Nicaragua
A Brisk Trade in Illusions
Envío team
Among the many labor protests that shook Nicaragua in October, one of them particularly affected the populace: the lottery ticket sellers' strike to protest a decision by the Social Security and Welfare Institute—for whom they work—to turn their collective bargaining contracts into individual ones.
Suspending the sale of these tickets not only lost the state an important source of income, but also withdrew a key piece of the "illusion market" for many Nicaraguans. The growing appeal of the country's traditional lottery reflects the anguish of so many who escape the difficulties of their daily lives by dreaming of winning sustained economic stability through the luck of the draw. The inevitable disappointment of losing the weekly "fat one" is assuaged by the thousand and one other novel promotions proliferating in Nicaragua's new commercial competition. Among them are the newer "instant scratch and win" tickets sold at intersections for the equivalent of a dollar, and offers linked to the purchase of goods that range from a pound of rice and beans for certain Coca Cola bottle tops to a prefabricated house offered in a drawing of used toothpaste tubes. In between are all the small and large household appliances that the neoliberal model raffles off as synonyms for prosperity.
But random luck is not the only route chosen by those urgently trying to find a quick alternative that will guarantee their survival or those seeking the consumerist joy shown all day long on TV channels increasingly saturated with foreign programs and ads. In mid-October, the National Police announced that the number of assaults between January and August 1992 was more than double that of the same period last year, with a sharper upward tendency in recent weeks. Almost daily, houses, banks, taxis and even armored vehicles are held up. In the countryside, reports of cattle rustling are also multiplying.
According to police data, the majority of the perpetrators are members of the army of un- or underemployed, which has now reached 60% of the economically active population. The majority of these holdups are unprofessional and for scant amounts of money, which also indicates the component of acute economic crisis behind these petty crimes.
Although Minister of Education Humberto Belli has frequently claimed that these signs of social decomposition are part of a "spiritual crisis," even the Bishops' Conference, in its pastoral exhortation published in October, sounded an alert about the evils produced by "extreme poverty, unemployment and the absence of social measures."
Another assault in October—in this case victimizing the entire population—was the imposition of a new 15% general sales tax that exempted neither health nor education. (Those who still have a sense of humor baptized this fiscal measure—known by the initials IGV —a "tax on the desire to live," which reduces to the same initials in Spanish.) Faithfully reflecting neoliberal logic, books were taxed the same as liquor; and while medicines for the population were not exempted, veterinary medicines were.
According to this inhuman logic, oxen and cattle contribute more to production than the immense mass of unemployed, who only burden the budget and are a continual source of political instability.
The new cross-the-board IGV provoked widespread protest, ranging from the parties in the UNO coalition to the FSLN, and from the Communal Movement to the Parents Movements in the high schools.
According to the government, this tax is necessary to counteract the budget shortages produced by the suspension of US aid, but insistent protests from pharmacy owners, newspaper publishers, parents and even directors of private schools, among others, forced the government to back off on a few items.
The government appears to have also been a victim of its own "illusion market." It grossly exaggerated the population's ability to bear up under this new load.
The battle of the branchesNational Assembly president Alfredo César charged that the new tax was illegal and promised to annul it, claiming that only the legislature has the power to decide on taxes. But it was a hollow promise; in the fight between the legislative and executive branches of government, which is growing stronger and stranger by the day, it is difficult to figure out what is legal or even who controls the National Assembly.
Few times in history has the state appeared as dysfunctional as in October; even the "minimum coordination" that the Constitution says should prevail among the branches of the state has broken down. The FSLN, backed by the executive branch, the Supreme Court and the "centrist" UNO legislators, insists that legality and the legislative majority are on its side. But César, the majority of the UNO bench, Vice President Virgilio Godoy and the US Embassy disagree. With the 39 members of the FSLN bench and 8 UNO "centrists" maintaining their September 2 walkout, César is now legislating with a new "quorum" made up of several elected UNO alternates and a few "alternate-alternates," directly chosen by the parties in UNO. Together with his new Executive Board, elected on September 2 without a quorum of any description, and now this new quorum completed with bodies no one elected, César has placed himself in total contradiction with the executive branch for close on to two months now.
In so doing, César has achieved part of his objective. At least for the time being, he has total control of the Assembly and has turned it into an ultra-right power base. Nicaragua's rightwing extremists had long been straining at the bit to take charge of the government agenda, if not of the government itself. César's error, however, was in choosing an illegal method. He probably fell into this error because of a political calculation that his time was running out. A new Assembly president should be elected in January, and this time, all other things being equal, it would surely reflect the majority, represented by the FSLN bench and the eight to ten UNO centrists loyal to the President.
Together with Godoy, Managua mayor Arnoldo Alemán and most of the other UNO mayors, César has been touring the country, calling for popular mobilization against what they call Chamorro's "co-government" with the FSLN. He has also intensified his media campaign in favor of his positions. His support base, however, is not in Nicaragua, but in the United States; it is in his success at feeding the anti-Sandinista sentiments and decisions in the US Congress.
César goes for brokeA government as dependent as Violeta Chamorro's on the United States and on foreign aid in general cannot afford to ignore César's charges to the US government. In October, the President traveled to Venezuela and the Scandinavian countries to offset both the economic effects of Washington's aid freeze and the political effects of César's accusations against her government.
But these countries, like the other donor countries and institutions, are strongly influenced by the International Monetary Fund, the United States and César's information. They have questioned Chamorro about her government's political and fiscal actions and its relations with the United States, and about the property issue.
Inside Nicaragua, the executive branch launched a new round of consultations with the UNO parties, and the FSLN followed suit.
The goal was to undermine César's support, taking advantage both of the fear these mini-parties have that César has gotten out of hand and of the opportunism that leads them to ponder how to capitalize on César's error to wangle some future perquisites for themselves. For both purposes, the executive's job was to stress that the issue was the ambition of one person and his immediate backers, not a fight between two branches of the state.
As legislative head, César launched a diplomatic offensive aimed mainly at the parliaments of donor countries. In it he asked for solidarity in confronting the "presidentialist" pressures against him, among which he included a supposed threat that Chamorro would suspend disbursement of the legislators' paychecks to undermine the National Assembly's current "independence." César even warned of the possibility of a "Fujimori-style presidential coup." This line of argument is effective among legislative bodies in other countries, which close ranks when they smell "presidentialist abuses" that threaten to shut down parliaments. In this context, the executive branch's warnings to César only buttressed his image as victim.
To a large degree, all of this is a war of images. The presidency accuses César of disrespect toward the Supreme Court, which has declared all his legislative activity since September 2 illegal. To this he replies that the National Assembly is the one being disrespected by the other two branches of government.
But César does not have the high cards needed to win, and, by the end of October, he seemed to be losing allies and began to speak of his own retirement. Internationally, however, his enormous campaign has helped him offset the weakness of his position inside the country. All this raises the question of whether, in the final analysis, the government will not be obliged to negotiate with César to resolve the political crisis instead of continuing to insist that he respect the Supreme Court ruling.
The executive branch has paid a high price in this confrontation, which complicated even further the release of US aid. But, once again, the population is footing the bill—the first item of which was the new sales tax. The government declared that the people would have to tighten their belts even more until the new US aid arrived. At the same time, it has asked foreign donors for "bridge loans" to comply with its foreign debt payment schedule. The government's assumption is that the new US President will have no further need to bow to Congress' ultraright wing, which still demands Sandinista blood.
What difference can a new president make?It will be problematic if restoring aid to Nicaragua is not a priority for Clinton. The Miami newspaper La Prensa Centroamericana reported in October that the "lobby" of César and the anti-Chamorro Nicaraguans living in the United States has organized a "committee to recover the properties of confiscated US citizens." This committee appears to have made contact with Clinton. César boasted publicly of having "close relationships with more people" in Clinton's campaign than in the Bush Administration and insists that a presidential change will not affect Washington's current policy toward Managua. However, it is not at all clear that César's claims are true. It remains to be seen if the new president will reorient tired Cold War policies towards Central America as well as towards the rest of the world.
Dialogue with whom? And about what?While many members of Congress, including Republicans, do not support the hold up of aid, the ones that do are wreaking havoc in Nicaragua. In a letter sent "to the Nicaraguan people," twenty-five members of Congress, led by Senator Jesse Helms, expressed their "profound concern" about the division between the democratic forces (the National Assembly and the Chamorro administration) and urged "the leaders of all democratic factions to put aside party differences and immediately begin an open dialogue in good faith, aimed at revitalizing democracy and the development of the free market." The "democratic dialogue" desired by these members of Congress as well as by certain US State Department officials and Nicaragua's own ultraright is exactly what César is demanding.
The goal is a bit more than a dialogue, however; the idea is a political negotiation in which the Chamorro administration accepts the extreme right's positions regarding political and economic power. These positions amount to displacing the FSLN, starting with the removal of the top army command and continuing by reforming the UNO alliance and guaranteeing that its politicians guide decision-making in all branches of government. This perspective wants it firmly established that Sandinistas are intolerable in both the army and the police, and may not even be tolerable in civic life.
César insists on a "serious and sincere" national dialogue, but wants it based on a united right strong enough to restructure the state and impose its conditions on the FSLN. His strategy is to assure a convergence of foreign and domestic pressures on the Chamorro administration that can annul its differences with the rightwing UNO parties and confront the FSLN both from this existential and ideological reencounter and from a strengthened extreme right in the National Assembly.
In sum, the goal is to effectively impede the executive branch from negotiating with Sandinismo, not only in the Forum, but even in the Assembly itself. This means paying whatever price necessary to prevent the presidency from ever again creating a new majority to challenge the political veto that César had forged with a majority of the UNO parties, backed by the US government acting through them. This is the root of the "battle of the branches." The strength of the conflict between the contending political and socioeconomic forces suggests that the institutional framework might not be able to contain the fight.
In government meetings with COSEP, the big-business umbrella, COSEP's representatives repeated the US argument: the country cannot continue to function without production incentives, with strikes and highway roadblocks, or with clashes between the legislative and executive branches. The government must impose "order" in the country once and for all, sanctioning all those who turn to "forceful methods."
The October pastoral letter of the Bishop's Conference supported César and Godoy in their project to hold a consultation or referendum "through institutional mechanisms, to clarify the mandate" of the current government. It indirectly criticized the government in that the "reconciliation it offered seems to have been a one-way street." It proposed the "abolition or reduction of the army" and an adjustment of the Constitution to the "new reality." Foreign media often comment now that Cardinal Obando y Bravo is becoming an increasingly open critic of the Chamorro government.
The right is no longer seeking to define a common anti-Sandinista platform, but to implement it. The right wants changes in the Cabinet ("all the ministers are thieves," says Godoy); the Supreme Court ("all the judges respond to the Sandinista party," says César); the Ministry of the Presidency ("Minister Antonio Lacayo should resign," say the UNO mayors); and even a change of President ("she is virtually kidnapped by Lacayo and Humberto Ortega," says Alemán). Accomplishing all this would guarantee the definition and implementation of a counterrevolutionary policy.
Starting from this "coup at the helm" called for by César, Godoy, Alemán, and more recently the Bishops' Conference, the right hopes to also harvest the political fruit of divisions in Sandinismo. The main division is between those who opt for the party's political participation, subordinated to the government's plan, and those who favor putting it clearly at the head of defending the rights of the popular classes.
Within this framework, César's invitations to international institutions to "mediate" between the government branches is another image game to strengthen his "underdog" position both with the Nicaraguan people and with other legislators. He wants to finally spark the "coup at the helm," forcing the President to step down.
Property and privatization In the neoliberal argot, "free market" translates as privatization of state holdings. In Nicaragua, disputes over the legitimacy of these holdings have to be added to that basic concept—and to its ideological baggage. Both capital and labor are fighting over who their legitimate owners should be. Privatization is thus being applied in a sui generis fashion.
One side contemplates the return of state properties to those claiming the Sandinista government “unjustly” confiscated them. Chief among those claimants are Somocistas who, in the intervening years, acquired citizenship in the United States or other countries. For the other side, the Concertation agreements determined that state properties would be handed over to the workers, who with their own sweat and sacrifice improved state farms and many of the rundown businesses that were nationalized.
The presidential office has been teetering along on this tightrope, trying not to offend either side too much. Given the serious economic and political situation, the government hastily proposed to resolve the entire property affair and conclude the privatization process. In mid-October it introduced a package of measures that legalized the agrarian reform and other transfers made by the Sandinista government on the one hand, but on the other ordered the review and return of a wide category of expropriated holdings, authorizing indemnification for claimants whose properties could not be returned due to union pressure or the rights of current occupants.
The FSLN had previously accepted that any abuses committed in such property transfers should be subject to review, but excluded the Somocistas affected by Decrees 3 and 38 of 1979. These two decrees respectively legalized the expropriation of property and capital accumulated by Somoza family members and allies under the protection of the dictatorship. Among the current claimants that the government wants to satisfy, however, are former National Guard offices and Somocista entrepreneurs, some of them US citizens and some not.
The government's "solution" to the property problem is making its own economic and political program more difficult. By opening the door to massive returns and indemnifications, the government is propitiating what FSLN daily Barricada has called "a multimillion dollar deal, a veritable piñata for rich people shored up by influence-peddling." The government decided to privatize the state institutes of energy and communications, offering shares in them to those who cannot recover what was "unjustly" confiscated.
Together with government bonds—both of which the recipients would have the right to sell to foreigners or other nationals—the amount of these programmed "indemnifications" is in the $150-200 million range, according to the Minister of Finance. This solution, however, has not satisfied very many claimants. Nor did it satisfy the workers or small and medium peasant farmers, since it accentuates even more the social demand of a minority over that of the majority.
To further demonstrate its determination to "clarify" the property situation in a manner acceptable to the United States, the government also ordered a strict review of those benefited by the Sandinista property laws. Of the 1,800 people who applied to legalize their properties in the first phase—which involved only urban houses protected by Law 85—barely half received approval; the remainder will have to go through a costly court process or abandon their homes.
With this governmental decision, the denationalization, de-democratization and reconcentration of property and economic power in the hands of a few economic groups looms on the horizon.
But to weaken the ability of Sandinismo as a whole to impede this neoliberal project, the government and the capitalists who stand to benefit from it must create new divisions, or aggravate old ones, in the social movements and in the FSLN itself. About this at least, there are no differences of opinion between the government and the ultra-right.
The neoliberal forces have made some advances in promoting these divisions. No one is unaware of the discrepancies among the various social organizations, or of the different public positions among National Directorate members regarding the issues of the economy and property. A large part of these differences are, however, a logical product of the newness of this phenomenon called privatization, and of the new conditions of struggle that Sandinismo is encountering in general.
Organized pro-Sandinista workers, mainly those in the industrial sector's Sandinista Workers Confederation (CST), are increasingly fixed on expanding their autonomy from the FSLN as a party. They have continued to demand privatization of enterprises in their favor, through both street actions and arguments at the negotiating table. In so doing, they are merely insisting on fulfillment of the agreements signed with the government in last year's Concertación accords.
In the rural sector, members of the Farmworkers Association (ATC) have already benefited substantially from privatization due to their mobilizations and negotiating pressures; it is the only such case in Latin America so far. (See the last issue of envío for figures on their new participation as owners of farm land and enterprises.) The price they paid for this success was the centrifugal tendency within the ATC fomented by sectors of workers who rejected the strategy and the negotiation results.
In the industrial and service sectors, the results have not favored the workers; the government rejected the CST's overall privatization proposal. It wants to negotiate with each union separately, dividing the workers by union, by area of economic activity, and even by enterprise, hoping thus to pull workers away from the National Workers Front, the umbrella organization of the CST and service worker union confederations.
In many cases, the unions' claims clash with those of the businesses' old owners. These previous owners never accepted the Concertation agreements on worker participation. The government has also now stepped back from these accords, arguing that the workers lack the economic means to invest in the enterprises, particularly those in urgent need of a capital injection. In response, the labor sector has threatened to "dynamite and destroy" the disputed businesses if the negotiations stall and the government's willingness to favor the property claims of old Somocistas persists.
The CST has charged that the government's strategy reflects its unwillingness to democratize state property or society itself; this is not an unfounded charge. The government is under domestic and foreign pressure and is using privatization as an instrument to divide the unions; but it is also doing so because it does not share the strategic objectives of economic democratization.
Even in cases in which the government has transferred ownership or part ownership of the enterprises to the workers, the battle for financing remains. The possibility is not far off that what the workers won through mobilizations and at the negotiating table will be lost in a productive undertaking in which they are denied financing and other spaces to participate effectively.
The government's intention to privatize the whole state banking system in order to impose commercial criteria and eliminate flexible credit policies that would help foment and develop small production make this even more predictable.
The revolutionary dilemmaThe FSLN seems to be relying on the hope that the contradictions between the government and UNO, as well as those within the UNO coalition itself, will make a regrouping of these forces impossible. Starting from this perspective, some Sandinistas think that the formation of a genuine co-government with Violeta Chamorro is even more imperative now. Their expectation is that in no case could the problems be worse than they are already.
Taking into account only the correlation of forces inside Nicaragua, their argument is not scatterbrained. If two of the country's three forces (UNO, government, FSLN) unite to challenge the third, and if an UNO-FSLN alliance is not a possible option, and if the government is getting weaker by the day, the FSLN could logically think that the way out is to shore up the government to prevent it from moving closer to UNO. This institutional logic is vehemently defended by Sandinista parliamentarians and by the top brass in the army, which is also sending out its own signals given that the institutional crisis has dragged on for so long.
The problem is that this analysis hides the role and the weight of the United States. While it may be correct from the perspective of the current and historical context of the rightwing political forces inside Nicaragua, it falls apart when put in the international context. It forgets the US ability to impose unity and reconciliation on the dominant social class.
However short-lived this "reconciliation" might be, it could perhaps assure the "coup at the helm" desired by the ultra-rightists. It is dangerously ingenuous to forget that in 1989 the United States succeeded in imposing this unity when it slapped together the National Opposition Union, which lasted just long enough to finish off at the voting polls what the war had been unable to do alone.
If a "new" UNO government emerges, the FSLN as party will have a hard time acting as a true counterweight to counterrevolutionary machinations, and the army will have a harder time yet. Only Sandinismo in civil society and on the streets will be in a position to defend a humanist alternative and thus be the guarantor of real national stability. Only it will be able to interpret "national interests" in a broader way than the Sandinistas in the National Assembly and the army can. With or without a co-government, with or without confrontation or a change in government, the popular classes will have to assure a favorable change in economic policy; otherwise, no other change will be a real one.
It is not only the image of the government and the FSLN, or even stability itself that is at stake, but the whole economic space opened by the revolution during the last decade. As with political space, this economic space is again being claimed by the bourgeoisie. Of all the areas disputed by Sandinismo and the bourgeoisie, the property issue is the most important since it is the one that materially sustains the social demands and any alternative political project to neoliberalism. The hope for a better life for all the popular sectors is linked to the workers' struggle for effective participation in privatization, to strengthen social programs and to prevent the centralized restructuring of large private capital, within which the government is now including Somocista capital.
The workers will also be called on to wage this battle inside the FSLN as party, to insist that some Sandinistas' arguments about the inviability of their fight and about excessive union rebellion and autonomy have no place in this social confrontation. On October 23, the 27 union federations in the CST announced the beginning of an intense period of protests to demand that the government resolve pending labor conflicts, eliminate the 15% general sales tax and return "zero" properties to the "Somocistas and the "decapitalizing entrepreneurs."
At the end of the month, the FSLN National Directorate called on its membership and sympathetic social organizations to "struggle firmly against all those government policies that go against popular interests and the country's stability." It expressed support for the sectors in struggle—including the strikers—for the repeal of the 15% tax, privatization to workers, rejection of property returns to Somocistas and the defense of the properties of those benefited by the previous government.
General Humberto Ortega also generated controversy by laying out the army's own position. While part of the controversy had to do with the content, most of it was sparked by the army's direct involvement in public politics. In his October 27 speech, General Ortega called for "a pact against poverty, a national agreement" in 1992. Leaving no one untouched, Ortega criticized right-wingers who are calling for the overthrow of the government, "government officials" who are using their posts to "sabotage the government" and armed groups on both sides of the political spectrum who are preventing "a climate of order and security for the national producers and foreign investors." He also backed the government's efforts to resolve the property question. The most controversial points in his speech, I however, dealt with the army and his leadership of it.
He said the army would be modernized and would not be cut further, and stated that he would not leave his post as head of the army until 1997, the date set for the completion of the army's modernization plans.
La Prensa immediately accused the army of being "political" and the FSLN of political insensitivity for "virtually approving anarchy and instability," thus contradicting "the sensible position" that many FSLN militants have adopted regarding property. But who can judge what is sensible and what is not? Are the policies that the international lending agencies, United States and Nicaraguan government itself are imposing on the people sensible? Is there anything sensible, or even legal, about the position César and his loyal followers have taken in the National Assembly? Are these economic policies and politicians not senselessly going against the economy and the nation's institutionality?
The real sources of national instability and chaos are found in Nicaragua's upper political echelons and in the "colonial insertion" they want to impose on Nicaragua in the world capitalist system. Is not the reaction of the people, who are demanding a different world order from the streets, more sensible and logical? Each and every sectoral association's struggle is the most sensible of the possible roads, the one on which important popular sectors have chosen to make felt their positions in favor of life for the majority.
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