The first 100 days: Between urgency and lethargy

A hundred days into President Ortega’s new five-year term, no one has bothered to do the traditional symbolic analysis, perhaps because Ortega had already announced that he would do “more of the same” in this period— and in fact has. The one notable feature is that he seems in a rush, and the field is open to him because society appears lethargic.

Envío team

Any new government opens with its strongest cards in its first 100 days. And taking advantage of the support won at the polls, it also implements the most unpopular measures on its agenda as quickly as it can. Nicaragua is utterly atypical this time around. The government isn’t new; the strong cards in its hand are pretty well known; and it has already announced its unpopular measures, but they won’t be launched until after the municipal elections.

This year’s target is the municipal governments

At the celebration of the Sandinista revolution’s 32nd anniversary in July last year, Daniel Ortega, already campaigning for his unconstitutional reelection, summed up what his government program would be: “The one we have in practice today, which we have to improve, strengthen and develop.” In these first 100 days that program has been very clearly improveed, strengthened and developed.

In character with the FSLN’s project, which is to achieve the most total institutional and social control possible, the target of this first stretch of its second consecutive term has been local government. Two bills to reform the Municipalities Law have been the chosen instruments to “strengthen and develop” the control the governing party had already gained over almost all mayoral offices in the country, 40 of which—the capital and the majority of the departmental capitals—were widely believed but never proven to have been won by fraud.

The President sent the first bill of his new term to the National Assembly in March with a request to fast track its approval. It is known as the “50-50 law” because the item that caught the most attention established that the political parties’ slates of candidates for mayor, deputy mayor and Municipal Council members for November’s municipal elections must have half men and half women.

This law responds to one of feminism’s historical demands: to expand the quotas of women’s participation in all public power and decision-making arenas. It is thus to be celebrated. In Nicaragua’s political context, however, it must be asked whether quotas and numbers are enough. It would appear not to be when members of women’s organizations with over three decades of accumulated awareness-building work can’t get on the list. Instead they will come from the political parties in a climate of intense authoritarianism by the government promoting the measure.

Patricia Orozco, a feminist journalist specializing in municipal affairs, said in the April issue of envío: “I’m convinced that there are enough women in Nicaragua to make the 50-50 rule a reality in all the power arenas if it’s a question of filling autonomous positions. There are enough capable women with gender awareness…. [but] these non-submissive, autonomous women aren’t generally found in the parties. So far, there hasn’t been the necessary reflection in the ranks of any Nicaraguan political party to allow active female members to be autonomous…. If the Electoral Law were to be reformed, restoring the rights taken away by the Ortega-Alemán pact—i.e. candidates by popular subscription, which could be sub-mitted independent of party slates with just 5,000 signatures—there would be more than enough women able and willing to manage any mayor’s office in our country with ability and gender awareness.”

Gender equity and
population growth

In April, only a month and a half after that reform, the executive branch decided to make another change to the Municipalities Law. If the March one was justified by raising the banner of gender equity , the one in April waved that of citizens’ participation. A goodly number of Nicaraguans have already been trained and “workshopped” to death on both concepts, which the governing party is now co-opting.

This second reform will increase the number of Municipal Council members in the country’s 153 municipalities in conformity with their number of inhabitants. The Municipal Council is the local governing body that makes decisions about development, discusses and approves ordinances and projects as well as the municipal budget and any changes to it, and is in charge of the locality’s natural resources.

The number of council members in each municipal government was established in the Municipalities Law passed almost 25 years ago. But Nicaragua’s population has virtually doubled in these past five government terms so that number in most mayoral offices no longer corresponds either to representative democracy or to the participatory democracy established by our Constitution. This reform, too, is thus in line with reality and is to be applauded.

4,356 new posts

The number of Municipal Council seats will double and triple in almost all cases, except for Managua, where it will quadruple. The increase in council members will be as follows: from 5 to 16 in the 83 municipalities with a population under 30,000; from 12 to 23 in the 35 with 30-50,000 inhabitants, to 28 in the 23 with 50-100,000 inhabitants, and to 35 in the 8 with 100-150,000 inhabitants (Jinotega, Estelí, Chinandega, Tipitapa, Granada, Puerto Cabezas and Siuna). Municipalities with 150-200,000 inhabitants (only Matagalpa and Masaya) will have 40. And finally, León, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, will have 50 council members while Managua, the capital, with its million-plus inhabitants, will expand from 19 to 80.

This brings the total number from today’s 1,089 to 3,267, and of course their corresponding alternates will increase by the same number. That means 6,534 people, half men and half women, who will have to appear on the candidate slates of all political parties participating in the municipal elections on November 4 of this year, and the political parties must submit those slates to the electoral branch of government by June.

Where is such a long list of qualified party activists aspiring to that post to be found in such a rush? Beyond the propaganda accompanying Ortega’s initiative, the political intent apparently behind this reform is to get the thousands of governing party men and women who have been participating in or moving closer to the Councils of Citizens’ Power (CPCs) since 2007 on the slates of either the FSLN or the parties allied to it.

Assuaging tensions
and exerting better control

President Ortega is in a hurry to give definitive form to his “citizen’s power” project, which contradictorily translates in reality into ever more centralized power in the hands of the presidential couple, its family and its closest circle. To consolidate “citizens’ power,” Ortega needs to surround himself with the greatest number of his own people in the most arenas of institutional power possible.

The internal conflicts in the FSLN are becoming increasingly visible in the municipalities. The excessive doses of centralism and top-down rule applied by the governing party are generating tensions, quarrels and tussles over power, perks and resources. In that conflictive scenario, Ortega is banking on the increased number of councilors helping to assuage the tensions: there will be more posts to hand out to more people and it will be easier to control a more numerous collective. He’s also counting on being able to neutralize the power of the mayors more easily through this larger collective of councilors.

His formula seems to be to both dilute and concentrate power. Some FSLN mayors have worked very well, have their own personality, function with some measure of autonomy and represent emerging leaderships, all inadmissible in the current power scheme.

With a spirit of service

The tensions within the FSLN are mainly political struggles for posts and economic struggles for resources. Council members earn very high salaries, are provided vehicles, mobile phones and travel expenses, and receive good per diems for each session they attend. That irritates the CPC activists, who may work more yet earn nothing like that. Trying to calm the waters, President Ortega warned when he presented his bill that more posts would not mean salary or per diem increases for anyone and that the mayoral offices would be working without increased budgets.

As is now commonplace in all his speeches, he put a “religious” spin on the warning: he explained that it was all about fostering “the mystique of service… like priests, pastors, who serve the people without expecting rewards.” The FSLN mayor of Managua, Daisy Torres, promptly recognized that “now’s the time” to give the CPCs space in the Municipal Council because they have that “spirit of service.”

So the political project has been “improved, strengthened and developed” in these first 100 days, as announced. By inserting the CPCs into the local governments, Ortega will finally be able to adjust the municipal institutionality to the new party model, institutionalizing the new FSLN into the State.

It all began in 2007

On, January 10, the very day of his 2007 inauguration as President, President Ortega decreed a reform to State Organization Law 290 by creating four new national councils. He put his wife, Rosario Murillo, at the head of one of them: the Council of Communication and Citizenry. Thus began the process of transforming the FSLN, which had become increasingly debilitated after the revolution’s electoral defeat in 1990 and in the ensuing years changed into an electoral machine made up of some 30,000 election monitors, voting table members and other guarantors of the party’s votes. This structure, activated only for elections, was in the hands of commandos directed by former intelligence chief Lenín Cerna. Their members didn’t even undertake any proselytizing activities during elections or at other times.

Murillo took on the mission of transforming that electoral machinery into an organizational network of base-level activists, and Cerna was dismissed. The task was enormous given the FSLN’s erosion over the past 16 years and time was at a premium.

What shall we call them?

Ortega and his wife invented a whole new instrument of “participation,” choosing to ignore Law 475, the Citizen’s Participation Law, in effect since 2003, and all the participatory scaffolding built up in the municipalities based on that legal framework. They also paid no attention to the accumulated experiences in constructing citizenship and decentralizing power that grew out of the proclamation of municipal autonomy in 1987 and the Municipalities Law the following year, both of which were important fruits of Ortega’s first elected presidency (1984 to 1990).

The concept behind their new instrument actually wasn’t all that new. It was basically a remodeling of the Sandinista Defense Committees from the eighties, which in turn imitated Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. In this new reincarnation they also emulated the Communal Councils of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and the Popular Congresses of direct democracy of Libya’s Khadafy. First they were called Citizenship Councils, then People’s Councils, then Community Councils of Citizens’ Power. They ended up as Councils of Citizens’ Power (CPC), recognizing that the word “citizenry” has enormous strength everywhere in the world in the years following the revolution of the eighties, when the words “people” or “popular” had more cache.

In addition to her other rapidly accumulating hats in the new government, the First Lady was put at the head of the CPC structure, which started at the urban neighborhood and rural district or community level and worked its way up through the municipal and then departmental levels until reaching the national level and her. Murillo proclaimed that by July the CPCs would have a million members.

They had no more than been decreed than they triggered the first intense legislative battle of Ortega’s new presidency. The opposition won its first parliamentary victory by blocking the assignation of state functions, the administration of governmental programs and the allocation of national budget resources to the new organizations. But that was only round one. The Councils remained, without formal government affiliation but definitely with government functions and re¬sources: those provided by Chávez’s development cooperation, which were beyond the reach of any audit because they were never incorporated into the national budget.

You can’t organize
people by decree

In the July 2007 event celebrating the 28th anniversary of the revolution, Murillo delivered her first report to Ortega as coordinator of the new CPCs. She reported that 6,334 new CPCs were already organized around the country, with 500,288 members. She forecasted that the complete structure—16,957 CPCs and 938,524 members—would be completed within two months. Murillo also reported that each CPC was made up of 16 people responsible for 16 different work areas—citizens’ rights, citizens’ security, women’s rights, children’s rights, the rights of older adults, health, education, culture, environment, transportation, rural development, sports, etc.—and attended 100 people in its respective barrio or rural district.

It seemed improbable that in less than a year more than 900,000 people—equivalent to the 38% of voters who had elected Ortega, his entire hard vote—would have been attracted and organized so quickly. While it was surely many fewer than in the official report, there the CPCs were, with power, resources and functions.

They were pompously called “subjects of the new Sandinista hegemony” in a notebook the FSLN distributed that July among its rank and file to introduce the “new Sandinista project,” identified as the “second stage of the revolution.”

In September of that year, journalist William Grigsby, at the time a severe critic of the FSLN’s reduction to an electoral machine and convinced of the need to reorganize the FSLN on the basis of consciousness, explained the presidential couple’s logic behind the CPCs in that month’s issue of envío: “If you don’t want to be just another government, if you want to make a difference, to change, then you need people behind you. So they decided to create the Councils of Citizens’ Power (CPC) by decree, as a way of organizing the grassroots sectors whose consciousness has been built. They’re basically saying, ‘I decree that the people are going to organize now.’” But he criticized that as a conceptual error: “In my opinion that’s not how things work.” You can’t organize people or create consciousness by decree.

“Let the people
be President!”

In his July 19 speech, Ortega had insisted that the CPCs would be part of the State he was determined to “reorganize,” even knowing that without a parliamentary majority he wouldn’t get his wish.

At that point he altered his tone: “They have the votes in the Assembly to say that the Councils of Citizens’ Power will disappear, but they would be in incompliance with the Constitution’s mandate. It must be made totally clear that it is the volition, the right of the government, a right of the President to share power with the people! Let the people be President! They can’t deny me that right!”

The CPCs are
officially installed

After several more rounds of intense legal battles (a parliamentary vote again adverse to Ortega, a presidential veto, a new majority vote overturning the veto, a presidential lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court and a pacted vote with Arnoldo Alemán’s handpicked Liberal justices that ruled in Ortega’s favor), the CPCs finally made their public debut.

On November 30, 2007, in a colorful and costly event in the Plaza of the Revolution, the Councils of Citizens’ Power were officially launched. Prevented from setting them up as a government entity, President Ortega had the previous day decreed the insertion of the departmental Cabinets of Citizen’s Power, which consist of the coordinators of the 16 sectors of each CPC, into the National Council of Economic and Social Planning (CONPES), the maximum constitutional authority by which the government consults civil society.

CONPES had been created in 1999 under pressure from the energetic civil society of those years, with strong backing from the international community. Henceforward, as Council on Hemispheric Affairs senior research fellow Dr. Frank J. Kendrick analyzed in February 2008, CONPES “will operate as an agency through which the local and regional [Citizens’] Councils will ‘directly participate in the decisions concerning the integral development of Nicaragua.’”

So the CPCs entered the State that day through the doors of CONPES, and on the same day Ortega gave his wife yet another new hat: CONPES executive director. In mid-October of the following year CONPES convened a total of 183 civil society organizations, most of them allied with the government, and of course including the departmental Cabinets of Citizen’s Power, to receive from President Ortega the government’s draft National Human Development Plan for their comments.

That’s the last reported meeting it ever had. To all intents and purposes it would appear to have ceased functioning. Not so the CPCs, which have continued to exist as partisan para-state organizations.

A new version of the FSLN

With the creation of the CPCs, the FSLN began to be something different. The political nose of the historical Sandinistas, critical of Ortega’s leadership of the party for years, especially his ongoing political pact with the former President and ever corrupt Arnoldo Alemán, indicated that the FSLN they had known and sacrificed so much for was being transformed. It was being restructured and transmuted through the CPCs, built on what former guerrilla commander Mónica Baltodano called “rubble, on what’s left of the FSLN structures, which has been losing leadership and any real leading role.” What that meant in practice is that the CPCs were being managed on the ground by the party’s political secretaries, not exactly known for being the party’s most honest, honorable and pro-participation representatives. They in turn were being directed from the FSLN by its Secretariat and from the executive branch of government by Murillo. It was hardly a healthy recipe for authentic citizen’s participation.

The party’s institutional structures (Congress, Assembly and base assemblies, where nothing had ever been openly and freely debated in any case, and even its original nine-man National Directorate), stopped functioning altogether. The four or five years preceding Ortega’s return to government were disastrous from the perspective of the party’s institutionality.

Baltodano, who left the FSLN in 2006 and is now a leader of the Movement for the Rescue of Sandinismo, commented on this in the December 2007 issue of envío: “Even pro-Daniel analysts inside the FSLN admit this. There’s no political organization or party institutionality in the FSLN and decisions that for years were made collectively are now in the hands of the presidential couple and a handful of close supporters. The electoral victory last year surprised the FSLN at a time when it was organizationally very weak and had no institutionality.”

Erecting the CPCs on this “rubble” of the FSLN structures, organizing them and sending them to muscle out the expressions of participation that had been functioning in the municipalities in the previous years and vie for leadership quickly began to generate conflicts.

The State-Party’s
conveyor belts

In the ensuing years polls showed that only a minority of FSLN sympathizers participated in the CPCs and that the behavior of many of those who did was sectarian, contradicting the pluralism that Murillo announced had been created. With exceptional cases, they did not tend to attract non-party membership or participation.

People’s experiences in barrios, districts and municipalities in which the CPCs functioned demonstrated that they were acting as conveyor belts for central power. They were responsible for filling plazas with state employees in the governmental acts and for converting the citizenry into “clients” of the governing party. The CPCs administered all the social programs financed with the abundant Venezuelan cooperation and had the power to issue political endorsements to those who requested them or wanted anything from state institutions: a job, a scholarship, a license, a deadline extension, a membership card, an ID card, some medicine…

Five years after that first legislative battle in January 2007, and now with the ample parliamentary majority provided by the highly questioned electoral results of 2011, Ortega has finally been able to get the reform to the Municipalities Law that he wanted, legally inserting the CPCs into the state institutionality. It is an important step for the State-party scheme, with the State controlled institutionally and the party transformed.

Electoral reforms as well

These 100 days brought something more than just the changes in local power. On the same day as the municipal reforms, Ortega presented a bill that amends 26 articles of the Electoral Law. Sidestepping the need to seriously revise the entire electoral branch of government, these changes don’t alter anything substantial.

National electoral experts qualified only two of them as “positive,” albeit irrelevant. Not a single one of the reforms addresses the demands that have been made for years by the Electoral Reforms Promotion Group, an umbrella of 14 national organizations. Nor do any of them take up the main recommendations of the international observer missions from the European Union and Organization of American States following the presidential elections of 2006, repeated even more meticulously and compellingly by the EU after last year’s presidential elections, describing them as a “process lacking in neutrality and transparency.”

Will these reforms do the trick
in Brussels and Washington?

President Ortega is well aware of the international illegitimacy resulting from the impossible-to-prove but widely believed fraud first in the 2008 municipal elections and then in the 2011 general elections. The first led to important cuts or freezes in European and US cooperation and the second to more cuts and the actual departure of several bilateral cooperation agencies.

Could he possibly believe that these reforms, which seem aimed at convincing Brussels and Washington that he’s willing to “make changes,” do the trick? Perhaps he does, because he knows municipal elections never trigger the kind of foreign interest or alarms that general elections do.

Perhaps he’s counting on Europe’s problems being so acute that Nicaragua will pass below the radar of the Old World’s foreign ministries no matter what happens in the upcoming municipal elections. Does he think that will also happen in the US State Department, which even on a bad day keeps more of an eye on its “back yard” than Europe does?

“They don’t scratch
where it itches”

Roberto Courtney, the executive director of Ethics and Transparency, Nicaragua’s oldest election observation organization, summed it up with a popular metaphor: “The problem with these reforms is that they don’t scratch well, don’t scratch hard and don’t scratch where it itches.”

They scratch without doing it either well or hard because even the procedural aspects they address are trivial. For example, the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) will now have 30 days instead of just 10 to issue credentials to the party electoral monitors… but they will still be issued by the same CSE magistrates who have betrayed any trust the population once had in them, thus denying the parties the autonomy to choose their monitors. Likewise, the deadline for issuing ID/voter cards has been extended… but they too are still issued by the CSE, not an independent authority.

And the reforms don’t “scratch where it itches” because the Electoral Law procedures aren’t what itch; the itch is in the totally partisan composition of the CSE, which means that the magistrates administer the procedures at the FSLN’s discretion. The lack of substance in the President’s reforms fit Jesus’ metaphor to describe the practice of the Pharisees: “They strain out the gnat and drink down the camel.” In this case the gnats are the procedural details while the camel is the magistrates’ gross violations of both ethical and procedural behavior.

The national experts have tired of reiterating that what they call the collapse of Nicaragua’s electoral system is not so much the result of the Electoral Law which, despite its flaws, was managed adequately until the 2006 elections, but because after that it was neither respected nor applied correctly. It was violated time and again by the electoral magistrates: in the 2008 municipal elections, the Caribbean Coast’s autonomous government elections the following year and the national ones last year, always favoring the FSLN. “Any Supreme Electoral Council with credibility would manage to regenerate the system,” says Courtney; “and all the rest would follow into the bargain.”

Moving like a cat

Ortega’s electoral reforms surprised the opposition led by Eduardo Montealegre, which hadn’t disguised its anxious expectation that he and the legislative representatives from his We’re Going with Eduardo Movement would discuss electoral and other “transcendental” issues in a bilateral dialogue with Ortega or some of his operators.

The reforms were given the nod by all the parties or party fractions allied with the FSLN. They were also approved by the CSE magistrates themselves, who immediately issued a formal invitation to November’s municipal elections following foot-dragging that had sparked uncertainty and even speculation that the surprise Ortega was preparing would be the change of at least some of their number.

With those two catlike moves—the President making changes so everything stays the same and the CSE quickly inaugurating the electoral period, also so nothing changes—it became abundantly clear that there will be no important replacement of electoral authorities, despite their disrepute and the fact that their terms are long over. This foretells an electoral process totally under the executive branch’s control, with all the irregularities we’re already familiar with.

All legal parties expressed their “intent to participate”

After formally announcing the elections on April 26, the CSE gave the political parties that still have legal status only until May 3 to present “letters of intent” expressing their determination to participate in the elections. They will then have to present alliances and candidates between June and July, which will turn their intent into a definitive decision. CSE President Roberto Rivas made it clear that, by law, those who do not choose to participate will lose their legal status and be expunged from the political map.

All 18 registered parties thus expressed their “intent.” The greatest enthusiasm was shown by the smallest five, including the stunted Alliance for the Republic party (APRE), created by President Bolaños while in office, and the fractured National Resistance Party, with some of its candidate hopefuls stating that they would run alone and others that they would go in alliance with the FSLN. The Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), still in the hands of the battered Arnoldo Alemán, was also unequivocal about participating. Only the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), now essentially headed by Montealegre, displayed doubts.

Gadea: “I’m no idiot”

About the only interesting aspect of the upcoming elections so far is seeing what the PLI Alliance does or doesn’t do, says or doesn’t say. The PLI itself submitted its letter of intent as a party and announced that it is already preparing for the race in the municipal territories. Two other members of the alliance, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), whose legal status was taken away by the CSE in 2008, and the Citizen’s Union for Democracy (UCD), which is an umbrella for 15 civil society organizations, announced that they would not be participating. The MRS had already stated a month earlier that it would not legitimate the electoral process with its participation unless all electoral magistrates were changed, a demand it reiterated when announcing this decision.

For its part, the UCD exhorted the “genuine opposition” not to participate in these elections because conditions don’t exist for them to be free, fair and transparent. Fabio Gadea, the Alliance’s presidential candidate last year, was even more categorical: “In these conditions, with these magistrates and this electoral system, I’m not even going to vote in these elections; I’m no idiot.”

Economic uncertainties

While Ortega raced forward with his political project in these first 100 days by institutionalizing the CPC party structure into local state power, he’s moving much slower on the changes the International Monetary Fund has insisted he make in his economic project. The delay is in part to put the municipal elections behind him first, but it is also surely born of the uncertainty that the President must be feeling when he looks toward Caracas.

The governing party’s alliance with the business elite in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) remains afloat, despite the prop¬erties—some of them of real economic value—being forcibly confiscated and appropriated by people close to the circle of power. Since some of the owners affected are also COSEP allies, this big business umbrella is trying to manage the issue with stealth.

In addition to the half dozen properties illegally snatched from their owners by the Attorney General’s Office that are now in litigation and are prominent in the media, there have been other smaller and less publicized ones, none of which are being resolved in the courts. According to declarations by the US Embassy in Managua in April, the government has confiscated 10 other properties from US citizens, which have not been made public, but could affect the waiver the US government grants to Nicaragua each July as long as it respects the properties of its co-nationals. Without that waiver, which exempts it from Sen. Jesse Helms’ legislation blocking aid to countries that have confiscated properties from US citizens, the hundreds of millions in resources being agreed to in these months between the Nicaraguan government and the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and International Monetary Fund for the next five-year period could be at risk, as, of course, could this fiscal year’s $20+ million in US aid.

The IMF visit

An International Monetary Fund mission arrived in Nicaragua in early May to review the country’s macro-economic situation prior to signing a new three-year agreement with the government, given that the previous one has now lapsed. The delegation spoke of cutting subsidies for electrical energy (the bill for which is footed by funds from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas—ALBA), making efforts to formalize the labor market (70% of Nicaragua’s jobs are informal) and discussing the law that allocates 6% of the national budget to university education so as to redirect funds to both primary and technical education. It also again expressed the urgency of a tax reform and a social security reform, two requirements the IMF had already insisted on to sign a new agreement.

COSEP knows that both reforms will affect its members’ interests: one will cut the tax exonerations that currently benefit large capital and the other will require a greater social security contribution from employers for their workers. Although the government would like to get these important measures out of the way as quickly as possible, it is in no rush to dispatch them at the moment for political reasons. It thus managed to persuade the IMF to let it postpone these two bitter pills; the social security reform won’t be applied until after the municipal elections and the tax reform until 2013.

Is there a Plan B
for after Chávez?

Ortega ought to be in a hurry to deal with these economic issues in case a Republican government takes office in Washington—a possibility he must consider—and before President Chávez disappears from the scene, but he doesn’t seem to be. His only hurry appears to be to consolidate his political project.

In the economic realm he would seem to be trusting in the influence Raúl Castro could have on Venezuela’s possible post-Chávez transition. He also seems to be relying on the good relations his government has maintained with the US government over drug trafficking to guarantee a protective shield from Republican ire if Mitt Romney wins, and from pressures by Obama should he be reelected.

But will the IMF share these expectations? Isn’t its mission likely to have brought a Plan B for the scenario of a Nicaragua without Chávez and the favorable payment conditions of Venezuela’s oil deal with Ortega? The Nicaraguan economy’s enormous dependence on Venezuelan resources makes us so vulnerable that the entire national economy would be severely stretched.

According to the latest report by the Nicaraguan Economic and Social Development Foundation (FUNIDES), over 20% of the growth of Nicaragua’s gross domestic product in the past two years has been guaranteed by Venezuelan cooperation. The increases in Venezuela’s financial cooperation and the growth of exports to that country, which is now Nicaragua’s second market after the United States, are spectacular.

Some 60% of all cooperation Nicaragua receives today comes from Venezuela. And considering that it has all been held together by the relationship between two people, Chávez and Ortega, big question marks hang over what could happen when one of them drops out.

Ortega’s hurry is met
by society’s lethargy

In spite of all this, Ortega seems sure, even arrogant. He has been able to push things through politically the way he has because of Chávez’s generous cooperation. Those resources have not only cemented his alliance with big capital, opening the Venezuelan market to them and postponing the fiscal reform the country needs, but have permitted him to stifle any social demands by giving handouts to the poor. All this has contributed to the lethargy Nicaraguan society is experiencing.

Although shortages, discontent and tensions blow up here and there every once in a while, as the recent elections showed, Nicaraguan society hasn’t maintained any visible and organized opposition to the social control the government is forcibly imposing day after day or to the pace at which it is moving to consolidate its project. A number of analysts attribute society’s lethargic discontent with the course of things to the lack of any organized and unified opposition among the political parties. From their perspective, only a monolithic leadership—they often whip out the Venezuelan example—could snap society out of its lethargy and create a counterweight to Ortega’s power.

Some opposition political leaders, however, disagree with this hackneyed analysis and recognize the opposition’s weakness from a broader perspective. MRS President Enrique Sáenz argues that “both the politically organized opposition and society lack the capacity to react with either debate or mobilization because the government’s onslaught against the institutionality opens new fronts each day and there’s no political, technical or mobilizing way to respond to all of them, to articulate alternative projects on so many fronts.”

There are governmental-business officials who like to call the lethargy “social peace.” For example, retired General Álvaro Baltodano, the presidential delegate for investments, explains it as the “strategic alliance among the private sector, the workers and the government,” which translates into a macroeconomic stability that attracts investments and into citizens’ security that distinguishes us from the rest of Central America due to our lower rates of violence and crime.

COSEP President José Adán Aguerri shares this vision and declares himself convinced that “Nicaragua is unique and exceptional.” For that reason, he argues, “we have to get out and sell the Nicaraguan label, despite all the differences and political confrontations.”

Fear is also contributing
to the lethargy…

Lethargy is defined as a state of prolonged somnolence, insensitivity to or alienation from any enthusiasm that is caused by certain illnesses.

Fear creates illness and insensitivity, and fear is certainly part of today’s lethargy. Fear of speaking out has already infected Nicaragua because people have seen the consequences that any criticism can produce. Freedom of expression isn’t just something the media engages in, it’s also what happens (or doesn’t happen) in work centers, the governing party’s barrio meetings, or in official settings. The fear of expressing oneself is increasing in many arenas.

…as is both poverty
and the responses to it

Poverty also explains some of the current lethargy. Like fear, poverty sickens and puts a damper on enthusi-asm. Thus the ever growing economic differences combine with the political fears and polarization to help explain society’s lethargy.

The Ortega government has given only short-term responses to the abysmal inequalities in resources and opportunities that have always existed in Nicaragua and still remain. But while its responses are mainly palliative rather than structural, they are necessary because they target real problems, improve people’s lives and give hope.

Paradoxically, the government’s ability to respond to so many lacks, largely thanks to Venezuelan funds, contributes to the somnolence of the part of society that’s being benefited by the whole array of ongoing social programs the government constantly crows about. Receiving zinc roofing sheets, a wheelchair, a food packet or a mattress right in your own home makes you feel remembered. You know you’re being taken into account when they bring you a pig or provide you a loan that you might not be obliged to pay back or put your name on a list to receive a house or a study grant for your child. All of that awakens sympathies for the government and silences any criticisms you might have. And it contributes to polarization by making you loathe to listen to anyone who gets hot under the collar about abstract and distant problems like fraud, illegitimacy, eroded institutionality, unconstitutional actions and the like.

Lethargy is also affecting a good part of the youth who have distanced themselves from politics run by adults who don’t convince them, while another youth sector is being creatively and skillfully awakened by the adults in the governing party through a raft of activities ranging from parties and liquor to soccer games and social tasks (tree-planting brigades, cultural brigades and the like).

It will take a while,
but this too will pass

Even the government is lethargic. Or rather, as the saying goes, “resting on its laurels.” For five years it frittered away the millions in Venezuelan cooperation rather than using it to construct a genuine national project with consensus and without exclusions. Now, those resources could be coming to an end. What will the government do without them? Will it snap out of it and build something different or continue down the same centralizing, totalizing path?

As history has repeatedly shown, lethargy may by its very definition drag on for a long time, but it always passes, for both the governed and those who govern them.

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