In mid-April,
protests rocked the small, colonial city of León, Nicaragua – an area known throughout Central America for
its vibrant political past. In these demonstrations, citizens of this
struggling country rejected their government’s plans to tax workers’ salaries
at a higher rate and cut the pensions of current recipients. The government had originally passed these measures as a means of paying for the country’s faltering social security system. As University students,
pensioners, and street vendors fled the shots of rubber bullets fired by police
forces and erected barricades of burning car tires to shield themselves from
such aggression, they did so in front of murals that recounted the city’s past.
Upon the walls of León’s streets are paintings commemorating
the country’s literacy crusade in which León’s
students travelled to the countryside to teach Nicaraguan peasants to read and
write during the early years of the country’s late-seventies socialist
revolution. The silhouettes of the country’s hero Augusto Sandino – a peasant
who waged a guerrilla war against the US Marines during the 1930s – grace the top of
a government building. Perhaps most eerily, a painting memorializing a 1959
street battle between University students and the National Guard in which four
students were shot dead, lines the very street on which current protesters
faced off against the police. In other former Sandinista stronghold cities like
Masaya, a city to the southeast of León,
protest leaders have declared their independence from Ortega’s government. Masaya was originally the first city seized by the Sandinistas during their late seventies revolution. Since
the protests broke out on April 18th, police and Sandinista paramilitary groups
have killed more than one hundred seventy Nicaraguans nationwide. Many are still
missing. In 2018, the Nicaraguan past surrounds the protests currently
unfolding in the present. But, perhaps, not in the way we might expect.
(Pictured: Sandinista guerrillas, 1970s)
While many
Nicaraguans are now calling for current President Daniel Ortega to step down,
they had once, not long ago, viewed his Sandinista Party’s ascendance as an
indication that democracy and opportunity might flourish in the small, Central
American country. In July 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front successfully
seized control of the National Palace in Managua, ending the Somoza family’s four-decade
dynasty in the country. In the preceding years, the country’s former President,
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had grown infamous throughout the region for
pocketing foreign aid money that flooded into the country after a 1972
earthquake devastated the city of Managua. As a result, Nicaraguan society gradually
flocked to the Sandinistas’ guerrilla army, viewing them as an increasingly
viable political vehicle with which to finally put Somoza rule to rest.
As the 1970s ended,
the Sandinista Revolution achieved important strides. The Party’s literacy campaigns cut the country’s illiteracy rate by more than half. They instituted equal
pay for all genders and extended paid maternity leave for female workers. They
distributed formerly Somoza-owned arable land to peasant families, allowing
them to form agricultural cooperatives. Many Sandinista-affiliated unions were
given seats in the country’s National Assembly, giving ordinary peasants and
workers a say in the country’s governing processes. Feminist-led Sandinista
collectives pushed for the sharing of community wealth among men and women, as well as an increasingly shared form child rearing. With this initiatives, Nicaraguan
feminists hoped to reform the traditionally patriarchal nature of Nicaraguan
society. In 1987, with the assistance of queer activists from the Bay Area, the
Sandinista Ministry of Health established some of the first AIDS Prevention
Programs in the Americas. Internationally, the Sandinistas were imbued with a
sense of hopefulness. A chance to create a democratic form of socialism in a
country formerly run by intense kleptocratic, oligarchical rule. Everyone from
British punk rockers The Clash to then Columbia University student Bill de
Blasio celebrated the Party’s achievements. Thousands of US citizens travelled
to Nicaragua during the 1980s to support the Revolution. Encouraged by the
Sandinista government's reforms, hoards of international leftists and progressives would
assist in building schoolhouses, paint revolution-themed murals, help to
harvest nationalized coffee and cotton, and even build hydroelectric dams in rural
communities.
(Pictured: Sandinista Literacy Crusade, early-1980s)
(Pictured: The Clash's great 1980 album "Sandinista" that featured a tribute to the Nicaraguan socialists on their song "Washington Bullets." More punk rock tributes to Nicaragua can be found in the Minutemen's "Song for Latin America," Pink Section's "Jane Blank," and even in the pages of Maximum Rocknroll. The long-running punk zine published a report on Nicaraguan socialism entitled "Nicaragua is Punk Rock" in 1988.)
Yet, such
progress remained short lived. As the Reagan Administration covertly pumped
millions of dollars into Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary forces known as the
Contras, the Sandinistas re-financed their national budget towards defense in
an attempt to defend the Revolution. This reallocation of the budget resulted
in Sandinista social programs falling by the wayside. Counterrevolutionaries
burned agricultural cooperatives and destroyed the schoolhouses of the literacy
crusade. Inflation soared. Due to a 1985 U.S. economic embargo, food and
medicine became increasingly scarce. In 1990, Nicaraguan voters, weary of the
Revolution’s ability to create equality amidst Contra violence, rejected
Sandinista President Daniel Ortega for the UNO Party’s candidate Violetta
Chamorro, a politician with ties to the Contras and more favorable to the
interests of the United States.[1]
The Sandinista Party was never the same.
(Nicaragua, 2018)
The Daniel
Ortega protested by Nicaraguans today is not the Ortega of the 1980s, but one
that emerged after the Revolution’s end. After 1990, Sandinistas leaders bought
up nationalized farms, businesses, and buildings in order to prevent them from
being sold into private hands under the policies of a new administration. Yet,
even after Nicaraguans re-elected Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas to the Presidency
in 2007, these lands still remain in private hands. Such policies have allowed
Sandinista leaders like Ortega and others to amass personal fortunes. After the
election, as a means of winning over the Catholic vote, Ortega imposed some of
the harshest abortion restrictions in Latin America. He has also consistently
pursued economic policies designed to accommodate big business as a means of
keeping them content. As of 2016, Daniel Ortega has begun his third
Presidential term of the twenty-first century. His Party controls the most
powerful offices of government and courts.
(Pictured: Nicaragua, 2018)
Many will want to
paint these protests and the country’s current woes as ones illustrating
socialism’s failure. Among the Right, comparisons to past socialist nations’
political woes abound. Yet, as I have
tried to show, the Sandinistas of 2018 are not the Sandinistas whose utopian
aspirations were lauded by the international Left during the 1980s. This Party was
significantly crippled by the aggression of the Reagan Administration, along
with its goals of equality. In fact, the Sandinistas’ 1980s Minister of Culture
and Party defector, Ernesto Cardenal, has repeatedly referred to the modern
Sandinistas as a “family dictatorship.” Such a phrase inevitably brings to mind
the very family that Ortega and his Party fought to overthrow almost forty
years ago in the same squares and streets that protesters now occupy.
Cardenal’s sentiments are echoed words of former Sandinista ambassador to the
United States Alejandro Bendaña:
“We
consider ourselves Sandinistas and believe that Ortega and his cohorts betrayed
the Nicaraguan revolution. So, what we’re trying to—we are part of this broad
movement that wants him out, but we do not renounce our ideals. We do not
renounce Sandino. We do not renounce our identity. But he has to go, if there
is any prospect of Nicaragua re-embarking on a path toward, first, reform and,
eventually, more structural, institutional change. He is now the principal
obstacle, as seen from a left perspective.”[2]
Much like Ortega and his comrades once did, protesters
in cities across the country are holding their leaders accountable.
(Pictured: The Ever-present comparison, 2018)
[1] News reports have recently covered Daniel
Ortega as never being democratically elected during the 1980s, yet he was, in
fact, elected to the presidency in 1984 by the Nicaraguan people. Prior to this
election, a National Junta comprised of varying political factions governed the
country. While I do not support Ortega in the present, I feel that this is
important to point out.
[2] This quote is taken from a recent
interview with Alejandro Bendaña on Democracy Now! The full segment can be found here: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/7/students_push_to_oust_nicaraguan_president
