Is it a bird? A plane? A cultural revolution…?

A series of top-down initiatives—an ideological proposal, an educational strategy and a legal text—raise new questions about the Ortega government project and the potentially rough time ahead with the death of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez.

Envío team

What’s the government’s new ambitious and wide-reaching step all about? Is it a cultural revolution, inserted into what is officially called “the second stage of the revolution”? The tacit admission of an ideological failure faced with a militancy bereft of principles? An adaptation of the “live good” of the 21st-Century socialisms of Ecuador and Bolivia? Or a home¬grown version of Mao’s famous Red Book? What does it all mean?

What it means to the First Lady

On January 23 First Lady Rosario Murillo, whose multiple government posts include that of communication and citizenship secretary, issued a 14-point document she called a “national strategy” for “living clean, living healthy, living nice, living good.” With that she kicked off what appears to be a high-priority government campaign. Within a couple of weeks, half a million copies of the 20-page document, which the government soon began calling a “basic guide,” had been printed.

The following are some sample extracts from the guide’s extensive prologue, in which Murillo herself explains what it means: “We invite ourselves, call upon ourselves, to work together, to learn together, Nicaraguans of all generations, to transform our Culture of Daily Life, putting indispensable emphases on the consistency between what we are, what we think and what we do…. Live Clean, Live Healthy, Live Nice, Live Good…! This means each of us undertaking a series of simple, easy daily Actions that gradually incorporate us in a Consciousness of Shared and Complementary Responsibility for the Country we dream of…. Because we must promote people learning how to find Happiness in Values, in Emotional Bonds, in Culture, Spirit, Science and shared Material Goods, as all Humanist, Idealist, Ethical and Evolutionary Philosophy mandates. As our Beliefs and Affections also mandate….”

Fourteen ambitious,
wide-reaching points

This prologue serves as an introduction to the 14 ambitious points covered by the strategy. The guide ranges from something as small and ecological as “Let’s plant trees, plants, vegetable gardens, kitchen and medicinal herbs in all urban, suburban and rural living spaces,” to something as enormous and subjective as “Let’s help promote Individuals and Communities committed to values, so we take care of ourselves physically and spiritually all the time.” In between are considerations as strange as this: “Excesses and Vices rob us of the Present and Future of thousands of Nicaraguans and it is our task to join forces to prevent and deal with that curse of so-called ‘Modernity.’”

A real grabber is point 11, which, alongside urging us to save water, says: “Let’s promote a Culture of Simple Life, without waste or ostentation, which hurts, excludes or limits other Sister/Brother Citizens.” Could that point possibly be an appeal to the 180 ultra-rich Nicaraguans with a personal fortune of at least $30 million (according to the World Report of Ultra-Wealth 2011-2012, prepared by the Wealth-X company)?

“Live clean” is already
a national clamor

With most of the population not yet fully aware of the contents of the strategy-guide, both the government and nongovernment media initially began to report insistently that it was a campaign to clean the streets, rain drains and garbage dumps… although it’s noteworthy that the guide doesn’t use the word “garbage” even once. Of the guide’s four titles, the one that caught on the fastest was “live nice,” equating nice with clean.

Living clean is a national clamor. Collective sloth has made Managua and many other cities in Nicaragua regrettable examples of generalized filth. Spontaneous garbage dumps can sprout up overnight in vacant urban lots of both rich and poor neighborhoods, all along our highways, and especially in the huge rain drains. All imaginable kinds of waste pile up, including empty cartons, plastic bags and bottles, food remains and dead animals. “We’re pigs,” people are quick to admit, painting the entire population with the same brush.

In this context, no one could be heard grousing about a national clean-up strategy, although it was only the most visible and plausible part of that title of the strategy.

The strategy comes
to the schools

The appearance of the basic guide almost coincided with the beginning of the 2013 school year. But it turns out that the Ministry of Education had its own new official strategy for the country’s educational system, from preschool to adult education and in both the public and private schools. Its title is “Grand National Campaign of Affection in the Daily Coexistence of Nicaragua’s Families.” This new project includes a set of instructions for developing the campaign, a teacher’s manual, a methodology for authorities to train the teachers and a strategy for implementing the campaign in the classrooms. At 58 pages long, this text is nearly three times the size of the “Live Nice” basic guide, although the two are linked, as orders are that dissemination of the latter must start “in the classrooms.”

Over the school year the country’s more than 50,000 teachers will meet monthly to evaluate how the campaign is going. Before classes started on February 1, teachers all over the country had to meet to hear Murillo’s message, via a video conference, in which she explained “the three vital chapters” of the “cultural evolution” that must be taught in school: self-esteem, respect and esthetics.

On March 1, the education minister announced another step of his strategy to the teachers: weekly Saturday “Workshops of Continual Training in Values.” They were advised that those who attend these workshops will obtain nothing less than a post-graduate qualification in “Values.”

“The only Christian country”

It has been made clear in the texts, Murillo’s daily messages and the messages of other officials that the training will be in “Christian values, socialist ideals and solidarity practices.” This intentionally ignores Article 124 of the Constitution, which establishes that “education in Nicaragua is secular.” It also overlooks the fact that Christianity is a religious movement that has been around for over two thousand years and has had diverse interpretations over the course of such a long and complex history.

Despite this important legal limitation and these evident cultural aspects, Murillo stated in her daily address of February 27 “how proud” she felt that Nicaragua is the “only country in the world that is declaring itself Christian.”

Other pro-government voices have also come out in favor of the educaional strategy. On March 1, the National Worker’s Front, made up of ten unions and guilds allied with the government, proclaimed that “this training is indispensible for the formation of all our teachers and students and to advance the Social, Political and Cultural Transformation process in the construction of Christian, Socialist and Solidary Nicaragua.”

A task for the
teaching profession

The teachers have been put in charge of developing this “cultural evolution.” In the texts provided them they are told, among other things, that “a teacher who values his/her own person, family, work and personal care—food habits, hygiene, health and personal appearance—enjoys what he/she does, feels proud, and transmits this feeling in the way he/she talks and behaves with others, particularly his/her students, for whom he/she is a role model.”

This description of how the nation’s teaching profession is supposed to take on the strategy is a tad extravagant. Nicaragua’s teachers are the worst paid in all of Central America. In Honduras, a country with economic problems similar to ours, a primary teacher earns the equivalent of US$500 and a secondary teacher the equivalent of $580. A public primary school teacher in Nicaragua, in contrast, earns a basic monthly salary equivalent to some US$150 and a secondary teacher $50 more than that, although the government has used some of Venezuela’s generous aid to top up their salaries with a “solidarity bonus” of approximately $30. But they have to go stand in a long line for it each month because it’s not a budget item and thus can’t be included in their paycheck (and can be canceled with the swipe of the pen at any time).

We all know how important education is to escaping poverty. But according to data of the Central American Economic Investment Bank, Nicaragua’s public investment in education relative to its gross domestic product is the lowest in the region: only 2.85%. Costa Rica invests the most with 6.40%, followed by Honduras with 5.40%.

Discussion of the Family Code

On top of the guide, the strategy document and the teachers’ workshops came an item of greater transcendence. Starting in April of last year, the more than 640 articles of the new Family Code began to be debated and approved one by one in the National Assembly every Thursday.

The objective is to merge into one higher-level piece of legislation all the existing family-related laws: the adoption law, the law regulating de facto unions, the child support law, the law on guardianship of minors… According to experts, an adequate debate and drafting of a code on such a crucial topic would be one of the most important efforts in the country’s juridical history.

That task first got underway in 1994 and continued in fits and starts over the years. Then in 2010, the FSLN legislative bench took the project up again with vigor. Given the importance of the areas the Code covers, the speeding up of the process, the unexplained and undebated changes to the earlier text and the scant consultation with civic organizations that have been working for years with the plethora of separate laws related to the family haven’t gone unnoticed.

The Code’s absence of attention to sexual and reproductive rights has also generated concern, given that they are among the most important issues in any family and have been the object of significant consciousness-raising work all over the country in recent years. “It has attracted a great deal of attention,” says jurist Azahalea Solís, “that neither the word ‘freedom’ nor the word ‘migration’ appears anywhere in the Code, given that what should be resolved and established in a Family Code is precisely how much freedom and privacy we as both individuals and families want vis-à-vis the State and that migration is currently one of the realities most strongly affecting Nicaraguan families.” (See María Teresa Blandón’s analysis of the Family Code in the Speaking Out section of the June 2012 issue of envío.)

The strategy comes
to the families

In February, Rosario Murillo sent the National Assembly a motion proposing a new chapter for the Family Code with articles legalizing “Cabinets of the Family, Community and Life.” This is another brainchild of hers, a spin-off of the Councils and Cabinets of Citizens’ Power.

The extemporaneousness of the proposal and the contents of its articles triggered intense debates in the legislative body and the media. But given the FSLN’s current absolute parliamentary majority, the text was pushed through with no changes and the Cabinets were inserted into the Code on February 21 with the following definition: “The Cabinets of the Family, Community and Life are organized with individuals, women, men, youths and older adults who live in a community to reflect and work together, promoting family values and unity, self-esteem and dignity, responsibility, rights and duties, communication, co-existence, understanding and a spirit of community so as to achieve coherence of being, thinking and action. The Cabinets of the Family, Community and Life are inspired by Christian values, socialist ideals and solidary practices.”

Partisan and
unconstitutional

It isn’t hard to work out the interrelationship between the guide, the strategy, the workshops, the training… and now the law. Nor to recognize that it’s a party project, given that the governing party defines itself in speeches, billboards, banners, posters, bumper stickers, T-shirts and pamphlets as a “Christian, socialist and solidary” government and defines Nicaragua the same way, ignoring the plurality of society, not to mention the various interpretations of what Christianity, socialism and solidarity mean.

The opposition legislators announced that once the Family Code as a whole is approved in the National Assembly they plan to file a writ of unconstitutionality against it. In the first place, the State is not Christian in Nicaragua. It has been secular since 1893 as a result of the Liberal revolution of General José Santos Zelaya. The current Constitution, written and amply debated by both the National Assembly and the population in 1987, reaffirmed that, establishing in article 14 that “the State has no official religion” in Nicaragua. In the second place, the Constitution does not define Nicaragua as “Christian, socialist and solidary.” Article 7 states that “Nicaragua is a democratic, participatory and representative republic.” Nothing more.

An aide memoire:
Background to the cabinets

Murillo, architect of this ideological jigsaw, explained on February 6 that what have so far been known as Cabinets of Citizen’s Power (GPCs) “are now called Cabinets of the Family.” We already know that the GPCs are made up of Councils of Citizen’s Power (CPCs), which leads to the deduction that the CPCs will now become Councils of the Family.

Their evolution started on inauguration day of Ortega’s first reelection (January 10, 2007), when he created four new national councils within the executive branch: National Policies, Food Security and Sovereignty, the Caribbean Coast, and Communication and Citizenship, putting his wife at the head of the last one. The mission she prioritized for herself at that time and ever since was to redo the organic structure of FSLN grassroots militants, by then reduced to a very eroded political structure organized exclusively for election work.

To that end, overriding all existing legislation, she created some more new “councils” that January. Not overtly defining them as party-related, she said they would be dedicated to promoting civic participation. At first called Councils of Citizens’ Participation, presumably in keeping with the 1993 Law of Citizen’s Participation, their name had changed to Councils of Citizens’ Power by July. After intense battles, the parliamentary majority, at that time held by the opposition, legally blocked the CPCs from becoming a para-state structure, as Murillo had in mind. As a result, they were prevented from being assigned state functions or administering any nationally budgeted government programs, which may help explain why the government’s Venezuelan-financed social programs they administer do not go through the budget.

They were publicly inaugurated in November 2007. To give them the access to government decision-making they were denied by law, Ortega granted them a plurality of seats in the National Economic and Social Planning Council (CONPES), an important government mechanism for consulting with civil society created in 2001 in response to pressure from the still vital civil society of those years. He named Murillo, already the national head of the CPC structure, to chair CONPES. But CONPES soon stopped meeting and effectively ceased to exist, while life was breathed into the CPCs as unofficial para-state and very obviously party organizations. Under Murillo’s organizational baton, the FSLN began to be restructured around them, with FSLN political secretaries directing them in each territory. They functioned at the local neighborhood and rural district level, then came together at the municipal and departmental level as GPCs.

In early 2007 Murillo had bragged that their membership would hit a million by that July, but for years polls showed that participation in them was weaker than she had predicted. While some functioned well and pluralistically, the sectarian behavior of the party hacks in many of them contradicted the government’s self-assigned description of “reconciliation and national unity.” Soon participation in the CPCs was largely limited to old FSLN militants and new sympathizers.

From the outset, they acted as conveyor belts of central power. Their growth was a product of the resources and power they wielded in their role of deciding who should get the various social assistance packages financed by Venezuelan cooperation as well as granting or denying the political endorsements required by people who needed anything from any state institution, be it a job, a study grant, a license, an extension of some deadline, an identity card or party membership card, medicine… In a number of communities their actions didn’t go down well with the traditional anti-Sandinista population, provoking political and even emotional discontent. In others, the largely poor and needy population came to terms with what was required to get on the list for sheet metal roofing and other handouts.

The end of a
seven-year process

In April 2012, five years after the first unsuccessful legislative battle to insert the CPCs into the State apparatus, Ortega encountered no snags in also reforming the Municipalities Law, given the FSLN’s absolute municipal majority. One reform finally inserted the CPC design as conveyor belt of executive power into the state institutionality at the local level, but with that role now being played by the FSLN’s Municipal Council members, who hold the majority in most municipalities following widely alleged fraud in last year’s municipal elections. Another reform increased the total number of Municipal Council members and their alternates from 1,178 to 6,534.

With their new, less tarnished name, the CPCs themselves will be inserted even further than before into the life of communities and families. That insertion, read in the current context, in which it is accompanied by the highly touted strategy of “living nice” and promoting “Christian values, socialist ideals and solidarity-based practices” has been perceived by a wide range of social, political and religious voices as worrisome meddling in families’ private life, a risk to individual rights, a social control mechanism and yet another expression of the State-governing party fusion and confusion, given that all state institutions are being told to work “in coordination” with the Cabinets. As Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) National Assembly representative Edipcia Dubón put it, “It’ll be like the State working at the tiniest level.”

Although the legislators who voted in favor of the Cabinets insist that joining and working with them will be voluntary, it must be remembered that the same thing was said of the CPCs at the outset.

In search of legitimacy

This ably prepared strategy mixes the important and desirable objective of a “clean life” that we all share as individuals and as society—at least at the level of values if not of daily practice—with more questionable objectives, among other reasons be¬cause they involve an attempt to standardize personal subjectivity. In any event, it needs to be set in the context of the new stage the Ortega government is entering as the possible effects of the post-Chávez era in Nicaragua start to reveal themselves.

Given the possibility of less support from Venezuela, Ortega opened the year with signs of seeking certain levels of legitimization that previously didn’t seem to concern him much. The unconstitutionality of his candidacy and his frequent disrespect of the laws could now prove counterproductive if his main international backing starts to weaken.

“It’s never too late”

Ortega’s first surprise came on February 6, when a full six years after the law establishes, he finally sent the National Assembly his list of appointments for top posts—ministers, vice ministers, directors of autonomous state entities and ambassadors—dating back to his first term. He should have submitted that list for ratification within 15 days of naming them.

“It’s never too late to put things right,” said some of his legislative representatives in his defense. The representatives of the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), Nicaragua’s weak second-largest party today, also applauded the measure because they are trying to butter up Ortega in search of some agreement. María Eugenia Sequeira, one of the representatives closest to current PLI leader Eduardo Montealegre, declared with rhetorical pomp that “today we are beginning a new stage for Nicaragua that we are all longing for, a stage in which democracy and freedom must shine.”

Another “legitimizing” step will be to resolve the “de facto” continuation in important posts of more than 60 high-level officials whose terms in office have long since expired. President Ortega’s political operatives have already begun chatting up PLI politicians to negotiate some of these posts and it is highly likely that before the middle of the year the National Assembly will have either ratified this sizeable group of officials in their posts for another term or replaced some. Mathematically, Ortega doesn’t need the PLI’s votes, but politically he does. Letting the opposition name some of the posts in exchange for ratifying the ones most important to him will give him more legitimacy.

Planning for the
time of thin cows

Given the likelihood of ending up with fewer resources from Chávez’s successor, the strategy of transferring responsibilities of all sizes to the teaching profession, the “new” Cabinets, the communities and families could be an attempt to offload some of the government’s responsibilities for when less is available to respond to more social problems. Could the idea be to blame the failure to resolve these problems on a lack of commitment and positive attitude from the people themselves, making it their fault that we don’t live clean or good or nice?

There are hints of that in the imperatives, invocations, appeals and invitations of the different expressions of the strategy, which emphasize a change of attitude among people, families, communities and teachers as a formula for resolving the nation’s problems.

For example, there’s an appeal to “work integrally, together with the National Police, the Family Ministry and Cabinets and the priests and pastors on preventing and attending to drug addiction,” turning a blind eye to the kind of institutional complicities with drug traffickers we have learned about or intuited recently. Likewise, we are called upon to “plant trees, pledging to care for and restore our Mother Earth,” with no mention of the economic interests of big private enterprise and governmental institutions behind the ravaging of the forests that’s turning our country into a desert.

It can all be
resolved with attitudes

There’s no cause and effect in the strategy’s “philosophy.” It all boils down to attitudes. It’s a recent trick of neoliberal capitalism to make us depend on positive thinking and a positive attitude in order to solve the disasters provoked or at least permitted by the neoliberal model itself.

Some years ago a much-repeated television spot attempted to demonstrate to us that a country’s economic development doesn’t depend on its natural resources, history, geographic location or culture, but only on its population’s “attitudes.” We were given the examples of Japan, a country with scant natural resources but a buoyant economy, and Switzerland, which has never planted cocoa, but produces the world’s best chocolate. Everything was reduced to attitude.

The government’s current strategy is of that same neoliberal bent. In trying to promote “attitudes,” it conveniently ignores or forgets the historical and contemporary causes of the problems it wants resolved. Even more seriously, it seemingly wants to change these attitudes by the pure voluntarism of top-down power.

Voices of alarm

The strategy is just getting underway, just beginning to be explained, developed and implemented and to reveal its scope. But we already know it’s a totalizing proposal. And it could be totalitarian in its execution. In a country with such a deteriorated institutional life and public sphere, the objective now seems to be to make headway in the private sphere, in family life.

While some evangelical pastors and Catholic priests close to the government are applauding the idea of an education “in values,” there are also voices of alarm, with the Catholic bishops in particular expressing “concern.” After the latest chapter in this scheme—the insertion of the Cabinets of the Family into the Family Code, which not one PLI representative voted for—representative Alberto Lacayo, who heads the PLI bench, indignantly said that “the only way to contain this juridical aberration that violates the Constitution of the Republic is for people to close the doors of their houses to activists of the party of Nicaragua’s new millionaires.”

One of three resolutions of the MRS National Council, held on February 24, was to “mobilize ourselves in all communities and neighborhoods to fight against the harassment by Ortega and his followers of anyone who expresses independence and refuses to be subordinated to their requirements. We do not recognize the so-called Cabinets of the Family as having any validity and call on the population not to recognize any authority attributed to them.”

Considering the lack of legal options to annul the Cabinets, which now have legal status, Vilma Núñez de Escorcia, president of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH), hopes that this will usher in a stage of civil disobedience, which she actively encourages: “There is only civil disobedience when there is a law that should be disobeyed. We must not wait for a response from the courts. The population can respond by not participating in anything to which they are invited by these Cabinets.”

A cultural revolution?
Or an admission of failure?

So at the end of the day, what does this all amount to? A cultural revolution? Murillo’s insistence starting back in 2007 that Nicaragua is experiencing “the second stage of the revolution,” the first of which began with victory over the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and ended with the FSLN’s electoral loss in 1990, leads us to think that this is what’s intended, even if it isn’t what it actually amounts to.

Is it in fact a cultural revolution? Or the tacit admission of failure? Could it be that those responsible for the design of the Ortega project have finally woken up to the fact that the grassroots and intermediate structures of what is today the FSLN are empty shells because their identity is not rooted in any real principles, values or ideology.

Perhaps those responsible have realized that after 16 years of being used as mere pieces in the FSLN’s electoral strategy every couple of years, they’ve now become, with Ortega in government again, perk-based brokers who feel like “revolutionaries” in the CPCs, GPCs, and Cabinets of the Family only because they’re alleviating some of people’s poverty and unmet needs.

The great majority of these new “militants” are too young to have had the experience of participating in the revolutionary project of the eighties, and most hadn’t even been born. Others are old and have lost the ideology and the mystique forged in those years. Is that the reason for the guide, the strategy and the workshops? To inject some ideological content into the structures that now underpin what is no longer a revolution, but simply Murillo’s project for political power?

What is this really?

Or is this simply an adapted copy of the “live good” philosophy of the 21st-Century socialisms of Ecuador and Bolivia? The new Constitutions of both those countries (Bolivia’s in 2007 and Ecuador’s the following year) incorporated this concept of sumak kawsay (a term from the ancestral Andean cosmovision) as one of the focal points of their new Magna Charta. In the words of the Pachamama Alliance, created at the invitation of the Achuar indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, “living good” means “living in harmony with our communities, ourselves, and most importantly, with our living, breathing environment.”
These two Andean countries, both of whose populations have sizable indigenous majorities that have long lived immersed in this cultural self-identification, opened this road, but not from the top down. It was struggled for from below by a decades-old grassroots movement demanding that this way of understanding the world be incorporated into the legislation of their plurinational State. These historic roots don’t exist in Nicaragua, except in small pockets in the Pacific side and more sizable but still minority ones on the Caribbean side. Nor do they appear with any clarity and depth in the current government project.

Much more problematic, could this strategy be a homegrown version of the one employed in the authoritarian power projects of last century, the most famous example being Mao’s Red Book?

Today, in the 21st century, the most innovative and healthy projects of alternative power speak another language. In one of their latest and most novel communiqués, Mexico’s Zapatistas, who “lead by obeying,” wrote that “we are convinced that any attempt at homogeneity is nothing more than a fascist attempt at domination… hidden in revolutionary, esoteric, religious or similar language.”

While they knew nothing about Nicaragua’s top-down “live nice” project at the time, did the Zapatistas inadvertently put their finger on it? Is that what this really boils down to?

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