The constitutional reforms will institutionalize Ortega’s total control

Reflections on President Daniel Ortega’s recently unveiled constitutional reform project by a self-defined center-left member of the opposition. In a short-sighted country, Ortega’s project is a long-term one of absolute control, annulling any vestige of democracy and militarizing the State. What’s he so afraid of?

Eliseo Núñez Morales

With the Purísima (Immaculate Conception) festivities nearly upon us and a Christmas mood growing by the day as Managua is lit up by the thousands of little yellow lights studding the gigantic metal “Trees of Life” on every traffic circle, and even the workers’ Christmas bonus paid earlier than ever, President Ortega sent his constitutional reforms bill to the National Assembly for approval in the first of the two required legislative sessions just before Christmas. He waited to do it now because he wants to artificially generate a sense of wellbeing in the population that will keep it anesthetized. With people’s senses dulled, it’ll be easier to push through his reforms to the Constitution with its amputations to the democratic system.

Ortega didn’t win; we lost

Before looking at the specific reforms, let’s go back a few years to see how we got to this point. By 2006, the fight over who would succeed Alemán as head of the Liberal family in Nicaragua had become fierce. Alemán didn’t want to relinquish any of his power in the party. He wouldn’t allow any succession and was manipulating the party under the table. That struggle wore us out. We stopped being a powerful counterweight to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and virtually handed Ortega his electoral victory. In those elections, instead of being sad because Ortega won, we were happy that we in the We’re Going with Eduardo (VCE) Movement, which had split from Alemán’s previously front-running Constitutionalist Liberal party (PLC), beat it out for second place. Ortega didn’t win the 2006 election, we Liberals lost it. Two factors favored Ortega that year: the Liberal split and the death of Herty Lewites, who would have pulled at least 6% of Ortega’s otherwise solid electoral base. That would have been enough to trigger a second round, which would have liquidated Ortega politically. Herty’s death was very favorable to Ortega, which is why people hypothesize all kinds of ideas about it…

In the next elections, the 2008 municipal ones, we believed that the unity of all Liberals—those in the PLC and those in the VCE—would be enough to stop Ortega. That time Alemán betrayed us by fraudulently handing the FSLN the mayoral offices our candidates had won. The VCE won 39 of the 40 stolen mayoral victories. The only one the PLC won, the Jinotega mayor’s office, was also given to the FSLN by the Supreme Electoral Council, even though it had been promised to the PLC, because its candidate appeared together with ours to make a declaration.

Then in the 2011 general election the problem was neither the split nor Alemán. The problem that time was the high level of abstention, provoked by the previous frauds and by the politicians themselves: people stopped trusting in either the vote or the politicians. The electoral system had been tarnished and so had we politicians. Many people stayed home that year because they saw the electoral exercise simply as a fight over legislative seats rather than a way to bring about a change in the country.

The last democratic
mechanism is now annulled

After all those failures, Ortega is now moving on utterly favorable terrain. When he began his second term in 2012 he had already come a long way with his plan to deactivate and destroy the mechanisms of representative democracy. He had already annulled the Supreme Court’s impartiality and subjected the electoral branch to his will. The only thing he still needed to deactivate was the legislative branch, the National Assembly, and with the 63 FSLN legislators self-assigned by fraud in the 2011 elections he was able to do so. What is the National Assembly today? I won’t lie to you: many of the 24 opposition representatives who show up every day wonder what the hell we’re doing there. Sometimes we find reasons to be there, but most days it’s a dilemma for us to know what we can do from such a weak position in response to the FSLN’s steamroller legislative bench.

The National Assembly was the last democratic mechanism left for Ortega to annul. Once he had achieved that objective, it was time for his constitutional reforms. It was the 18th-century philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Liberal, who said, “The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.” Ortega has decided that now’s the time to gather all the strength he has accumulated deactivating all the branches of government and turn it into law, into constitutional reforms, and to convert the submission of those who follow him into obedience of the law.

Institutionalizing the dictatorship

The constitutional reform bill is nothing more than the expression of everything Ortega has been putting together in recent years, which will now be enshrined in the Constitution. With his strength transformed into law, the submission he has achieved from many sectors will be transformed into obedience of the law. “The law is hard, but it is the law” is the famous Roman phrase that assumes strength to be morally and ethically correct once it becomes law. Many ordinary people think obeying the law is the moral thing to do and that idea isn’t easily broken. Most people aren’t rebels; they prefer to obediently go with the flow until they come across something or someone, perhaps some group, that offers change.

The constitutional reforms will institutionalize the particular kind of dictatorship Ortega has been forging. I call them 2.0 dictatorships because they’ve “upgraded,” modernized to improve their efficiency and, continuing with the information technology jargon, “perform better.”

All the Latin American dictatorships of the sixties and seventies censured the media. Ortega doesn’t censure them, he buys them up, promoting social inertia through the many media he now owns. And he does that two ways. One is to paint the picture of a happy country every day, providing music, joy, festivities, dance, sports… everything Vargas Llosa includes in his La Civilización del Espectáculo (Civilization of Spectacle). The other is information: his media only give the news he’s interested in giving, what they call “uncontaminated” news. It doesn’t resemble Somoza’s dictatorship, which closed the media, censored them, told them what they could and had to say. This one has been different: everyone can say what they want… They just have nowhere to say it. Now, however, the constitutional reform will establish strict control on communications.

Annulling the middle class

And there’s another difference. Somoza and the other Latin American dictatorships let the middle classes survive. They were the ones that organized, disseminated ideas, proposed an alternative. And in the end they were the ones that overthrow Somoza. The people participated, but only at the end of a process of producing ideas. The production of ideas and the proposal for changes came from the middle classes which, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, had already ascended to interests beyond basic and immediate needs, beyond food and a roof over their head.

The middle classes aren’t determined by the degree of income they have, but by the level of intellectuality their members have achieved. For me teachers are middle class because, despite their low incomes, they have a developed intellectual capacity that permits them to think, to propose. Admittedly there has been a passive numerical growth of the middle classes, simply because the whole population has grown. But there are some statistics that should give us pause. For example, 40% of the land in Nicaragua is in the hands of 2% of the population. This indicates that the middle class is held together with spit, because it doesn’t own anything except the little job it has. It has no rootedness.

Perhaps my vision of the middle class is skewed by the fact that my town, Masaya, is an area of minifundios, tiny landholdings, where almost everyone has a little plot, anywhere from one acre up to eight or nine. We’re middle class because we own our own land, our own little business. But today the middle class is shrinking. It subsists in Managua, Masaya, Granada, but not much beyond that. It subsists despite its poor income. It subsists even though it’s been hard-hit by the recent tax reform, which was designed to protect the wealthiest, understanding the employment they provide as tax compensation.

This tax reform is built on the famous trickle-down thesis: when the treasure chest of those at the top overflows, what trickles out will alleviate the most urgent needs of those below. The tax reform is affecting the middle class, the sector Ortega is aiming to annul, but isn’t going to be able to control. That’s our hope, at least.

Making Ortega’s alliance
with big capital constitutional

To annul the middle classes, this 2.0 dictatorship has allied with the most powerful behind-the-scenes power in the world: capital. It has done so to such a degree that these reforms introduce big Nicaraguan capital into the Constitution as a new power. As I said to someone in the FSLN, that’s an ideological anathema because capital has enough power not to need protecting by the Constitution.

With this move, Ortega is institutionalizing a corporative model, which consists of ensuring the earnings of and making deals with the wealthiest while giving handouts to the poor and annulling the middle class, which is his objective. Putting this model into the Constitution will make authentically national solutions that favor and prioritize those without power much harder because the State will begin to lose the capacity to redistribute the wealth and regulate the institutions. Decisions can no longer be made at the cost of capital, thus annulling the power of those who don’t have capital and must moderate the power of those who do. From every viewpoint it’s an ideological anathema. The result of such a model is inertial societies, ones that don’t move.

Buying off the political class

Another thing Ortega has achieved with the help of us politicians is the total discrediting of the political class, the leadership class. It doesn’t surprise or anger me to know that probably seven out of every ten Nicaraguans reading this doubt that what I’m saying is sincere, because I come from a political class that hasn’t done things well and is on the verge of failure largely by our own doing. And the day we politicians are replaced by bullets, as is already happening in northern Nicaragua, we’ll not only be witnessing the outcome of our failure to find solutions to people’s problems via a civic path that requires neither more blood nor more deaths, but also the failure of the country, which has already borne too many failures.

What has been Ortega’s best recipe to hasten our failure? I think we find the answer when we ask a different question: What is Cardinal Obando’s utility to Ortega? I don’t believe he’s useful because he prays a lot for things to go well for Ortega. I also don’t see Rosario Murillo, the First Lady, very interested in him praying for her. Nor do I even believe Obando is useful to them because he can deliver the vote of hordes of Catholics. Obando’s usefulness to Ortega is to show us that if a cardinal of the Catholic Church, the oldest institution in the West, can be bought, who can’t? It’s a very powerful message. It’s a way of telling us that if I succeeded in buying Obando y Bravo, then everyone has a price, albeit some have a lower one. Converting the leadership class into tradable merchandise or giving the population the idea that all politicians have a price has been one of Ortega’s many accomplishments.

People have every right to think Eliseo’s saying this today, but how long will it be before we see him cutting some deal with Daniel Ortega? It’s a valid fear given everything they’ve been through.

Other people say that nowhere else in the world have they seen an opposition party so unwilling to dialogue with the government. But in the internal discussions in my party, the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), we’ve found ourselves obliged not to dialogue with this government because any dialogue under the parameters Ortega has established generates such a level of distrust that we lose what little credibility we still have with the population. It’s risky even to attempt some arrangement with the Ortega government because the price is too high. Putting us at that risk and pushing us to pay that price has been one of Ortega’s strategies. And it has worked.

Dismantling municipal autonomy

Ortega knows he can’t function in a democracy, so to impose his model he first destroyed every vestige of democracy. What we have today is a discredited judicial branch, an electoral branch that doesn’t put on credible elections and a legislative branch that doesn’t resolve anything for anyone.

But it wasn’t enough for Ortega to dismantle the branches of State; now he has also been dismantling municipal government. He began to engineer its collapse by increasing the number of Municipal Council members to 80 in Managua, 40 in Masaya and so on in all the municipalities. He knows those 80 council members will never be able to come to any agreement so in the end it’ll be the mayor who decides everything.

Now he’s also reforming the law of municipal transfers, establishing a commission that will tell the mayor how to invest the resources transferred by the central government. We’re witnessing the end of municipal autonomy.

Institutionalizing the
dissolving of all other powers

Ortega hasn’t left standing a single stone of the democracy we knew. Everything has been dismantled, right down to the local powers, the municipal government. There’s no longer a single power that can oppose him. He has watered down all other power, leaving only himself, and the objective of these constitutional reforms is to institutionalize this dismantling.

Who resolves things in such a model? The “direct democracy” promoted by Ortega, which will now be put into the Constitution, acquiring constitutional status. But it isn’t the direct democracy promoted in Sweden or Finland, it’s Family Cabinets and Territorial and Sectoral Councils, which we already know are conveyor belts for executive branch orders. They are another expression of the total dissolving of all power to concentrate it in Ortega, making him the all-powerful doer of everything. They are his way of telling us that he’s the only one who will decide anything.

Examining specific reforms:
Political changes

Following this brief historical summary, let’s now turn to some of the specific constitutional reforms.
Eliminating the prohibition of dictatorships. The first change that caught my attention was the elimination from article 5 of the prohibition of parties that “aim to reestablish any kind of dictatorship or any anti-democratic system”. Was that actually an act of honesty? Did Ortega feel his system contradicted that constitutional prohibition? Whatever the case, it’s gone.

Reducing the role of political parties. Article 5 also contains another reform that annuls political parties even more. If people already considered them inoperative, it will be worse now. The existing Constitution said the political parties have the right to participate “in the country’s economic, political and social affairs.” The reform says they have the right to “free organization and participation in the electoral processes established in the Constitution and the laws.” Full stop. We can go to the elections and afterward occupy any parliamentary seat we won, but offering opinions and participating in the affairs of the country are no longer roles for political parties.

Redefining the country’s principles. Still in article 5, which establishes “the principles of the Nicaraguan nation,” the reform introduces “Christian values, socialist ideals and solidarity practices” as factors that define Nicaragua.
Christian Nicaragua? I believe in the secular State. I was educated by the Salesians and studied at the Central American University, which is Jesuit, but I don’t believe the State has to have a religion, that it has to define itself with religious values. I believe that secularism even benefits the Church. I once read an idea by Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, who said that secularism is positive for the Catholic Church because it resolved the problem of being subjected to the comings and goings of earthly power. It leaves the field open for the Church’s spiritual work. Seeing article 5 reformed to include “Christian values” makes me think of Nicaragua’s large Palestinian community—some 30,000 Muslims live in this country and they will feel excluded by that constitutional definition. We also have Buddhists—not very many, but they will also feel marginalized. Imposing the values of one religion is an authoritarian conception. It wouldn’t be quite as negative if it was sincere, but it’s being incorporated for manipulative reasons.

Socialist Nicaragua? I respect anyone who wants to be socialist and have no problem interacting with Social Democrats and Socialists. But as a Liberal, I don’t believe a State’s ideology must or can be defined as Liberal, Socialist or Conservative in the Constitution, which belongs to everybody. There shouldn’t be any state ideology. It’s a principle of democracy that even a single contrary voice must be taken into account. And what we’ve been suffering in Nicaragua, even before these reforms, is a dictatorship based on the thesis of the majorities, which states that the majority that voted for a particular party gets to make all the decisions. It’s an obsolete concept. Modern democracy gives enough weight to minorities for there to be a permanent balance of power.

Solidary Nicaragua? Although this has been the least debated term, how can we define ourselves as solidary in a State that maintains a totally inequitably format? For example, between 2011 and 2012 we had nearly a 10% increase of people with a personal capital wealth of over US$30 million. We went from 180 people with this fortune to 192 in one year. And poverty decreased by only 0.2% in Nicaragua that same year, according to the International Foundation for the Global Economic Challenge (FIDEG), directed by leftist economist Alejandro Martínez Cuenca. Nicaragua is a profoundly inequitable society. What solidarity is there here? I think that if removing the prohibition on dictatorship from the Constitution was an act of honesty, putting into the new Constitution that we are a solidarity-based State is an act of sublime hypocrisy given our levels of inequity.

Militarization of the State

In my judgment, the most essential constitutional reform is the militarization of the State.
Allowing officers to hold civilian posts. The reforms establish in article 95 that “members of the Army of Nicaragua may occupy unelected posts in State institutions when so required by the supreme interest of the nation, considering for all legal purposes that the officer is providing a service.” Giving military officers access to public posts affects the Army of Nicaragua’s professionalism, which has been advancing since the nineties and earning our society’s respect. Being a member of the military in Nicaragua has become something prestigious. I know sons of Liberals who have gone into the Military Academy because they no longer saw the Army as subordinate to a party but as a national institution they not only trusted but felt proud to belong to. Will they continue feeling that way with these reforms, which effectively link the Army to a political party’s authoritarian project?

Allowing officers to hold civilian posts while still on active duty also has grave consequences for the Army’s institutionality. The first is the possibility of a rupture in the chain of command. The officers function as a hierarchy, with a vertical chain of command. Even though he’s the Supreme Chief of the Armed Forces, the President of the Republic has to give his order to the Army chief, who then passes it down to his subalterns. The President can’t just call up an officer on the phone to give him some order; he always has to go through the chain of command. What could happen now? For example, Ortega could give any order to some “rebel” colonel, breaking the chain of command that starts with the Army chief. And if the Army chief happens to disagree with Ortega’s order and wants to sanction the colonel, Ortega could name him to an executive post, thus saving him from responsibility. Just knowing Ortega can award military officers civilian posts could even deteriorate military respect for the chain of command.

A second consequence, just as serious as the first, is that it affects the system of promotions. Ortega could interrupt and manipulate it by appointing active officers to civilian posts. A military council of officers from different areas determines promotions by proposing who should rise up the ranks. What could happen now? For example, if Ortega knows that certain officers have no possibility of being promoted, he could pull them out of the Army and name them to a civilian post, thus skewing the system of promotion and succession.

I once asked a former Guatemalan colonel how military promotions worked there and he told me it’s simple: you’re either promoted or you retire. He explained that if there are only 10 posts for colonel but 40 majors waiting in line to be promoted, the 30 who don’t make it are out. If the time established for a major to be promoted to colonel is five years and six pass without him being chosen, he goes into retirement. “That’s it,” he told me, “because if you don’t do it that way, you fill the Army up with resentful officers who’ve been passed over. You always have a given period of time to be promoted and if you don’t make it you leave.” Now, with the naming of officers to civilian posts, the promotion system could freeze up because Ortega could name a major in line for promotion to a civilian post and when he leaves it he’ll still have the military rank he had before while others have moved on up… what happens then?

Military Code reforms. In addition to Ortega’s meddling in the Army through the constitutional reforms, he has also sent a Military Code reform bill to the Assembly. Those reforms include establishing the possibility of the Army chief being indefinitely re-elected to his post, annulling the five-year term after which the chief passes into retirement. They also increase to 40 years the time an officer can be in the Army before retiring. I’m pretty sure that’s the longest period in any Latin American army. The Military Code reforms also permit retired officers to be called back into active service. All this will affect and distort the Army’s promotion system.

Another way to control everything

Why is Ortega doing this, given how much it affects the Army? For the same reason he deactivated the judicial branch, the electoral branch, the legislative branch and the municipal powers: so he can control everything. He has already put the National Police under his control, so all that was left was the Army. Assuming these reforms pass in two successive legislatures, it will no longer have any possibility of acting as a counterweight.

Although I’ve been a particular enemy of the Army’s existence, it has undergone a difficult transition to professionalize itself, which is worthy of applause. But that’s all over now. And while I’m not an advocate of any Army being a counterweight to civilian power, that possibility will also be over. To this let’s add other, more earthly aspects: Ortega has given state jobs and even vehicles to wives and relatives of officers. Ortega gives a Suzuki to everyone who graduates from the Military Academy…

The repeating of history

The militarization of the State leads me to think that Nicaragua would have been an excellent laboratory for Giambattista Vico, the Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist of the early 18th century, to test out his thesis that history always repeats itself as a spiral, only changing the actors and somewhat updating the methods. That’s why I refer to a 2.0 dictatorship. The concept of active military officers in civilian posts in the “commission of service,” as the constitutional reforms now establish, also existed during the Somoza dictatorship. Somoza further established that when a civilian went into the armed forces he was given a military rank corresponding to his or her academic level. So if a civilian doctor was contracted by the National Guard he or she automatically went in with the rank of colonel.

Somoza’s 1939 constitutional reform had many of the same components as Ortega’s does today. In 1939 Somoza García turned the National Guard into his National Guard, after it had tried for 10 years to professionalize and was evolving from being an interventionist and ideologized army. Over the years we saw officers rebel: Abelardo Cuadra, Aguirre Sacasa’s father, and other later generations of officers who also rebelled.

Also in 1939 Somoza worked out an arrangement with the country’s major business leaders that was very similar to the one Ortega now has with the business executives in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) in the model he calls “shared responsibility.”

The control over telecommunications

There’s still more. According to the constitutional reforms the Army of Nicaragua is entrusted with control of telecommunications. Article 92, which is new and appears under the title of “national security,” reads: “For purposes of defense and national security: a) the computer databases and records must remain in the country; b) in no case is it permissible to establish systems that alter or affect the national communication systems; c) the state communication points must be the property of the State of Nicaragua; and d) the radio and satellite spectrum that affects Nicaraguan communications must be controlled by the State.”
This last point is logical but what captures one’s attention is that the spectrum will be “controlled” as opposed to regulated, as the laws of any other country establish.

What does it mean that all computer databases and records must remain in the country? The current computer data storage system is known as “cloud storage,” which has given small companies the possibility of having a technological base at a lower cost because having their own server with a considerable database would cost them some US$5,000 and require that they hire a systems engineer, acclimatize the area where the server is and pay for a special point-to-point internet connection—allowing them to upload to the network and download from it at the same speed—so they can connect their server’s data with other databases. The cost difference between an asymmetric connection and a point-to-point one is huge. If an internet company today sells us one gigabyte of downloading capacity, the uploading capacity we get is barely a quarter of that: 256 kilobytes. That asymmetric connection only costs us $29, but if we were to ask for a one-mega point-to-point connection it would cost $450 because it’s a specialized service and uploading information is much more expensive than downloading it. If a small company in Nicaragua today is obliged to have its own server to be able to have point-to-point connection, it has to have air conditioning and pay for the electricity that server uses every day. This would significantly increase the costs, and as businesspeople never lose they would pass those costs on to the consumer.

Today, if I send an SMS on any phone, that message is housed in the company’s database, which identifies who’s sending it, validates whether there’s enough money in the account to cover it, identifies the recipient and sends it, all in an extremely high-speed process. But the server that performs that operation isn’t in Nicaragua, it’s in Guatemala, El Salvador or Mexico, depending on the company, because it’s a regional server for all of Central America and acts as a mirror for other telephone company operations in other places. With the constitutional reform, that server must be brought to Nicaragua, which will stop the telecommunications companies from maintaining an economy of scale, thus increasing SMS costs, because only 5 million of the 30-40 million registries in the regional server will be brought to Nicaragua.

And when we want to send an SMS to someone outside Nicaragua, the process will get even more complex and expensive. Some experts estimate that a telephone company will have to invest US$8-10 million to bring its databases to Nicaragua. And it won’t be an investment in the country because the server will have to buy the equipment from IBM or some other foreign company and the engineer probably won’t be Nicaraguan either. Perhaps the only benefit that will stay here will be the payment for the increased energy use, which will be paid to the electricity generating company... which belongs to Ortega.

For many reasons, then, it’s positive for both the businesses and the users that the computer databases and records be outside Nicaragua, particularly because it keeps the costs down for both of them.

Article 92 also says that “the state communication points must be the property of the State of Nicaragua.” As I didn’t understand what that would mean, I asked an expert and he explained that an undersea cable currently belonging to Claro comes into Nicaragua through Bluefields and is the State’s “communication point” because it connects to the internet through that point or terminal. The reform proposes that that terminal belong to the State, which already has the Chinese company XinWei and the Russian company Yota as Ortega’s business partners. We assume the terminal will be taken away from Claro or it will negotiate some beneficial deal. We also presume that XinWei and Yota have an interest in using the platform others have built, not building their own.

Why so much power to the military?

Why militarize the State? Why is telecommunications a national security issue and why must it be controlled by the Army? I know from talking to people close to Ortea that he doesn’t understand the communication that circulates in the social networks, on internet. And it concerns him a lot precisely because he doesn’t get it. He fears that ideas that would endanger his project could circulate through these networks he neither grasps nor controls. So he has decided to control them through the military.

Yes, the military will control communication in Nicaragua. But we’re not suddenly going to find ourselves without Facebook or internet overnight. They’re going to apply the “frog in warm water” method. It works this way: if you put a frog in hot water, it will most likely jump out and escape the minute it feels it, but if you put it in tap water and start heating it slowly, the frog won’t jump out; it will even feel good until the temperature gets so hot it ends up cooked. They’re going to apply that method to us, gradually turning up the heat.

Ortega is militarizing the State to resolve two problems he can see coming but doesn’t control. He fears the social networks because he fears a revolution from below that he won’t be able to either predict or control. He’s afraid of something like Egypt or Tunisia happening here, these current changes being generated at the base among people who communicate through the new media, and not at the political leadership level. We couldn’t envision Egypt’s “solution” as we so enthusiastically saw the excitement of the people protesting in Tahrir Square against Mubarak. But before Mubarak’s power collapsed under the pressure of the demonstrators, his loyal officers deposed him and engineered a series of events to preserve both the life and capital of Mubarak and his family. After that, they patiently waited for Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected President, and other elected authorities to make their first mistake, then got rid of them. Now power is back in the hands of the same upper echelon that sustained Mubarak, who is today free in his own home. Learning from this example, Ortega is militarizing the State as an insurance policy against a grassroots rebellion.

Ortega is also militarizing the State because he fears the chaos that would follow his death. He fears succession because as both a dictator and a caudillo he knows how difficult it will be. What shattered the PLC into a thousand pieces and made it collapse in barely six years was the struggle to succeed Alemán. Ortega knows he’s capable of imposing himself but incapable of imposing someone else. He has nobody in the wings as a successor. He can’t impose his wife or children and knows that after him would come the deluge. So he’s incorporating the military into the State not just to protect himself from a possible social struggle, but also to assure that he can count on them because he fears that his death would lead to a very fluid situation that would endanger his family. That’s how I understand the strong military component in the constitutional reforms: to protect him from rebellion and prepare for what could happen that he won’t be around to control, putting it in military hands.

Maneuvers against Rosario Murillo?

On the issue of succession, I see two “digs” aimed at Rosario Murillo in the constitutional reforms that seem like the work of the FSLN old guard. The first is in article 147, which eliminated the prohibition of consecutive presidential reelection and reelection for more than two terms, but left intact the prohibition of people running for president who are related to the incumbent President up to the fourth degree of consanguinity or second degree of affinity. There’s a juridical debate between two interpretations of whether Rosario Murillo could be President of Nicaragua. Some say she could because they consider there’s no degree of affinity between spouses, that they’re two halves of the same legal person, while others argue that she’s ineligible. The fact that these prohibitions were left in the Constitution means that if Murillo wants to be President she’ll have to go to the Supreme Court and rely on FSLN Justice Rafael Solís, who’s a power in the court, for an interpretation in her favor, which won’t be all that easy because he doesn’t answer to her.

The other dig is that the constitutional reform establishes a new version of the Council of Justices. What’s noteworthy about this new version is that it marginalizes current Supreme Court President Alba Luz Ramos, who has been Murillo’s main ally in the government branches for years. The new council will be made up of three Supreme Court justices plus the Court president, but they won’t have jurisdictional functions; they’ll only administer the judicial career. This leaves Ramos with much less authority, reducing her to administering the nuts and bolts in the Court, sanctioning judges when they misbehave—quite a few of whom she should sanction but doesn’t—and appraising recommended promotions.

Picking up on these two maneuvers makes it seem that the conflict within the FSLN is indeed serious and that the old guard won the battle over Rosario Murillo in the constitutional reforms, since the only thing they left her was article 50, the one on Mother Earth, which it says “is our Great Mother and must be loved, cared for, regenerated and venerated.” But even this whole bit about venerating Mother Earth is contradicted by what was added to article 102, which refers to the natural resources. It now states that “given the advantageous geographical position of the country, the State may draw up a contract or grant a concession for the rational construction and exploitation of an interoceanic canal.” Some say these two articles contain the most absolute paradox of these reforms: on the one hand they order me to venerate Mother Earth and on the other they cut it in two… The canal concession law, which has already been pushed through, assumes the total depredation of “Mother Earth’s” natural resources. It’s not only destructive but also so illegal that its own clause 9.1 says the Constitution and the country’s laws must be reformed to make what the contract contains legal, recognizing that it’s shot through with illegalities as it stands.

The reforms are a complete package

The constitutional reforms are the final expression of a political project. When the PLI Alliance bench discussed whether or not to participate in the consultation commission organized by the FSLN, we concluded it would be best just to send two of our representatives, but with the mandate to negotiate absolutely nothing because we didn’t want to fall into the temptation of thinking we could achieve any significant changes by negotiating. I said that making changes to one or two of the reformed articles was like looking for a dentist to pull a couple of a shark’s teeth before battling it, believing the shark is less dangerous with 198 teeth than with all 200. The reforms come as a whole package encapsulating a general concept; it’s a project, and all of it must be rejected.

We’ve seen how big capital grouped under the COSEP umbrella and allied with the government migrated in only a couple of days from more timid positions, concerned only about the control of telecommunications, to worrying about the militarization of the State and the clipping of democracy’s wings… Perhaps they just hadn’t read the reforms before. Or perhaps they’ve finally realized that short-sightedness no longer reins in Nicaragua. Up to now, Ortega has functioned with bilateral deals with each big business executive in this country in which the two negotiate outside of the laws. Now that Ortega will have the ALBA Corporative Bank—which is essentially his family bank—up and running, the deals will continue but things will begin to change. The business leaders, like the political class, are waking up to the fact that their short-term approach has to come to an end.

The poor can’t plan, but we must

Ours is a myopic society. I have an idea that illustrates the responsibilities of those of us who have studied more or have greater economic possibilities. When seven of every ten Nicaraguans live on less than US$2 a day, as the statistics say, all they do once they’ve had breakfast is think about where or whether they’re going to find anything for lunch. In other words, their sights are short; their planning doesn’t extend beyond filling their family’s stomach at lunchtime. They can’t think about what their children will study if they ever graduate from high school or anything remotely like that.

And if we look at salaried workers, with the average monthly salary in Nicaragua of 4,500 córdobas (US$180) according to Central Bank statistics, their planning horizon doesn’t get past the first 15 days of the month. So their mentality is short-term too.

In this situation of so many shortages, our society tends toward immediate issues, to dealing with things one day at a time. Ortega has understood this very well; it’s why he gives out zinc roofing and bags of food. It has worked very well for him, because it resolves the immediate needs of people who can’t think beyond that, can’t think about the quality of education, which is a long-term problem, or about problems of productivity or technological backwardness because doing so won’t put the food on the table.

It’s time to end myopic politics

All of us who aren’t in that short-sighted 70%, such as politicians and academics, have the responsibility to look further ahead and try to see how to get that 70% to move beyond its plight, to get a decent job with a decent wage that allows them to think about their future.

I don’t want to exempt us from blame. Nicaraguan businesspeople and politicians have sunk into the same shortsightedness and immediacy. Let’s cut a deal; pay the bribe, put in a Supreme Court justice… and we’ll see what happens afterward. We’re to blame for letting ourselves be guided by immediacy. But these reforms are an important stop sign in the road, a point of inflection. We’re beginning to realize that we’re facing a very long-term project; that living in the short term is all over for us.

The European ambassadors have been bewildered by the content of the constitutional reforms. One of them told me it’s shocking that the population can’t see what they see: that the same pattern they went through with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco is being repeated right here. He stressed that we’re living through that same history 60 years later, repeating the same errors: the corporative State, the fascist model, the closing of democratic spaces, the militarization… I think that out of respect he didn’t mention something that makes things even worse: that we in Nicaragua have a much less educated population than the Europe of even 60 years ago. That aggravates things, making it easier for Ortega to stay in power longer, because more educated people tend to rebel sooner.

The new spiral of violence

I want to conclude with an issue few people like to touch on, which is the question of the rearmed groups in the northern part of the country. I know the majority of those people, not because we Liberals are behind them or are financing them but because they were PLI electoral monitors and route chiefs, campaign bosses in the territory. Those people who want to shoot Daniel Ortega are just as ready to shoot any of the rest of us who insist on a political solution to what’s happening. They don’t believe that what we’re doing or what Ortega is doing is solving either their problems or the country’s, so they’ve chosen another, very dangerous way. We need to accept that we’re living through another spiral of the kind of violence we’ve already known. It’s easy to turn our back on this problem, saying that those people are just delinquents, but it will flatly assure that the problem persists.

And I’m going to go further. There are more than 40,000 people unemployed in the north due to the rust fungus that’s devastating the coffee harvest, so I ask myself what’s more dignified for a poor coffee picker: to assault someone and steal their food or enroll in a political project he believes will free Nicaragua from this dictatorship and assures food for his family ? I think the project is more worthy than the robbery.

This government hasn’t been inept in its response to the problem of people most affected by the fungus; it has been malicious. It knows they never voted for the FSLN so it has turned its back on them for political reasons. When those thousands of unemployed went to ask the State institutions for help they were told: If you didn’t vote for us, don’t come around asking for anything now. That’s one of the reasons the armed people killed José Cruz, the FSLN political secretary in Aguas Rojas, Wiwilí. I’m not saying it was right to kill him, but what happened there? The unemployed went to ask him for help because there were no jobs picking coffee. And what did he tell them? Ah no, neither you nor your families voted for us! So someone got the idea that the solution was to kill him and hang him on a post at the entry to his ranch.

With these constitutional reforms we’re taking Nicaragua into another cycle of the violence we already know. Somoza did that and we know where he ended up. Ortega is doing the same thing and will end up where he has to if we don’t find another solution first. I believe these next three years of his term will be vital to show whether Nicaragua is going to opt for a long-term dictatorship with a violent outcome after 10 or 15 years, or we’re all going to join forces to finally put this country on track. Many betrayals and ambitions put the country off course, never concluding its transition from war to peace, from dictatorship to democracy.

This constitutional reform is leaving Nicaragua on the same path it was on in 1939. Shaking off Somoza 40 years later, not 5, 10 or even 20, but 40 years afterward, cost us 50,000 deaths. And it cost us another 50,000 deaths to put an end to the war that followed the fall of Somoza. That’s 100,000 of the 2.5 million people Nicaragua had at the time; approximately 4% of the population. Another half a million were displaced by the war, obliged to go into exile or leave their homes; that’s another 20% of the population. We still don’t perceive the full magnitude of what happened because we let Somoza set himself up on the throne, which is why we have to keep repeating the danger we’re in today. We can’t let this happen again. The next three years will be vital if we are to find another road.

Eliseo Núñez Morales is a National Assembly representative for the Independent Liberal Party.

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