Three mirrors to see ourselves in

The presidential elections in El Salvador, the municipal elections in Ecuador and the protests in Venezuela are three nearby mirrors in which Nicaragua’s government should look at itself to think, to learn and perhaps even to correct.

Envío team

In this globalized and hyper-informed planet on which more than seven billion human beings currently coexist, it’s almost impossible to avoid comparisons among countries, analyzing what’s happening here in the light of what’s happening there and what people there are declaring compared to what those here are saying. Although the refrain that “all comparisons are odious” remains valid, it’s useful to compare some realities because influences are also being globalized on the information planet. What happens there influences what happens here and vice versa. One needn’t go as far as the Ukraine or Turkey or a little while ago to Tunisia or Libya to learn about other realities. Nicaragua’s government and its society should take a look at themselves in three nearby mirrors this month to give some thought to the course our country is on.

The mirror of El Salvador

Presidential elections were held in neighboring El Salvador on February 2. For the second time in a row, the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) beat out the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), the solidest and most organized party of the Central American Right. In this case, while the FMLN didn’t win in the first round as it did five years ago, it pulled nearly 49%, just under the combined percentage of votes won by ARENA and UNIDAD, a rightwing coalition whose leader is former President Antonio Saca, with a reputation for corruption. In the second round, the FMLN was declared the winner in an unexpectedly close result.

If any political organization in Latin America could originally be considered the FSLN’s “twin,” it’s the FMLN. Both had to make war to change decades of dictatorships, and once the military conflicts ended, both have now spent years in the opposition, seeking to take power through the ballot box. One of the main differences that have largely blurred the twin-like features is that the FSLN led a brief but hard-fought popular insurrection that overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship and governed Nicaragua for a decade, during which the US government financed and basically directed a proxy war against it and imposed a crippling economic boycott that ultimately brought the country to its knees. With that rather bitter experience of power, it knew what it was in for when it was reelected in 2006, with barely 38% of the votes. The FMLN, in contrast, negotiated a peace agreement with the rightwing government after a far longer war, and when it was voted into office for the first time in 2009, it was with over 51%.

The main divergence reflected in the Salvadoran mirror today is an important one: electoral legitimacy. The FSLN’s Daniel Ortega has used illegitimate maneuvers to hold onto his presidency for two successive terms. The first was an unconstitutional ruling by the party’s justices in the Supreme Court that allowed him to run for reelection and the second was the strongly alleged electoral fraud in 2011 that, while probably not making the difference between him winning and losing, definitely gave the FSLN such a pumped-up majority in the National Assembly that it can change even the Constitution without a single opposition vote. In contrast, the FMLN’s return to office, after testing out two different kinds of candidates—from outside the party last time and a party militant this time—is due to transparent elections in both cases. The FMLN worked for years to be able to finally push forward its political project with the democratic legitimacy provided by an electoral majority, while the FSLN overcame its consistent electoral minority after 1990 through sleazy means: first engaging in an unconscionable pact with President Alemán to lower the percentage required to win to 35%, and later through successive fraudulent maneuvers in municipal, legislative and even presidential elections and now allegedly the autonomous government elections in the Caribbean Coast.

The lesson of transparency

The election results that gave the FMLN a victory in 2009 with journalist Mauricio Funes as its presidential candidate and former FMLN comandante Salvador Sánchez Cerén as his running mate were recognized by all other candidates, including the defeated ARENA, which at that time still dominated the electoral tribunal. The first round of elections on February 2 this year played themselves out transparently and the speed and cleanness with which the results were released were exemplary. Any citizen could go on line to learn virtually in real time how the voting was going and even review the results on the individual tally sheets, a practice unknown in the rest of Central America.

Mauricio Funes and the FMLN won over a majority of the population without making any structural changes in the country, but the programs were more far-reaching than those of the FSLN. They included the emblematic Ciudad Mujer (Women’s City)—six large and beautiful complexes where officials of the state institutions daily help thousands of women resolve problems and file charges, provide medical consultations and offer workshops for economic undertakings, as well as other social programs of a more welfare-oriented nature in the municipalities financed with income from the sale of Venezuelan oil through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) agreement. The beneficiaries of these programs ratified the FMLN with their vote.

Looking at herself in the Salvadoran mirror, Nicaragua’s First Lady Rosario Murillo, the government’s secretary of communication and citizenry, focused only on how “peaceful” the process was. Other government spokespeople, also ignoring the exemplary transparency, criticized the value of second electoral rounds given their cost for such poor countries and because they wear out the population. While both the FMLN in El Salvador and the Citizens’ Action Party (PAC) in Costa Rica subjected themselves to a second round, the FSLN simply abolished it in the constitutional changes approved in January. From now on, a presidential candidate wins in Nicaragua by a simple plurality over all other candidates running, no matter how small that winning percentage may be. Some spokespeople went so far as to predict that this new reform imposed by Ortega will soon be “copied” by all countries in the region.

The mirror of Ecuador

Another mirror in which Nicaragua’s government can see itself is further south, in Ecuador, a member country of ALBA together with Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and four smaller Caribbean countries. Ecuador’s government is one of those internationally identified with what German political analyst Heinz Dieterich labeled 21st-century socialism.

On February 23, this Andean country held elections for the mayors of its 221 municipalities. They were crucial elections for the Citizen’s Revolution project and for the PAIS Alliance, founded by President Rafael Correa. Having won two presidential elections, previous municipal elections, a referendum to change the Constitution and other consultations of the population, Correa expected an easy victory and treated the campaign as a new plebiscite on his administration.

He counted on his government’s huge social investment in health, education, social security and roads—elements applauded by most of the population—to give him a comfortable win. But in fact he suffered his first political reversal in seven years. The PAIS Alliance candidates were defeated in 9 of the country’s 10 most populous cities, including Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca, the three largest and most important cities. The defeats represented a stern warning from the population.

These elections were also transparent and their results endorsed by both winners and losers. It’s an important lesson for Ortega that Correa, his peer in ALBA, subjected himself to real votes instead of resorting to fraud even in elections as crucial to his project as these.

In Nicaragua’s 2008 municipal elections, a similarly crucial plebiscite on Ortega’s project two years into his return to office elected by such a minority of the population, the losing parties provided the media significant evidence of fraud. But because the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) never permitted any legal hearing for those charges, its fraudulent adjudication of the capital’s mayoral seat to the FSLN even without counting a full 30% of the ballots remains an allegation, as do the charges of fraudulent FSLN wins in some 40 other municipalities. Somewhat less was at stake for the FSLN in the 2012 municipal elections and the alleged fraud was less demonstrated by the opposition, but both cases abounded with irregularities and could not remotely be called transparent.

The lesson of messianic authoritarianism

While there are obvious differences in history and social and economic structures between the Correa and Ortega governments, there are also various similarities, the basis of which is that Correa won the same qualified majority in the legislature in 2013 that Ortega won in 2011—albeit in Correa’s case without fraud. That majority allowed them both to make and unmake all the laws, regulations and codes they wanted. Both governments have also similarly opened their doors to huge transnational corporations and fostered open-pit mining. And like Ortega, Correa used his parliamentary majority to pave the way to increased hyper-presidentialism.

They share even more: like Ortega, President Correa is authoritarian. From his presidential offices he controls and polices any form of social organization that doesn’t adhere to the official line, disqualifies his adversaries, judicializes politics, goes after NGOs, seeks to silence civil society, harasses the media and has created a cult of personality around “the com¬pañero President,” as he likes to be called. And he has done all this under the banner of direct democracy and citizen’s participation. Sound familiar?

In these municipal elections, with the messianic consciousness he exhibits, Correa appointed himself campaign chief for all his candidates, going so far as to overshadow and even substitute them on stage, where he made the speeches, sang and danced. He called those who didn’t vote for PAIS Alliance “traitors” and “agents of imperialism.” During the campaign for Quito, the capital, he even used this quote attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola: “In a besieged castle, all dissent is treason.”

Solution: Reelect yourself

Correa was defeated despite all his efforts, but he didn’t acknowledge it with even a drop of humility, although chronicles commenting on the results suggested different reasons for this reversal. “What has been broken in these elections is the myth of the leader’s invincibility,” stated one; “fear has also been lost.” Another asks: “Why this inflection after ten elections and consultations with favorable results for Correa?” And answers: “Among other reasons because of the political sectarianism of the single leader and negation of anything contrary.” Still another adds that “the propaganda saturation showed that seven years had passed with all the same bromides; that opened the majority’s eyes about the lack of fresh air.”

In light of the results, which according to Correa jeopardize the continuation of the “Citizen’s Revolution,” he followed Ortega in announcing that he was reversing his decision not to run for a third reelection. His party, with its parliamentary majority similar to Ortega’s, can also change the Constitution and propose indefinite reelection. In all probability Rafael Correa will again be the PAIS Alliance candidate in 2017.

The mirror of Venezuela

The mirror in which the Nicaraguan government views itself daily, perhaps hourly, is Venezuela’s. It’s an image laden with uncertainty and anxiety.

As US Southern Command Chief General John Kelly sees it, if Venezuela’s internal crisis were to render it unable to maintain its flow of oil to Cuba and Nicaragua at what he calls “almost give-away prices,” it would have a powerful impact on our economies. The way he put it to the House Armed Services Committee is that “when the economy starts to go south, the migrants start to move north.” The Nicaraguan government doesn’t care as much about migratory increases as the US does, but it certainly shares the fear of any reduction in oil supplies from Venezuela, which Kelly says is “already talking about perhaps not being able to continue.”

Venezuela’s hundreds of millions in oil resources have been essential to the success of Ortega’s political project. They have guaranteed both the development of certain social programs and the expanded capital accumulation of the FSLN’s business group. Even the social programs have benefited the business elite by maintaining peace and stability. By ensuring fewer conflicts to deal with and less need for taxes to sustain public spending, Venezuela’s resources have fed Ortega’s authoritarian tendencies, reducing any need to dialogue with other sectors.

Venezuela’s mirror reflects features similar to those of Nicaragua’s political model: power concentrated in the President who exercises strong institutional control and governs in an authoritarian manner, judicializing politics against any dissidents and annulling any monitoring of the use and abuse of public resources. Nicolás Maduro’s narrow victory in the April 2013 elections following the death of Hugo Chávez and the extent of the student street protests this February demonstrate the weaknesses of an authoritarian political model that responds with ideological rhetoric to the shortages in an economic model that has collapsed the country’s productive structure.

It’s time for “skinny cows”...

The country currently seeing itself in those three mirrors isn’t the same as even a couple of years ago. Nicaragua’s economic situation has changed, and not for the better. Both our exports and their international prices have dropped. Our export of food to Venezuela, Nica¬ragua’s second market after the United States for some years now, has contracted or even stagnated due to the economic chaos in that country.

The coffee crisis caused by a serious plague of rust fungus and the lower international prices for this crop—the most emblematic of all we export—isn’t only expressed in the reduced volumes harvested or the drop in hard cash coming in. More critically, it is severely affecting thousands of small growers who are facing a grim future with no responses from the government and is pushing tens of thousands of agricultural workers to migrate since the dearth of jobs on the farms means they’re already facing serious food problems.

An extemporaneous decree issued by President Ortega on February 11 was a tacit admission of the government’s fragile resource equilibrium and the fiscal crisis it’s facing, worsened by a shortfall in the projected tax collection. The decree reformed the regulations of the Tax Concertation Law approved only last year, among other things by raising the taxes paid by those who trade their products on the Agricultural Exchange, who also happen to be the country’s most powerful growers. Caught off guard, the business elites grouped in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) didn’t hide their indignation. After a rain of protests, Ortega withdrew the decree, again demonstrating that the governing party’s alliance with those elites is a top priority.

As usual, big business won’t pay the price of the economic downturn. It is the poor who will yet again have to tighten their belts. It’s just one more example of the increasing inequity in this country between those with little and the “happy few,” as Pope Francis calls the richest.

...and for inequities

While the drop in export income has certainly played a role in the fiscal crisis that pushed President Ortega to issue his surprise decree, austerity measures were already required in state institutions and will likely lead to cuts in this year’s budget, another contributing factor is the new tax law’s “collection failure.” That law was the exclusive product of bilateral negotiations with COSEP “from the catacombs,” as tax law expert Julio Francisco Baez termed the two allies’ avoidance of any public debate on its contents.

The projected collection rate of 15.3% based on that new law was used to draw up the 2014 budget. But while more taxes were indeed collected last year, it was far below that projection. The reasons for this failure haven’t been made entirely clear, but independent economist Adolfo Acevedo has suggested some of the possible influences: “the new law’s complexity; the pressure under which it was negotiated and approved without ensuring adequate dissemination, understanding and appropriation by the public; the halving of the effective IR [income tax] rate on dividends and financial profits and an incorrect appreciation of the drop in collection that would be caused by eliminating the ISC [selective consumption tax] on the import of a number of goods.”

In plainer language, the privileged position the biggest capitalists negotiated for themselves and the government was willing to accept is a significant reason for the collection deficit. The two tax cuts Acevedo listed favored only those who concentrate the profits in Nicaragua and to a lesser extent middle and upper-middle class families with significant purchasing power.

The tactic of cosmetics

In more political language, the brief crisis triggered by the hastily issued and just as hastily withdrawn presidential decree is an expression of the cost for both the government and the country of the corporative model governing Ortega’s relations with big business. The Tax Concertation Law favored it too much. COSEP was better able to negotiate on behalf of its interests, while the government lacked a strategic perspective with a longer-term vision in defense of national interests, particularly those of the majorities. Instead, those majorities are worse off under the new law, which maintains the regressive system based on indirect and thus unjust taxes.

To cover up this inappropriate contradiction for a project that defines itself as “Christian, socialist and solidary” the government may well provide new figures that pretty up the collection failure and camouflage the cost of the corporative model.

That is already happening with data in other spheres of public administration. In the Speaking Out section of this issue, Dr. Leonel Argüello refers to that same strategy in the health system, noting that the presidential office orders public health personnel not to talk about the existence of certain illnesses, to alter figures that demonstrate unresolved problems or even to keep the wraps on information Ortega doesn’t want to get out. “Covering up reality for political reasons promotes inefficiency and ineffectiveness,” Argüello argues.

Two agendas in contradiction

The extreme centralization of power in two people in Nicaragua also promotes inefficiency and ineffectiveness, although in a lopsided manner: in the social agenda, not the business one. There’s good understanding and stability in the agenda of the corporate business economy, made up of COSEP’s traditional business leaders allied with the FSLN’s new businesspeople heading up the ALBA consortium businesses. They don’t lack the resources to buy up media and shares in all kinds of transnational corporations. Nor do they want for negotiations to file down any rough spots. Things follow a strategic vision of common interests and priorities. In that terrain there’s efficiency and efficacy.

In contrast, continuing instability and ongoing improvisation can be seen in the agenda of the grassroots economy and the population’s social wellbeing (health care, education, rural development, informal economy, small-scale production and coops). Priorities change; activities multiply without being based on any information about the results obtained by the previous ones or whether or not the programs even function; there are no negotiations with either officials or experts; there’s rampant disorder with ebbs and flows in resource availability; and corruption keeps popping up…

More changes in the Cabinet

After the “resignation” in January of Deputy Education Minister José Treminio for failing to live up to the expectations imposed on him in relation to the new rural secondary distance program, another deputy education minister “resigned” this month: Marlon Siu, in charge of planning and programs. The reason wasn’t given and the executive offices didn’t even confirm it.

The population also heard of two more “resignations” this month, again with no reasons given, this time in the productive field: Ariel Bucardo, head of the Agricultural and Forestry Ministry (MAGFOR), and Pedro Haslam, who headed the recently created Ministry of Family, Community, Cooperative and Associative Economy. Some spoke of a “lack of expected results” and “issuing of unreliable statistics” by the two ministers. The lack of information confirming these movements in the Cabinet or reasons for the changes is a sign of the instability in the field in which the majorities’ interests are played out.

Bucardo, of peasant origins, was one of the founders of the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG), the Rural Workers’ Association (ATC) and the National Federation of Cooperatives (FENACOOP), all in the eighties, and has been the MAGFOR minister since 2007. Despite the importance of this ministry in a country with an agrarian economy, its tasks are being slowly taken away from it. Bucardo “resigned” from the administration of an increasingly gutted ministry. The latest in the continual changes decided in the presidential offices was the creation of a new agricultural health institution, which Ortega named a military officer, Colonel Manuel Gutiérrez, to run.

Haslam’s case
was the opposite

If Bucardo was being left with an empty shell, Haslam’s new ministrywas given huge responsibilities, spelled out quite clearly in the name the First Lady gave it. Created in July 2012, it was assigned the objective of generating 20% growth in the economy of the poorest and most marginalized rural and urban productive sectors in the next five years, i.e. Ortega’s second presidential term. These sectors represent 70% of the country’s labor force and contribute 40% of its gross domestic product.

The new ministry was made responsible for executing policies, plans, programs and projects “in an integral manner.” This included absorbing the government’s two insignia programs—Zero Hunger and Zero Usury—not to mention the Rural Development Institute (IDR), another institute that deals with micro, small and medium businesses. Still other responsibilities were the food security program and the new CRISOL program (named for Christian, Socialist and Solidary), which provides credits, inputs, technology and property titles, among other things. It was also given the task of periodically organizing and staging fairs all over the country for the commercializing of products from the countryside. In all, the new portfolio had 15 different major functions.

Pedro Haslam, who had previously only been heading up one of those functions, the IDR, was made responsible for organizing this whole mass of programs, each with its own history and personnel, and making them function at peak efficiency to produce a greater growth rate than the economy as a whole appears capable of. In the end, it seems he wasn’t able to make much of a dent in all the tasks dumped on him by First Lady Rosario Murillo, who not only promoted the new institution but also coordinates the entire grass¬roots and social agenda.

Also in the municipalities

The grassroots and social agenda is also the municipal agenda. The municipal mayors in each department meet once a week to receive guidelines from the presidency, via the FSLN political secretaries, for responding to the local agendas.

This centralization has not only made hash of municipal autonomy, but is also producing inefficiency and inefficacy. As one might expect, no one moves a finger until the “guidelines” arrive.

“People get tired”

Looking at ourselves in the Salvadoran mirror brings up a question that frequently appears in the analyses of our own national reality: Would the FSLN still win the elections if we had an electoral branch of government that acted with the transparency displayed by El Salvador’s Electoral Tribunal? Ortega and his group insist it would. But if they’re so sure of that victory, why are they so resistant to changing the management of the thoroughly discredited Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) and the anti-democratic electoral law and ID/voter registration card process, both of which the CSE administers discretionally and with a partisan skew?

And what will we ask ourselves standing before the other two mirrors? Perhaps simply “How long?” Some months ago, recalling the time when he was the Jesuit superior in Argentina, Pope Francis confessed that “when I had to deal with difficult situations, I made my decisions abruptly and by myself.” He added that “my authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems…. Eventually people get tired of authoritarianism.”

That is the lesson reflected in the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan mirrors.

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