resulting from such negative achievements. But it would also be necessary—and possible—to reach out to elements within this opposition, and to elements of the opposition’s own base, to bring shifts in the constellation of power within the country. Such shifts would allow the return of an FSLN government. The policies of such a new FSLN government must build greater popular support, either by including or neutralizing old enemies. Crucial for the regime’s survival in a capitalist world would involve being adept at playing on contradictions and complexities within that world and adapting fully (in a manner incompatible with the old Marxism initially prevalent within the FSLN) to capitalism itself.
After the FSLN government was turned out in 1990, Ortega and his co-thinkers foresaw that the governments of the old bourgeois political parties would not fare well. There were three succeeding governments: the ineffectual UNO coalition of Violeta Chamorro, the fantastically corrupt regime of Arnoldo Alemán of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), and finally the administration of Enrique José Bolaños. This third government, headed by the man who had served as Alemán’s vice president, went after Alemán for being corrupt—which resulted in Bolaños being kicked out of the PLC. In 2004 he formed the Alianza por la República (APRE, Alliance for the Republic) a politically unsuccessful formation that aligned with the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN) in the 2006 elections but went down to defeat as Ortega’s FSLN once again swept into office.
Chuck Kaufman of the pro-FSLN Nicaragua Network can certainly be expected to give a hostile summary of the sixteen-year period of non-FSLN rule: “Free education and health were eliminated. Public employee jobs were cut to the bone. The backbone of Nicaragua’s economy, peasant farming, was starved for lack of government credit. The result was displaced farmers and desperate families who served to provide cheap labor for foreign sweatshops.” As another critic commented, for the rich there were “free trade zones, malls and motorways”; for the poor, “illiteracy, malnutrition and disease.” The Guardian’s Rory Carroll, hardly an Ortega fan, offers a succinct description of these wretched years: “Corruption blossomed and the poor were forgotten. Jobs were scarce and most people scrabbled on less than $2 a day.” A line from an Ortega campaign speech resonated widely: “We’ve had 16 years of these democratic governments, and what have they given us? They’ve turned us into beggars! They’ve plundered the people and robbed from our youth.”34
Ortega’s FSLN—with its old revolutionary rhetoric, its residual presence in sectors of the state apparatus, its continuing control of many of the old mass organizations, and its mass voting base—was able to pose as representing a credible alternative. But it was not interested in a repetition of the earlier scenario in which its enemies would join in a coalition to once more turn it out of power. “By forging alliances with his former enemies,” Stephen Kinzer noted, “he has built a regime that appears likely to remain in power for a long time.” Especially important were increasingly effective efforts to win over the traditionalist hierarchy of the Catholic Church (embracing the infusion into the political discourse of a relatively conservative Christianity with a “pro-family” social agenda that strictly banned all abortions, opposed gay marriage, and so forth). Persistent bridge-building with former contras, from the poorest peasant to the wealthiest landowner, became another priority. The FSLN also prioritized making three deals with the PLC: (1) to adopt legislation marginalizing political forces aside from the FSLN and PLC; (2) to protect Alemán from paying the price for his immense corruption, while protecting Ortega from being prosecuted for the sexual abuse of his own stepdaughter; and (3) to carry out far-reaching constitutional reforms that would make it easier—eventually—for the FSLN to win elections and enhance its power when in government. And the message was conveyed to the business community (including in the United States) that not only would the FSLN regime have no intention of overthrowing capitalism, but it would also accept the strictures of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and foster a business-friendly climate.35
Social Reform in a Capitalist World
The other key to maintaining power was shoring up the FSLN’s mass base. When Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007, his government’s policies evolved along several tracks that greatly enhanced its chances for survival. One involved continuing the orientation of either winning over enemies or marginalizing them, of course. But no less important was carrying through, in modest but meaningful ways, on the radical-populist promise that had been embedded in the Sandinista program from the beginning. Even sharp critics acknowledged that Ortega’s government “has made some progress in addressing the needs of the poor. Examples in the areas of education and health include reducing the illiteracy and infant mortality rates, and providing free access to health care.” A more supportive Katherine Hoyt emphasized “the provision of food, transport and energy subsidies for the poor. With free school meals, these have allowed Nicaragua to reduce malnutrition,” assertions backed by more than one observer. Hoyt also reported that infrastructure projects “have included the construction and improvement of 6,000 kilometres of roads and new bridges connecting the Pacific and Caribbean coasts,” and that “much work has also gone into improving water systems, providing clean water to hundreds of thousands of people.”36
Maurice Lemoine reported “tens of thousands of poor Nicaraguans given 854,000 sheets of zinc by the government to mend their leaky roofs,” adding that hundreds of Managua residents benefitted as well from a dignified housing project that built affordable homes in place of the ruins left from the 1972 earthquake. He also told the story of Yaira Mayorga, who used to live in the ruins of an old building. “She and 360 neighbors, nearly one-quarter of whom say they are ‘non-Sandinistas,’ now have real homes: ‘Look at my beautiful house!’ she said.” He also cited the case of Rosalia Suárez, “one of the 80,000 female beneficiaries of the Zero Hunger plan who was given a cow, a pig and six hens: ‘My cow has already had two calves. I sell the milk we don’t drink, my children have eggs to eat … Before that, we had nothing.’” Lemoine pointed to “the many women, including single mothers, who have used zero-interest loans to set up bakeries, small businesses selling nacatamales (stuffed corn cakes) or tortillas, or establish cooperatives.” Although there have been charges of voting irregularities that have contributed to the dramatic rise in FSLN election totals, there was also an obvious feeling on the part of many working-class and peasant voters that the government is on their side.37
“The strength of this regime lies in the country’s poverty,” one critical observer, Arturo Cruz, noted, adding that Ortega has become “a father figure for the campesinos—he can resolve their needs.” Often this adds up to “knowing how to distribute the scarcities with more abundance than other politicians.” In chronically impoverished Nicaragua, expectations among the majority are modest. “It can be resolved for many people with a few pieces of roofing tin and a handful of nails. The voter thinks, ‘Now I won’t get wet.’ And when it rains he thinks of Ortega.”38
At the same time, Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo (a political force in her own right), openly and ostentatiously present themselves as devout Catholics, interweaving Catholic social teachings (including prohibition of all abortions) with other pronouncements and policies. “These days, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, an old opponent from the Reagan years, appears alongside Ortega and Murillo in public, blessing whatever they do,” notes journalist Jon Lee Anderson. One FSLN cadre in Managua, Lucy Vargas, observes: “In many countries, abortion is not restricted, but they don’t look after women and children’s health, and many of them die. Here, we help women, if only by providing free healthcare.” A former FSLN official adds: “The conservative peasants who thirty years ago may well have shouted ‘Long live Reagan’ may today shout ‘Viva Ortega.’”39
The Reagan-Bush governments of the United States had previously undermined and blocked—“by any means necessary”—Sandinista financial ability to implement such beneficial policies, a hostile goal decisively achieved with the collapse of the USSR and Communist bloc. Despite continuing US hostility, however, a shifting international situation now opened up new financial lifelines that made possible the sweeping social reforms. While US global power is still quite strong, new developments have brought relative decline. The global economic downturn and crisis in the first decade of the twenty-first century, combined with increasing competitive dynamics among the most powerful capitalist countries, have certainly contributed to the decrease of US hegemony, as have disastrous and debilitating military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Within this new context, leftist insurgencies in Latin America caused a number of left-nationalist governments to take power and to form a new political-economic power bloc, initiated by Cuba and Venezuela—the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). Russia under Vladimir Putin, as well as Iran and (before its overthrow) the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya, provided additional potential allies in the global arena. Especially important was the People’s Republic of China, which had now become a universally acknowledged world power of the first rank and a keystone of the global capitalist economy. Not only did this new international reality provide space within which Ortega’s FSLN could reconquer and hold power in Nicaragua, but especially thanks to the oil-rich and radical Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, an annual $500 million of life-giving aid could now flow to the Ortega regime, making possible the economic projects and social programs generating such widespread popular support.40
This was supplemented by a proliferation of foreign investors whose interest in making profits in Nicaragua would generate further development that allowed for the uptick in the country’s economy. This was possible because the Ortega regime—despite its oft-repeated slogan of “Cristiana, Socialista, y Solidaria” (Christianity, Socialism, and Solidarity)—had committed itself fully and intimately to a pathway of capitalist development. A central “pillar of the new regime is big business,” writes Stephen Kinzer. “As an anticapitalist revolutionary, Ortega had confiscated hundreds of farms, factories and other assets. Many businessmen fled the country. Now Ortega counts them among his closest allies. He recently pushed a tax law through Congress giving a host of concessions to the wealthiest Nicaraguans and foreign investors. One provision allows the tax-free importation of yachts and executive helicopters. The flood of foreign investors now includes behemoths such as Cargill, the agro-industrial conglomerate that recently unveiled a ‘master plan’ aimed at making it one of Nicaragua’s major food producers and distributors.”41
Traveling on the Capitalist Road
Mónica Baltodano notes that “the economic pragmatism shown by the FSLN with respect to privatizations and neoliberal policies was fully displayed” from the beginning of Ortega’s return to office, with a “rapprochement process with the other pillar of national power: the heads of big business grouped under the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) umbrella,” involving an acceptance of privatization and neoliberal policies. She insists that it is “a symbiosis rather than an alliance because what defines the nature of the current regime is that its main mission is to create or strengthen the market economy conditions, buttressing big capital, while handing out crumbs to the poor to keep them pacified.”42
Daniel Ortega’s speeches are sometimes peppered with anticapitalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric. Yet his brother Humberto (onetime guerrilla fighter and FSLN minister of defense) has cautioned that people shouldn’t pay too much attention to this, because “one thing is discourse for the political clients, and another thing is what the reality shows you are doing.” Policies of the new FSLN, according to critics from the left, have in fact involved far-reaching adaptations to neoliberalism, highlighted early in the party’s reascension by two indicators: “First, the FSLN did not oppose a free trade agreement when it was negotiated by President Bolaños, and did not attempt to reject or renegotiate it once it took office in 2006. Second, while the Ortega government has received massive financial support from Venezuela, it has channeled it through the Sandinista business sector rather than through the state.” Observers friendly to the FSLN have noted the same thing: “Foreign investors and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank cannot fault the way Nicaragua has been governed over the last five years. The private sector—which includes some very rich Sandinista entrepreneurs, among them Ortega—has been favored. It has even been able to take advantage of the government’s strategic decisions: by joining ALBA and turning to South America, the government has opened up new markets.” José Adán Aguerri, president of the big-business confederation Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada (COSEP—Superior Council on Private Enterprise) noted approvingly that “there is not a single law that the Sandinista government has passed that has not been consulted on first with us in the private sector,” adding that in terms of “non-intervention in the private sector,” Ortega’s government “is ranked No. 8 in the world.” Tax policies, too, favor the wealthy: leftist critic Mónica Baltodano notes that fiscal policy is still regressive, based on indirect taxes, “which basically punish the poor and middle classes, while the wealthiest are privileged with exonerations and exemptions.”43
As early as 2006, one conservative observer, Emilio Álvarez Montalván, commented with grudging admiration: “Ortega has turned his movement into a buffet lunch and everyone is invited: conservatives and radicals, Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas, pro-Americans and anti-Americans,” adding that “the essential question people are asking themselves is if Daniel Ortega has really changed.” One man who decided that perhaps he had “really changed” was Jaime “the Godfather” Morales, a wealthy former contra leader whose luxurious home had been confiscated for Ortega’s personal use and who became Ortega’s vice president, serving from 2006 to 2012. This unlikely alliance was explained by FSLN leaders as part of a policy of “reconciliation,” although another old adversary of Ortega’s, Edén Pastora, observed that “reconciliation is just a synonym for opportunism.” Pastora had been a prominent Sandinista up to 1982—then, in opposition to the revolution’s radicalization, went into armed opposition, joining the contras. (He was the famous target of a failed FSLN assassination attempt in which a bomb killed and maimed a number of aides and journalists.) By 2010, however, he also reconciled with Ortega and took a position in the government, admiringly commenting (with special reference to a major business deal with the Chinese): “None of the previous Presidents had Daniel Ortega’s hormones. Strength and political ability are needed to carry out the job.”44
One critic of the regime has argued that “the FSLN has economic interests in various sectors of the economy: tourism, construction, financial sector, agricultural production, trade, services and petroleum products, among others. This has facilitated it [in] reaching agreements with Nicaragua’s traditional big capital and leading families, which has undermined the transformative potential of the FSLN.” But this hardly captures the full extent of what has happened. Baltodano, writing in 2014, noted that 8 percent of the Nicaraguan population control 46 percent of the country’s wealth and that the number of multimillionaires has been growing—from 180 to 190 between 2012 and 2013 alone. These multimillionaires include prominent FSLN figures, although some argue that their business success is nothing to be ashamed of. “If there is a free market, there needs to be a system in which people are free to get rich, so the poor can stop being poor, so the poor can become middle class and the middle class can become business owners and be better off,” insists Humberto Ortega. Having broken the economic stranglehold of a small ruling class, he adds, the Sandinistas can become vital “new actors” in today’s modern free-market economy. Not all Sandinistas are millionaires, of course, although salaries among the upper levels of the FSLN are significantly higher than the incomes of the common worker. “Roberto Rivas, the head of the Supreme Electoral Council, earns more than 17 times what the average Nicaraguan worker does,” points out Alejandro Gutiérrez. “Paradoxically, Orlando Nuñez, chief architect of Ortega’s anti-hunger and anti-poverty programs, earns 12 times the salary of the average Nicaraguan.”45
The implications of what is described here go far beyond a simple contradiction between the old Sandinista and socialist ideals and present-day realities of inequality. As Baltodano notes, “Ortega and his group are with big capital because they themselves are now an important capitalist group and the government represents its community of interests with the traditional oligarchy and transnational capital.” But she goes on to point to the more essential aspect of the new reality:
The leaders of the big businesses affiliated with COSEP, who congratulate themselves for having gotten five years of salary agreements that benefit them, 68 laws by consensus and 39 models of public-private alliances in these seven years of the Ortega government … don’t say a word about the interests of the workers, peasants, small and medium businesses or the middle classes among all these accomplishments. So we can see that the “bourgeois State” has been consolidated and the state institutions are obeying the logic of capital.
The phrase I have italicized here has profound importance. Baltodano acidly notes that “the wealthiest are obtaining the greatest benefits of this ‘Christian, socialist and solidary’ model.” But she also acknowledges that the sincere defenders of the current FSLN (foreign supporters plus a strong residue of sincere and idealistic cadres in Nicaragua) are certainly describing reality when they argue that “there are benefits for the poor.” Yet these gains are built on sand, given the logic of capital that guides the economy. “The private sector generates 96% of the GDP,” she notes (which is “totally the opposite of the Sandinista revolution’s project, in which the public sector was hegemonic”). The state’s institutions are controlled by a layer of bourgeoisified “Sandinistas” who are interlinked with a national and transnational bourgeoisie. “A symbiosis between them [is] based on the interests of the ‘free’ market, which prohibits, rejects or fights any regulation.” Which means that the new FSLN has established a government “incapable of promoting a socialized vision of the economy.”46
After taking power in the twenty-first century, the Ortega regime was able to rely on vital and generous support from the leftist government of Venezuela, allowing for modest but meaningful reforms that secured a mass base sufficient for mobilizing the votes to keep the regime in power—at least for a time. Not only were there no guarantees about the permanence of this arrangement, however, but the death of Hugo Chavez and the growth of problems and instabilities in Venezuela raised questions about the future.
Some feel this has given urgency to the remarkable push by the Ortega government to undertake an immense project of building a new Nicaraguan Canal. The waterway, running between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and rivaling the Panama Canal, is projected for completion in 2019. With support from the Nicaraguan and Chinese governments, an agreement was signed in 2013 by Daniel Ortega and Wang Jing, president of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND). The terms of the agreement guarantee Nicaragua receipt of $1 million each year beginning immediately, and also receipt of 10 percent ownership in the company each decade for fifty years, at which time it would own 51 percent of the canal, with the original agreement up for renewal for another half-century. In a 2013 statement, an HKND spokesman explained the anticipated results of the canal in this way: “Nicaragua will become by far the richest country in Central America—and that will affect the entire region. Investment in this project is three to four times the GDP of Nicaragua, there will be an effect of full employment and prosperity.” Multiple questions have been raised—regarding the canal’s technical feasibility, actual profitability, and environmental impact, as well as (especially because of lack of transparency) what is or is not being given away to the Chinese investors. Defenders of the FSLN have responded: “Opposition parties, including those of former Sandinistas, are scared to death that the FSLN will continue to increase employment and decrease poverty. They are concerned that development spurred by the canal will increase the FSLN’s popularity and further marginalize their own electoral ambitions.”47
One relatively conservative opponent, Antonio Lacayo, once a senior official in the Chamorro regime, has offered a fairly negative analysis:
Daniel can see the disaster that is coming in Venezuela. So he looks around. It’s not a long list: there’s Russia, China, Iran. With Iran, there was nothing to get. From Russia, he got some buses and some reconnaissance planes. So Daniel decides to attract China to Nicaragua—to “defend” it from the U.S., and to contribute economically. How does he do it? By offering the Chinese a hundred-year concession to do whatever they want.48
Edén Pastora, on the other hand, argues that the benefits will be transformative:
The opposition calls it a surrendering of national sovereignty, but investors need security for their investment. And not a single foreign soldier is coming to Nicaragua! What really bothers them is the prestige that this signifies for Daniel Ortega. Keep in mind: this will change the economy of the world. The natural resources won’t have to go around Cape Horn anymore, but come straight through here to China, on megaships! There will be two-hundred-ton trucks doing earthmoving and specialized drivers earning a thousand dollars a day! … There are going to be railroads, refineries, satellites, hydroelectric plants, airports, and over thirty-seven social projects—all of it achieved in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy, without even so much as a tear-gas cannister fired, without persecuting anybody. In five years, Managua will be a canal city, the most beautiful of Central America.49
It remains to be seen whether the sort of Marxist analysis articulated by Mónica Baltodano can be made irrelevant by the projected wonders of the canal. Of course, she is still animated by the Sandinista vision of old:
We Sandinistas struggled to give workers and peasants direct control of the wealth so they could manage it and grow, develop and be subjects of their own transformation. What we have now is a compassionate socialism, in which things are done for the poor through charity, with gifts or handouts that link grassroots religiosity to power, like the long lines of the poorest people before the Púrisima altars where the government gives them some food. The slight reduction of poverty that some indicators point to has been achieved with programs that allow the poor to receive something immediately: sheets of zinc roofing, farm animals, seeds … but that doesn’t imply any in-depth transformation of the material conditions in which they live so they’ll stop being poor.50
Yet in the present moment, there are no longer significant forces mobilized around the vision to which Baltodano gives voice. Journalist Jon Lee Anderson suggests that in the new Nicaragua, “past allegiances, even mortal rivalries, mean nothing; the only important things seem to be power and profit.” He describes a discussion he had with Victor Tirado López, one of the old FSLN comandantes: “Of the Sandinista revolution, there is nothing left—just projects that were unfinished,” Tirado said. “If it hadn’t been for us, there wouldn’t be this new epoch, this new country. But the ideology—the Marxism and all that—that’s history; it’s over.” Baltodano agrees: “Critical thinking—Marxism, which was the ‘intellectual sword’ of Sandinismo, to evoke Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase—has been replaced with the most corroded religious ideas.”51
The Regime Today
The global performance of capitalism in the twenty-first century seems to militate against stability, certainty, and harmony. And there remain those inequalities and consequent tensions between the “haves” and the “have-nots” that have been intensifying in so many countries. Is it some sense of these inequalities—the potential source of challenges to his authority—that troubles Daniel Ortega? Or is it the old bad memories of losing power in 1990? Or is it a compulsive pragmatism preventing him from simply relying on the popularity that a plan for a new canal generates, with the promise of increasing employment and decreasing poverty? Whatever the motivation, he has consistently sought to firm up control. Mónica Baltodano has described the process this way:
In recent years we’ve witnessed both the annihilation of organizations that don’t subordinate themselves, and the proscription of the Left. At the same time the rightwing leaders have been reduced by their own errors and limitations or by the manipulation of the electoral and judicial apparatuses Ortega controls. Whatever the cause, they no longer exist. They’ve been unable to put together any alternative force in recent elections. What exists in Nicaragua today is a single party, the party of perks and divvying-up power, of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” in which it no longer even matters who wins. Those willing to play can sit at the same table. What exists is the determination to proscribe the emergence of any leftist party or parties, any party that could promote an alternative project.52
Maneuvering to control the judiciary, to establish greater integration of the military into his regime, and to push through sweeping reforms that will enshrine the canal deal with China into the constitution, while also clearing the way for him to run for presidency as many times as he wants—all these moves have created considerable discontent among those who are not FSLN loyalists.53
Another former FSLN leader from the revolutionary days, Dora Maria Tellez, elaborates:
Today all the institutions have collapsed because President Ortega wants to be re-elected perpetually. His ambition for eternal power has brought about the collapse of judicial power, which has collapsed not only institutionally but ethically as well. None of the magistrates who are there is credible as a judge, because they are all political arms of Ortega or Alemán. Who could believe a judge who endorses a caudillo’s positions? This supreme court has collapsed institutionally and ethically. The comptroller as well. The human rights prosecutor also. With his lust for re-election, Ortega has forced the principles of the country into an abyss and now he is doing everything possible to buy votes so he can have a majority for changing the constitution for the purpose of permitting him to stay in power.54
Even Humberto Ortega (retired from politics, now concentrating on his memoirs and his businesses) has expressed uneasiness that his brother’s government has become too “closed and authoritarian.” It is time, in his opinion, for what he terms the “political class” to “sit down and sort this out.” He warns: “If we lose all sense of law and order and respect for institutional authority, then none of the important macroeconomic advances we have made here will mean anything.”55
The “important macroeconomic advances” that the old general (despite tactical and rhetorical differences) values fully as much as his brother—the integration of the regime’s policies with the interests of big capital—are seen in a different light by an erstwhile comrade such as Mónica Baltodano, who yearns for the revolutionary democracy of genuine socialism.
Unlike the Ortegas, she has never moved away from the vision that motivated her when the FSLN was a revolutionary organization. While many FSLN members and supporters see Ortega’s government as representing a variant of the left, this is not how she and others like her see it. “This is not a leftist government,” argues her like-minded comrade, Dora Maria Tellez. “It is a rightist populist government. Their principal ally is large-scale capital. Their policies have favored Nicaraguan capital, the concentration of capital in a few hands, the creation of a cloak of corruption in the country. This is a rightist government. The poor are still poor, as in Nicaragua of 2006.”56
Comparisons have been made by some critics between the old Somoza regime and that of Ortega. “Ortega grew up under the dictatorship of the Somoza family, which endured for 40 years through the rule of a father and two sons,” writes Stephen Kinzer. “As a Sandinista leader, Ortega helped destroy this corrupt dynastic system. Now he is emulating it, turning into just the kind of pro-business autocrat he spent years of his life fighting.” Other critics take issue with this. “The Nicaragua of today still is not a dictatorship like we had when we confronted Somoza, who had closed all democratic space and forced us to take up arms and employ violence against the regime,” insists Humberto Ortega. “We need to know how to respond in an appropriate manner to authoritarian expressions, which all power has to one degree or another.” Baltodano agrees: “I don’t believe this is a regime that can be catalogued as a dictatorship as it is today. Much less should we catalog it as a dictatorship that’s worse than the Somoza one. In my view, when we say things like that it weakens our discourse and our critique.” She adds, importantly: “I do believe it’s an authoritarian regime with a dictatorial ambition and dictatorial actions. And I believe it could become a dictatorship. All the steps Ortega and his followers are taking are leading toward a dictatorial regime.”57
It is Baltodano who seems to have articulated the most incisive and balanced analysis of the Ortega regime, from which it is worth quoting at length. There are four features, in her view, that must be grasped:
First feature. We aren’t in any second stage of the revolution, as FSLN spokes-people would have us believe. No transformations are being implemented to put us on the road to a system of social justice. To the contrary, a social-economic regime has been strengthened in which the poor are condemned, like never before, to eke out a living in informal, precarious self-employed jobs, work long hours for miserable wages or migrate to other countries in search of work. If they’re at all lucky, they can look forward to pathetic retirement pensions, if they ever hold a formal job long enough to be eligible. We’re talking about a regime of social inequity with an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of small groups.
Second feature. The country’s subordination to capital’s global logic has been intensified. Almost without our realizing it, our country is being turned over to large transnational corporations and foreign capital in general, which come to exploit our natural wealth or take advantage of our cheap labor force, as is happening in the free trade zones. The most pathetic case of this logic of handing over the country and its resources is the concession for the construction of an interoceanic canal, but many other mining, forestry and energy generating concessions have been made to foreign companies all over the country.
Third feature. Such a social-economic system needs to do away with social resistance and the Ortega regime is accomplishing that by exercising severe social control. It controls the unions, producer and professional associations and grassroots organizations, facilitating the alienation of those sectors, which would otherwise be inclined to resist were they not under the impression we are being governed by a leftist revolutionary party.
Fourth feature. An unconscionable concentration of power has been taking place in the clique surrounding Ortega and his wife, Rosario (“Chayo”) Murillo. It’s a process of expansion and growth that in our judgment still hasn’t topped out. It threatens to destroy every vestige of democratic institutionality, as there’s no force even able to slow it much less halt it right now.58
Future Struggles?
It is impossible to know how Nicaraguan realities will unfold in the coming years and decades. It seems unlikely—given the complexities and contradictions of global capitalism, and how they are apt to combine with Nicaraguan realities—that the Ortega regime can secure the permanence for which it seems to be striving. Inevitably there will be crises and struggles. The nature of those struggles, and their outcome, cannot be predicted at this moment. Former Sandinista militant Silvia Torres, commenting on “internal fractures” within the FSLN, notes that her old organization “has displaced the old guerrilla militancy in favor of young people … with very little understanding of history and no class positions, along with the alianza with big capital.” She adds: “In the case of the peasantry and the workers, the Sandinista Front abandoned its representation. The only alliance that stands firm is the one it maintains with the big businessmen organized in the COSEP, with whom the government consults all its economic policies.” Struggle for change in the FSLN’s “anti-poor policies, and its relationship with the financial oligarchy and transnational capital,” according to Torres, “is being organized and led from the periphery.” She adds that “civil society organizations and representatives of some political parties support this mobilization,” but admits that such efforts “at the moment do not show a medium-term resolution.” It will take time.59
This matches Baltodano’s view that “there are no organized political forces with a social base capable of resisting this [Ortega] project in a holistic way.” She adds that the “transformations the country needs aren’t going to come from” elements among the Nicaraguan Liberal parties. “They’ll come from the Sandinistas as a whole, from that mass forged in a quarter century of struggle against the Somocista dictatorship, ten years of revolution and all these years of resistance.” This is a point she returns to again and again. “That’s where the transforming potential is, even though many of these people are working with Ortega today, are employees of his government or have to go to his traffic-circle rallies to keep their job.” Arguing with some of her fellow dissidents, she stresses: “There’s potential there, but there are some messages that don’t get through to that potential. We have to be able to find the right messages to get through to them and make them think. We have to be there, close to those people.”60
The force capable of bringing the kind of solution Baltodano wants to see can be built and mobilized, she is convinced, by those who “unravel and unfold flags, values and ideals of those who gave everything for justice and freedom.” Insisting that “there’s no possibility of a progressive solution in Nicaragua without taking the Sandinista grass roots into account and without the banners of the Sandinista ideology and vision,” she argues—here addressing the position of onetime comrades such as Humberto Ortega and Victor Tirado López—that “it is not true that the cause of revolutionary transformation is now a goal for which there is no point fighting,” adding “whenever we see a greater concentration of wealth, greater injustice, violence against women, destruction of the environment, capital wants to destroy everything … you have to keep fighting.”61
She calls for “an alternative project with a medium- and long-term strategy,” and with “an identity and a clear progressive profile that’s clear about its objectives, those that are vital for Nicaragua, its people and democracy.” It is necessary to build “a force that rejects caudillo logic and insists on educating the people to turn popular conscience into a material force for change.” Such a force (1) “can’t be at the mercy of short-term electoral interests or subjected to utilitarian alliances” and (2) cannot have its focus restricted to “denouncing how the institutional foundations of a dictatorship are being constructed, how political rights and the law are being violated.”62
On this second point, she notes, “There’s a disassociation between struggle and the denunciation of these big political issues, which don’t seem to interest people, don’t mobilize them, because they feel remote from the major daily issues that do interest them and make them victims of this regime.” The regime’s “pragmatism and accommodation can only be confronted by taking up the struggles in response to social problems, linking the social problems to the big political issues such as the constitutional reforms, the canal concession.” She points to the FSLN’s revolutionary experience:
The original links we worked on to get people convinced they had to struggle against the Somocista dictatorship began with social problems. We were among the people, with the people. We have to identify what government measures are disappointing and frustrating people and accompany them until some victory is achieved. Because achieving something reaffirms the awareness and conviction that the way to progress is by being organized and united.63
Baltodano clearly sees differences between (a) Oretega’s FSLN regime, (b) the actual FSLN organization, and (c) the FSLN base. “This regime, based on concentrating wealth in few hands and bestowing advantages on the transnationals, is generating a lot of contradictions.” On the other hand, within the organization there are different elements. Some still adhere to and attempt to act upon the old ideals—they are “good people” who “firmly believe that they are making the revolution, and are doing very good things for their community.” Others are firmly ensnared by the opportunism and authoritarianism of the regime and “are little party bosses, little caudillos.” At the same time, “contradictions are emerging within the Sandinista base,” with some beginning to “see the authoritarianism operating in their barrio, community and workplace.” In her opinion, “the day will come when that guy who’s now satisfied with the 10 sheets of zinc roofing they gave him is going to start asking why he’s supposed to be grateful for them” while, at the same time, the “upper echelons are living like millionaires. That day will come, just as the moment always comes in humanity in which the oppressed ask themselves if the oppression they’re suffering is fair.”64
Those adhering to the revolutionary organization that Baltodano envisions serve the function of patiently building around a long-term political program, rather than around some pragmatic and electoral quick-fix. They must grapple with the underlying problems: “We need to work on them, revealing, thinking about, analyzing and explaining them.” This can happen by “energizing people to express their frustrations through struggle in the social movements. Connections have to be built between the social problems that concern people and the political issues.” At one point she emphasizes: “We have to foment indignation. We need to organize indignation. Because it will not happen here on its own…. We need to organize it in the neighborhoods and communities…. There are circumstances that cannot be predicted, but they trigger a social explosion,” she says. “The idea is to be organized and ready for when it happens.”65
Such generalizations have defined the approach of revolutionary Marxist groups in many countries for many years. It remains to be seen how effectively and successfully they can be applied in Nicaragua as the twenty-first century continues to unfold.