Nicaragua
The $100 Million Poker Game
Envío team
When the news broke in late May that powerful sectors in Congress were urging a freeze on the $100 million in aid scheduled for disbursement that month, it hit Nicaragua like a 500-pound bomb. Politicians and technocrats alike panicked. In particular, President Violeta Chamorro and Minister of the Presidency Antonio Lacayo rained curses down on National Assembly president Alfredo César, the highly deserving scapegoat of this new US maneuver.
Their inelegant reaction to the freezing of the funds, part of a $280 million US commitment programmed for FY 1992, exposed some unpleasant truths: among them the Chamorro government's extreme dependence on significant amounts of US aid to make its economic plan viable. Even more importantly, it revealed the vulnerability of the Chamorro government itself, together with that of a formal economy that is increasingly leaving the majority of the population out of the productive sphere. The one truth that surprised few was the fragility of the Bush Administration's political support for her government.
The sad part is that, if and when the money is released, it will do little to help the desperate situation of the majority of Nicaraguans; most is earmarked not for development or social programs, but to support Nicaragua's balance of payments. It is part of an exceptional fund allocated to keep the government afloat and avoid a financial crisis in an economy whose only lifeline is foreign loans.
Antonio Lacayo has pegged the success of his economic stabilization plan to the promise of a fixed exchange rate of 5 córdobas to the dollar. Apart from the fact that this now overvalued official rate has made Nicaragua one of the most expensive countries in Latin America, the only way to prevent the real disparity between it and the black market rate from getting out of control is through the unrestricted availability of the dollar. Proof of this is that the mere announcement of the possible aid freeze drove the street exchange rate from its virtually constant 5.20 córdobas of the past two years to 5.50. With Nicaragua's recent history of hyperinflation and devaluations, no one wants to get stuck holding córdobas.
With exports still at a critically low level, the government's primary source for these dollars is foreign loans. The $100 million is thus a life-and-death issue to the Chamorro government's political stability. Since, in turn, that stability determines the life or death of the political-constitutional framework created by the former Sandinista government, the FSLN felt its own share of panic.
The Bush Administration held up aid in response, primarily, to congressional conservatives' concerns over the Chamorro governments' compromises with the Sandinista opposition. This campaign was led by Senator Jesse Helms, friend of Anastasio Somoza III, and backed by a letter to President Chamorro by some two dozen members of Congress. Nonetheless, liberal Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Foreign Operation Subcommittee, placed the only formal congressional hold on aid. Obey's very different concerns included the large percentage of aid in the form of cash transfers rather than dedicated to development projects. But when Rep. Obey lifted his hold on July 2, the Bush Administration refused to restore the aid.
Who's the real culprit?Although all Nicaraguan politicians agree on the need for the funds, they differ on who is responsible for the freeze and what should be done to thaw it. Alfredo César and Nicaragua's rightwing business interests blame the central government and Antonio Lacayo in particular. In May César went to Washington, where he told Congress and the media that the FSLN still governs in Nicaragua and that Lacayo, on whom President Chamorro relies totally, acts as the Ortega brothers' representative. César's evidence is that the FSLN still controls the army and police, and that Lacayo fired Minister of Government Carlos Hurtado for trying to change the police command structure.
The executive branch and the FSLN are convinced, in turn, that the congressional group only began demanding explanations from AID after César's visit to Washington, and, in particular, after an op-ed article by ex US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick, citing his accusations, was published in the US media.
This explanation, however, tends to exaggerate César's influence in Congress and the State Department. Since power relations flow in precisely the opposite direction, it is more reasonable to assume that technical and political "concerns" were already being felt in Washington and among the most anti-Sandinista media. The question is thus not to what the members of Congress are reacting, but to whose bidding in Washington César and his Nicaraguan business allies are responding.
Technical issues or political ones?The FSLN's still-sizable influence in Nicaraguan politics is not the only concern in Washington. Another big one is the property issue. For some time a number of members of Congress have been under pressure from both naturalized and native-born US citizens who are claiming properties in Nicaragua that they abandoned or that were expropriated by the Sandinista government—even though, in many cases, they were duly compensated. Despite this now familiar "technical" complication in the relations between Congress and Nicaragua, those members of Congress concerned about it have let AID do most of their pressuring.
For AID, the issue is more ideological. It wants the primacy of the private sector clearly defined in general, and the state banking system dismantled in particular. It is pegging its disbursements to privatization and even to the return of properties to Somocistas (in their convenient guise as US citizens). It is known that two sons of Luis Somoza II, both naturalized US citizens, came back to Nicaragua to claim various family possessions, confiscated via Decrees 3 and 38—which respectively legalized the confiscation of Somoza family and Somocista holdings. Although Lacayo has vowed on numerous occasions to respect Decree 3, a number of lower-profile Somocistas have recently been given back their shares in some businesses.
While the Chamorro government undoubtedly shares AID's desire, it has a countervailing political problem to contend with: it does not want any more destabilizing confrontations over property with the unfavored social sectors, which are also demanding rural land and urban lots. Nor does it want to square off with the FSLN over the state banks. The FSLN, staunchly opposed to their closure, is holding the government to the transition accords and to its commitment to abide by the Constitution, which guarantees the existence of a state banking system. At the bottom of the bank issue is access to credit, which, in turn, is tied to restrictions put on access to and use of funds. To all this must be added the problem of police protection and security for property-holders' rights.
César has been a hard-line opponent of the government's partial legalization of the Sandinista administration's property redistribution. According to him, it puts a brake on productive investment. The last straw is that the state banks, in César's opinion, have distributed AID funds to businesses in Sandinista hands.
Whose money got lost? And where did it go?There are real technical concerns regarding "unrecoverable" loans granted with international aid, but the issue became political when César unjustifiably branded the bad debtors as Sandinistas. The fact is that a major part of the loans provided through the state banks went to large private agroexporters, mainly in cotton, sugar and bananas. In the fine old tradition of Nicaraguan private enterprise, these same agroexporters have used their influence to demand that the bank reprogram or even pardon their debts. It is thus arbitrary, to say the least, to accuse Sandinista small producers of squandering large amounts of credit that they no longer even receive, or to accuse the state bank, whose operations and financing allocations are increasingly squeezed, of being an accomplice in this waste of US funds.
What the government could admit, if it chose to, is that a good chunk of the money and goods provided to former contra leaders has been lost, and that the bank recovered less than $400,000 of the $3 million originally destined for a repatriation program. Another aspect of the loss, which Lacayo did acknowledge, is attributable to falling international prices for cotton and coffee. While most growers of these two crops were unable to repay their loans, those affiliated with the big-business association COSEP outnumber those in the Sandinista-linked UNAG by four to one.
It is not even clear that it was AID's money that was "lost" (in much the same sense that millions upon millions of US taxpayers' dollars are "lost" in subsidies to US farmers each year). AID does not give any money directly for credit programs. Nicaragua's Minister of Foreign Cooperation noted that this money could just as easily be considered part of the country's export income, which, like AID funds, passes through the Central Bank. But from the orthodox neoliberal perspective, once the government agrees to follow the fiscal guidelines dictated from abroad, it matters little who the owner of the funds is.
The US hedges its betsIt is assumed that the letter to President Chamorro from the 24 House members was originally intended to be private, just another of those frequent respectful requests that she take some specific measure or other to assure that the letter's signers not run into problems in Congress. For his part, Senator Helms employed the same open political blackmail that gets him Federal government favors for his state; this time he used it to try to resolve the problem of some of his backers with particular interests in Nicaragua. At some point, however, the chaos became so great that even liberals were asking that the funds be frozen, thus muddying beyond recognition the real issues behind the dispute.
And where was the Bush Administration in all this confusion? The assault has taken on such importance precisely because the Bush Administration is directing it backstage. César's trip, which would have been difficult to organize without a tacit nod from the US Embassy, was the perfect pretext to wring new concessions from the Nicaraguan government. But the State Department has a well-honed practice of proclaiming its support for President Chamorro while using—and even promoting—rightwing criticisms to make Antonio Lacayo more receptive to US positions and less so to those of the FSLN. This time it may have even created the circumstances in which not only to repeat its old demands on the government but also add some new ones.
Some observers even think that, now, the target is not only the positions Lacayo defends, but the man himself. They speculate that his name has been added to the list of resignations demanded by Washington, right up alongside that of Humberto Ortega. After two years of economic support to the Chamorro government, the most conservative sectors in the Bush Administration seem to have run out of patience—they are now insisting on payment of the political bill that government has run up.
But, as usual, the Administration sent runners to place bets in its name on both players. While AID officials in Managua were dispatched to Washington to explain the technical aspects of the problem to Congress, several Congressmen came down to explain to Chamorro officials that the Bush Administration shares Congress' "concerns" and that they must be addressed. Assurances that the Chamorro government is also concerned did not alter Washington's demand that words be matched by deeds.
It was the old White House game of putting its own demands in the mouths of others—in this case, Nicaraguans and Congress people—to optimize its own negotiating position and protect its image as the people's benefactor. The logic reached its height when, after a brief meeting with President Bush at the ecological summit in Rio de Janeiro in mid-June, President Chamorro announced with unconvincing enthusiasm that he had promised to do "everything possible" to unfetter the aid to Nicaragua. The State Department, too, assured that its policy of friendship and support for the Chamorro government had not changed and that it was also doing all it could to free up the aid.
Anyone who knows Washington's bureaucratic world is aware that the White House can unfetter aid disbursements any time it chooses. But it has no incentive to pull President Chamorro's chestnuts out of the fire unless she is willing to politically singe her own hands a little inside Nicaragua. At the same time, however, it has no desire to bum its image with the Nicaraguan population. The last thing Washington wants is to disappoint the sectors—including those inside Sandinismo—that are always ready to give their historic foe the benefit of the doubt.
Not two weeks after Bush's assurances, Chamorro's economic Cabinet had to alert the population that an economic emergency would be inevitable if the aid is not released within the next five months.
Who deals the deck names the gameThroughout June, the issues of the police and army returned to the front burner, and, not by coincidence, so did the campaign against the old state security structures. It was a reminder to President Chamorro that the State Department could not tolerate her accommodation policy and the transition accords with the FSLN indefinitely; they are incompatible with the neoliberal political and economic principles defended by the US aid programs.
Aware of Washington's impatience, César and other politicians such as former Minister of Government Carlos Hurtado scrambled to put together a new round of pressures. From nowhere appeared deserters from the army and the old security apparatus denouncing their former superiors and propagating stories about rivalries and enmities with the Sandinista military institutions.
Up to now, the Chamorro Administration has repeatedly skirted the requirements presented by the Embassy. With justification, Lacayo argues that his economic program has the international financial community's general support and has even exceeded some of its goals (at the obvious cost of society's poorer sectors). In his words, the government has been "careful to carry out the economic program to the letter to get certificates of excellent conduct from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund." It would be ingenuous, however, to believe that the US government bases its foreign policy towards Nicaragua on such certificates, or that it measures "good conduct" only in economic terms. It would be more ingenuous yet to think that excellent economic conduct could earn Chamorro's government the space to do what the Bush Administration's perspective would call "political tricks." Such beliefs would be slightly less preposterous were Nicaragua's economy not so dependent on foreign assistance and particularly on the US contribution to it.
High-stakes anteDespite unusually open appeals from the rest of the international financial community, Washington put aside discreet diplomacy and unsheathed the iron conditions of its economic aid. With the ante raised so high, it was hard to imagine that the US might not really have all the high cards in its hand this time.
The country's vulnerability was bared for all to see. The Chamorro government desperately needs the funds, but a decision to buckle under to Washington's hard line would cost it the commitments assumed in the name of social stability, shrinking even further its own scanty autonomy and room for negotiation. Dare the Chamorro government call the US bluff? Dare it not?
One calculation is that there is probably not enough desire or political ability in the Bush Administration or in Congress to cut the aid programmed for Nicaragua. Sectors within both may just recognize that it is a moment of optimum advantage. It is the period in which the new fiscal year's foreign aid bill is debated in Washington and thus the time Congresspeople impose restrictions or negotiate additions.
Nicaragua's own political calendar plays a role too. For one thing, the danger exists that the understanding between Sandinismo and the government could soon be institutionalized into an ongoing consultation body. This makes it necessary to take advantage of Alfredo César's last months as president of the National Assembly. As long as he has headed the Assembly, it has functioned as the domestic delegate to coordinate with and complement US Embassy pressures. But César's maneuvering room began shrinking as the mid-year recess approached. When the legislative body reconvenes, it enters the pre-electoral period for the new board, and the Sandinista bench is confident that it can get the support of at least the six UNO bench representatives solidly loyal to Chamorro to block César's reelection.
This fast-fading political moment happens to coincide with a critical economic one for the Chamorro administration. It is no accident that the release of the $100 million was scheduled for May. The onset of the rainy season puts a tremendous demand on the Central Bank's reserves for production credits. With much of those reserves pledged to guaranteeing the córdoba rate, making foreign debt service payments and the like, the withholding of the US disbursement could imply rerouting some of the already insufficient funds allocated to agricultural loans to honor these other commitments.
Violeta matches the betThe likes of the Chamorro government's political campaign to get the funds released have not been seen since the old Sandinista days. In addition to dominating the otherwise rather boring Central American presidential summit, the campaign met with surprisingly positive response from other international sectors. Several regional lending agencies pointedly moved forward their own scheduled disbursements, and in the first of three separate occasions time in the month, staunch European allies took polite but surprisingly open exception to a US position—the second was in Rio de Janeiro, when all countries except the United States signed an international agreement on ecological protection, and the third was the public recoiling of a number of governments (Chamorro's included) from the US Supreme Court decision that the United States has the right to kidnap accused nationals of other countries whose governments refuse to permit their extradition.
On the domestic front, Violeta Chamorro and her son-in-law Antonio Lacayo invoked nationalism in their call to all sectors to take a public stand in favor of immediate disbursement. To the astonishment and disgust of US diplomats, who thought such days were over, Lacayo even obliquely called for demonstrations in front of the US Embassy.
Responding to the call, the FSLN demanded the release of the funds. It was not alone. A dozen UNO representatives in the National Assembly joined the Sandinista bench to declare their support for Chamorro's appeal. The plethora of small far-right parties in the UNO coalition, however, did not climb on the bandwagon. Like the big business association COSEP, they icily blamed the Chamorro administration and its "co-government" policy for the delay and for the economy's failure to reactivate.
Old property owners win the first handWhat followed has all the earmarks of a well-known Nicaraguan political cycle. Each time the State Department finds an excuse—and a scapegoat—to demand more concessions from the Chamorro government, Lacayo uses these demands to wring more concessions out of the FSLN. This time the government showed a bureaucratic agility it has never demonstrated in responding to the legitimate demands of Nicaragua's poorer sectors, even the former contras who helped get it elected.
In particular, it speeded up the process of returning disputed properties to their former owners. The San Antonio sugar estate and refinery, the biggest such operation in the country, was given back to its former owners, thanks to pressure by US citizens who once owned 20% of the stock. The FSLN protested loudly, since the Sandinista government had paid most if not all of the indemnification it negotiated with the company's founders and major stockholders—Nicaragua's powerful Pellas family—at the time of expropriating it due to years of decapitalization. But the protest went unattended; hundreds of workers were laid off as part of the deal.
In the first week of June, the government announced the creation of a property proctorship to facilitate the review of claims and return of properties. The claims of Somocistas-turned-US citizens are apparently included among the files, despite the agreement the FSLN reached with the incoming Chamorro government to honor the decrees under which they were expropriated.
The Sandinista Workers' Confederation had its own response to the accelerated return of productive urban properties. It called on workers to resist any such effort since the government had promised to first negotiate with them the percentages of shares of companies being reprivatized that would go to them in recognition of their sacrifices to keep the state holdings operational during the war years.
The government, by semi-paralyzing a number of enterprises it is trying to privatize rather than turn shares over to the workers, has consistently demonstrated its reticence to fulfill this agreement with the union movement. But the new US pressures serve to justify this governmental sabotage.
The army plays roughIn the countryside, the property issue got a good bit rougher. The government ordered the army to impose order, disband any demonstrators and remove all those occupying farms claimed by their "legitimate" owners. Gone was government and army tolerance of land and road takeovers by the mix of former contra and army combatants known as "revueltos." The armed forces duly evicted landless peasants from the farms they had taken over, and occupied the ones still in litigation, ignoring the peasants' advanced preparation for the planting season.
In last August's Concertación Forum, the government had agreed that farms on which there had been labor conflicts with the old owners would not be returned; the original owners would be offered other property or indemnification. Yet now, backed by the police and army, these owners are getting their properties back without recognizing the workers' accumulated rights or even the existing collective agreements.
In the last days of June, more than 2,000 peasants from Matagalpa took to the streets with FSLN backing to demand the immediate release of 80 farmworkers detained by the army. Union leaders denounced the force exercised by the army and police at the confiscated landowners' insistence. FSLN secretary general Daniel Ortega charged that the army's action exceeded its constitutional faculties, a view not shared by his brother Humberto, who heads the army.
The marchers called on the soldiers and police not to lend themselves to the interests of "Somocista and confiscated shackburning landowners." The latter pejorative referred to the demolishing of two peasant homes by police patrols on orders of a local judge who collaborated with a large landowner. In Matagalpa, as in other places, the popular organizations and local FSLN leaders called on those benefited with lots and houses to join together to better fend off the government's offensive, which they called "totalitarian and oppressive."
Those who have long denounced the Sandinista Popular Army as a destabilizing instrument that answers to the FSLN were the first to ask for its help in protecting their properties. The property security demanded by COSEP and the US Embassy thus ended up being guaranteed by the very army they insist on dismantling or at least drastically reforming.
Nicaragua's rural entrepreneurs have consistently seen unbridled force as the only "solution" to the property dispute. At last they have found some allies in the government willing to do almost anything to assure the approval of foreign funders. They have even found some converts among the technocrats who naively think there is a queue of foreign investors only waiting until the issue of private property guarantees is "cleared up" before investing their capital in Nicaragua.
In Managua alone, more than 100,000 families from some 300 neighborhoods are still waiting for the deeds to their small lots and/or homes as also promised in the Concertación Forum. The government promised to have them ready by June 30, but it has yet to issue a single deed. The only sign of good faith it has shown is to extend the period in which the decrees covering their claims remains in effect. Meanwhile, Arnoldo Alemán, Managua's viscerally anti-Sandinista mayor, recently announced a new campaign of evictions from the capital's urban squatter settlements. For their part, Communal Movement leaders warned that they would take any measures necessary to defend people's lots and houses.
Police force under siegeAlemán accompanied this show of force with the debut of his controversial "Municipal Inspector Corps." Although the mayor claims they are a civilian force, the stiff uniforms, bearing and behavior of this para-police unit are reminiscent of Pinochet's Chile. One resident of a lower middle-class neighborhood, watching wide-eyed as a pair of them headed determinedly down the middle of her tree-lined street, murmured nervously to herself, "Hmph, the eyes and ears of the counterrevolution."
The FSLN daily newspaper Barricada put the same idea in even stronger terms. "No one," it sentenced, "can guarantee that the famed Inspector Corps will not be converted tomorrow, as is feared, into the shock troops of the Somocista liberalism associated with the mayor."
Police Chief René Vivas' warning was more circumspect but no less clear. Taut jaw muscles belying his calm tone of voice, Vivas assured that there would be no problem as long as they remained unarmed, stuck to the tasks of advising people of any infractions of municipal rules and made no attempt to arrest anyone or otherwise infringe on the mandates exclusively assigned to the National Police that he heads.
Alemán's inspectors are not Vivas' only headache. All signs demonstrate that the government is rapidly caving into US Secretary of State James Baker's "recommendations" during his January visit to Managua to "professionalize" the National Police to beef up its support of law and order. Lacayo has announced that he will ask for US support in creating a National Police Academy to train new recruits and "refresh those who were in the force before the arrival of doña Violeta Chamorro." In late June, Lacayo went to Spain to request, among other things, assistance in "training" the police and "professionalizing" the armed forces and intelligence units.
The right stirs up the countrysideMeanwhile, the revueltos are still out in the countryside, although they have not repeated the wave of takeovers that shook the country in April and May. This alliance between Sandinistas and former "contras"—which were formally called the Nicaraguan Resistance—is part of an incipient depolarization process within the peasantry that is unacceptable to the extreme right.
The countryside clearly had to be stirred up as a complement to the political and economic pressures mounted by the US right and César in Managua. On June 21, former Resistance leaders charged that they were victims of a Sandinista extermination plot; as proof they pointed to the death of several of their members that month. Other such leaders, who had become board members of the Union of Small Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG), announced their plan to resign from UNAG to create an Agrarian Party of ex-contras. A number of zonal leaders of the ex-Resistance charged that they were being pressured to leave the recently formed Campesino Coordinating Body, made up of Sandinista cooperatives, UNAG and other peasant groups, including former army and Resistance combatants.
Meanwhile, the armed "recontras" in the north of the country stepped up their activities again. Their demands, which are more political than social or economic, include the substitution of army commanders and the transfer of power to Vice President Virgilio Godoy. They threatened to kill any demobilized contras they considered "manipulated by the Sandinistas or the government." Yet when a former Resistance leader was found murdered near Waslala, they blamed Sandinista forces for the crime—a hypothesis the government does not share.
The FSLN's dilemmaAll this has led the FSLN to ask itself, as it has done so many times before in the past two years, what price it is prepared to pay to coexist with a government that has no other long-run option than to surrender terrain to domestic and foreign rightwing pressures. Its dilemma is not exclusively related to the government, but also to the property issue and the structural crisis affecting the nation.
Defending and consolidating a more democratic property structure is fundamental to the FSLN. But it has repeatedly tried to minimize conflicts between the workers and the government in this already difficult process of adaptation to a new concept of property whose economic administration, in its vision, would be neither statist nor neoliberal. For Sandinismo, however, this means constantly being caught in crossfire.
From one side the government is pressuring to return properties to large capitalists, cut credit to small and medium producers and end new distributions of land to those who have nothing and whose desperation could at any time turn violent. From the other side the FSLN is being leaned on by Sandinista property owners—not large ones as much as small ones, including workers who have gotten shares in the privatization of their work place and peasants who received land under the Sandinista agrarian reform. Many of these people still have no legal title and thus are ineligible for bank loans. With no working capital of their own, their situation is little better than if they were landless. The FSLN supports their demands for legalization and financing—which are part of institutionalizing the new property scheme it is promoting.
For their part, rural workers heeded the Sandinista Workers' Confederation call by announcing that they would resist the transfer of property to old Somocista owners. For the FSLN and its popular organizations, however, it appears to be a zero-sum game. If they permit or encourage the takeover of farms or factories, they pay a political price with other sectors of society and particularly with the government, with which they are trying to reach some basic understanding about property and credit. But retreating from the struggles of the dispossessed is not without its own high political price.
This dilemma and the debate it engenders about what methods of struggle to use have immersed Sandinismo in political incoherence for over two years now. Some have concluded that negotiation is the only recourse in the property battle. It means conceding some rights and assuring whatever titles can be gotten out of the government before the pressures of the right and the United States clamp down. According to this pragmatic view, it is better to gain something than lose everything. Given the extent of the crisis, this position creates a growing dependency on government institutions.
The revolutionary popular sectors that keep coming out with the short stick in this draw are getting increasingly exasperated with such a line of thinking. They are jobless, landless or with no access to credit, because they have no title to the plot they received during the revolution. Most cannot pay even the minimal stipend the government now demands to send their children to public school and even less can they afford the medicines that were once free. Many are lucky if they can feed their families once a day. These people are not about to watch passively as everything they risked their very lives for in the past decade or more is slowly whittled away. They have access to weapons and long experience in how to use them. And, as a Managua taxi driver astutely pointed out to an envío writer in another context (a colleague of his had just been senselessly shot to death by a gang of armed robbers), ten years of war means that the powerful barrier against killing another human being has been crossed by thousands upon thousands of Nicaraguans.
Buying time to sell sovereigntyUp to now, the government has ably applied a practice of selective favors, conceding some lots, houses, rural land and shares in enterprises to some Sandinista sectors. With this policy it is stretching out the conflict, dividing leaders from the led and buying time while it turns most of the plums over to new and old big business interests at bargain prices. Not infrequently, these "business interests" are associates and even family members of government leaders.
In theory, the considerable power granted to the President in the Constitution could serve to respond to the social demands channeled through the FSLN and its unions and other popular organizations. It could be done peacefully, without upsetting the economy or creating an embarrassing appearance of loss of political control that could affect the government's international image. In fact, it is useful to the government to be able to use the FSLN as the interlocutor for the demands of these diverse sectors, since the FSLN can largely prevent or defuse unmanageable political outbursts.
But such a policy has its limits because it is predicated on two false premises. One is that the FSLN has an unlimited ability to determine the forms of struggle of both the mass organizations and the unorganized sectors; the other is that the government has relative autonomy to manage its relations with the FSLN and attend to the popular demands through it.
The government's moral authority is maintained thanks to the almost heroic work deployed by Sandinista cadre in constant dialogue with the social sectors on the verge of exploding. But these cadres' authority is eroding. In the end, its viability will depend on the FSLN's ability to influence the government through negotiation and political pressure to assure some real response to popular claims.
The government's own ability to affect the FSLN's response is directly related to its ability to hold on to its political and fiscal autonomy. Sovereignty cannot be shared; it is defended and maintained, or it is lost. If the FSLN's dilemma is serious, the government's is grave. Meanwhile, the stakes in the $100 million poker game keep on growing, as does the cost of for any player of folding.
|
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America