NICARAGUA BRIEFS

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DECREE ON SOCIAL SECURITY

An administrative reform to the social security pension system went into effect on January 1. It was instituted by presidential decree just before the Christmas holidays, thus avoiding public consultation and parliamentary debate, after being hammered out between the government and the big capitalists in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) umbrella group. While the changes will help relieve the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute’s financial problems, they do nothing to clean up the institution’s underlying problem: the large numbers of people who work in the informal market and currently don’t pay into the social security system, leaving them ineligible for retirement benefits and meaning there are fewer people paying in than receiving pensions. With the reform, the employers’ contribution to the system for their workers’ retirement benefits will go up 3% between 2014 and 2017, taking it from the previous 6% to 9%. The employees’ contribution will stay at 4% of their salary. Another 0.25% was added to boost the pensions of war victims. The reform that most affects the contributors has to do with a change in the formula used to calculate both future pensions and today’s minimum pensions. Starting now, pensions will be adjusted annually based on the average national salary and no longer on the minimum wage, which grows at a faster rate and thus guaranteed that pensions would also increase faster for retirees. Although contributing workers are also affected in other ways, COSEP is presenting itself as the most put-upon sector in the reform.

MORE ON THE
INTEROCEANIC CANAL

Last year Wang Jing, who holds the concession for Nicaragua’s interoceanic canal project, stated that his company, HKND Group, would reveal the route chosen for the canal in January of this year. But the first month of the year came and went with no word on any decision. Moreover, on January 3, Manuel Coronel Kautz, president of the recently created Grand Canal Authority, told the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa that construction would “probably be set back to 2015.” Three days later, First Lady Rosario Murillo, the government secretary of communication and citizenship, circulated a note she made Coronel Kautz sign reiterating that the megaproject will indeed get underway at the end of 2014. And four days after that, Daniel Ortega and Wang Jing signed another communiqué ratifying that construction would begin at that time.

Murillo also reported that her husband had explained the details of this project to Fidel Castro during the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Havana on January 28-29. “He was telling him all the progress, the schedule for the work, the initiation of the studies, the number of experts who have visited, are still visiting and are working in our country, busily ensuring that the work schedule will be met in full, as we all know that starting in the last quarter of this year the plan will begin to be developed to start at the end of this year.” Coronel Kautz assures that the canal construction and other associated megaprojects will provide direct and indirect jobs to a million Nicaraguans.

CHANGES IN THE GOVERNMENT

It was learned on January 20 that Central Bank President Alberto Guevara had resigned after holding that post since March 2012 when Rosario Murillo forced out his predecessor, Antenor Rosales. He had dared to publicly backpedal on a financial decision announced by her husband that had not been cleared with the bank’s directors and had the business class up in arms. Ortega accepted Guevara’s resignation two weeks later, again skirting the board of directors, which according to the bank’s organizational law is empowered to decide on resignations. No explanation was given for his removal, although rumors circulated about murky financial management by the man who was Ortega’s treasury minister prior to his move to the Central Bank. He was replaced by Ovidio Reyes, the bank’s general manager, whom the business class considers much better trained for the job.

The same date as Guevara’s resignation, Murillo fired Deputy Education Minister José Tremino, the visible face of that ministry. Again no reasons were given, although it is known that the low enrollment rate achieved in the rural secondary distance learning model had irritated the First Lady. Eight days later, on January 28, Francisco Alvarado, director of Managua’s Transport Regulatory Institute, was also dismissed from his post, which he had held for 10 years despite repeated charges of corruption and abuse by bus and taxi cooperatives in the capital. Yet again no reasons were given, but he was an ardent defender of the new e-card bus fare system in the capital, implemented inefficiently and abusively by the MPeso company. Alvarado was replaced by Amaru Ramírez, right-hand man of Fidel Moreno, the powerful secretary of the Managua municipal mayor’s office.

NICARAGUA HAS A NEW CARDINAL

On Sunday, January 12, Pope Francis announced 19 new cardinals, among them the archbishop of Managua, Leopoldo Brenes. The selection of Brenes and another 9 of the new cardinals, who are from Latin American, Asian and African countries, is an expression of the pope’s project to start separating the Church from the traditional power centers and give more representation to the Churches of the periphery, banking on priests linked to the community. In 1985 Pope John Paul II named then-archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, as Nicaragua’s first cardinal. When Obando retired as archbishop in 2005, Brenes assumed that post. At the time, Ortega was beginning to cozy up to Obando, his erstwhile nemesis, who in turn began collaborating closely with Ortega once the latter returned to the presidency in 2007. Brenes’ positions have been moderate, always prioritizing pastoral and human aspects when conflicts crop up. He has also been a signatory of Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference documents that have denounced the alleged electoral frauds promoted by President Ortega since 2008, and more recently severely criticized Ortega’s constitutional reforms.

FAKE TELEVISA JOURNALISTS
EXTRADITED BACK TO MEXICO

On December 23, after protracted debate over a bilateral Mexico-Nicaragua government agreement, 18 Mexicans who had posed as a broadcasting team from Mexico’s Televisa corporation and were arrested in August 2012 while transporting US$9.2 million in drug money across Nicaragua were extradited along with three other Mexicans convicted of drug trafficking crimes between 2007 and 2010. The fake journalists and their leader Raquel Alatorre, who had concealed the money in a caravan of high-tech vans bearing the Televisa logo, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison in Nicaragua. Never during the 16 months the media followed this important case did the National Police explain how Alatorre and her group had managed to pass through Nicaragua on their way across Central America more than 40 times in recent years in the same vans, transporting drugs and dollars in both directions, without ever being stopped.
It is generally considered that such a feat is impossible without contacts among the border police, customs officials and other state functionaries.

HUMBERTO ORTEGA DEFENDS
THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS

On December 10, the day the National Assembly passed President Daniel Ortega’s constitutional reforms the first of two required times, retired Army Chief Humberto Ortega presented his new book La odisea por Nicaragua to a group of Nicaraguan politicians and big business leaders, most of them graduates of Harvard University and members of the self-dubbed “Harvard Group.” During the gathering, he defended his brother’s controversial reforms, insisting that they do not seek to install a dictatorship and emphasizing that “we’re not going to permit another Somoza.”

THE MRS ATTACKS THEM

Also on December 10, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) bench in the National Assembly expressed its “out-of-hand rejection” of the constitutional reforms in a text that said the following: “We reject them and do not recognize them because they are illegitimate in their origin, a product of a doubly unconstitutional President
and of a false, inexistent and illegitimate constitutional majority born of the 2011 fraud. We reject them and do not recognize them because they are illegitimate in their procedure, as in-depth changes that transform the country’s juridical and political order have been implemented without the necessary consultations with the population. We reject them and do not recognize them because they are illegitimate in their objective, as they pursue the consolidation of the dictatorship by perpetuating one person and one family in power through repression and fraud. They pursue the consolidation and expansion of the current government’s wealth and economic power. We reject them and do not recognize them because they are illegitimate in their consequences by deepening the division of the Nicaraguan people, destroying confidence, closing possibilities of an electoral political solution and intensifying the hopelessness and desperation of growing Nicaraguan peasant and urban sectors, pushing them ever harder into taking the path of armed violence… We reject them and do not recognize them because they are profoundly irreconcilable with the thinking and the sacrifice of Sandino, with the dreams and aspirations of generations of young Nicaraguans who gave their life so there would never again be a dynastic family dictatorship in Nicaragua.”

THE COFFEE CRISIS IS
PRODUCING A FOOD CRISIS

A study presented last December by the Central American University’s Nitlapan research institute in Managua reveals that food insecurity will be one of the most worrying effects of the rust fungus plaguing nearly half of the country’s 126,000 hectares planted with coffee. The study, conducted in the main coffee-growing areas of the north, explains that 56% of the wages earned by coffee pickers on the farms goes to buy food. It calculated that at least 64,000 day laborers have been left without picking jobs due to the fungus. Sinforiano Cáceres, president of the National Federation of Cooperatives, spoke of a “disastrous” situation in the coffee zones, warning that things will only get worse with the temperature changes already being caused by climate change. Making matters still worse, the fungus has coincided with a drop in international coffee prices. Production has fallen by up to 30% so far in the harvest, which is nearing its end, and the coffee growers calculate that their export income could drop by up to 51%. The Nitlapan study estimates that US$47 million is required to provide an adequate response to this crisis, which involves renovation of the coffee groves and other emergency measures, on which the government has so far been dragging its feet.

FEMICIDES IN NUMBERS

The Latin American network called Catholics for the Right to Decide (CDD) reported that 72 Nicaraguan women were murdered during 2013, 7 of them in other Central American countries. Nearly half the women (34) were between 21 and 40 years old and exactly half (36) were killed by their partner (28) or other relatives, with 44 murdered in their own homes, 31 shot to death. A good part of these crimes (26) were committed in the northern and southern Caribbean coast. Twenty-five of the killers have been identified, but all are fugitives from justice. Another 58 potential femicides were frustrated for different reasons, leaving the women wounded or injured. In its first accounting for 2014, the CDD reported 8 femicides just in January.

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