"History ends up looking like private
property,
whose owners are the owners of everything else." Rodolfo Walsh(1)
Over the next few months the new coalition government in Nicaragua
will begin to implement programmes to try and redress the
immiseration of Nicaragua's people imposed by 16
years of corporate crony-capitalism. In January this year, the
administration led by Daniel
Ortega took over a government ransacked by their predecessors in the
crudest possible way. This was only to be expected of the regime under
former President
Bolaños who had been Vice President to Arnoldo Aleman throughout
the kleptocracy they both supervised between 1996 and 2001. But
one hears no condemnation from North American or European governments
or their corporate media of the Bolaños' "piñata".
After they lost the election in 1990, that was the term used to
denigrate the Sandinista Front for
National Liberation's frantic attempt
to compensate thousands of functionaries and workers facing poverty
and unemployment after a decade of service and sacrifice. It was
also an
attempt to try and keep hold of resources they believed would only be
divvied up between the various factions of the incoming oligarchy. On
that latter score, events proved their fears to be all too justified.
Now the thoroughgoing corruption of the Bolaños administration
is available for all to see. But this embarrassing reality has
been kept very quiet by the foreign
governments who consistently and fatuously praised the Bolaños
administration
for its commitment to root out corruption.
It has long been the case
that the governments and international financial institutions that talk
loudest
about
anti-corruption tend to be the very ones that promote corruption in the
first
place.
Policies of privatization, deregulation and reduction in government
services constitute a determined rejection of even notional
attempts at redistribution of meagre macro-economic growth.
In a small society like Nicaragua's, dominated even more
noticeably
than societies in North America or Europe by a greedy, venal
elite, such a
policy stew was bound to foment corruption. One leading analyst
has
calculated that the Nicaraguan Treasury has lost as much as US$13.6
billion to corruption, tax evasion, spurious tax exemptions and
privatizations since 1990. (2)
After the watershed 1990 election, corporate capitalism's fierce
propaganda onslaught against the legacy of the Sandinista
Revolution promoted the individualist consumerism that facilitates
private capital's
assault on the common good. Its frontpersons,
Violeta Chamorro, her son-in-law Antonio Lacayo and their colleagues,
followed later by Arnoldo Aleman and Enrique Bolaños set about
dismantling government's influence in all areas of economic and social
life - from health and education to industry and agriculture. While the
US and its proxy international financial institutions decried
government intervention in society and the economy, they instigated
ideology-driven interventions of their own in favour of big business.
It is worth reviewing the subsequent history so as to understand some
of the characteristics of Nicaragua's current political arguments,
especially vis-a-vis the new government led by the FSLN.
16 years of neo-liberal Dark Side
The process of demolishing effective government had many effects. Apart
from facilitating concentration of wealth in the country's oligarchic
elite, wrecking government's capacity
to redistribute wealth, it weakened the possibility of sustaining a
coherent
popular movement. As in the rest of Central America, trades unions
found
hard-won gains
from earlier decades steadily eroded as the low-wage, high-profit
"free market" model was ruthlessly implemented with enthusiastic
government support. With credit harder to obtain and technical
assistance cut back, the cooperative movement was deliberately
undermined.
Hundreds of co-ops broke up. By contrast, private non-governmental
organizations
proliferated. Many prospered from development funding from large
international institutions and major foreign development agencies.
Others tried to survive providing genuine grass-roots services.
Ideological arguments in the FSLN began soon after their 1990 electoral
defeat and tended to mirror the fragmentation of society in general.
They turned fundamentally around how far progressive political agendas
could accommodate to aggressive corporate
capitalism. It was easy in the mid-1990s to see revolutionary
aspirations and especially Cuba's determined defence of those
aspirations as an anomaly. "Globalization" seemed to sweep all before
it. European-style social democracy and submission to "free market"
capitalism-with-a-human-face looked attractive. In 1994, from that
argument and
the various personal acrimonies accompanying it, sprang the Movement
for Sandinista Renewal (MRS) led by former Vice-President Sergio
Ramirez, one of Latin America's pre-eminent novelists.
After losing the chaotic, fraud-ridden 1996 presidential elections to
Arnoldo
Aleman's Liberal Alliance movement, arguments within the FSLN became
steadily more bitter. The main disagreement had to do with the nature
and extent of the quid pro quo involved in dealing with Aleman's
governing PLC party to facilitate legislation in the National Assembly.
The disagreements were compounded by damaging but disputed accusations
of
sexual abuse against Daniel Ortega by his step-daughter in 1998.
Despite, or perhaps thanks to, vicious attacks
attempting to make political capital out of the affair, Ortega's
credibility held up. He lead the FSLN's significant progress in the
municipal elections of 2000, when the party won control of the capital
Managua.
In 2001, he stood as presidential candidate for the FSLN-led
Convergencia Nacional
coalition. Despite the openly corrupt use of post-Hurricane Mitch aid
money by the sitting government, that election was won by Enrique
Bolaños following a
campaign in which US ambassador Oliver Garza openly and actively
campaigned on Bolaños' behalf. Then FSLN vice-presidential
candidate, Agustin Jarquin, related how on the night of the election
count
Garza stalked into the count centre in Managua, halted the
vote-counting
process and demanded changes in personnel, which were made. The
election took place in the shadow of the horrific attacks in New York
and Washington, which the US embassy and its protégé
Bolaños shamelessly exploited, accusing the FSLN of being
supporters of terrorism.
Following yet another loss in presidential elections, leading
Sandinista dissidents insisted that either a change of candidate and
policies,
or both, were essential for the FSLN. But their arguments faltered when
the
FSLN-led Convergencia Nacional made significant gains in the 2004
municipal elections. Even so, disenchanted with the FSLN's political
deal with the PLC, still led by disgraced ex-President Arnoldo Aleman,
several talented and experienced leaders like Herty Lewites,
Henry Ruiz, Victor Tirado, Victor Hugo Tinoco, Luis Carrion and Monica
Baltodano
either left the FSLN or were expelled. In 2005, the party they
supported, the Movement for Sandinista Renewal led by the widely
respected Dora Maria Tellez left the Convergencia Nacional in
order to support the presidential candidacy of former FSLN mayor of
Managua, Herty Lewites.
With both the Sandinistas and the Liberals split, the 2006 elections
seemed to mark a possible change in the loyalty inertias that have
characterized Nicaraguan politics since the Contra war of the 1980s.
Herty Lewites' untimely death in July of that year lead to the MRS
substituting a former top-level official of the Inter-American
Development Bank, Edmundo Jarquin, experienced and capable, but not
nationally well-known. Immediately prior to the election, in an
apparent attempt to embarrass the FSLN, President Bolaños
submitted a request to fast track an anti-abortion law through the
National Assembly. The move followed a Catholic Church organized
anti-abortion rally of around 200,000 people as part of an unscrupulous
campaign to take advantage of electoral considerations. The legislation
passed easily since no party in the legislature was prepared to risk
the electoral
consequences of bucking the political and economic power of the
Catholic Church
hierarchy.
Kinds of ethics worth wanting (3)
It is in this context that the FSLN came to power for the second time
led by Daniel Ortega. The FSLN's electoral programme was clear, a
return to genuinely free education, more resources for health services,
food security programmes for areas suffering hunger and malnutrition,
prioritizing financial and technical support for small agricultural
producers and cooperatives, working with Venezuela to guarantee energy
supplies, promotion of foreign and national investment so as to
increase employment, a non-aligned
foreign policy and improved management of the environment and
natural resources. Two key FSLN commitments are to promote more direct
democracy and to encourage national reconciliation.
Despite the clarity of the FSLN's programme for government, anyone
trying
to follow Nicaraguan affairs through the corporate media - including
the two most important Nicaraguan national dailies La Prensa and
El Nuevo Diario, both owned by members of the elite Chamorro family -
would find it hard to get a coherent account of government measures.
Disinformation abounds.
Likewise, coverage in alternative media also tends to be dominated by
the
views of
the FSLN's political opponents in the MRS. One might think this is
simply an accident or a coincidence, that people from diverse
backgrounds happen to concur in their views of what is happening in
Nicaragua and that therefore their views must present a reasonable
account of reality.
Another view is that available interpretations of events in
Nicaragua are inextricably, viscerally linked to class. A good example
is the clear preference in the foreign solidarity and development
managerial class for
social democrat MRS interpretations of Nicaragua's political reality as
this quote from a recent article by Witness for Peace in the
Countercurrents web site clearly demonstrates. "For years, civil
society groups' concrete proposals for change have fallen on deaf ears
as the government insisted on adhering to the U.S. or IMF policies that
provoked popular protest. While the details of policy shifts are
difficult to predict at this early point, the Ortega administration's
initial action and discourse offer some indication that several civil
society demands for change may now be heeded." (4)
The appeal to the sacred "civil society" cow as some kind of arbiter of
FSLN government policy is remarkable for its vanity. FSLN government
policy lines were clear from well before the 2006 election, but Witness
for
Peace suggests the Ortega government needs "civil society" in order to
know what it should do about 16 years of neo-liberal economic war on
the
impoverished majority. This reads suspiciously like the liberal social
democrat
managerial class staking out its claim for funding from their
respective donors.
Compare this from a leading ideologue of the MRS, Carlos
Tunnerman Bernheim, commenting on FSLN
government proposals for more direct democracy, "Solid democratic
governance relies on the existence of broad social and political
agreement....a balance between the powers of State is not sufficient,
constructive relations with civil society are also necessary that
permit long term policies to rest on broad national
consensus.........While political action aims to attain power, when it
is inspired by ethical principles the drive to power does not end with
power in itself but rather in the capacity to respond to the demands of
the citizenry in a context of full respect for human rights and the
rule of law."(5)
Tunnerman shares with Witness for Peace the social democrat vision
derived from liberal middle-class experience of political pluralism in
North American and European capitalist societies. The underlying
assumption is that the analysis of the managerial class embodied
in what they call "civil society" - namely, they themselves - should be
privileged and that it is necessarily benign and "ethical". Anyone
unaware of the bitter political sectarianism from which the MRS sprang
might
find these clear arguments for European-style social democratic
societal consensus appealing. But there are other ways of looking at
things which pose legitimate questions about this particular variety
of class-bound "ethics".
Ethics and fundamental loyalties
When Oscar Rene Vargas suggests "real power no longer lies with the
political class but rather is wielded by the economic class via opinion
moulding and "manipulating" political professionals"(6), he might well
be alluding to the plethora of stakeholders in Nicaragua's continuing
neo-colonial subjugation, including the academic, intellectual and
"non-governmental" managerial classes among whom sympathy for the MRS
is strongest. It is striking that the labels they apply to the FSLN -
"undemocratic", "authoritarian", "opportunist" - conform closely to
concerns expressed about the FSLN in North American and European
government pronouncements supplemented faithfully by commentary in
those countries'
corporate media.
When FSLN opponents appeal for liberal social democrat political and
economic arrangements in Nicaragua they neglect a deep historical fact.
Namely, the countries currently enjoying such Panglossian arrangements
are only able to do so on the back of centuries of racism, slavery and
colonial pillage - a record sustained to the present day via debt,
"aid" and inequitable terms of trade locked into place via the World
Trade Organization and "free trade"-in-your-sovereignty deals.
The FSLN
won the election in 2006 on promises to improve the material conditions
of life of the impoverished majority of people in Nicaragua resulting
from that history. They are unlikely to be able to do so by adopting
the very structures, standards and logic that have sustained
Nicaragua's immiseration since the 19th century.
Essentially, the political argument in Nicaragua is between the right
and centre on one side arguing that Nicaragua is best off colluding
faithfully in the designs of the imperial powers and, on the other
side, the FSLN and nationalists like Jaime Morales Carazo who seek to
broaden available economic options through links with the various
integrationist models being worked out in Latin America. So the
MRS academic and intellectual class string along with their right-wing
allies' diffidence about the ALBA development cooperation agreements
between Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. They prefer existing models like
the development cooperation agreements with the European Union which
tend to be seen as more benign than those of the United States.
One of the leading representatives of the European Union countries in
Nicaragua
is Eva Zetterberg, Sweden's ambassador who helps manage some effective
development projects in Nicaragua via Sweden's development cooperation
programme. In an interview she gave me in September last year,
Zetterberg discussed varieties of intervention including those of
the US, the EU and Venezuela. Zetterberg remarked in passing that the
EU intervention in Nicaragua was necessary and important because
Nicaraguans have been unable to manage their affairs successfully on
their own. However well-intentioned such a remark may be, especially
from someone so clearly committed to doing their best for Nicaragua's
people, it very clearly indicates the colonialist attitudes that still
underlie contemporary development cooperation relationships with member
countries of an imperialist bloc like the European Union.
While differences of emphasis and style certainly exist between US
diplomats like ambassador Paul Trivelli and his European counterparts,
all of them prefer the pro-free market policies of the MRS and all to a
greater or lesser degree
have reservations about the FSLN, whatever diplomatic niceties
may be exchanged for public consumption. During the election campaign
Trivelli consistently contrasted the "undemocratic" FSLN with the
"democratic" MRS and with right-wing banker Eduardo Montealegre's
Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance party (ALN). So at that fundamental
ideological
level the MRS tends to identify with the designs of the governments of
the United States and Europe to keep Nicaragua securely within their
imperial orbit. One might argue about the ethics of that.
Ethics and neo-colonial perception management
Beyond that fundamental moral question - why should the interests of
Nicaragua's impoverished majority be subordinated to the neo-colonial
designs of the great powers? - critics of the FSLN in Nicaragua
also seem to be ethically-challenged when it comes to reporting
specific events and their context. In 2005, during the week of the
vital vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) I met
up with Canadian writer Jonah Gindin of Venezuela Analysis. He had just
come from one of the Thursday morning information briefings run by
members of the local North American solidarity and development
community in Casa Ben Linder. Jonah asked me why the FSLN supported
CAFTA.
Perplexed, I explained to him that in fact the FSLN legislators had
voted
unanimously en bloc against CAFTA on the Monday of that very week.
Jonah had spent a 90-minute briefing on CAFTA and emerged from it
without being told the FSLN had clearly opposed the measure in the
National Assembly. Not everyone is as determined to get the whole story
as Gindin. The disinformation campaign on that issue mounted by the MRS
and its sympathisers was consistent and thorough. To his credit, Sergio
Ramirez has subsequently clearly acknowledged the fact of the FSLN's
vote against CAFTA. Others, in particular Monica Baltodano, seem
deliberately to have spread the falsehood that
the FSLN supported CAFTA. The hypocrisy of this takes some beating
since both the MRS presidential candidates, Herty Lewites and then
Edmundo Jarquin, supported CAFTA themselves.
Any fair coverage of Nicaragua's recent political history would explain
that since 1990, the FSLN, while always being Nicaragua's single
largest political party, has never had a majority in the National
Assembly. They have always been out-voted by the combined Liberal
parties and have only succeeded in promoting legislation of their own
through deals with whichever of the Liberal parties has been inclined
to work with them. That is the origin of what critics of the FSLN and
the PLC call "El Pacto" (the Deal) - supposedly the epitome of
anti-democratic under-the-table chicanery. (It may be worth noting that
no politicians in Nicaragua, either right or left, are prepared to
foment violent conflict to force radical change.)
Critics of the FSLN never refer to the fact that in the 2006 election
the "pacto" parties of the PLC and the FSLN won over two-thirds of the
vote while the "anti-pacto" parties won just 35%, including a bare 6%
for the MRS. That may well be interpreted as the Nicaraguan electorate
blowing a huge raspberry at MRS and ALN hypocrisy, since those parties
themselves made a little publicised deal in Miami, along with the
PLC, in June of 2006
agreeing to cooperate against the FSLN. That particular arrangement
with the
right-wing mirrored an MRS funding agreement with the electoral
intervention specialists of the US International Republican Institute,
including a meeting with IRI board member Jean Kirkpatrick, supporter
of mass-murderer and fraudster Augusto Pinochet, Guatemala's genocidal
Efrain Rios Montt, the "dirty war" Argentinian military junta and
promoter of the US-fomented Contra terror war in Nicaragua. One might
think in amongst all of that some ethical problems might suggest
themselves .
Another issue which has been manipulated against the FSLN is that
anti-abortion vote in the National Assembly, shortly before the
presidential elections. Reporting of the vote generally failed to
provide context, for example noting that the legislation was presented
by Enrique Bolaños under a fast track procedure, or noting the
massive anti-abortion march just weeks earlier and the ruthless
pressure around the vote from the Catholic Church hierarchy. Instead,
much reporting suggested that the vote had been actively driven by the
FSLN and ignored the role of the other parties who were indeed
determined to pass the measure and were hoping to embarrass the FSLN
immediately prior to the presidential vote.
MRS women's activist Sofia Montenegro, a leading member of the local
feminist managerial class, has correctly pointed out that Daniel
Ortega's politically influential wife, Rosario Murillo, is personally
opposed to abortion. Unfortunately for the commitment to democracy
espoused by Montenegro and her MRS colleagues, Murillo shares that view
with a clear majority of people in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan society
remains firmly under patriarchy, with both the Catholic Church and the
increasingly
influential evangelical churches policing traditional Christian taboos.
Montenegro and her MRS colleagues could always try dissolving the
Nicaraguan people and electing another one - though the ethics of
such a step might be questionable. However, one should not be flippant
about an issue which puts the lives of many vulnerable women and girls
at risk.
In that case, it may be legitimate to ask, since fierce critics of the
FSLN like Montenegro, Monica Baltodano and leading Nicaraguan poet
Ernesto Cardenal are genuinely concerned about human life, how many
more women might have
died untimely deaths as a result of the overall policies of a
neo-liberal
ideologue like Eduardo Montealegre becoming president rather than a
socialist like Daniel Ortega. The June 2006 MRS deal in Miami with
Nicaragua's Liberal parties aimed for a win by the ALN's Montealegre or
the PLC's Jose
Rizo. Ernesto Cardenal agressively and explicitly suggested people
should vote for a right wing candidate in preference to the FSLN's
Ortega. In fact, the chances of getting the new anti-abortion
legislation
modified to protect vulnerable women and girls are very much higher
under an FSLN government than under one of the right wing Liberal
parties.
The vicious personal attacks against the FSLN's Daniel Ortega and
Rosario Murillo by leading MRS figures, like Baltodano, Cardenal or
Montenegro, find
their echo among influential foreign sympathisers. One has to ask what
the ethics are of criticising Murillo and Ortega for driving Mercedes
Benz - a regular anti-FSLN jibe - when on any Thursday morning in
Managua outside the Casa Ben Linder the congregation of SUVs
belonging to the local North American solidarity and development
outfits mark a lamentable disregard for the planet's ozone layer. Nor
are Montenegro or Baltodano famous for their cycling exploits - they
too enjoy the
material trappings of Nicaragua's political and intellectual managerial
class in which they play a talented and important role.
Beyond "ethics" - what is to be done?
While the MRS and its sympathisers work out how far they are prepared
to accommodate to the continuing neo-liberal agenda of the imperial
powers, the FSLN is
trying to work out its own set of contradictions at the same time as
coping with the exigencies of government. Influential intellectuals
like Carlos Tunnerman have the luxury of putting sententious
rhetorical questions about policy direction.(7) By contrast, the FSLN
is trying to implement its domestic programme of government as a
minority party in an ideologically hostile legislature and in
conditions of extreme uncertainty in the international economy. An oil
price spike following a US attack on Iran would send most countries in
Central America into economic crisis.
Even without that catastrophe, market uncertainty about the dollar
tends to make economic planning a lottery for a country located in a
dollar-dependent region. Nor can the possibility be ruled out that the
US government, in cahoots with the international cartel of Central
Banks, is managing dollar decline as a Damocles' sword, held over
dollar-dependent governments to keep them compliant.
Currently, the Ortega government's credibility is high. The early
decision to slash and cap ministerial salaries has been followed up by
unequivocal support for moves against corrupt officials, whatever their
party
affiliation. Sandinista mayors have been among those removed from
office for misuse of public funds. With support from Venezuela worth
over US$400 million, the government has managed to stabilise the
country's long-standing energy crisis. As the rains that herald the
planting season draw near,
more viable credit arrangements are being made for agricultural
producers, especially cooperatives. Increased technical support,
assistance with mechanization and the provision of cheap urea for
fertilizer should encourage production of basic grains and valuable
export crops like sesame seed.
Ortega's recent criticism of President Bush's agreement with Brazil's
President Lula on ethanol production indicates that the FSLN is well
able to manage a critical policy line between trying to
encourage socially responsible private investment while protecting the
natural environment
and promoting sustainable agriculture. The division of labour between
Ortega and Vice-President Jaime Morales seems to reflect the balance
the FSLN wants to maintain between a willingness to work with corporate
big business and a determination to carve out wider government-managed
economic policy options. Infrastructure improvements have already begun
on the country's water system and long-neglected highways, like the one
linking Sebaco, Matagalpa and Jinotega.
Foreign solidarity and development organizations have a relatively
limited role to play in helping rebuild Nicaragua's economy and
create employment. It is mostly in the area of social policy that such
outfits can accompany people in Nicaragua and work with them to improve
their lives. Nicaragua needs these organizations because they bring in
foreign exchange, generate economic activity and provide valuable
health, education and social services in a country where around 70% of
people
live in poverty and where government services have been systematically
cut back for over 15 years. The policy of many of these organizations
starts from the initial question, "Who should we work with?" Their
answer is to work with people in partner organizations who tend to
think like them and to share the same managerial class view.
It might be more ethical to start with the question "What should we
do?" A government is in power committed to working
seriously via clear policies to transform the conditions of material
life for Nicaragua's
impoverished majority. People in Nicaragua cannot afford the vanity
with which we in the solidarity and development managerial classes
preen ourselves on our dubious moral cleanliness. For once, we should
perhaps acknowledge our own contradictions and think about what we can
do to help the FSLN government deliver on its policy commitments to
Nicaragua's people. We certainly have no business colluding with an
unscupulous local social democrat managerial class trying to take
ownership of perceptions of what the FSLN is trying to do.
Notes
1. 'Nuestras clases dominantes han
procurado siempre que los trabajadores
no tengan historia, no tengan doctrina, no tengan héroes ni
mártires. Cada lucha debe empezar de nuevo, separada de las
luchas anteriores: la experiencia colectiva se pierde, las lecciones se
olvidan. La historia aparece así como propiedad privada, cuyos
dueños son los dueños de todas las otras cosas?.
(Reportaje de Ricardo Piglia a Walsh. Marzo 1970). "Palabra de
Walsh", Roberto Baschetti, AGENCIA RODOLFO WALSH, Argenpress
4/4/2007
2. "Megacapitales en Nicaragua", Oscar-René Vargas , Nuevo
Diario, March 15th 2007
3. Apologies to Daniel Dennet whose book "Elbow room : kinds of free
will worth wanting" can be read as a notable indirect contribution to
political philosophy as well as to the philosophy of consciousness.
4. "Ortega Government Shows Some Response To Civil Society Demands",
Witness for Peace, Americas Program, Countercurrents, April 1st 2007
5. "Gobernabilidad democrática versus gobernabilidad
autoritaria", Carlos Tünnermann Bernheim, El Nuevo Diario, March
7th 2007
6. "Megacapitales en Nicaragua" - see Note 2.
7. "¿Hacia dónde va el país?", Carlos
Tünnermann Bernheim, Nuevo Diario, March 28th 2007