Seismic red alert on the Ides of April

April will be forever marked in red on the calendar. As the sun was setting the afternoon of Thursday, April 10, the western side of Nicaragua was shaken by an earthquake followed by continuous aftershocks and two more sizable quakes. The mounting anxiety altered people’s plans for Holy Week and wiped the government’s long-anticipated new moves to consolidate its political project out of the headlines.

Envío team

In ancient Rome, the middle day of each calendar month was called the ides, and was considered to bring good omens. The ides of March went down in history and acquired literary fame because it was on that day, in 44 AD, that Julius Caesar was assassinated, an event that marked the ending of the Republic and beginning of the Empire.

There was no shortage of political happenings in Nicaragua around the ides of April, coinciding with predictions, omens and conjectures stirred up by the seismic events. They have been fertile days for serious reflection on what Nature keeps warning us about: the vulnerability of the country and particularly its capital city.

Thursday, April 10, 5:30 pm

At the end of the workday on Thursday, April 10, the issue on most people’s minds in Managua and the rest of the country was the Holy Week vacation just around the corner. Beach, river, spa and cool mountain resorts were poised for the invasion of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans.

In a calculated routine we’ve seen for years now, the long vacation was preceded by an important political event. The government decides them and implements them on the eve of vacations so their importance and the interest they could spark in public opinion get buried in the preparations for the days off.

This time the happening was the election of officials for 54 top government posts, many of which had been illegally occupied for over four years. In 2010, an illegal presidential decree initiated an unending saga of “de facto functionaries,” those whose terms had ended but who were never subjected to parliamentary reconfirmation. Ortega and his now absolute majority legislative bench were waiting for the approach of Holy Week so they could “resolve” this long-pending issue in just three days.

The 6.1 magnitude earthquake that hit at 5:30 in the afternoon on Thursday April 10 effectively buried any negative fallout for the government from the parliamentary maneuvers consummated earlier in the day. While the quake was felt all over the country, it particularly shook the departments of Managua and León, causing most damage in the city of Nagarote, about 30 miles northwest of the capital on the old León Highway, home to about 18,000 people.

That evening the government decreed a “red alert” which it soon changed to an “extreme red alert,” a concept alien to seismic terminology. Shortly thereafter it upped it to a “preventive and protecting red alert,” a concept unique to the government’s paternalistic style.

The very next day a 6.6 quake centered in Nandaime, on the Pan-American Highway some 41 miles south of Managua, did less damage only because its epicenter was deeper. The nervous population gave no further thought to the election of government officials with expired terms.

Some elected,
others reelected

Despite the alerts and recurring panic, with hundreds of aftershocks of various intensities and depths that have yet to abate, the political event of those same days shouldn’t be ignored. Those newly elected and reelected will be making decisions that will affect us all, and could even occupy their posts indefinitely, as established in the constitutional reform imposed by Ortega at the beginning of this year.

There had been rumors for some time that deals were being cut between the governing party and Independent Liberal Party (PLI) leader Eduardo Montealegre so his legislators would legitimate the election of the new officials—the two Sandinista Renovation Movement legislators refused to participate in the talks. But the offer apparently wasn’t attractive enough, because the FSLN reelected the majority of de facto officials and elected a few new ones with the additional votes of only the two Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) legislators. In exchange, the severely shrunken PLC got to keep all of its members already in those posts and even got a new one.

Human rights and
fiscal watchdogs

FSLN member Omar Cabezas was reelected to head the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s office, which has been playing an irrelevant role for some years now. PLC member Adolfo Jarquín Ortells was reelected as his deputy, proof of the scant value the government places on anything related to human rights defense and protection.

The Comptroller General’s office was restructured with five top officials capable of fulfilling the tasks the governing party has assigned this public resources watchdog: serious audits that guarantee anti-corruption sanctions, always of course previously agreed to by the presidency. The model requires an institution that’s not at the service of the citizenry and doesn’t transparently inform the public, but serves the interests of those governing.

Two of the five former comptrollers (Luis Ángel Montenegro and Guillermo Argüello Poessy), who have ample technical experience for the job, were reelected. And three new ones were elected (former State Security member Vicente Chávez, distinguished Army cadre Marisol Castillo and former President Arnoldo Alemán’s daughter María Dolores, who represents the PLC’s most “modern” sectors). They will bring to the task ahead of them a political capacity to move the model forward. All five are leaders in their own right and have the proven cunning needed for the job.

Electoral and judicial chiefs

The most important issues for both the government and the PLI were what the new Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) and Supreme Court would look like. The parliamentary session that created the most expectations, even beyond political and media circles, was the one that would choose the CSE’s seven magistrates, with the hottest issue being whether or not CSE President Roberto Rivas would remain. Rivas is without doubt the most questioned public official in the country due to his ostentatious lifestyle, documented acts of corruption and role as the visible face of the alleged electoral frauds organized by the CSE since 2008. In the end, he was proposed by the FSLN bench, and thus guaranteed reelection.

The FSLN also kept four other electoral magistrates, two from its own party (José Luis Villavicencio and Emmett Lang) and two chosen years ago by the PLC (José Marenco and Luis Benavides). Two FSLN members were chosen to cover vacancies due to deaths: Lumberto Campbell, the only comandante from the Caribbean Coast, and Johnny Tórrez. As president of Mana- gua’s Departmental Electoral Council in 2008, Tórrez is alleged to have played a strategic role in organizing that year’s documented fraud, in which the FSLN beat out Eduardo Montealegre for mayor of Managua with 30% of the department’s votes never publicly tallied.

The election of the 16 Supreme Court justices was scheduled for the last day, Thursday, April 10. Eight governing party justices were reconfirmed (Rafael Solís, Francisco Rosales, Alba Luz Ramos, Armengol Cuadra, Marvin Aguilar, Juana Méndez, Yadira Centeno and Ligia Molina) as were two from the PLC (Manuel Martínez and Antonio Alemán Lacayo). The remaining six seats went to two proposed by the PLI (Virgilio Gurdián and José Adán Guerra, both of whom held ministerial posts in the government of Enrique Bolaños), three more from the FSLN (Armando Juárez, Gerardo Arce Castaño and Bluefields judge Ellen Joy Lewin) plus Carlos Aguerri, who represents the business elite.

Hours later, with the National Assembly closed and its occupants anticipating their week of vacation, the first earthquake shook the capital’s foundations.

Balance and representation

Did the finally implemented election of the expired posts by the FSLN’s absolute legislative majority qualify as a political earthquake? Actually, it didn’t; at most it was a tremor, but not a particularly high-intensity one.

Although Roberto Rivas was also reelected CSE president only hours after being reconfirmed, it is probable that the governing party will eventually ask him to resign on some graceful pretext given the extremely high cost of keeping this disgraced functionary as chief administrator of the 2016 presidential, legislative and municipal elections. Lumberto Cambpell, elected the CSE vice president despite his comparative inexperience in electoral matters, is thus next in the line of succession. Will Ortega use that costeño face at the CSE table to improve its image, even though the proceedings will surely not change?

José Adán Aguerri, president of COSEP, the umbrella of the big business chambers and main government ally, wasted no time in expressing his displeasure at Rivas’ reelection and the lack of “representation” and “balance” in the electoral branch’s new leadership.

Aguerri offered no opinion about the composition of the new Supreme Court. Two of the three new justices (Gurdián and Guerra) have a known affinity to private enterprise, and a third, Carlos Aguerri, José Adán’s uncle, worked inside the National Assembly for 11 years guaranteeing the interests of big business. Upon leaving parliament he declared that he will continue defending those interests as a Supreme Court justice, without so much as a pretense that he that he might see his new post as obliging him to have a wider social perspective in favor of justice.

In this new shuffling of a Supreme Court accustomed ever since the pact between Arnoldo Alemán and Daniel Ortega became law to having handpicked justices who always bow to the interests of these two caudillos, the business elite will now have three pairs of eyes on the inside, where so many things affecting their interests are decided, and not always in their favor. How will these three men act now? In any event, this readjustment is the “balance” the business elite have earned for their tight alliance with the project of what amounts to one of their segments: the Sandinista business elite.

No to Roberto Rivas

The three pre-seismic days dedicated to electing the 54 posts also suggested a slight readjustment of forces in the closed political scenario Nicaragua finds itself in today.

In March 2013, also just before Holy Week, the governing party couldn’t pull off the election of the expired posts even though by then it had the votes needed to do so alone. The problem was that it wanted national and international legitimacy for its choices and the PLI Alliance bench was split between those who refused to give them that legitimacy in exchange for a couple of posts and those who considered doing so a lesser evil that had to be accepted because “in politics you can’t leave spaces empty.” The inability to close that rift was one of the factors that set back the election.

A year later, it was rumored that Montealegre had finally achieved unanimity among his own representatives: those who wanted the few spaces offered by the FSLN prevailed, and they were prepared to pay the political cost if their attitude was interpreted as a sell-out. We thus expected to see most if not all of the PLI representatives voting in favor of the final list, but it didn’t happen. Apparently the PRI decided not to vote for Roberto Rivas under any circumstances, even if it meant missing out on any posts.

2016 on the horizon

On Tuesday, the first day of the parliamentary discussion of the candidate list, the PLI bench members participated in the debate but abstained from voting for any of the FSLN candidates. The next day they repeated that performance and topped it by walking out of the session following Rivas’ election. On Thursday, the last day, they didn’t attend the Assembly at all and thus didn’t cast their votes for Gurdián and Guerra, initially proposed by the PLI itself.

So in the end, the FSLN elected all the officials with its own 63 votes and those of the two 2 PLC representatives, today totally beholden to the script dictated to them by the governing party. Ortega was denied the light coat of legitimizing varnish the PLI vote would have given the proceedings, while at the very last minute the PLI skirted the political cost of the sell-out label. We have yet to learn the cost of this unexpected decision inside the PLI itself...

At the outset of the voting, the PLC had announced that it aspired to get 15 posts. It only walked away with one new but admittedly important one in the Comptroller General’s office, which suggests that Ortega isn’t quite ready to give up the PLC’s usefulness in keeping Liberalism divided.

With this Rubicon now crossed, Eduardo Montealegre is preparing to call for, promote and be the spokesperson of what he calls the great national opposition unity—the longed-for-by-some new version of UNO—that would take the FSLN on in the 2016 elections. But given that the divisions in the PLI didn’t end with the Rivas case, only time will tell how this plays out.

The situation in Venezuela—where the broad opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) is so effectively hounding President Maduro—and Nicaragua’s upcoming electoral horizon surely carried a lot of weight in the PLI’s unanimous decision regarding Roberto Rivas’ scandalous reelection, which was correct by any measure.

Another step forward
for Ortega’s model

President Ortega isn’t flagging in the construction of his power-concentrating model. The FSLN now also has the majority of members in the Caribbean Coast’s two Regional Councils. How it got them is the topic analyzed by Salvador García Babini in this same issue.

Furthermore, at the same time his list of candidates for the top national posts was presented the National Assembly, Ortega also submitted a bill to reform the National Police Law. Elvira Cuadra, the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policies’ new director and an expert on security issues, sees it as a new law rather than just a reform, although she admits that after so many years the old law did need to be revised, particularly after the recent constitutional reforms.

Both she and colleague Roberto Orozco, also an expert in the field, have expressed various concerns about the content of the reforms. Among other things, they warn about the tasks that the National Police Intelligence Division may develop or be assigned in order to guarantee democratic security, citizens’ security and “national security.”

“I’m worried that by granting it open-ended, non-specific functions, we could see a revival of the Anti-Communist Service, which considered any political or armed action against the Somoza family as terrorism,” says Orozco. Cuadra shares this concern: “The riskiest part is that the law doesn’t make clear who defines, supervises or controls the actions of the intelligence specialty to which the project attributes investigation functions.”

The reformed law separates the National Police from the Ministry of Government, subordinating it more clearly to the President. He can now also keep in their posts indefinitely not only the police chief but also deputy directors, the inspector general and officers with 40 years of service. The reforms relieve them of the obligation to retire.

As already revealed in the recent reform to the Military Code, the new legislation governing the Army of Nicaragua, the Police Law reform reflects Ortega’s lack of confidence in the police cadres formed since the nineties and his fear of losing those who joined the force due to their Sandinista militancy and remained there throughout the revolutionary eighties and afterward.

The seismic danger is real

Despite their extreme seriousness, all these legal, institutional and political issues took a back seat to the April 10 earthquake and its continuous aftershocks of varying and sometimes unnerving intensity.

Land tremors are a frequent occurrence in this vulnerable earthquake-prone country, tightly surrounded by no fewer than six tectonic plates of widely differing dimensions that are in turn close to still active and potentially very dangerous volcanoes. The most serious aspect of the strong shake we got on April 10 was that its epicenter and those of a significant number of the aftershocks were near the Momotombo volcano.

The first scientific information explained that the quakes were “emigrating” through Lake Managua from Momotombo to the Chiltepe peninsula, location of the even more dangerous Apoyeque volcano, which also meant they were coming closer to Managua, an extremely vulnerable city with a million and a half inhabitants living on top of 18 faults and their branches.

Five of these faults are highly dangerous: two of them activated in 1931 and 1972 destroyed the city each time. Given that and a general belief among the population that major quakes hit roughly every 40 years, the population reacted with a major dose of nerves from the first moment, and had every reason to do so.

Not until midnight on April 10 did President Ortega himself appear on a nationwide TV hookup. After a confusing message full of religious appeals, he decreed the red alert for the country as a whole. By that time it was Friday of Sorrows and the jumpy inhabitants in the capital and a good part of the country’s Pacific Coast were anxiously going through their own Stations of the Cross. Never have so many people congregated in churches and so few headed to the beaches.

A responsible government

The government fully took on the emergency situation on a daily basis. In her role as government communication secretary, First Lady Rosario Murillo gave radio messages commenting on virtually every aftershock, which were in turn picked up by the government TV channels. She insistently exhorted the population to take prevention measures given what could happen. For two weeks a good part of the population in the capital and the other municipalities most affected by the quakes slept in the street or in their yard or porch for fear of a late-night quake. The third quake registering over 6 on the Richter scale, which hit just after 11 pm on Sunday the 13th, brought yet another round of alerts and precautions.

Given fears that another strong quake could alter some of Managua’s most dangerous fault lines, the government finally announced the wise decision to demolish the remaining multi-story but wall-less ruins semi-destroyed by the 1972 earthquake in which very poor families have made their homes ever since. These open shells of buildings, originally judged strong enough to be brought back into use with new facades, have become part of the capital’s landscape, known to all as “los escombros” (the rubble). Some have indeed been rebuilt while others have been demolished over the years. Now the government has evacuated the last dozens of families to a safe place and promised them a new house elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Army installed three field hospitals, one in Ciudad Sandino, just around the lake from Managua, and two in different points of the capital itself, in anticipation of a greater catastrophe. Fortunately, however, the damage was only moderate (see Nicaragua Briefs in this issue for details).

The peculiarity of the seismic events attracted experts from Chile, Mexico and Japan, all countries with their own seismic experience, and specialists from the friendly countries of Venezuela and Cuba. The role of the national scientists was and will continue to be crucial, given their accumulated experience and familiarity with our telluric history.

Rapid response capability

The governing party’s always impressive organizing and mobilizing capacity and the economic and human resources it can mobilize meant an immediate presence in the most affected areas around Nagarote, Mateare and other areas. Brigades, mainly of young people, wearing FSLN government t-shirts gave the hundreds of homeless people food, mattresses and construction materials to begin to rebuild.

We can only applaud the responsibility, diligence and sensibility with which the government acted, particularly compared to Nicaragua’s former governments in times of crisis. When much of Managua was leveled by the December 1972 earthquake, the thousands of homeless spent weeks waiting for the Somoza government to respond. Meanwhile, they watched helplessly as its National Guard busied itself looting the damaged and destroyed homes and even containers of emergency supplies arriving from abroad. President Alemán’s response to the tragedies provoked by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 also left a lot to be desired, including his unpardonable refusal to heed the call by Posoltega’s Sandinista mayor to evacuate her municipality given the probable collapse of the Casita Volcano’s crater lake. As a result several thousand people died in the massive mud¬slide that indeed did happen.

Setting aside comparisons with other Nicaraguan governments, we recall the first Sandinista government’s laudable response to the 10 days of historic non-stop rains in May 1982, which brought as much flooding to western Nicaragua as Mitch did 16 years later. Honduras had only a tenth the damage but suffered twice the number of dead because teams from the Sandinista mass organizations worked day and night with the Army Civil Defense in Nicaragua to save thousands of stranded people and run ad hoc shelters for those left homeless. Although participation in such humanistic endeavors was more voluntary and spontaneous then than now, when state employees and young party militants are more pressed into service, the government has demonstrated the same admirable rapid response capability in this new emergency.

Favored by timing
and a centralist model

The government was favored by the timing of the crisis, which pushed the “Richter” reading of the parliamentary maneuvers immediately preceding it out of the headlines. It was also favored by the fact that the crisis wasn’t catastrophic, i.e. was limited to a few geographic areas and a relatively small amount of damage, even though the prolongation in time left many with ragged nerves. The high drama and low urgency allowed the FSLN to exhibit its organizational and mobilizing capacity, fields in which it has always excelled.

The government’s extremely centralist model also favored it, because decisions and information must be centralized in crises of this nature. But in this case, the centralism also showed its dark sides. Murillo’s omnipresent provision of extensive informative messages was so exaggerated that it—surely inadvertently—highlighted President Ortega’s current limitations, and constrained ministers and other government officials to endlessly repeating her messages out of fear of saying anything different or referring to any initiative corresponding to their own particular posts. Perhaps the most problematic aspect is that it relegated the national experts, who could have contributed more exact and thus more reassuring information.

A time of anxiety

The communication secretary also maintained a constant party bias in her messages. Considering that a sizable segment of the anxious population rejects both her and her manipulation, it added to the general anxiety a sense of unease that could have been avoided. Making matters even worse and contrary to Murillo’s calls for calm and love, the government radio and TV media contributed to the alarmism and panic, announcing each aftershock with the undulating howling of sirens and exaggerated warnings.

The crisis showed the traditional religiosity of a good part of the population. In all media “man on the street” interviews, knowledge of what was really going to happen was attributed to God and what had already happened was interpreted as divine punishment for the country’s moral and political “vices,” an event already announced in biblical texts or a warning of the imminent final judgment. The official messages tended to reinforce that religiosity, reiterating that we are a “Christian country,” projecting it as a kind of shield against the quakes.

Social infantilism vs
responsible statesmanship

The crisis also revealed, more than ever, an attitude and behavior the government has been encouraging, especially among the poorest; a kind of social infantilism rooted in a religiosity assumed as submission to power that is detrimental to civic consciousness.

Today, any person of any age or condition who receives anything from the government feels obliged, even pressured, to be obsequiously grateful, perceiving what is received not as a right but a personal favor from “Comandante Daniel and compañera Rosario.” This tag line, which saturated the government media’s news programs during the quake crisis, was unnecessary because it was already more than evident how responsibly the government apparatus was attending to the population.

A few days before Nicaragua’s first quake, the Chilean city of Arica experienced one that was more devastating than ours in both intensity and destructive capacity. And shortly after that, a voracious fire consumed whole areas of the city of Valparaíso. Taking full charge of the crisis resulting from these two catastrophes, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet visited the victims, speaking with great proximity, but also great sobriety. This didn’t happen in Nicaragua, where the responsibility was always exercised long distance, exclusively through the media.

Fear for Managua

On April 25, two weeks after the first earthquake, the scientific team of both national and international experts presented a summary report. Given what had happened and the probabilities that something more serious could still happen, it recommended that the government maintain the red alert in six municipalities—Managua, Ciudad Sandino, Mateare, Nagarote, León and La Paz Centro—while lowering it to yellow in the other municipalities of the departments of Managua and León and the rest of the Pacific Coast.

The aftershocks, the report said, could “continue for several days or even months,” adding that “it also must be borne in mind that the probability of an earthquake in Managua’s fault system could be greater today than before the events that began on April 10,” recalling “the city of Managua’s degree of seismic vulnerability and the always latent possibility of a strong earthquake.”

Tremors imperceptible to the population continued to occur under Managua as late as April 29, serving as a justification for Ortega to order the demolition of Managua’s Lighthouse of Peace and Acoustic Shell without consulting their builders. His reasons were interpreted as political rather than technical: attempts to erase the population’s memory of history. The Lighthouse was built in 1990 as a symbol of the end of the war by the government of Violeta Chamorro, who unseated Ortega in the 1990 elections. At its base are buried 15,000 rifles turned in by demobilized combatants from both sides of that cruel war. The Shell was erected in 2004 by Managua’s then-FSLN mayor, Herty Lewites, as a new adornment for the capital and a stage for large events. Lewites separated from the FSLN in 2006 to run for President on the Sandinista Renovation Movement ticket, challenging Ortega’s candidacy. He appeared to have a real shot at winning, but died of a reported heart attack in the middle of the campaign.

A positive analysis
of the ides of April

We close this issue on May 6, still on red alert and hoping that someday we will be able to look back on the ides of this April as a time of positive lessons. We hope the seismic crisis will make us more conscious of the fact that, whatever their catastrophic level, these episodes are normal, not exceptional on the Earth we inhabit and the country we live in. We hope the crisis will make us think and act: for example, to recognize the need to establish construction standards that are complied with and help the poor avoid having to turn to deficient cheap materials to build their houses.

We hope the crisis will make us less shortsighted, more responsible and more rationally creative. It has already sparked a debate about the idea of moving the capital somewhere safer, a creative proposal that is possible if done gradually.

Former Managua mayor Dionisio Marenco has been proposing it, starting back before becoming mayor, during his administration and still today. “If the main vulnerability is geological it has no remedy,” he said four years ago. “The situation could become unsustainable if the current urban tendency continues, because it has Managua crucified by housing developments and human settlements. We need to let the capital rest, to stop building more, leaving just what exists now and slowly start building and populating the areas in the direction of Granada, Sabana Grande and Tipitapa.”

Red light to the canal

But above all we hope this seismic crisis will make us more sensible. Only a few months ago engineer Dionisio Rodríguez, founder of Nicaragua’s Institute of Geology and Geophysics and one of our national seismology experts, explained Nicaragua’s geological formations. He was speaking at the first forum held in Managua by the Academy of Sciences to offer opinions and information about Ortega’s highly questioned interoceanic canal megaproject for Nicaragua, which the country’s scientists were never consulted about.

On that occasion, Rodríguez was very concerned, just as he was on the ides of April. He listed all the studies needed before deciding to dig that canal, studies that were in fact not done before the government signed a binding contract and even converted it into law. He mentioned studies of geological cartography—commenting that barely 20% of Nicaragua has been geologically mapped. He also mentioned studies of stratigraphy, structural tectonics, geomorphology and aerial, land, marine and lake geophysics, as well as geo-environmental studies. He indicated that the geology of not only Nicaragua but the whole of Central America needs to be taken into account, since we share it with our neighbor nations. And he referred with concern to all types of risks that need to be considered, all of them already experienced in our country: volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, landslides, floods, hurricanes, tremors and of course full-blown earthquakes.

Will the seismic red alert trigger a definitive red light that will halt the insane project of opening a canal in Nicaragua’s “young and thin crust,” as Rodríguez describes it?

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