Nicaraguans strip materials off VP Rosario Murillo's "Tree of Life" sculpture in Managua on April 22. (Inti Ocón/Getty Images).
Last week the population of a Third World country near the bottom of the world economic food chain that has been pawned to a foreign superpower threw off its chains and went up against the collective power of its rulers and ended the peace imposed by the thin veneer of democracy over tyranny. It wasn't in the USA, or in Iran, or in Gaza, or in Venezuela, but in the neglected Central American nation of Nicaragua. It got to be so violent this week that an international soccer tournament of Under-17 national teams has been cancelled as their hosts cannot guarantee their safety.
If anyone in the USA remembers Nicaragua in any context, it typically involves the shadowy world of drugs, arms, hostages Mullahs and other fun known as the Iran-Contra Affair of the late 1980s when Reagan-Bush Administration officials of the CIA were exposed trying to launder money in a hare-brained scheme to fund the anti-communist Contra groups without congressional funding. Therefore, before anyone points any fingers at me for being self-righteous about his let me state clearly: Yes, American foreign policy in Latin America did create the fertile ground for the Sandinista Revolution of 1979, and it's possible that our support for military dictators is the reason we are now dealing with communist despots that have replaced them.
Before the storm, the Sandinista revolution
Sandinista guerrilla Edén Pastora was essential in overthrowing the Somoza family dictatorship, but later turned against the Marxist government of the FSLN and the Ortegas.
Until 1979 Nicaragua was governed by the Somoza clan, a family of National Guard officers focused on maintaining the country's corrupt and almost feudalistic economy that was subservient to the interests of the USA and other foreign investors. Like Russia in 1917 or China in 1949, Nicaragua was ripe for social upheaval and revolution, as the last Somoza, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had plundered monies donated in 1972 to benefit earthquake victims and rebuild the country.
The Sandinistas of the 1970s were a broad front, though decidedly left-wing of various critics of the dictator that included communists, liberals, Catholics, and others. While outgunned by the National Guard, the Sandinistas gradually gained steam due to the brutality of the regime and when President Jimmy Carter decided the USA would not continue to supply him with direct military aid. In August 1978 one of the Sandinista affiliate groups led by Edén Pastora stormed the Nicaraguan Congress and successfully negotiated a hostage situation that led to the freeing of many of their imprisoned colleagues. This would be the beginning of the end and following the murder of opposition journalist Pedro Chamorro Nicaragua's streets erupted in strikes and protests leading to Somoza's resignation in July 1979.
Daniel and Humberto Ortega - Protegés of the Castros - 1979-90
Far from instituting a period of liberty in Nicaragua and Central America, the Sandinista Revolution instantly became fractured along the lines of doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and Daniel Ortega Saavedra and some of its erstwhile allies like Pastora. Along with ex-Somocista supporters, many of the opponents of Ortega coalesced to form groups of new guerrillas known as "Contras" (counterrevolutionaries). In reality, not all of the Contras were trying to reverse the revolution, rather they sought to reclaim it from Ortega and the Soviet-aligned FSLN. This would institute the next stage of Nicaragua's civil war and related sagas such as Iran-Contra. Although they did conduct free and fair elections in 1984, Daniel Ortega and his brother and defense minister Humberto became solid allies of the Castro regime in Cuba, and in many ways modeled their government in such a way.
But by 1990 the Soviet bloc was falling apart due to civil unrest caused by decades of corruption and repression, and the USSR's allies began one-by-one to abandon Marxist-Leninist economic policies as Soviet aid dried up. Only some of the more obstinate and tightly controlled nations such as Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba maintained any semblance of that system and most conceded some ground to market economics in order to avoid social upheaval and shortages that would lead to humanitarian disasters. Bordered by US ally Honduras in the north and by the much richer neutral Costa Rica on the south, Nicaragua would have never been able to shut down its insurgent rebels entirely.
The FSLN and Contras had already begun a peace process in 1987 and with Cuba and other Soviet allies no longer willing to commit military forces or hardware to fend off rebels, Ortega had little choice but to yield. Ortega was defeated in the free elections of 1990 by Pedro Chamorro's widow Violeta, a socially conservative opponent of both his and Somoza's regime. To be fair, although Chamorro and her paper La Prensa had been intimidated since breaking with the Sandinistas in 1979, she also benefited from the support of American opponents of Ortega including the Bush Administration-backed National Endowment for Democracy. Contra groups also fought a war of attrition against both the government and civilian supporters and the regime was choked by currency limitations and bank restrictions imposed by the Bush Administration following its intervention in Panama in 1989.
The Chamorro era and Ortega's path back to power
In 1990 Violeta Chamorro, a widow of one of Somoza's most ardent civil opponents, was elected president. She was at the time one of the most credible opponents of both the Somozas and the FSLN. (Nuevo Diario)
Whatever criticisms of Violeta Chamorro and her climb to power, she governed with a policy expressly dedicated to ending the civil war, conceded powers from the executive branch back to Congress, and reducing the size of the military. As it so happens Chamorro was inaugurated 25 years ago today. Rather than attack the Sandinista military she worked with them. In 1997 she retired and was succeeded by the notoriously corrupt Arnoldo Alemán and then the Catholic hard-liner Enrique Bolaños. Neither one possessed the judgment or reforming vision of Violeta Chamorro, and therefore the peace accomplished during her term in office did not produce a new more open society as its neighbour Costa Rica enjoys but a regression to the corrupt and crony-ridden politics that led to it and other regional nations being called "banana republics".
Meanwhile, Daniel Ortega did not go away but reformed his image by making overtures to past opponents, including returning to the Catholic Church and having a second wedding ceremony to his wife Rosario Murillo, an action that would have appeared surreal during his time in power when the FSLN was openly feuding with the local Archbishop Miguel Cardenal Obando y Bravo. Running again for president in 2001, Ortega made statements to the effect that he would not repeat the abuses and excesses of FSLN rule in the 1980s and that in the wake of Sept. 11 he wanted a positive relationship with the new Bush Administration. Ortega had also successfully fought accusations by his step daughter of sexual abuse. He did lose the election that year but it went a long way to building bridges and alliances so that next time he was able to build on his performance and in 2006 won the next election to return to power.
Second wind - Ortega back in office
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega rehabilitated his image after 1990 thanks to his wife and confidant Rosario Murillo. Since retaking office however she has become as hated as him and is now a liability. (Rodrigo Arangua/Getty Images).
The world that received the new Ortega presidency was ripe for the politics that he was proposing. Like his father, George W. Bush had continued the interventionist foreign policy of the United States in Latin America as if the Cold War had never ended, including the corporate friendly Free Trade Area of the Americas. FTAA would have essentially eliminated tariffs across the Western Hemisphere (apart from Cuba) but also eliminated the sovereignty of all its nations. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, then a darling of anti-free trade activists soon rallied around him the nations that had reservations about the FTAA. Bush also lost much prestige in Latin America due to his administration's role in the 2002 Venezuelan coup and the general perception that he had deceived the public in order to engage in the Iraq War as well as mishandled Hurricane Katrina.
Therefore the new Ortega administration pursued policies modeled on the alternate axis of world geopolitics centered around Cuba and Venezuela in the western hemisphere as well as Iran, Russia, and China worldwide. Like Chavez's people's democracy model, Ortega created a parallel system of local government known as the Citizens' People's Councils (CPCs). In Venezuela, these are somewhat analogous to some of the Bolivarian missions, including Mission Miranda which forms a supposedly organic civil defense force. But the autonomy of these civil governance and defense bodies, just like in other countries, was never a reality. Notably, Ortega's wife Murillo was the inaugural leader of the CPCs and remains to this day central to the power of his regime. (Perhaps she is fulfilling the role of his brother Humberto who is no longer politically active.)
Rewind to the failures of the past
"The caiman is leaving!" Caimans are smaller relatives of the alligator native to Central and South America. Nicaraguan opposition cartoon predicting the flight of Ortega and his wife and VP Rosario Murillo. As of today they remain in power.
La Prensa, still the leading opposition media organ under the new Ortega regime, correctly warned that the CPCs would regardless of Murillo's assurances to the contrary follow the path of similar previous programs and become an arm of state suppression of dissent under Ortega in the 1980s.
Unlike in the 1980s, Ortega no longer faced armed insurgents like the Contras as his main opponents, although so-called advocacy groups like the National Endowment for Democracy continued to agitate against him due to his undemocratic power grabs from the legislature and judiciary. By 2011 the Roman Catholic Church had also had enough and condemned Ortega's measures to replace magistrates and members of the Supreme Court with his partisan supporters. After winning reelection that year, in 2014 the National Assembly eliminated all term limits for the president, and concentrated more civil and military power in his hands. Therefore in 2016 in an election for a third consecutive term Ortega faced no significant opposition.
But whereas he consolidated power during a relatively prosperous economic period in 2011, Ortega soon encountered a number of obstacles once key ally Venezuela's economy began to go bust during a world-wide fall in petroleum prices. Similar problems have occurred in other members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the group of nations that support Chavez's challenge to US dominance over Latin America. Notwithstanding their bold resistance to challenges of their sovereignty by the Americans, the ALBA bloc has begun to unravel for the following reasons among othersAt:
In most of these countries the national economies are dependent on either fossil fuels and mineral wealth (Ecuador and Venezuela) or agricultural products and other low-tech industries. At one point Venezuela had had a diversified industrial economy but Chávez caused a meltdown of the private industrial sector and by the time of his death in 2013 it had morphed into a petrostate.
- Illiberal treatment of opposition activists and journalists by Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro, Ortega and their allies has led to social unrest and friction among erstwhile supporters of their progressive policies.
- The economic wealth redistribution policies of the members, especially in Venezuela, triggered massive capital flight and departures of first the rich citizens and then middle class professionals.
- In order to finance their increasingly quixotic capital projects as well as the social welfare systems that satisfy their poorer voters, ALBA bloc members enter into agreements with allies that eventually become skewed to benefit the foreign investors. This includes China's loaning of $50 billion over ten years to Venezuela that have not been loaned back, as well as Nicaragua's now struggling project to create an alternative to the Panama Canal across the southern part of the country.
- The canal project was in particular the beginning of souring the good will on a local and grassroots level for the Ortega government. This was not just among his traditional opposition but even progressives like Nicaraguan human rights activist Bianca Jagger, the wife of the Rolling Stones lead singer and a key campaigner against US intervention in Central America in the 1980s. Indigenous and peasant activists would no longer believe his pretenses of being their representative while planning to dig up their lands and transform them into a canal.
Ticking time bomb
Similar to canal, the latest fight over social security benefits, pensions, and taxes has done nothing but sustain the impression that Ortega is no longer representing the interests of Nicaragua's large rural poor (campesinos) and indigenous populations indigenous and Creole societies. Nor is he popular among the urban youth and the university students, but rather he appears to be intent on consolidating the power that he has aggregated since 2007 that was once devolved away from the presidency under Chamorro.
Amid a public call for peace by Pope Francis, Ortega has conceded to demands that the increased taxes and decreased benefits be cancelled. The death toll of the recent riots is at 34 people, but thanks to the intercession of several local Catholic clergymen it is possible that the riots will subside for the time being. But the crisis will also continue to go unresolved as Ortega has long lost the confidence of COSEP, the nation's largest trade union and is now dealing with the scars of a bloody street battle with youth and university students. INSS, the social security agency of the small nation, is likely to go bankrupt in the next two years.
Given the major upheaval caused by this change in a small Central American nation to social security, here in the United States perhaps we should start a more sober and free discussion concerning how to deal with our own insolvent Social Security system.
