The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution
http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach02272009.html
By ROGER BURBACH
February 27 - March 1, 2009
Upon his inauguration as Nicaraguan president in January 2007, Daniel
Ortega asserted that his government would represent "the second stage
of the Sandinista Revolution." His election was full of symbolic
resonance, coming after 16 years of electoral failures for Ortega and
the party he led, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation
(FSLN). The Sandinistas' road to power was paved with a series of
previously unthinkable pacts with the old somocista and Contra
opposition. The FSLN's pact making began in earnest in 2001, when, in
the run-up to that year's presidential election, Ortega forged an
alliance with Arnoldo Alemán, an official during the Somoza regime
who had been elected president in 1997.
But even with Alemán's backing, Ortega was unable to win the
presidency. So, before the 2006 election, he publicly reconciled with
his old nemesis, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, a potent symbol of
the counterrevolutionary movement in the 1980s. Ortega and his
longtime companion, Rosario Murillo, announced their conversion to
Catholicism and were married by the cardinal. Just before his
election Ortega supported a comprehensive ban on abortion, including
in cases in which the mother's life is endangered, a measure ratified
by the legislature with the crucial votes of Sandinista deputies. To
round out his pre-election wheeling and dealing, Ortega selected
Jaime Morales, a former Contra leader, as his vice presidential candidate.
Even with these concessions to the right, Ortega won the presidency
with just 37.9% of the votes. Once in power, he announced a series of
policies and programs that seemed to hark back to the Sandinista
years. Educational matriculation fees were abolished, an illiteracy
program was launched with Cuban assistance, and an innovative Zero
Hunger program established, financed from the public budget and
Venezuelan aid, that distributed one cow, one pig, 10 hens, and a
rooster, along with seeds, to 15,000 families during the first year.
Internationally, Nicaragua joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas (ALBA), a trade and economic cooperation pact that includes
Cuba, Bolivia, and Venezuela.
But the Ortega government's clientelistic and sectarian nature soon
became evident when Ortega, by presidential decree, established
Councils of Citizen Power under the control of the Sandinista party
to administer and distribute much of the social spending. Even more
importantly, under the rubric of ALBA, Ortega signed an accord with
Venezuela that provides an estimated $300 million to $500 million in
funds personally administered by Ortega with no public accountability.
As Mónica Baltodano, the leader of Resacte, a dissident Sandinista
organization, argued in a recent article, Ortega's fiscal and
economic policies are, in fact, continuous with those of the previous
governments, despite his anti-imperialist rhetoric and denunciations
of neoliberalism.1 The government has signed new accords with the
International Monetary Fund that do not modify the neoliberal
paradigm, while the salaries of government workers remain frozen and
those of teachers and health workers are the lowest in Central
America. According to the Central Bank of Nicaragua, the average
salary has dropped the last two years, retrogressing to 2001 levels.2
Moreover, the government and the Sandinista party are harassing and
repressing their opponents. During an interview in January, Baltodano
told me the right to assembly has been systematically violated during
the past year, as opposition demonstrations are put down with goon
squads. "Ortega is establishing an authoritarian regime, sectarian,
corrupt, and repressive, to maintain his grip on power, betraying the
legacy of the Sandinista revolution," she said.
***
The core of this legacy was the revolution's commitment to popular
democracy. Seizing power in 1979 from the dictator Anastasio Somoza,
the Sandinista movement comprised Nicaragua's urban masses, peasants,
artisans, workers, Christian base communities, intellectuals, and the
muchachosthe youth who spearheaded the armed uprisings. The
revolution transformed social relations and values, holding up a new
vision of society based on social and economic justice that included
the poor and dispossessed. The revolution was muticlass, multiethnic,
multidoctrinal, and politically pluralistic.
While socialism was part of the public discourse, it was never
proclaimed to be an objective of the revolution. It was officially
designated "a popular, democratic, and anti-imperialist revolution."
Radicalized social democrats, priests, and political independents as
well as Marxists and Marxist-Leninists served as cabinet ministers of
the Sandinista government. Images of Sandino, Marx, Christ, Lenin,
Bolívar, and Carlos Fonseca, the martyred founder of the Sandinista
movement, often hung side by side in the cities and towns of Nicaragua.
A central attribute of the revolution that has made its legacy so
powerful is that it was a revolución compartida, a revolution shared
with the rest of the world.3 As Nicaragua, a country with fewer than
3 million inhabitants, defied the wrath of the U.S. imperium, people
from around the world rallied to the revolution's support. In a
manner reminiscent of the Spanish civil war half a century earlier,
the Sandinista revolution came to be seen as a new political utopia,
rupturing national frontiers. It marked a generation of activists
around the globe who found in the revolution a reason to hope and believe.
With the deepening of the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary war from
military bases in Honduras, activists from the United States came to
be the largest contingent to support the Sandinista revolution. An
estimated 100,000 people from the United States visited Nicaragua in
the 1980s, many as simple political tourists. Some came as part of
delegations, but most of them arrived on their own. It was an
experience totally different from that of Cuba, where the prohibition
of U.S. travel to the island meant that only organized delegations
arrived via Mexico or Canada with assigned accommodations and
structured tours. But it was not just the travel arrangements that
were different. Those going to Nicaragua found an "open door"
society: They could talk with anyone, travel to the countryside, and
stay where they pleased with no interference from the government.
The Sandinista revolution's commitment to democracy led it down a new
political path. This was not a revolutionary government conducted, in
the classical sense, by a dictatorship of the proletariat. While the
National Directorate of the FSLN oversaw the revolutionary process,
it was not dictated by a single strongman but by nine people who
reached consensus decisions with input from popular organizations.
The Nicaraguan Revolution thus responded to internal and external
challenges by deepening its democratic and participatory content,
rather than by declaring a dictatorship.
In October 1983, when a U.S. assault appeared imminent in the
aftermath of the invasion of Grenada, the National Directorate
adopted the slogan "All Arms to the People" and distributed more than
200,000 weapons to the militias and popular organizations. I was
there as U.S. aircraft flew over Managua, breaking the sound barrier,
trying to "shock and awe" the populace. Bomb shelters and defensive
trenches were hastily built as the country mobilized for war.
We may never know whether the threatened invasion was a ruse or if
the popular mobilization forestalled a U.S. attack. But it did
reaffirm the revolution's commitment to democracy. In 1984, in the
midst a deteriorating economy and the escalating Contra war, the
country held an election in which seven candidates vied for the
presidency. The election was monitored by "at least 460 accredited
observers from 24 countries," who unanimously described it as fair.4
A reported 83% of the electorate participated, and Ortega won with
almost 67% of the votes.5 The election demonstrated that a
revolutionary government can solidify its hold on power in the midst
of conflict, not by adopting increasingly dictatorial powers but by
building mass democratic support.
The adoption of a new constitution in 1986 marked yet another step
forward in the democratic process. The constitution, which
established separation of powers, directly incorporated human rights
declarations, and abolished the death penalty, among other measures,
was drafted by constituent assembly members elected in 1984 and
submitted to the country for discussion.6 To facilitate these
debates, 73 cabildos abiertos, or town meetings, were attended by an
estimated 100,000 Nicaraguans around the country. At these meetings,
about 2,500 Nicaraguans made suggestions for changes in the constitution.
But this bold Sandinista experiment in revolutionary democracy was
not destined to persevere. As occurred in the Spanish civil war, the
tide of history ran against the heroic people of Nicaragua, sapping
their will in the late 1980s as the Contra war waged on and the
economy unraveled. Often as I departed from the San Francisco airport
on yet another flight to the Central American isthmus, I would look
down on the Bay Area, with its population roughly the same size as
Nicaragua's and an economy many times larger, and wonder how the
Sandinista revolution could possibly survive a war with the most
powerful nation on earth.
Perhaps the die was cast in neighboring El Salvador with the failure
of the guerrillas there to seize power as the United States mounted a
counterinsurgency war. The inability to advance the revolution in
Central America seemed to confirm Leon Trotsky's belief that a
revolution cannot survive and mature in just one nationespecially in
small countries like Nicaragua with porous borders, which, unlike
island Cuba, lend themselves to infiltration and repeated forays from
well-provisioned military bases.
To end the debilitating war, the Sandinista leaders turned to peace
negotiations. Placing their faith in democracy, they signed an accord
that called for a ceasefire and elections to be held in February
1990, in which the Contras as well as the internal opposition would
be allowed to participate. Once again the popular organizations
mobilized for the campaign, and virtually all the polls indicated
that Ortega would win a second term as president, defeating the
Contra-backed candidate, Violeta Chamorro, whose campaign received
generous funding from the United States.
Nicaraguans and much of the world were shocked when Chamorro defeated
Ortega with 55% of the vote. Even people who were sympathetic to the
Sandinistas voted for the opposition because they wanted the war to
end, as the threat of more U.S.-backed violence remained looming. The
day after the election, a woman vendor passed me by sobbing. I asked
her what was wrong, and she said, "Daniel will no longer be my
president." After exchanging a few more words, I asked whom she had
voted for. "Violeta," she said, "because I want my son in the
Sandinista army to come home alive."
***
During the next 16 years, three Nicaraguan presidents backed by the
United States implemented a series of neoliberal policies, gutting
the social and economic policies of the Sandinista era and
impoverishing the country. Ortega ran in every election, drifting
increasingly to the right, while exerting an iron hand to stifle all
challengers and dissenters in the Sandinista party. Surprisingly,
Orlando Nuñez, with whom I wrote a book with on the revolution's
democratic thrust, remained loyal to Ortega while most of the
middle-level cadre and the National Directorate abandoned the party.7
Many of these split off to form the Sandinista Renovation Movement
(MRS), the largest dissident Sandinista party, founded in 1995.
When I asked Nuñez about his stance, he argued that only the
Sandinista party has a mass base. "Dissident Sandinistas and their
organizations," he said, "cannot recruit the poor, the peasants, the
workers, nor mount a significant electoral challenge." Nuñez, who
works as an adviser on social affairs to the president's office, went
on to argue that Ortega allied with Alemán not out of political
cynicism, but for the sake of building an anti-oligarchic front.
According to this theory, Alemán and the somocistas represent an
emergent capitalist class that took on the old oligarchy, which had
dominated Nicaraguan politics and the economy since the 19th
century.8 A major thrust of Ortega's rhetoric is bent on attacking
the oligarchy, which is clustered in the opposition Conservative Party.
But it is also true that some of the most famous Sandinistas, many of
whom are in the dissident camp todaylike Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda
Belli, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, and othersare descendents of
oligarchic families. Accordingly, Ortega and Murillo have accused
them of being in league with conservatives in an effort to reimpose
the old order on Nicaragua. While the dissident Sandinistas have yet
to mount a significant electoral challenge, the Ortega administration
has nonetheless gone after them with a particular vehemence. Case in
point: Chamorro, the onetime director of the Sandinista party
newspaper, Barricada. In June 2007, Chamorro aired an investigative
report on Esta Semana, the popular news show he hosts. According to
the report, which included tape-recorded conversations, FSLN
functionaries tried to extort $4 million from Armel González, a
partner in a tourist development project called Arenas Bay, in
exchange for a swift end to the project's legal woes, which included
challenges from campesino cooperatives over land disputes.
The government's response to the bad publicity was swift and
ruthless. While the district attorney buried the case, González was
charged and convicted of slander. National Assembly deputy Alejandro
Bolaños, who backed the denunciation, was arbitrarily removed from
his legislative seat. And Chamorro was denounced in the
Sandinista-controlled media as a "delinquent," a "narco-trafficker,"
and a "robber of peasant lands."
The harassment of Chamorro and other government critics continued
during the run-up to Nicaragua's November 2008 municipal elections,
which were widely viewed as a referendum on the Ortega
administration. The Ministry of Government launched a probe into NGOs
operating in the country, accusing the Center for Communications
Research (Cinco), which is headed by Chamorro, of "diverting and
laundering money" through its agreement with the Autonomous Women's
Movement (MAM), which opposes the Ortega-endorsed law banning
abortion. This agreement, financed by eight European governments and
administered by Oxfam, aims to promote "the full citizenship of
women." First lady Murillo called it "Satan's fund" and "the money of evil."
Cinco's board of directors were interrogated, and a prosecutor
accompanied by the police raided the Cinco offices with a search
warrant. Warned in advance of the visit, some 200 people gathered in
the building in solidarity, refusing the police entry. Then as night
fell, the police established a cordon around the building and, in the
early morning, police broke down the door. After kicking out the
protesters, the police stayed in the office for 15 hours, with
supporters and onlookers gathered outside, shutting down traffic for
blocks around. The police rummaged through offices, carting off files
and computers. Since then, no formal charges have been filed, but
Chamorro remains under official investigation.
Along with MAM, the broader women's movement in Nicaragua, which
firmly opposes the Ortega government, was among the first to
experience its repressive blows. In 2007 the government opened a case
against nine women leaders, accusing them of conspiring "to cover up
the crime of rape in the case of a 9-year-old rape victim known as
'Rosita,' who obtained an abortion in Nicaragua in 2003."9 In August,
Ortega was unable to attend the inauguration of Paraguayan president
Fernando Lugo because of protests by the country's feminist
organizations; from then on, women's mobilizations have occurred in
other countries Ortega has visited, including Honduras, El Salvador,
Costa Rica, and Peru.10
Charges were levied against other former Sandinistas who dared to
speak out against the Ortega government, including 84-year-old
Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal, the renowned poet who once served
as minister of culture. In August, after Cardenal criticized Ortega
at Lugo's inauguration, a judge revived an old, previously dismissed
case involving a German citizen who sued Cardenal in 2005 for insulting him.11
In addition to harassing critics, the Ortega government also
displayed its penchant for electoral fraud during the run-up to the
November municipal balloting. Protests erupted in June, after the
Ortega-stacked Supreme Electoral Council disqualified the MRS and the
Conservative Party from participation. Dora Maria Tellez, a leader of
the renovation movement, began a public hunger strike that led to
daily demonstrations of support, often shutting down traffic in
downtown Managua.
Meanwhile, bands of young Sandinista-linked thugs, claiming to be the
"owners of the streets," attacked demonstrators while the police
stood idly by. Then, to prevent more demonstrations, Ortega
supporters set up plantones, permanent occupation posts at the
rotundas on the main thoroughfare running through Managua. Those who
camped out there were known as rezadores, or people praying to God
that Ortega be protected and his opponents punished.
Besides the FSLN, two major political parties remained on the ballot,
the Liberal Constitutionalist Party and the Nicaraguan Liberal
Alliance. While independent surveys indicated that the opposition
candidates would win the majority of the seats, the Supreme Electoral
Council, which had prohibited international observers, ruled that the
Sandinista candidates won control of 105 municipalities, the Liberal
Constitutionalist Party won 37, and the Alliance won the remaining
six. An independent Nicaraguan group, Ethics and Transparency,
organized tens of thousands of observers but was denied
accreditation, forcing them to observe the election from outside
polling stations. But the group estimates that irregularities took
place at a third of the polling places. Their complaints were echoed
by Nicaraguan Catholic bishops, including Managua's archbishop, who
said, "People feel defrauded."12
After the election, militant demonstrations erupted in Nicaragua's
two largest cities, Managua and León, and were quickly put down with
violence. The European Economic Community and the U.S. government
suspended funding for Nicaragua over the fraudulent elections. On
January 14, before the election results were even officially
published by the electoral council, Ortega swore in the new mayors at
Managua's Plaza de la Revolución. He declared: "This is the time to
strengthen our institutions," later adding, "We cannot go back to the
road of war, to confrontation, to violence." Along with the regular
police, Ortega stood flanked by camisas rosadas, or redshirts,
members of his personal security force. A huge banner hung over the
plaza depicting Ortega with an up-stretched arm and the slogan, "To
Be With the People Is to Be With God."
"This despotic regime is bent on destroying all that is left of the
Sandinista revolution's democratic legacy," Chamorro told me in
January. "Standing in the way of a new dictatorship," he continued,
"are civil society organizations, the independent media, trade
unions, opposition political parties, women's organizations, civic
leaders and othersmany of whom can trace their roots back to the
resistance against Somoza."
As the Nobel-winning novelist José Saramago put it: "Once more a
revolution has been betrayed from within." Nicaragua's revolution has
indeed been betrayed, perhaps not as dramatically as Trotsky depicted
Stalin's desecration of what was best in the Bolshevik revolution.
But Ortega's betrayal is a fundamental political tragedy for everyone
around the world who came to believe in a popular, participatory
democracy in Nicaragua.
--
Roger Burbach directs the Center for the Study of the Americas
(CENSA), based in Berkeley, California (globalalternatives.org). He
was a "fellow traveler" during the Sandinista revolutionary years,
collaborating with the FSLN Directorate of International Relations in
analyzing U.S. political and military strategies.
--
Notes.
1. Mónica Baltodano, "El 'nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda?
Democracia pactada en Nicaragua," Le Monde diplomatique, Southern
Cone edition (December 2008): 1617.
2. Ibid.
3. The concept of revolución compartida is developed in Sergio
Ramírez, Adios muchachos: una memoría de la revolución sandinista
(Mexico City: Aguilar, 1999).
4. Rosa Marina Zelaya, "International Election Observers: Nicaragua
Under a Microscope," Envío 103 (February 1990), envio.org.ni/articulo/2582.
5. BBC, "1984: Sandinistas Claim Election Victory," available at
news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday.
6. Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost, Democracy and Socialism in
Sandinista Nicaragua (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996), 8485.
7. Roger Burbach and Orlando Nuñez, Fire in the Americas, Forging a
Revolutionary Agenda (Verso, 1987).
8. Nuñez develops this argument in his book La Oligarquia en
Nicaragua (Managua: Talleres de Grafitex, 2006). See also Nuñez, "La
Agonía política de la oligarquia," El 19 no. 14, November 27December
3, 2008, available at sepres.gob.ni.
9. Human Rights Watch, "Nicaragua: Protect Rights Advocates from
Harassment and Intimidation," October 28, 2008, available at hrw.org.
10. Baltodano, "El 'nuevo sandinismo' es de la izquierda?"
11. CBC News, "Latin American Artists Protest Persecution of
Nicaraguan Poet," September 6, 2008, available at cbc.ca.
12. "How to Steal an Election," The Economist, November 13, 2008.
*This article appears in the NACLA Report on the Americas,
"Revolutionary Legacies in the 21st Century," March/April, 2009. See
the full Report for additional articles on Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela,
Bolivia and Haiti. http://nacla.org/currentissue
.
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