Less and less institutionality; more and more inequality

After seven years avoiding a dialog with the bishops, President Ortega decided to receive them, thus triggering expectations about what the bishop’s agenda would and should be. But while the country’s deteriorated institutionality is a priority for much of the opposition, Pope Francis has others.

Envío team

The New Year kicked off with a surprise for Nicaragua when Pope Francis announced that one of his new cardinals would be Leopoldo Brenes, archbishop of Managua. The news caused immediate and irremediable political ripples. It has been impossible for the country’s political class—both ruling and opposition—not to see more power than service in that appointment, understanding it as a privileged post that opens up new opportunities on the respective agendas of both the presidency and the opposition. Both sides were virtually deaf to Pope Francis’ insistence that the cardinalate is not a promotion, honor or decoration for Monsignor Brenes and the others named; according to him, it’s more service, not more power.

The first real tension

Aware that the conflicts with the Catholic hierarchy in the eighties had done him serious damage, Daniel Ortega decided to change his strategy upon his return to office. His government began to financially support parish priests and prelates in social works and patron saint celebrations. The discourse coming from the presidential offices is rife with rhetorical and symbolical references catering to grassroots religiosity. Not a day or an opportunity goes by without the government encouraging the most traditional religiosity in the most diverse ways as a means of legitimizing its power.

After more than a year in “peace,” the Catholic bishops were the first social sector to allege fraud in the November 9, 2008, municipal elections. Two days after them, using unusually direct language, they pointed out the irregularities they had perceived in the process and made “an urgent call to the Supreme Electoral Council members to act honestly, transparently and impartially for their own personal dignity and out of respect for the sacred vote our people deposited in the ballot box in good conscience.” They proposed a review of all the vote count tallies, a request they continued insisting on although it fell on deaf ears.

Given the months of donations to the ecclesiastical structures around the country and the FSLN’s decisive vote two years earlier to criminalize therapeutic abortion, the government was caught totally off guard by the bishops’ reaction, perceiving it—as it perceives any criticism—as a betrayal. That explains the declarations of some officials, including FSLN electoral magistrate Emmett Lang, who went so far as to say that the bishops preach love for one’s neighbor, but “denigrate their neighbor”—i.e. his party—charging that acting that way “is a moral sin.”

From that moment on, relations between the Catholic hierarchy and the government alternated between tension and distension—ups and downs, according to the prelates—with very highly charged moments as in May 2009, provoked by what First Lady Rosario Murillo charged were “deluxe hackers” (see “The Month” in our May 2009 edition for details), being spelled by bilateral negotiations, accommodations and readjustments.

The firm anti-fraud position taken by the Catholic hierarchy inspired the media and opposition political leaders to begin attributing to the bishops a leadership that replaced what the parties themselves were losing, delegating to them responsibility for finding a “solution” to the power-concentrating model Ortega was rapidly setting up.

The surprise of
a second cardinal

The entire country rejoiced at the news that Monsignor Brenes, or “Polito,” as many affectionately called him and he himself said they could continue calling him if they wished, had been made a cardinal. The joy was justified by his record as a good, simple, accessible man in his work as parish priest (1974-88), auxiliary bishop of Managua (1988-1991), bishop of Matagalpa (1991-2005) and then at the head of the archdiocese of Managua. Evoking Pope Francis, Brenes is a “shepherd who smells of sheep.” He is of the people, knows them, doesn’t give himself airs, comes from poverty and continues to live an austere lifestyle.

In May 2009 Dominican priest Rafael Aragón portrayed him in the following way in the pages of envío: “He has a pastoral style and a great capacity to win people over. In Matagalpa, where he was the bishop before being named to the capital, he was in tune with the peasants’ soul, not for any specific pastoral plan, but just by being with them, by being close. It is also a characteristic of his to try and make his clergy feel like a family, to foster friendship, integration and harmony among his priests.”

Since 2007 the Ortega government has boasted of the privilege of having a cardinal as an ally, referring to Monsignor Miguel Obando, named by John Paul II in 1985 in the middle of the contra war. Brenes replaced him as archbishop of Managua. The government was at first perplexed to learn of the naming of a second cardinal. Not until the day after the news arrived from Rome did its secretary of communication and citizenship, First Lady Rosario Murillo, congratulate Cardinal Brenes, expressing the desire that he “help deepen the paths opened by Cardinal Miguel.”

The first cardinal’s weight

During these years Ortega has kept Cardinal Obando at his side at all public events, as a kind of “pledge” of his Catholic “conversion.” The President also sent him out to barrios and rural districts all over the country for years to personally give out sheet metal roofing to poor families that benefited from the Roof Plan. This January, Cardinal Miguel Obando’s name even made its way into the preamble of the recently reformed Political Constitution of the Republic with the title of “Cardinal of Peace and Reconciliation.”

With respect to the government’s befriending of parish priests and clerics with generous economic aid over these same years, Silvio Báez, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, admitted in an interview by La Prensa on December 30 that “I have had and can denounce information from some priests that the government has offered them clean money they can use without any accountability. We have some concern about this, although it is accompanied by a certain degree of understanding. We would like to think that the priests’ intentions are good, although we do not deny that there could be dark interests behind it.”

Referring to Obando’s symbolic weight in the clergy, Báez said: “We have clearly denounced a social and political situation that isn’t doing any good for either the present or the future of the nation. And the fact that Cardinal Obando is at the government’s side has probably encouraged and made less scandalous the fact that these priests are distancing themselves from the positions of the Bishops’ Conference because he he is supporting the government policies without making the slightest criticism of any kind.”

The context of the dialogue

In this years-long context and in the more recent one, in which the model of absolute, concentrated and centralized power has now been virtually consolidated, Ortega couldn’t fail to take note of an event of such high symbolic grassroots, social and also political content as Monsignor Brenes’ investiture as cardinal. It was in that atmosphere of backing, congratulations and festivities that the President finally decided to dialogue with the bishops of the Episcopal Council.

Over his now more than seven years in government, Ortega has met periodically with only one sector of national life: representatives of big private enterprise associations grouped under the umbrella of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise.

Archbishop Brenes first publicly requested a bilateral dialogue with President Ortega back in May 2009, at the time of the denigrating message against the bishops allegedly from a presidential adviser’s office, although according to the First Lady it was planted in the Internet by “deluxe hackers.” He received no response.

The dialogue with the bishops...

The warm reception President Ortega and his wife decided to give the newly ordained Cardinal Brenes on his return from Rome on March 3 was highly publicized by the official media, only in part because it was Ortega’s first public appearance after the “greatly exaggerated” news of his death. That reception was the forerunner of news of Ortega’s imminent first dialogue with the bishops, which in turn renewed the exaggerated expectations by the opposition media and political leaders of the episcopate’s capacity to remedy, amend or transform the country’s course.

At such moments all those voices unconsciously render over a third of Nicaraguans invisible because they’re Evangelical. The people see the pastor of their own barrio or rural district as the maximum moral authority so do not invest the Catholic bishops with such exclusive expectations.

In any event the bishops met privately for two days, March 10 and 11, to decide whether or not to dialogue with the President. With the consensus in favor they sent a letter to Ortega on the 18th asking him to advise them of the meeting date with sufficient lead time. On the 24th, the President responded that they should set the date and place.

Silvio Báez, who is also the secretary of the Bishops’ Conference, laid out two obvious conditions at the beginning: that the dialogue be with the full Conference and that it have an open agenda. He also made two ambitious suggestions: that it be followed by a dialogue with all national sectors and that everything discussed be made public.

...and the election of
government officials

Virtually at the same time, Ortega ordered the FSLN’s legislative bench to get busy with the long-overdue naming of now more than 50 officials who have been illegally in their posts, since 2010 in some cases. That year had begun with an institutional urgency: the constitutionally mandated terms of 25 top-ranking officials heading up the electoral branch, the Supreme Court, the Comptroller General’s office, the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s office and the Superintendence of Banks were ending between February and June and the legislators were supposed to elect their replacements.

Because he didn’t have a parliamentary majority at the time, Ortega promptly issued a presidential decree—illegally because it usurped exclusive attributions of the legislators—maintaining the hand-picked and loyal officials indefinitely in their posts until such time as the Nicaraguan parliament could reach agreement to replace them. Ortega justified his decree citing his responsibility to “avoid chaos,” but the fact is that he opted to decree rather than negotiate the posts from a weak position in the National Assembly.

Over the years still more unelected officials exceeded their terms, continuing to exercise their responsibilities de facto without having to go through the legality of a legislative vote. The big change is that now, as a consequence of the alleged fraud in the 2011 general elections, Ortega has enough of a legislative majority to do whatever he wants.

“Institutional dismantling”

The parliamentary process for appointing people to these posts was fast-tracked with the accustomed and nevr-xplained hurry previously seen in the pushing through of the canal concession in November, the constitutional reforms in December and the reform to the military code in January. The presidential order was clear: all officials to these posts must be elected or reaffirmed before the Holy Week recess.

The coinciding of the postponed dialogue with the bishops and postponed election of these top posts led various sectors and analysts to link the two issues and insist that the bishops talk before the parliamentary process. Some said it was no coincidence, but was premeditated by Ortega so the bishops couldn’t try to influence the appointments. He would only talk with them once all the illegality of recent years had been legitimated.

Others said the bishops should discuss with the President the institutional crisis in which he has sunk the country. They put their confidence in the political changes they believed would grow out of the dialogue with the hierarchy.

They had a point in focusing the agenda on the institutional crisis. Not without reason, the Bishops’ Conference had released a forceful document in November criticizing the constitutional reforms and characterizing the national moment as “an evident institutional dismantling of the country.”

It is Monsignor Báez who has most strongly underscored Nica¬ragua’s priority problems as democratic deterioration, violations of the rule of law and lack of institutionality. The institutional crisis as a national priority is also a recurring issue in the information coming out of the few independent media remaining in Nicaragua.

The other agenda:
The social inequalities

In envío’s own pages, we have insistently noted institutional deterioration as a source of other pressing problems our country is facing. In the “Speaking Out” section of this issue, Sinforiano Cáceres, president of the National Federation of Agricultural and Agro-industrial Cooperatives (Fenacoop), explains with examples how institutionality subjected to top-down, anti-democratic political orientations can distort worthy and much-needed social programs for the poorest.

Conscious of the injustices this lack of institutionality produces on a daily basis, we would nonetheless like to emphasize another area of our national reality that is no less urgent and lacerating and very appropriate for the agenda the bishops could take not only to the President but also to the population they shepherd every day.

Throughout these years, the insistence by a majority of critical voices on legal, institutional and juridical issues, on laws being violated, institutions being controlled and legal norms being disparaged have overshadowed the country’s social inequity, the scandalous abyss that separates the very few who have a lot from the very many who have so little in Nicaragua. That gap always existed, even in the eighties, but it has been getting deeper and wider in recent years.

The insistence on institutionality and political democracy has been distancing the opposition’s discourse from the heart and mind of the impoverished majority in the countryside and city, a majority that’s increasing due to the lack of economic democracy. It is made up of people whose poverty is structural and is either barely palliated by the government handouts, not palliated at all or forces them to emigrate to seek a living in other countries because they have no options here.

Some figures on inequality

It’s useful to take a look at some of the figures on the country’s economic reality, crossing them with Pope Francis’ impassioned words on social inequity.

As economist Néstor Avendaño comments on his blog, Nicaragua’s fifth and latest national living standard measurement survey, done in 2009, reveals that only 23.2% of all Nicaraguan families, a percentage he calculates to be very close to 19% of the economically active population, has enough resources to acquire any more than what is strictly basic. The income of the other 76.8% doesn’t exceed US$587 a month, a poverty level whose degree of precariousness depends on the size of the family, with some falling as low as US$34, in other words abject indigence. According to Avendaño’s own analysis, the income of 80% of the lowest income families accounts for only 48.6% of the country’s total income, while the other 20% has 51.4%, with the top 5% of those families concentrating 21.4%. Those figures reveal a scandalous structural social inequality, and, as Avendaño points out, “also help demonstrate the progressive extinction of the country’s middle class.”

Adolfo Acevedo, another independent economist, has focused on the country’s future as reflected in the situation affecting its children. He notes that, according to the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the country’s own latest household surveys, while poverty affects 58.3% of the total population, 29.3% of which is indigent, in the case of children, 70.4% live in poor households and 39.1% in indigent ones. “That,” he clarifies, “means that children are suffering much higher levels of poverty and indigence on average than those affecting the population as a whole.” In other words, the social inequity is most affecting the smallest.

An inequitable and
exclusionary economy

What has changed over this govern¬ment’s more than seven years in office? To what degree have the hundreds of millions in resources from Venezuelan cooperation, which have so benefited those in the circle of power and their business elite allies, widened the gulf of inequity?

No precise data are available, but they can be imagined, taking into account that the oil bill with Venezuela has allowed some US$3 billion to circulate in the country and that the resources linked to the Venezuelan-Nicaraguan business consortium called Albanisa are so vast that those who know that operation up close say they “seem to have no horizon.”

Avendaño winds up his blog entry this way: “The Nicaraguan economy remains exclusionary and inequitable. The majority of our country’s economic growth has been concentrated in few hands and the State has few instruments for redistributing income. The Washington Consensus of the nineties removed those instruments via the implementation of the first two draconian Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility programs in our country, involving slashed social spending, privatization of public holdings and massive unemployment.” He concludes that “if at this time the State doesn’t have enough capacity to redistribute income, the tripartite government-business-unions dialogue, now raised to constitutional rank, should at least insist on ensuring equal opportunities for all Nicaraguan families.”

In his article in this issue, Sinfor¬iano Cáceres also discusses the urgent need for a “quatripartite” system that moves past the exclusion and inequity suffered by the “social economy” sector: half a million people whose labor sustains production in the countryside and who contribute to the national economy, yet with whom there’s no dialogue because they have no recognized representation in “Christian, socialist and solidary” Nicaragua.

“The joy of the Gospel”

Pointing out the social inequity should be a priority on the bishops’ pastoral agenda because it can’t be swept under the rug. We see that social ill in the sumptuous mansions going up in some areas of Managua; in the capital’s vehicles, which include a hugely disproportionate percentage of luxury SUVs for such a poor country; in the daily news about the rapid and shamelessly flaunted enrichment of business leaders and government officials; or in the report that the number of super-rich—those whose personal wealth is at least US$30 million—went up by 10, from 180 to 190, in 2012 alone.

This is the priority underscored by Pope Francis in his first far-reaching and self-written text: the November 24, 2013, “Evangelii Gaudium, Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World.” It’s an extensive text in an agile, impassioned and fresh language aimed at shaking its audience of bishops, priests, nuns and laypeople into leaving the peripheries and become joyous accom¬paniers rather than severe, condemning judges. In the middle of that central message, Francis also talks about what most pains and preoccupies him in today’s world. Many of his ideas should find an echo in Nicaragua, as they contradict both the actions and discourses we see and hear every day.

The Pope starts with the fact that the Christian faith has social consequences, that there is “an inseparable bond” with the situation of the poor and that “both Christian preaching and life, then, are meant to have an impact on society.”

Is economic growth
enough for us?

Francis referred, alarmed, to an “econ¬omy of exclusion and inequality” because “such an economy kills.” It is the economy of the current model, based on “the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. In the context of an economy with that design, he said, “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”

He added that “this opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

Defenders of trickle-down can be found in abundance in Nicaragua. They include the people governing the country and the business elite allied with them. Without mentioning the word trickle-down—perhaps considering it obsolete—they continuously speak of how good the economy is going to be, referring to economic growth, an indicator they tout above any other, as a guarantee of employment and well¬being.

But Francis said: “We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programs, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.”

And given that one of the best-oiled tools for distributing income is the tax system, the pope also critiques “self-serving tax evasion” as one of the factors ensuring that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.”

The structural
causes of poverty

There’s no doubt that we are coexisting with a happy few in Nicaragua today or that this minority is practicing self-serving tax evasion, clinging to unjustified exonerations and exemptions. Our country’s tax system is one of the most inequitable on the continent because it’s regressive and thus unjust. It’s one of the age-old problems that generate inequalities and that no government has ever wanted to resolve in Nicaragua, either with the institutionality demolished by Ortega or with any previous one.

“The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed,” says Francis, “not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises.”

The structural causes of poverty—including the lack of of land—haven’t disappeared in rural areas. In September of last year, Nitlapan-UCA researcher Alfredo Ruiz shared with envío data from the 2011 agricultural census showing that 7% of the Nicaraguan population concentrates 57% of the land. “The 40% of Nicaragua’s productive land reformed by 1990 was back down to only about 10% by 2002,” said Ruiz. “Today we are witnessing the return of the large-scale estate. One statistic explaining rural poverty is that at least 160-170,000 rural families (40%) have no access to land today. And the FSLN government’s political will to address this reality isn’t conspicuous.”

Fewer poor and
more inequality?

It’s now proven that governments of different ideological stripes can fight poverty and even reduce it while inequality increases. Such is the case of Chile, which is one of the countries that has most reduced poverty and at the same time the one with the greatest inequity and social inequality gap on the continent. Programs abound that emphasize the struggle against extreme poverty but none focuses on how to deal with extreme wealth.

We’re heading down that same path in Nicaragua. While the abyss of social inequality is being dug deeper, the Ortega government is offering to “combat poverty.” But its offer has centered on palliative social programs, which are important for those who never received anything from previous governments but are fleeting without touching the structural causes.

Francis criticizes “simple welfare mentality” and also refers to programs engaging in it: “Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.”

The fragile environment

Noting that the “thirst for power and possessions knows no limits,” Francis mentions one of its consequences: “In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

A few months ago the Humboldt Center presented a report on our geography’s increasing defenselessness showing that some 2,900 square kilometers more of our territory were delivered over to foreign mining concessions between 2011 and 2013, bringing 13.4% of our national territory now under such concessions. And this government continues “selling” Nicaragua to the world for new mining investments that destroy the environment, generate very little employment and pay virtually no taxes to the State. With this same greed the government has “sold” the entire country to the canal concession while sectors linked to the ALBA businesses are deforesting the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve.

In his text—and like his namesake, Francis of Assisi—Pope Francis speaks with the spirituality of an environmentalist: “God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.”

The “ephemeral peace”
of “a happy minority”

The pope makes reference to what he calls “two great issues” that strike him as “fundamental at this time in history” because he believes they will “shape the future of humanity.” These issues are “first, the inclusion of the poor in society, and second, peace and social dialogue.”

With that he summarizes what should be the ongoing agenda of those seeking a change of course, both in the world and in our country, a change that will not be achieved smoothly or without sacrifices.

Although he never mentions the word “institutionality,” Francis suggests it by linking the political with the economic: “Peace in society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. Nor does true peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their lifestyle while others have to make do as they can. Demands involving the distribution of wealth, concern for the poor and human rights cannot be suppressed under the guise of creating a consensus on paper or a transient peace for a contented minority. The dignity of the human person and the common good rank higher than the comfort of those who refuse to renounce their privileges.…

“We do not need plans drawn up by a few for the few, or an enlightened or outspoken minority which claims to speak for everyone. It is about agreeing to live together, a social and cultural pact.”

It is the issue of our time

Pope Francis’ concern coincides with that of a growing intellectual sector that’s thinking critically about the current course of the world. For example, the inequality of income, wealth and opportunities that characterize this time in human history is the central theme of French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which Nobel Prize Winner for Economics Paul Krugman predicts will be the decade’s bestseller. Piketty documents the concentration of income—unprecedented in the last 20 years—in the hands of a small economic elite and demonstrates that it is a return to “equity capitalism” in which the economy’s fundamental levers are dominated by inherited wealth, which carries more weight than effort and talent.

Some months ago Nicaragua’s bishops warned that the constitutional reforms imposed by those who control this government favor “the establishment and perpetuation of absolute power over the long term, dynastically exercised by a person or a party or through a political and economic oligarchy.”

Equity capitalism and dynastic power, which are very close, similar realities, are being talked about not only in our country but in the world as a whole.

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