Nicaragua
How Long Should the FSLN Shoulder the Government’s Burden?
Nitlápan-Envío team
For several weeks in March, all the media, as well as a vast number of private conversations, centered on the discovery of a young girl's body, raped and decapitated, in a drainage ditch along a well-traveled Managua road. As panic spread about the increasing number of sexual attacks against young children, a psychologist referred to the state of Nicaraguan families as "collective hysteria."
Hardly the only case of child rape or murder, it is the most repulsive and well-publicized one. While police unsuccessfully sought not only the criminal but also the unidentified child's head, what most deeply touched social consciousness was that no one came to see if the body might belong to their own lost child. Some media speculated about her nationality. Could her parents be undocumented South Americans—Peruvians perhaps—passing through Nicaragua on their way to illegal entry into the United States? That was the most generous interpretation, but there were others.
Society as a whole could not grasp that any child, independent of social extraction or poverty, could be so unloved by other human beings. As one Managua newspaper expressed it, this little daughter of no one thus became the "daughter of everyone." Many blamed the country's social environment, which has undergone a virtual evaporation of minimal norms of human coexistence, as much as they blamed the mysterious assassin.
Crisis of expectationsBoth the victim and the victimizer appear as aberrant and perverse reflections of Nicaragua's decomposing society, in which violence now permeates both political and social culture. Sheer physical survival has become more compelling than legality and the disappearance of values is becoming generalized, as is the hope deposited in either the opposition parties or the government.
In the two years since the UNO government took office, the living standard of the majority of Nicaraguans has dropped to unprecedented levels. One Sandinista calls it "the worst crisis in Nicaragua's history." Unlike previous crises, this one is marked by two apparently contradictory phenomena, although they may fundamentally coincide. In either case, they serve as indicators of the new situation.
One is that diverse grassroots sectors, including some never linked to Sandinismo, are uniting their demands and actions to confront the government. At the beginning of March, groups of recontras and recompas jointly occupied the northern town of Ocotal, in a peaceful protest against increasing hunger and unemployment in the surrounding countryside, aggravated by both last year's drought and the abandonment of cotton cropping. In the middle of the month, the conflict returned to Managua with a sugar workers' strike joined by previously rival union confederations. Also in March, producers from the pro-Sandinista National Union of Farmers and Ranchers joined together with demobilized members of both the army and the former contras, to create the National Peasant Coordinating Council. A second grassroots movement, the Popular National Coordinating Council, also formed in March, grouping together laborers from the Sandinista union umbrella called the National Workers Front (FNT), demobilized contras, recompas, war victims, merchants and an association of unemployed to defend their shared demands. There is hope that leaders of YATAMA in the Atlantic Coast and the former Resistance will join it too.
The other phenomenon, however, is that the distance between such grassroots movements and the Sandinista party leadership is widening, provoking new confusion and debates. Faced with the current crisis and wave of crime, neither politicians nor policies are providing any answers. With a violent confrontation brewing between the sugar workers and police just outside her office window, President Chamorro boarded a plane for Brazil, declaring that she was leaving the government "in God's hands." (Shortly after taking office, she had made clear that she would never leave it in the hands of her own Vice President.)
Only a few hours after her departure, Minister of the Presidency Antonio Lacayo and FSLN General Secretary Daniel Ortega, two of the country's most influential leaders, left together for Washington to solicit aid from wealthy donor countries. In Washington, news was already circulating in the media about the violence, lawlessness and uprisings in Nicaragua. Some fingered as the main culprit the very economic policy Lacayo had come to defend.
In sum, unprecedented levels of desperation are promoting similarly unprecedented agreements at the base. But while old political barriers are falling, they are being replaced by new ones that separate the people from the political superstructures.
It is hoped that a new opposition movement will emerge from these first efforts that will again link popular and party interests and will be able to peacefully force the government to change its policies.
Arms and hunger: A volatile combinationThe situation of the majority of peasant producers has been aggravated by the dramatic contraction of credit (peasants find it virtually impossible to get new loans from the banks), the collapse in international cotton and coffee prices and the impact of last year's drought in northern Nicaragua. According to Farm Worker Association (ATC) statistics, 35,000 peasants are currently unemployed and their families are going hungry. Alongside the alleviation of hunger, immediate legalization of all properties peasants received through the agrarian reform has become a growing demand. All these demands are becoming increasingly vehement in the face of continued government passivity.
The drought alone has created a desperate situation for more than 50,000 people living in southeastern Matagalpa and thousands more in Las Segovias (Region I). The lack of rain, which many blame on deforestation, meant that the harvest was lost in those areas.
As envío went to press, both FSLN and UNO National Assembly members were trying to have Region I declared an "emergency zone." In these areas news of the death of children from malnutrition and the generalized consumption of roots to fill empty stomachs have become routine.
A multifaceted symbol of the diverse groups now joining forces were some 2,000 recompas and recontras who, clad in red and black kerchiefs, smoothly coordinated the taking of the northern town of Ocotal on March 5 with support from the local population. The population itself warmly dubbed the occupiers "revueltos" (scrambled, as in eggs). The people of Ocotal understood that it was not an attempt to provoke violence, but a message clearly directed to the government. The recontras and recompas ran the town for eight days with order and mutual respect. Although the army was dispatched, it camped at the edge of town and merely kept an eye on events until the government finally sent a negotiating team on March 10. Sandinista leaders Daniel Ortega and Victor Tirado had arrived two days earlier to mediate between the revueltos and the army.
The revueltos' demands were the legalization of farmland and urban lots for the demobilized from the contras and army and for families of those who had died in the war, financing to work the lands, and the non-privatization of education and health. They explicitly rejected the government's recent individualistic and shortsighted negotiating ploy of simply buying the rifles from recontras in exchange for their demobilization.
After the government agreed to provide construction materials for 319 houses and provide titles and financing, among other things, the revueltos retreated from the city. Nothing had been damaged and not a single shot had been fired. They did not immediately demobilize, however. They gave the government 15 days to begin to comply with its agreement first. To call attention to their own gender problems, 200 women discharged from the army, demobilized from the contras or repatriated from other countries after the war, together with women cooperative members or neighbors from poor barrios in Ocotal, formed what they called the "Nora Astorga Northern Front." Armed and in uniform, the women marched out onto the Pan-American Highway leading to Ocotal to publicize their demands: jobs; financing for a home for the elderly, a child center and a maternity clinic; free medicine; and emergency reforestation projects in the zones where they live. They pointed out that women participated in the armed struggle and in the peace negotiations, but have not been taken into account in the resulting accords. The group threatened to take over buildings and sections of highways if its demands are not met.
This newfound cooperation is even beginning to embrace UNO and FSLN National Assembly representatives; together they are asking the government for emergency food aid. The Protestant and Catholic churches have also joined the clamor, demonstrating growing impatience with government insensitivity. Estelí's Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata called on the government to urgently respond to the needs of the most impoverished rural communities. Many peasants' only food, Bishop Mata charged, "is a tortilla with salt, and this only sometimes, once a day. And we won't even talk about the situation of clothing, or the subhuman housing in many of these communities."
Many of these hungry people in the countryside have access to more than one weapon. This explains why the government never finishes "disarming" the recompas and recontras, and why, after each announcement that the "last" group has turned in its weapons, another appears—perhaps even formed by some of the same people—demanding more money in exchange for more rifles. It is burlesque theater: the government appears to comply and the rebels appear to disarm. It is quite likely that a good part of these new rebels were never part of either the contras or the army. They are "Johnny come lately" combatants, peasants who have gotten hold of weapons, and are willing to turn them over for money.
The government's project to buy arms has not been a total waste. The Organization of American States' International Support and Verification Commission (CIAV) in Nicaragua says that over 17,000 people have turned in weapons since the contras demobilized in May-June 1990. With international support, the government has spent some $8 million at $200 a weapon for foot soldiers and as much as $4,000 for commanders. That does not count "special benefits" such as Toyota Land Cruisers or visas to the United States for some particularly hard-bargaining and troublesome "comandantes." But there is still hunger in the countryside, and there are still weapons. It is a volatile combination.
The sugar strikeOn March 16, 10,000 of the industry's 13,000 permanent and seasonal sugar workers launched a strike that paralyzed four of the country's seven state or partially state-owned refineries and crippled the other three. Some 2,000 workers, representing all six refineries in the Pacific, traveled to Managua, where they camped out on the street and in the parks surrounding the presidential building for the duration of the strike.
Their demands are the very same ones made in November 1991 during another work stoppage. The main one is government compliance with the right they won in the August 1991 concertación accords to 25% of the shares in the six refineries in the Pacific being sold off or returned to former owners. Even with the harvest at its peak, it took 10 days of striking to finally force the government to fulfill its own agreements.
The agreement signed after the November strike had even included a calendar: privatization was to begin that same month, with the San Antonio refinery, and continue slowly until April 1992, when it would culminate with the Victoria de Julio. Three of the six being privatized are wholly owned by the state and the other three have mixed ownership in which the state is divesting its shares. The only refinery exempted from this process is the Camilo Ortega, located in the South Atlantic Autonomous Region and thus governed by the Autonomy Statute.
By early March, privatization had not even begun, and it became clear that the government was decapitalizing the refineries. While the worker trusted the government to keep its promises, the state administrating agency for the refineries had begun to cut social benefits, lay off workers and limit state financing to the refineries—all in the guise of reducing costs. But it was also, in the government's proven style, an effort to weaken the enterprises being privatized to reduce their price on the market and thus increase their appeal to investors.
In this and other privatization negotiations with workers, the government tactic has become clear: gain time, with the hope of wearing down and weakening the workers' position, thus giving the new or old private owners a favored edge. Bankrupting or even closing enterprises, then reconstructing them without the old workers is a corollary tactic the government uses during this gained time. In the case of sugar, the last straw was when the government warned that under no circumstances could the 25% to workers affect former owners' interests. That was when the cutters put down their machetes and operators left the machines.
The government also stalled the negotiations with the argument that, since the workers were divided into various rival unions, the patrimony corresponding to them would have to be divided. But the Sandinista Workers Confederation (CST) coordinated with the Nicaraguan Workers Confederation (CTN), and all tried to focus their efforts on the workers' right to part ownership. At the San Antonio refinery, the CST also attempted to join forces with the rightwing Confederation of Trade Union Unity (CUS), its historic rival, but with less success.
The government entity that oversees state corporations and their privatization (CORNAP) finally agreed to the strikers' new proposal: consolidate the blocks of percentages to which the workers had a right. Instead of 25% of each refinery, they got higher percentages of the three exclusively state ones: 70% of Julio Buitrago, 50% of Benjamín Zeledón and 30% of Victoria de Julio.
Although the workers also demanded a 100% wage increase, this was not included in the negotiations with CORNAP; the government ruled that the meetings taking place under this strike pressure could only deal with privatization, and that wage issues would have to be taken up with the Ministry of Labor. These and other just demands of the sugar workers—financing for the enterprise and job stability—have also been part of the package fought for by customs, bank, communications, energy and airport workers. Since they, too, have received largely empty promises, they threatened to join the sugar workers in an escalating strike. They warned that the first to be affected would be government officials themselves, starting with those in the presidential offices.
Which side are you on?The FNT headed all these protests, but more than just more than just Sandinista workers answered the call. New labor groups even arose, separating from their more conservative traditional leadership. The leader of the recently formed Democratic Cane Workers Union declared that "if we are united with the FNT it is because they are the only ones willing to fight for our demands; there are no [party] flags here."
Lucio Jiménez, the FNT's main representative and a Sandinista Assembly member, publicly criticized FSLN leaders for their conspicuous absence during the sugar workers' strike. Speaking in the name of the striking sugar workers and bank employees, he unfolded a plan of action that would end up paralyzing the entire country within three weeks. Clearly responding to his radical base, Jiménez called on the Sandinista leadership to "define itself," even dubbing it "collaborationist" with the government. In an allusion whose meaning was lost on no one, Jiménez said he knew that the government has "support in its struggle against the workers" from political parties and social organizations and that "we workers are going to seek out those who support us in these same organizations," spreading his net to include the armed forces. The time has come to define which side you're on, Jiménez warned, the government's or the workers'.
The very next day, FSLN National Directorate member Tomás Borge responded to the challenge by demanding a little respect and political seriousness. He explained that Sandinistas would be "irresponsible, cheap and demagogic populists" if they encouraged social instability. "In my opinion," he added, "it would be very easy to harvest applause, and even, if we wanted, to increase our popularity ratings in the polls if we joined the calls to anarchy and violence."
After a long meeting between Daniel Ortega and FNT leaders, all agreed that the conflict with the government had to be conducted by strictly peaceful and civic means. Jiménez publicly insisted, however, that the government is the one encouraging violence by firing thousands of workers, reaching agreements with the International Monetary Fund to undermine worker aspirations and continually ordering patrols of the feared anti-riot police to break up worker demonstrations. "We are enemies of chaos and instability," said Ortega with equal insistence, stating that the problem had arisen due to lack of communication.
But what exactly does "political seriousness" mean? Who is provoking chaos and instability—the government or the workers? Given this evident ambiguity, underscored daily, the National Directorate's call left many Sandinistas uncomfortable, particularly those directly suffering unemployment and hunger, and all those who feel that they cannot remain silent in the face of the havoc the government's economic plan is wreaking.
This unease was fed by a closed-door meeting on March 14 between the Sandinista leadership and top government authorities, in which, among other things, it was agreed that Daniel Ortega would join the Nicaraguan delegation to meet with donor country and international lending agency representatives. The FSLN leadership denied that any other concrete agreements were reached with the government, and said that they had only exchanged points of view. The Sandinista leadership had previously decided that any government proposals would have to be discussed with the Sandinista Assembly before a response could be given.
Political schizophrenia?Ortega explained the party leadership's apparent duality by saying that the FSLN could not enter into total confrontation with the government's economic program "because we would be accused of making it falter." Even though the government policies are anti-people and Sandinista leaders share criticisms by opposition economists, the party leadership has come to the conclusion that Sandinismo as a whole cannot come out politically ahead in such a confrontation. "We would surely have gained the cohesion of Sandinismo, but not the backing of the people," Ortega explained to an assembly of FSLN members. This distinction between Sandinista militants and the rest of the "people" is repeated in other arenas of FSLN political activity.
For example, the survival of much of the growing commercial sector, including informal merchants, is jeopardized by even the threat of a general strike. The distinction thus also extends to one between unionists and "people," which helps explain the divergences between the FSLN and the FNT. Union strategy and struggle is obviously not synonymous with party or political strategy and struggle. What the government media censures as "chaos" within Sandinismo is simply employed or unemployed workers making their own demands on the government "without intermediaries." As one FNT leader pointed out, it is the unions' job to negotiate labor problems with the government.
The FSLN has always taken non-union sectors into consideration, insisting that those who oppose work stoppages cannot automatically be branded as bourgeois. But the current complexity of trying to responsibly represent a broad range of sectors-who could be won over to progressive social transformations, but not necessarily to the specific struggles of other sectors that damage their own critical immediate interests-sometimes overshadows a more fundamental question. How thin should the FSLN spread its social and political "responsibility"?
As the country's most important and powerful political force, should Sandinismo continue shouldering the government's burden even when the situation becomes ungovernable? Should it even do so when that ungovernability is a product of the government's own deficiencies and corruption, or its own ideology? Should the FSLN cover for any government failing in the name of social stability and wear itself down trying to channel potential social explosions into controlled civic actions? How long can it go on trying to reconcile its identification with the workers and its commitment to national stability? Are the recompas and recontras who peacefully took Ocotal or the thousands of peasants who marched on Managua on March 10 shouting for food and work not part of "the people"?
Divide and ye shall conquerIt was Daniel Ortega himself who went to calm down the revueltos in Ocotal and the sugar workers in Managua. He offered them the FSLN's official support, but not a call to spread the conflicts to a general strike, as the FNT planned, or the taking of other cities, as the revueltos had in mind. The Sandinista leadership spoke harshly to both the government and the workers, all in the name of national stability and social equity. Trying to reason with both sides, the FSLN leaders attempted to depolarize society, even at the risk of confusing their own political identity.
They are not, however, oblivious to the government's crafty counterposing of wage demands with the demand for jobs. It insists that the economy's continuing fragility does not allow for wage increases, even though a farm worker earns the equivalent of $30, a teacher $70 and a public hospital medic between $120 and $160 a month! Despite the reality of these wages, the government exaggerates and distorts the wage demands, posing them as unjust at a time when some 700,000 rural and urban Nicaraguans have no wages at all. In doing so, the government aims not just to divide the Sandinista and non-Sandinista union front, or the Sandinista union and party leadership. It also wants to present itself to public opinion as an administration "sensitive" to the cries for food and jobs, desirous of making the "unprotected and the unemployed" its priority. It casts itself as hobbled by the "violent destabilizers," the working-class "traitors" who already have the "privilege" of being employed, yet are demanding higher wages and participation in ownership, thus rendering the government unable to act on its desire to help the unemployed.
The foundation is thereby being laid for a possible escalation of government repression against what some CTN leaders have referred to as the "hotheads." The government is making it appear that it will have to do this "for the people" and even for Sandinistas in the self-proclaimed "center group." Speaking in the name of those who are tired of strikes, violence and instability, in the name of the peace that "all citizens long for," the center group argues that law and order must be obeyed, that stability must be defended at all cost.
From their perspective, like that of the government, the most "politic" thing is to assure that the "people" (or, perhaps, only urban TV-watching people?) not blame them for the instability, but see them as defenders of national and popular interests. Within their perspective is an effort to design a new kind of party. It is their answer to the necessary restructuring and regrouping of Sandinismo following its electoral defeat.
Opposition party or what? Characteristic of Sandinismo historically, this restructuring is not coming about through debate, but as a product of existing circumstances and the need to assure survival and social representation. In this context, the FSLN has stopped being opposition—a party that comes out in defense of the government every time a social or economic crisis erupts can hardly be called opposition. But neither is it a co-governing party. The only Sandinistas who insist that the FSLN should co-govern are those from the new "center group," who aspire to political posts and power.
The FSLN is "something else." By taking responsibility for preventing levels of chaos that would endanger the popular forces' possibility of again being directly represented in power, the FSLN believes itself to be above the government and almost above the nation itself. But it is a strategy fraught with risk.
One risk lies in overestimating the patience and capacity for sacrifice among workers and the most oppressed sectors. Another lies in the very assumption that the FSLN's "mature" actions will make it more politically attractive to a segment of the apathetic and individualistic population, or to those too worried about their own survival to have defined political positions, or even to sectors that will never accept Sandinismo because the workers' strikes infuriate them.
The government's mirror gamesThe government's strategy is clearer. It only implores FSLN collaboration in moments of crisis, not when it is defining the policies that could provoke it. The government tries again and again to corner the FSLN as a party, to turn it into a mediator—or, even worse, into a government apologist to the workers. The government is determined to end worker protests, and if it can do so by neutralizing their union or political leaders instead of by repression, so much the better for its own image. It is also easier for the government to invoke the FSLN's patriotic commitment to national stability and its sense of responsibility as the country's most organized political force. As a party and a political force concerned with its domestic and international image, it is difficult for the FSLN to reject this recurring invitation.
veins of political favors and debts run through all this. Antonio Lacayo has his virtually unconditional commitment to army chief Humberto Ortega and his willingness to stop any intent by National Assembly president Alfredo César to reform the law determining military structure, which protects the Sandinista top command. But the balance sheet appears less skewed when economic policy and privatization are added to the other column.
Roberto Moreno, leader of the CAUS, the Communist Party union federation, claims President Chamorro has more confidence in her predecessor than in her own ministers to resolve conflicts, and turns to Daniel Ortega "to convince the FNT to give up some demands and methods of struggle." From the other side, the extreme right still blames Ortega and the FSLN for every worker action. But, given the new, more autonomous relationship being forged between the unions and the FSLN, both claims are highly oversimplified.
With the same brush, the ultra right also tars the administration for permitting the FSLN to "co-govern" through the concertación accords and its periodic closed-door "understandings" with presidential minister Lacayo. As we have described above, the government is not so simple as all that either. Disavowing the responsibility its own policies have for engendering instability and violence, the government not only plays classic divide-and-conquer games but has also become adept at fancy image tricks with mirrors. Lacayo and his economic Cabinet constantly appear on TV to defend their economic plan, stressing only the new monetary stability and foreign support for the structural adjustment. The mirror trick is to refract any flaw in the plan on to "others." Last month's guilty "others" were the striking Central Bank employees, officially accused of sabotaging the provision of credits requested by the producers. Not one word was said about the fact that the real credit package allotted to producers is only a fraction of what it has been in past years.
The government is hardly blameless. It can no longer attribute the recession and the deteriorated living standards of the majority of the population to a lack of foreign resources. It has now accumulated enough foreign exchange to stabilize the economy as well as the currency. In the March 14 meeting between the FSLN and the economic Cabinet, the government admitted that it had $70 million to respond to the immediate problems of unemployment through emergency programs.
Even the donor governments and lending institutions now attribute stagnation in production to administrative and implementation deficiencies of the "technocratic" government itself. In addition, the many variants of government corruption are no longer deniable.
Privatization and ownershipAdded to all this is the government's political inability to resolve the property issue. All political forces and the numerous foreign technical missions agree that until there is a property structure that guarantees stability and security in the countryside, there will be no production and, by extension, no social or economic stability.
Legalizing property titles demanded by rural workers and adjudicating 25% of the shares to workers in enterprises being privatized are central Sandinista objectives. The issue in part is to avoid the reconcentration of property and wealth in the hands of new economic groups capable of financially grinding small producers underfoot, and eventually competing politically with the FSLN. The property issue and defense of the agrarian reform are also a question of principle for the FSLN, since a million people have been benefited by the revolutionary redistribution of property.
Both the government and the FSLN agree that stability will grow out of the legal recognition and the titling of most rural land and urban lots distributed during the Sandinista government, as well as of the state lands the Chamorro government ceded to demobilized army and contra fighters. Only large capitalists from the business association COSEP and their UNO party representatives in the National Assembly headed by Alfredo César disagree. The problem is that property is a question of principle for the ultra Right as well, among whom are Nicaraguans who obtained US citizenship during the 1980s and whose claims of "robbery" are now strongly defended by "their" Embassy.
Unlike the large landowners and business interests, however, the FSLN and the FNT have no concrete privatization strategy. Having won the right to 25% in the concertación accords, they now find it difficult to explain to the workers what this means in practice. (The government's own explanation often boils down to arguing that 25% of a bankrupt enterprise equals zero.)
In reality, the interpretation and the percentage in dispute vary from one enterprise to another. Each negotiation and each industry has its own particularities. The government ably takes advantage of this complex and often confusing situation—occasionally with the support of some Sandinista economists and entrepreneurs who agree either with its general project, or that a particular enterprise is not economically viable or even that worker participation itself is not viable.
Assembly president César, on the other hand, cannot be bothered to quibble about individual cases; he wants to derail the entire issue, once and for all. In a new round of confrontation with the executive branch and the FSLN, he entered the ring again on March 18 with the argument that President Chamorro technically did not veto the article of Law 133 (known as the "César law") annulling Sandinista Laws 85 and 86. In these two laws, the outgoing Sandinista government gave ex-post-facto ownership rights to urban lots and houses it had given out over the years but never titled. According to César, Chamorro only "suggested" changes in the language of his article, and since he opts not to take her suggestions, he plans to publish it as law along with the others unaffected by her partial veto last year.
With this pronouncement, César reinjected his own overdose of anxiety into the affected population, turning his back on the legal and political validity of the decrees that grew out of the concertación accords. Those accords had reaffirmed the irreversibility of most property transfers made during the revolution.
The FSLN's areas of coincidence with the Chamorro government do not diminish the latter's responsibility for failing to resolve the property problem. As in the conflicts with the sugar workers, the FNT, and the recompas and recontras, government officials sign agreements they then do not fulfill. The government's delay in providing certificates to the urban beneficiaries of Laws 85 and 86, agreed to in the concertación accords and ratified in later government decrees, contributes to the instability it says it is trying to prevent. Whether due to administrative deficiencies, or part of a political game to extract concessions from the popular sectors around such a sensitive issue, the government has required bulky paperwork for each solicitation, thus making the process very complicated for people with limited education. Even then, the special government office set up to handle this has fallen way behind in processing certificates for those who did make it through the maze.
A five-year truce?Such government deficiencies in carrying out its commitments are politically costly for the FSLN, since they essentially weaken the political framework of negotiation implied by being the party-base of the "post-revolutionary order." The FSLN still insists that concertación is the main instrument of popular struggle, but it has yet to answer the obvious question: What are we supposed to do when concertación doesn't work or when the signed commitments are not fulfilled? Hearing no response, it is not surprising that many at the base suspect that concertación only serves the government, and that the FSLN's insistence on it thus only ends up backing the government.
The government position is that privatization cannot be seen as "booty," that there is next to nothing to divvy up in the enterprises, and that the FSLN's duty is to educate the working class in perspectives more in line with the times. The problem, however, is the neoliberal conception of "development" and the mechanical acceptance that Nicaragua has no other alternative that does not rest on the sacrifice of the poorest. Entering its third year of administration, the Chamorro government is still asking the popular movement for a "truce" to permit the current policies to lead to the promised land of "economic takeoff." This, said Lacayo in Washington, will make Nicaragua an "interesting" country for investors.
But patience is not a virtue of either people or banks. After two years of "democracy," the country is still in a deep recession, and stability is still a myth. The possibilities of investment, whether small or large, national or international, are thus just about nil. Even if the much-touted stability—which neither government nor opposition have been able to define—were to arrive, no capitalists have been sighted waiting impatiently in the wings to put their money where their mouths are.
It was perhaps in recognition of this alarming reality that the government, in its March 14 meeting with Sandinista leaders, asked for a new truce, this time for a period of "two to five years." Given the international situation, it would have been more honest to request an "indefinite" one—in other words, to ask the left and the popular sectors to resign themselves to permanent social and political marginalization.
FSLN leaders acknowledge the need for some sort of structural adjustment, but find it difficult to pay the political, party and social price of being seen by the people as collaborating with the government in such an unpopular plan. Lacking an alternative program, they want something in return for their "collaboration" and commitment to national stability—and, in fact, to the continuity of the current political model. They want to build the basis for stability in the medium run that will favor popular interests and institutionalize the revolutionary changes of the past decade. The big question is whether the government or the economic dictators of the "new international order" are willing to concede this "something."
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