Nicaragua heads into 2012
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Send to friendtoni solo, December 30th 2011
Most Nicaraguans go into 2012 full of optimism that their lives will continue to improve not merely in terms of economic well being but also in terms of security, stability and social coherence. Despite broader concerns about the international economy, all Nicaragua's social and economic indicators show their optimism is justified. Nicaragua's social and economic development since 2006 has decisively vindicated the socialist inspired policies of the country's Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega.
That social and economic development since Daniel Ortega took office in January 2007 was the decisive factor in the Sandinista-led “Nicaragua Triunfa” coalition's overwhelming electoral victory in Nicaragua's recent national elections. Another factor was the abysmal failure of Nicaragua's right-wing opposition to mount an effective challenge. Not only was Daniel Ortega re-elected by a huge margin, but his Sandinista party and their allies also won a substantial majority in the National Assembly.
This outcome was pre-figured in the 2008 municipal elections in which the Sandinistas and their political allies increased their already commanding control of the country's municipal authorities from around 90 municipalities out of a total of 153 to over 100. That victory in the 2008 municipal elections was attacked by Nicaragua's fractious opposition parties as being the result of massive fraud. Three years later in these latest national elections, they have made the same false accusations without success.
The behaviour of the Nicaraguan opposition is virtually identical to that of their counterparts in other countries with successful progressive governments like Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador. Right-wing leaders and their allies in these countries invariably follow a psy-warfare script concocted by influential foreign supporters in NATO countries. The script attempts to portray these failed right-wing politicians as stalwart defenders of democracy and human rights, battling deranged, sinister, dictatorial socialist extremists.
So, in Nicaragua, leading exponents of the region's human rights industry make the ridiculous claim that Nicaragua is a dictatorship. Leading media and cultural figures claim they suffer from serious curtailment of freedom of speech. Opposition feminist leaders claim women's rights are undemocratically suppressed. NATO country political and media circles in North America and Europe then regurgitate these absurd false claims to create another of the infinite psy-warfare feedback loops essential to those rich Western countries' endless war on humanity.
In terms of domestic politics in Nicaragua little is likely to change in 2012. The Nicaraguan opposition will continue to flail and flounder. The US government and its European Union allies will continue to fund fake “civil society” non-governmental organizations relentlessly critical of Daniel Ortega and his government. Against that futile mood-music, the Sandinista-led “Nicaragua Triunfa” coalition will certainly devise a balanced and equitable legislative program in consultation with the right wing opposition, despite their massive majority in the legislature.
Daniel Ortega's government will carry forward its national development program following the successful formula of radical but consensual change, stressing both economic stability and poverty reduction. Daniel Ortega's wife Rosario Murillo has clearly stated the government wants to place increasing emphasis on the protagonism of women and youth. The example of complementary teamwork given by Ortega and Murillo itself signals a revolutionary change in the gender roles that have until now characterised regional politics in Central America.
Regionally, grave misgivings persist about the gangster regime that effectively controls Honduras under the weak presidency of Pepe Lobo. But organized crime and drugs trafficking pose huge problems for all countries in the region, especially Guatemala. Regional leaders occasionally speak in code about the importance of narcotics to the US economy, but none say outright what everyone knows – narcotics are a hugely important component of the United States and European economies, generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year to sustain the NATO bloc financial system.
Even Mexico's right wing leader Felipe Calderón has criticized the US authorities for not doing more to combat both the US narcotics industry and the illegal arms trade that feeds so much of the violence in Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere in the region. Official US cynicism and hypocrisy on that theme is likely to be a key motif in 2012. US officials will inveigh against the pernicious effects of narcotics while US financial institutions engage in big-time money laundering and US arms manufacturers rake in huge profits from sales of weaponry under US government programmes like Plan Merida.
Another regional issue likely to cause tension is the Costa Rican government's flagrantly aggressive and downright racist handling of its territorial dispute with Nicaragua over the Rio San Juan which forms part of the border between the two countries'. The Costa Rican government has violated every norm of environmental best practice by hacking out a highway all the way along the southern bank of the Rio San Juan. In doing so it has thumbed its nose at the Central American Court, caused what may well be irreparable damage to the river's ecosystem and decisively lost what little sympathy it may have enjoyed in the region regarding it's claim to Nicaraguan territory in the Rio San Juan's delta.
In the wider regional context, Nicaragua is a member of the Cuban and Venezuelan led Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA). Nicaragua's status as a full member of ALBA gives a very important Central American dimension to the development of ALBA's solidarity based trade and development cooperation model. Nicaragua's great economic success has depended largely on the ability of Daniel Ortega and his colleagues to combine traditional trade and development cooperation links with those made available under the ALBA framework.
ALBA gives member countries like Nicaragua the regional support and context to think globally in terms of trade relations. What that means in practice is that Nicaragua has broadened its development cooperation and trade relations to include coutnries like Brazil, Russia, Iran and Vietnam as well as deepening its relationship with existing partners as diverse as Cuba and Taiwan. In any case, ALBA gives Nicaragua particular flexibility in its trade relations through a range of programmes to develop Nicaragua's energy and agricultural sectors. An important symbol of that is the new oil refinery being built on Nicaragua's Pacific Coast.
The United States and its European allies remain ossified in a political and economic system incapable of meeting the needs of their countries' peoples. By contrast, Latin American countries like Nicaragua are following socialist inspired social and economic programmes that are finally giving their peoples' cause for optimism after decades of despair. For Nicaraguans, 2012 is likely to consolidate their country's development, lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty. The contrast with the outlook for ordinary people in North America and Europe is stark.