[Socialism Today, No 14, December 1996, p. 3-4]
Alemán’s victory presages a period of sharp struggle over the demands of the dispossessed rich.
October’s Nicaraguan presidential elections brought right wing candidate Arnoldo Alemán, the mayor of Managua, to power. Alemán, who leads the Liberal Alliance – a grouping based on the Liberal Party of former right-wing dictator Somoza – won a reported 48% of the vote, against the 39% of Daniel Ortega, candidate of the Sandinistas (FSLN).
FSLN leaders claimed widespread ballot irregularities. Ballot boxes were not distributed to parts of Managua and some rural districts, and FSLN observers were excluded from many polling stations. All commentators agree that these factors cost Ortega many votes.
There is no doubt that the electoral defeat is a major blow to the FSLN, and their hundreds of thousands of supporters among the urban and rural poor. When in 1990 the FSLN suffered electoral defeat at the hands of Violetta Chamorro’s UNO coalition, much store was set on the possibility of an electoral victory in 1996.
Arnoldo Alemán’s victory is the result of a three-year campaign, massively financed by the rich who returned from Miami exile after the 1990 election, and by anti-Castro Florida Cubans.
Alemán is the candidate of ’social revenge‘. He has represented the demands of the rich for a return of all their property confiscated during the 1979-90 revolution. While over the last six years many of the gains of the revolution, including free education and health care, have collapsed, former owners have not regained large tracts of land and other property confiscated by the Sandinistas. Alemán’s victory presages a period of sharp struggle over the demands of the dispossessed rich,
Despite the shrill demands of the wealthy for ‚justice‘, the face of Nicaragua has changed radically in the last six years – in their favour. The country is now the second poorest in the Western hemisphere, after Haiti. Joblessness is around 50%. While wages for those lucky enough to have a job are about US$2 a day, a pound of rice or beans, the staple diet of the poor, is 40-50 cents. Those with large families barely have enough to eat, let alone money for rent or clothes.
Hundreds of thousands have thus been ‚marginalised‘, reduced to begging, street peddling or scavenging rubbish dumps. An unemployed man who died recently when a rubbish dump collapsed was found to be a trained agronomist, with a degree from a Cuban university, feeding his three children by scavenging. At the same time the newly returned ‚Miami crowd‘ rich flaunt their wealth in Managua’s new fashionable areas. They exude, according to The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, ‚the unchallengeable confidence of privilege restored‘.
Nicaragua’s slide towards impoverishment started with the US-imposed Contra war during the 1980s. War and conscription wrecked the economy. But the situation has worsened dramatically since the Sandinistas left office. There is no longer Soviet aid. The IMF imposed privatisation and harsh austerity – demanding for example the closing of schools, health centres and the children’s breakfast programme in return for writing off $600m of the country’s $800m debt.
Denominating all debts in dollars has been disastrous for the poor. For example, under the Sandinistas the Soviet ‚Belarus‘ tractor cost a highly subsidised $3,000, affordable by peasant co-operatives. Now an American-made tractor costs $35,000 – affordable by the rich only. As poor farms and co-operatives become unviable and are sold off, class inequality deepens.
The American investment and aid which many Nicaraguans thought would result from the 1990 defeat of the FSLN never materialised, as the Republican Congress foreign policy establishment, led by Jesse Helms, accused Chamorro of temporising with the Sandinistas. All Nicaraguans got from putting the UNO coalition in power was deepening poverty. A foreign aid worker recently told journalists, ‚This country has the prices of New York, the wages of Bangladesh and the services of Timbuktu‘.
The 1990 defeat, and subsequent rolling back of the gains of the revolution, demoralised important sections of Sandinista supporters. A formerly staunch FSLN family, who had made many sacrifices for the cause including losing two sons in the anti-Contra war, told Jonathan Steele: ‚We’re totally demoralised. We’ve lost our love for, our interest in the revolution‘ (Guardian, 12 October). The same family also told Steele: ‚The (anti-contra) war stopped us seeing how much the FSLN- had already changed. Now we see no future in any party. The US imposes its will on the whole world and we will have to die with this yoke upon us‘.
The FSLN remains however overwhelmingly the party which the most class conscious and determined workers and peasants give their support to. But many reports during this year’s election speak of disquiet with the direction of the leadership. In 1994 Sergio Ramirez, one of the nine ‚commandantes‘ during the revolutionary period, broke from the FSLN to the right, founding the Sandinista Renewal Movement.
Ramirez’s drive to have the FSLN adopt an openly pro-capitalist, social democratic, political position was opposed by Daniel Ortega. However, subsequently Ortega’s policy pronouncements revealed little substantial difference between him and Ramirez. In the coming period the Nicaraguan workers and peasants face new and harsh attacks. A new phase of the struggle is opening.
Phil Hearse
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