Nicaragua
The US-Nicaraguan Honeymoon is Over
Envío team
Nicaragua, part of a region commonly used as a US foreign policy proving ground, is now part of a new test: following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the definition of military unipolarity, can the US government and the revolutionary left shift their historic rivalry from the military battlefield to a political one? In this supposedly post-Cold War era, should the eradication of Sandinismo, the region's most powerful leftist force, continue to be a strategic US objective?
Neither military nor electoral intervention could erase Sandinismo from Nicaragua's political and social map over the last decade. The FSLN's respect for the country's constitutional framework and its peaceful departure from government should have assured a relationship of "mutual respect" and peaceful political-electoral competition.
For the first time ever in US-FSLN relations, both agreed on one thing: supporting the Violeta Chamorro government. The United States provided the bulk of financing for economic stabilization, a priority shared by all three parties. Sandinismo's contribution was to guarantee that the popular sectors respect the new government's legitimacy, although that would depend ultimately on the degree to which it could get the government to respond to popular demands.
For its part, the Chamorro government signed accords with AID and the multilateral lending agencies pledging to carry out the "structural adjustments" that were a quid pro quo for new loans and donations. With the FSLN, it signed transition accords followed by social and economic agreements, pledging to respect both the institutionality of the armed forces and police and the rights won by the people.
Who went more than half way? The international banking pacts and the domestic political ones have numerous precedents in Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America. The unprecedented aspect is the direct or indirect participation of a revolutionary opposition that is also the country's largest and most powerful political force. But who in this new equation is reconciling with whom?
That question has not yet been answered. Thanks to the revolution, the political framework within which President Chamorro governs is not structured to easily avoid the just and equitable participation of the popular forces. While the FSLN is not in a position to satisfy the popular agenda, the government is in no position to ignore it.
The US government honeymoon with Sandinismo by way of Violet a Chamorro seems to be over, not only because religious norms frown on such ménages à trois, but also because Sandinismo has not played the classic opposition role. With origins outside of the traditional ruling class, the Sandinistas did not trade groveling acquiescence for political patronage. While the reconciliation and the agreements emerged from top-level negotiations, they were not personal deals cut between elites in which private privilege was traded for public support. They were negotiations about fundamental political issues, part and parcel of a confrontation in which the popular forces made their own voices heard about the use of political power and control over the economy.
As with all the other oligarchic elite in the region, the Nicaraguan right is not prepared to share or alternate power with the popular forces. But unlike its regional counterparts, Nicaragua's wealthy bourgeoisie lost its power over the nation, first to Somoza and the National Guard, and later to Sandinismo and the institutions of power built during the revolutionary decade. Since 1912, the task of protecting the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie against its own weaknesses has fallen to the United States. Between 1912 and 1934 the US exercised that self-appointed mandate by way of direct Marine intervention; between 1934 and 1979 it did so through the Marine-trained National Guard; and, starting with the triumph of the revolution, it did so via the National-Guard trained "contras."
Independent of the desires of the right, which emerged triumphant from the Cold War, Sandinismo only lost an election, not a war. The survival of Sandinismo meant the survival of the country's strongest political and social force, and neither the United States nor the Chamorro government could ignore this. Even after losing the elections, it preserved important quotas of power in the armed forces, the legislature, the judiciary, the municipal governments, and, of course, in the unions and other social organizations. This quota of power would have been enough to make the country ungovernable, but Sandinismo did not opt to play the destabilizing role that the right and the United States played when they were in the opposition.
Using more intelligence and more realism, the FSLN proposed to negotiate with the government based on its mobilizing capacity; in other words, the circumstances would determine whether its role would be to stabilize or to destabilize. There are those who call that political blackmail, but others simply see it as democracy in action.
The United States put its neoliberal strategy to the test, confident that the combination of financial aid and the conditions put on that aid would assure an economic stabilization that would favor the reconcentration of financial power in the hands of the old bourgeoisie. There are those who would call that economic blackmail, but others see it simply as a stimulus to private enterprise.
The right wants the whole cake The problem is that the neoliberal program cannot get off the ground because the social sectors fight back and there is no repressive force to guarantee the interests of Nicaraguan capital and of the United States. The Chamorro government cannot concede to the most extremist wishes of the old right, including financial groups linked to Somocismo. This stalemate is reflected in the property battle, in which, to some degree, the popular sectors have forced the government to recognize their rural or urban property rights, whether or not they were backed by a piece of paper.
"The honeymoon is over," said Senator Jesse Helms in his June 22 letter to the AID administrator announcing his unwavering opposition to all future aid to Nicaragua because "it would simply eliminate any incentive for genuine reform." The unadulterated ideological coherence of his position elevated him to spokesperson for the naked interests of the imperial state and the Nicaraguan right: no more coexistence between the FSLN and the Chamorro government, no more merely cosmetic changes in the issues of property and the armed forces. The only government that deserves US assistance, he made clear, is one whose property and security frameworks respond exclusively to the forces of capital, and therefore to the purest interests of the United States.
Helms hit the proverbial nail on its head, clearly and publicly stating the contradiction in US policy toward Nicaragua. Washington's premise had been that the Chamorro government's economic needs would assure implementation of the neoliberal economic program and contribute to the forging of a counterrevolutionary political framework. If Sandinismo could not be extirpated, at least it could be contained and subordinated to this framework. This scheme presupposed greater "firmness" by the Chamorro government and a split in the FSLN due to its internal contradictions. But after more than two years, neither the firmness nor the divisions have emerged triumphant. Washington does not want to pitch good money to Nicaragua after bad. And the pitch has been big: it is the largest aid package provided by the United States to a Latin American country and the fourth largest in the world (the very largest per capita).
Everything indicates that US aid, moving ever further from its own objective, served as a stabilizing resource for the new cooperative relations between the FSLN and the Chamorro administration—relations now in danger of becoming institutionalized. As US Embassy officials noted, Helms' proposals had been circulating from the time the Chamorro government took office, are shared by the Bush administration and would have surfaced even without the urgings of the powerful and stubborn senator.
But this time the US pressure had more clout, because it came directly from Congress and at the very moment it was reviewing financial appropriations. Helms was not alone; he was flanked in Washington by the White House and the State Department and in Nicaragua by National Assembly president Alfredo César, rightwing business sectors and even some in the executive branch who saw possibilities in the economic blackmail for putting together a campaign to end what they call the "co-government" of Antonio Lacayo and the Ortega brothers.
The President ingenuously explained to the Nicaraguan public that the delays in the US aid disbursement originated in Congress' "lack of information," but that the White House was favorably inclined to release the $100 million. That subterfuge was laid to rest by the failure of a governmental mission headed by the ministers of foreign relations and of government to get the aid released after traipsing through the halls of Congress trying to close the supposed information gap. On his return, Foreign Minister Ernesto Leal acknowledged that Helms' position was ideological and the steps he was demanding of the government were incompatible with an even minimal pursuit of sovereignty.
With similar ingenuousness, the FSLN news daily Barricada congratulated Leal for having failed to convince the senator's aide's (Helms himself refused to receive Chamorro's envoys). "It would have been disastrous if Helms' ideological sect had applauded the Nicaraguan position, at the cost of humiliating concessions which would have compromised national sovereignty," it said.
But Helms' very display of displeasure, which elicited no opposition from the White House and even attracted limited congressional support, led the government to take the humiliating steps the right wanted. Although the government adopted a very nationalist rhetoric, it was unconvincing. The bottom line is that it took domestic measures effectively aimed at satisfying the United States and the extreme right, who had finally found a sufficiently powerful and unbending spokesperson. AID's Managua director publicly assured that Senator Helms was not a derailed ideologue who had gone too far, and that it was unfair to blame Alfredo César for the aid hold-up.
Amid rumors and realities of divisions in the Chamorro Cabinet and calls for Minister of the Presidency Antonio Lacayo's resignation, the government began shifting to the right in its actions, which brought it into contradiction with the political and constitutional commitments assumed with the FSLN. In other words, it was flouting the understandings that had permitted a minimum of stability based on respect for the concerns and desires of the 41% of the population that had voted for the FSLN.
Property One nerve center is the demand for the return of properties to US and Nicaraguan citizens. This means handing back to their old owners not only the properties given out by the Sandinista government, but also the state agricultural or industrial enterprises that the new government has already privatized to other individuals. In many cases, these original owners, now emboldened by Senator Helms' green light to reclaim their holdings, have already been indemnified. Other controversial properties that are starting to be returned are those respectively confiscated from the Somoza family and its cohorts under Decrees 3 and 38, which the new government had promised to respect.
From the right's perspective, the mere willingness to return property holdings is not enough; the owners want assurances that they can exercise their property rights. The government had not satisfied that expectation since the concertación accords oblige the participation of the existing occupants in the negotiations and prohibit police involvement. In July, however, a former vice president under Somoza came back to claim "his" properties in the northern part of the country. He received them following pressure from Washington, which led the Managua government to order police assistance in assuring the properties' return. The local police, in turn, asked for army support in carrying out the orders from Managua and Washington.
The armed forces Helms also required the removal of high-ranking Sandinista officers from the police, intelligence and government agencies. In July, the government announced the start of police "professionalization," the euphemism for a restructuring in which civilian delegates from the Ministry of Government would assume authority over the police, thus breaking the old military chain of command. Comandante Rene Vivas would remain for the moment in his post as national police chief, but observers say his legal faculties have been reduced.
La Prensa, the country's main rightwing newspaper, joined the ranks of Helms' campaign with a series of reports sanctioning the actions of the old intelligence bodies. It was no coincidence that, at this same moment, investigations into the perplexing killings of Jean Paul Genie and Enrique Bermúdez were reopened. The young Genie was gunned down in his car on a highway near his home, while top contra leader Bermúdez was shot in the head at close range in the parking lot of the Intercontinental Hotel. There are no known eyewitnesses and few clues in either case. In July, a Managua court filed a formal accusation directly implicating bodyguards of General Humberto Ortega in Genie's death and indirectly implicating the general himself. According to the accusation, Ortega's bodyguards shot the young man after he penetrated a security perimeter. For Helms, the Nicaraguan right and the AID representatives in Managua, the Genie case is "the symbol of violence and disregard for the law by certain individuals and groups."
The inaction of the court, which sat on the case for almost two years because it has been so extremely politicized, served Helms' demand for judicial reform. The business right has been making the same claim to grease the wheels of its litigations and to assure that the police will enforce judicial sentences, particularly with regard to the eviction of squatters.
Another demand, for investigations into the "150 freedom fighters killed since Mrs. Chamorro took office," was the product of a campaign by La Prensa and other rightwing media on behalf of former contra leaders who claim they are being hounded and eliminated. It is yet another attempt to have an impact on Congress, exploiting the emotional attachment certain congresspeople, including Helms, have for the former contras.
Nor was it any coincidence that the government announced in this same period that it was discharging 2,000 more army officers, bringing total personnel down to 18,500.
Danger signs Denaturalizing the army and police. In some ways, the campaign against the army has been so effective that it has even been taken up by some Sandinista sectors. Organizations such as the Farmworkers' Association and the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights denounced the army and police for trying to resolve the property issue with a billy club. Many wonder if the "change of mentality" that the Ministry of Government says is beginning to reign in the police will be based on this returning use of repression. FSLN secretary general Daniel Ortega tinged his public opposition to restructuring the police with chilling sarcasm when he rhetorically asked if the Los Angeles Police Department was the US model of a "professional" force.
Even more serious is the alert sounded by these same organizations that local capitalists are using the police and army to resolve agrarian conflicts in their favor. Local economic power is thus beginning to acquire repressive capacities based on these "reforms" in the police structures. Legally speaking, no one can oblige the army to play the role of gendarme for economic interests, since the Constitution expressly assigns it only the role of national defense.
A Nicaragua without Lacayo or a center. In many respects, time is not on the side of the more extremist sectors who, after two years, have not managed to widen their political space. Their intense use of friends in Washington is indicative of their desperation in the face of what they see as the consolidation of a Chamorro-FSLN "co-government" and of the mixed property scheme. In political terms, Alfredo César's days as power-abusing president of the National Assembly are numbered, since the combined votes of the FSLN and the UNO group known as the "center," loyal to Antonio Lacayo, assure that one of these centrists will be elected to replace César when his current term is up at the end of the year.
In this context, the US aid crisis was generated, or at least is being used, to unleash a furious assault on Lacayo, symbol of the policy of concertación and reconciliation with the FSLN. In July a new scandal involving the government gained strength when César's party cohorts in the comptroller general's office leaked information to the US media and certain congresspeople that funds from Lacayo's Ministry of the Presidency had allegedly been used to bribe some UNO "centrists" in the National Assembly to support presidential positions. Vice President Virgilio Godoy publicly asked for Lacayo's resignation, and there were serious signs of insubordination against Lacayo within the Cabinet.
The scandal provoked by Comptroller General Guillermo Potoy and played up by The Miami Herald and The New York Times was rooted in investigations into the embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a fund for the socially oppressed known as FASO by former Vice Minister of the Presidency Antonio Ibarra. Potoy, like César a leading member of the Social Democratic Party, had been assigned the investigation after Ibarra fled to Miami late last year as rumors of his malfeasance mounted.
The scandal aimed at killing several birds with one stone. It would weaken not only Lacayo, but also the centrist Assembly representatives who, together with the FSLN, had blocked the advances of the most extremist legislative positions on property and the armed forces. It would also sow doubts among donor governments about the use of funds in Nicaragua.
Cubanization of US policy toward Nicaragua. The Managua government and, to a lesser degree, State Department officials have insisted on optimistically referring only to "snags" in the disbursement of the $100 million. They even throw in the excuse that it is all getting complicated by the upcoming US elections, which admittedly always make politicians more attentive to their loudest constituency, particularly those who contribute to their campaign coffers. The greatest danger in this context is that the well-orchestrated campaigns on Congress, particularly by anti-Sandinista and anti-Chamorro Nicaraguan exiles in Miami in coordination with their counterparts in Nicaragua, could "cubanize" Washington's policy toward Nicaragua. Said another way, it could institutionalize the hostility toward Chamorro's centrist policy of working with the Sandinista opposition.
The irony of such US hostility is that Chamorro government representatives take pride in what they see as their successful imitation of the US political process in which opponents from the two parties sit down and work out their political differences in a civil fashion. "The problem here in the past is that political opponents were also enemies, and they didn't talk to each other," explained one presidential spokesperson. "Now, no, doña Violeta has a different mentality, totally open to dialogue. The US government, however, while publicly touting its interventionist policy in other countries as the defense of these noble democratic principles, is in fact promoting quite the opposite.
Admittedly, the Nicaraguan exile community has nothing remotely like the mobilizing and financial clout of its Cuban counterpart. That power, combined with their organizational arm, the Cuban National Foundation, gives Cuban exiles an inordinate voice in the formulation of official White House policy toward Cuba. Nonetheless, the Nicaraguan ultra-right's influence in Washington should not be underestimated. The pressure mechanisms of high-ranking US citizens and the exiles’ close links with anti-Castro fundamentalists, the Florida political machinery of both US parties and their old anti-Sandinista nexus with President Bush's son Jeb buoy the financial weight of economic groups in Managua and Miami and the interests created and represented in Nicaragua. Such direct channels give this visceral anti-Sandinismo, now reduced to a minority inside Nicaragua, disproportionate political weight in Washington.
The Ibarra financial scandal seriously weakened the government's domestic image and administered a dose of pure oxygen to the most recalcitrant sectors in Washington. The right was handed a new argument for its arsenal: keeping Lacayo and the centrist policy is equivalent to tolerating corruption, and endangers the foreign aid flow.
Between a rock and a very hard place At stake is not only Lacayo's survival but also that of the government and of the FSLN as a party. Violeta Chamorro has reiterated her unshakable confidence in her son-in-law, but individuals are not the real target of the extreme right in the United States and Nicaragua. What they want to bring down is the existing economic scheme and governing strategy. They want nothing less than what has come to be called in Nicaragua a strategic "coup at the helm." In plain English, what this means is a reimposition of the old property structure, as well as the military structures that used to defend it.
The popular forces are thus pushed into choosing between the short leash recommended by the neoliberal "professionalizers" and modernizers in the Chamorro administration or the straightjacket required by the defenders of old capital and old privileges—each of whom have their respective ideological backers in Washington. What would happen if Lacayo went? It is a question most analysts prefer not to think about, since it brings visions of the immediate social and political crisis that would ensue if the extreme Right were to land in the President's office. Should this came to pass, the FSLN would be forced into a genuine opposition role. This scenario does not seem to worry the extreme right, which is confident that it would emerge victorious thanks to its hard-line supporters in Washington.
Although the FSLN leadership never stops thinking about what would happen if destabilization from the right were matched with popular destabilization, the Lacayo crisis has brought the issue front and center. On the one hand, it would force the government to come down harder on the Sandinista movement to win back space from the right and the US Embassy. On the other, the FSLN does not have enough space of its own either to back down from the popular sectors' demands or to force the government to comply with its old commitments. But abandoning the negotiation table now could throw the government straight into the arms of the extreme right.
The increasingly critical economic situation for the vast majority of the population is painting the Sandinistas into an ever smaller corner. With the added pressure of the hard-liners, conciliation of the antagonistic class interests represented by the government and the FSLN becomes continually harder to negotiate. When Washington steps in to pit the "pragmatists" against the "hard-liners," it becomes nearly impossible.
Some months ago, the Sandinista leadership had reached the conclusion that the solution was to share, while Lacayo and other wealthy "centrists" leaned toward seeking more permanent alliances with FSLN "moderates." But given the US condition that Nicaraguan policy shift violently to the right, the danger is growing that the old contradiction will again take its most violent form.
Given this new right-wing offensive, the FSLN is rapidly hunkering down around its two main positions: struggle around the property issue by demanding the fulfillment of the previous privatization and titling agreements, and the prevention of any police restructuring that would turn it into an "LAPD-style" force.
Sandinista determination should not be underestimated. The unexpected filling of the Plaza of the Revolution on the 13th anniversary of the revolution sent a message not only about the growing unemployment and discontent, but, more generally, that the government is becoming dangerously discredited. It is discredited by the financial scandal in immediate terms and by buckling under to the United States at the cost of popular interests and needs in more general terms.
The most infuriating expression of the latter right now is the government's intransigent response to the ongoing student mobilizations demanding more state financing for the universities. This may be the start of a new cycle of popular mobilizations whose minimum objectives would be to move the center of gravity back from the right and, with that, bring about a change in government policy.
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