Nicaragua represents the worst of third world politics-that can happen today

By SJ Otto

Events in Nicaragua are troubling to say the least. I have read one newspapers account after another and they all paint a bleak picture of what is happening in Nicaragua. The articles focus mainly on growing authoritarianism by President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, violent protests against his government and the same kinds of economic problems we see now in Venezuela.

After 1979, there were many leftists as myself who flocked to support the Sandinista Revolution. This was a Marxist government that had a thriving democracy as well as the kinds of public works and programs to fight poverty that we had come to expect from a Marxist revolution. The Sandinista’s seemed to be Marxist as Cuba, but they were far more democratic. This was the kind of Revolution that western Marxists had hoped for the entire 20th century. This seemed to be the most democratic Marxist revolution that every existed. That is excluding elected leaders such as Salvador Allende, who also attempted Democratic Marxism, but relied entirely on the electoral system of Chile. The Sandinistas had an actual revolution, such as Cuba or Mexico.

During this time we had President Ronald Reagan who took power in the US and he made it a priority to try and destroy the very revolution so many of us worked to support. He armed a CIA manufactured guerrilla army and waged open war on the Sandinistas. He instituted a blockade and sabotaged their economy. He had the CIA and other US officials try and manipulate Nicaragua’s elections. He finally had some success in 1990, where Violeta Barrios de Chamorro won the presidential election. It was victory for Reagan and a bitter defeat for US progressives.

For many of us there was always hope that the Sandinistas could come back into power in a later election. That seemed to happen when Ortega came back to power, winning the presidential election in 2007. At the time left-leaning governments were being elected in many Central and South American countries. As with many third-world Marxist parties, such as in Mozambique and Angola in Africa, the Sandinistas were now calling themselves democratic socialists rather than Marxists. And still many of us hoped the election of Ortega would return Nicaragua to a left-leaning country once again.

What is happening today in Nicaragua is not positive at all. Suddenly a place that held great promise for American (meaning the hemisphere, not just the US) leftists seems to be fading fast. Ortega is trying to create what looks like a one party state. But this is not a leftist party state as we have seen in Cuba. Ortega has moved to the right on many issues. He has slashed social programs that were the pride of the Sandinista Revolution. He has banned abortion to win favors of Christian right-wing groups. His authoritarian actions, such as banning opposition parties, have led to anti-government protests from both the left and right. His actions may actually be pushing the country’s population away from supporting socialism or Marxism. From, NACLA “Nicaragua’s Authoritarian Turn is Not a Product of Leftist Politics”:

Civil society, which emerged as a vibrant political sphere in the 1990s, has suffered under the Ortega administration. For instance, Ortega has targeted feminist non-governmental organizations, many of them founded by onetime Sandinistas, with policies that monitor and limit their outside funding. These efforts have been accompanied by a vitriolic campaign in FSLN-controlled media, accusing Nicaraguan feminists of money laundering, CIA collusion, pornography, and promoting illegal abortions. Attempts by former Sandinistas to develop opposition parties like the Sandinista Renovation Movement have been met with similar responses. A cursory review of Ortega’s policy positions shows that his administration no longer enacts the values that once defined the Sandinista Revolution. As Sandinista Vice President of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, Sergio Ramírez, writes in his memoir Adiós Muchachos, the party has been “entirely replaced by the personal will of Daniel himself and his wife, Rosario Murillo.” What we are witnessing today is not the return of Sandinismo but the rise of Orteguismo.

There are reports in the mainstream press of protesters carrying blue and white flags. Right-wing protest movements often use a national color and then mix it with white. Many of these people seem similar to the right-wing protesters of Venezuela and they are no doubt hoping to push Nicaragua back into the kind of bourgeois government they had before the revolution. The US is, once again, trying to use legitimate protests to re-establish the kind of imperialist control they had in Nicaragua before the Sandinista Revolution. By coincidence the US now has a right-wing populist president similar to Roland Reagan. Again from, NACLA:

U.S. occupation and support for the Somoza regime bestowed on Nicaragua a deep and enduring experience of political repression. It is no wonder that FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca identified U.S. imperialism as the driving force behind authoritarianism in the country. Inspired by Sandino’s struggle for national sovereignty in the 1920s, the FSLN emerged in the 1960s as a homegrown response to dictatorship and imperialism. The improbable success of the Sandinista Revolution initiated a period of political transformation, as Nicaragua attempted to forge a new society, grounded in political pluralism and democratic participation, which served the interests of its most vulnerable sectors. Sandinista state policy reflected these commitments with agrarian reform, expansions in health services, and a national literacy campaign that brought a generation of youth to the countryside to teach rural families to read. The revolution infused new social and democratic energies into political life, and popular participation in revolutionary organizations burgeoned.

The New York Times covered the destabilization campaign extensively, making the editorial board’s claim that “allegations of corruption” led to the Sandinista electoral defeat appear myopic at best.

No single factor explains the 1990 electoral defeat that brought the Sandinista Revolution to a close. Certainly, the fledgling Sandinista state made significant errors as it sought to remake the highly unequal society it inherited from the Somoza regime. The Sandinista’s early approach to governing indigenous and Afro-descendant communities on the Caribbean coast was one of the most serious. But these missteps are overshadowed by the tremendous resources and energy the U.S. dedicated to sabotaging the revolution. As Nicaraguan poet and former Sandinista Gioconda Belli writes in her memoir of the revolutionary years, “I will never cease to be appalled at the utterly venomous, unwarranted manner in which the United States acted toward a tiny country that simply tried to do things its own way, even if this meant making its own mistakes.” A massive propaganda campaign against the revolutionary state paired with diplomatic pressures to isolate the country were followed by $400 million USD in aid to the Contra insurgency, the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, and a debilitating U.S. trade embargo. The New York Times covered the destabilization campaign extensively, making the editorial board’s claim that “allegations of corruption” led to the Sandinista electoral defeat appear myopic at best.

It is not surprising to see that the mainstream press is covering Nicaragua as it is covering events in Venezuela. They are blaming everything on leftwing politics. For an example see “Op-Ed: Nicaragua’s democracy is falling apart,” Los Angeles Times.

Also from NACLA:

“The recent events in Nicaragua have garnered attention from mainstream media outlets in the U.S., decades after international press corps flocked to the country to cover the Sandinista Revolution and the Contra War that followed. While Nicaragua has faded from public consciousness, old political narratives about the country and the Latin American Left die hard. Nowhere is this more evident than the recent New York Times editorial, ‘Dynasty,’ The Nicaragua Version.

Authored by the Times editorial board, the piece tells a story that reflects U.S. political interests as well as a good deal of amnesia about our country’s history of intervention in Nicaragua. Focusing on the corruption of the Latin American Left as an explanation for rising authoritarianism, the board laments the democratic deficit that now exists in the country. The analysis, steeped in a heady dose of American exceptionalism, omits U.S. efforts to squelch democratic aspirations in Nicaragua and misses the true tragedy of events: Ortega’s betrayal of the revolutionary Left and the vision of a more just society it represented.”

Also from NACLA, there is this:

What the New York Times editorial board misses is that the corruption and authoritarianism unfolding in Nicaragua is not a failure exclusive to the contemporary FSLN. Ortega’s efforts to establish a family dynasty are distressing, but he is hardly unique. The revival of the strongman role reflects a political tradition of caudillismo in Nicaragua. The Sandinista Revolution offered a short-lived challenge to that tradition. Even with the mistakes made by its leadership, the revolution’s vision of popular democracy and embrace of liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor created a democratic opening in the 1980s that was once unimaginable. U.S. efforts to crush this opening are a shameful product of our interventionist policy in the region.

The editorial board closes by noting dire conditions in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, which have led citizens of these countries to flee their homes for an uncertain future in the U.S. Nicaragua has been spared the worst of the violence that plagues postwar Central America, but all four countries share a crippling legacy of U.S. intervention. After the Cold War, the focus shifted to counternarcotics, and the U.S. helped to remilitarize the region to fight the drug war. At home, border militarization and the criminalization of immigration has added another layer of violence to our historical entanglement with our neighbors to the south. For the rest of the world, our interference in Latin America has had similarly destructive consequences. Historian Greg Grandin writes that the region, as a workshop for U.S. empire, has served as a testing ground for interventionist strategies and counter-insurgency tactics used in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

There is no mistake that we are witnessing an authoritarian turn in Nicaragua. But if we are to understand how and why this happened we cannot ignore the role of U.S. intervention. Rather than chiding the Latin American Left for its corruption or anti-democratic tendencies, we would do well to consider how the U.S. presence in the region has diminished democracy and promoted violence and suffering. Any effort to understand contemporary Central America demands an honest reckoning with this history. And while we too lament the growing authoritarianism of the Sandinista state, a critical reexamination of U.S. policy in Central America is long overdue.

Once again there are problems on both sides. Ortega has set himself up as a dictator and it seems more based on his personal greed and hunger for power and not for the benefit of the poor in Nicaragua. However his opposition is mostly taken over by right-wing forces and shills for US imperialism. We don’t want to endorse this Charlton, but we don’t want to unwittingly end up supporting the efforts of US imperialism. The US government under Trump is trying to overthrow Ortega and the Sandinistas, trying to portray this as freedom vs. socialism. Real socialism is not anti-freedom and that needs to be pointed out by the people of this country. Congress people such as Ilhan Omar have stood up to the tyrant Trump and spoke out against him. We all need to do the same. Many people in this country realize that being socialist is not the same as being anti-freedom.