Caribbean Coast elections: Between conspiracy and responsibility

Regional elections were held on March 2 in the North and South Caribbean Coast. For the first time ever, the FSLN will have the majority on both Regional Councils. Here are a few data, many questions and some important reflections on the dark and light aspects of these elections.

Salvador García Babini

Quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing election results on the Caribbean Coast is always a challenge due to the dynamics of the elections themselves, the small amount of data available at the end and the task of understanding the complexity of the political, social and economic background in play before, during and after the elections. I’ll try to interpret the March 2 election data without losing sight of the context of the whole region.

Lack of transparency

In the seventh elections for regional governments of the North and South Caribbean Coast (CCN and CCS, respectively, formerly RAAN and RAAS), held on March 2, voters elected 45 Regional Council members for each region from among the 11 political parties running. The official results in the CCN were Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) 28, the regional indigenous party Yatama 11, Independent Liberal Party (PLI) 5 and Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) 1. In the CCS they were FSLN 30, PLC 6, Yatama 4, PLI 3 and the regional Multiethnic Indigenous Party (PIM) 2.

There was a lack of transparency, which is no longer surprising, as the effort of the current Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) to provide public information is inefficient at best. After the elections its web page only published the number of Council members elected for each political party, providing no information on the number of votes by electoral district and no results by polling station as required by law.

This lack of transparency aggravates the credibility problem of the electoral process by rendering parties unable to compare official results with their own tallies. A noteworthy blow to the autonomy won on the Caribbean Coast in the eighties is the fact that for the first time in the history of regional elections the information about the results didn’t come out of Bilwi or Bluefields, the two regional capitals, but was centralized in Managua, with the strongly questioned CSE President Roberto Rivas speaking for all of Nicaragua. Kenny Lisby, director of Radio Caribe in Bilwi, commented to me on this change: “The reports were broadcast but there was no opportunity to ask questions or make comments. Apparently that was precisely the strategy.”

Abstentions “won”

Abstentions took first place in the election results, according to different media and institutions able to reconstruct the data using dispersed unofficial information. It is thus known that the total number of eligible voters in both regions, based on the active and passive election rolls, was 353,582 people, of whom 146,559 voted, counting both the valid and invalidated ballots. This figure shows 41.4% participating and 58.6% abstaining.

Even taking into account the formal complaints made by Yatama and PLI that part of the population—a still unknown number—were unable to vote because they had been removed from the voting rolls or were registered at a polling station far from their home, the low level of electoral participation by the people on the Caribbean Coast is a historical trend. Except for the first regional elections in 1990 and 1994, abstentions have always come in first: 58% in 1998, 62% in 2002, 55% in 2006 and 60% in 2010.

The deeper problems

How should these figures be interpreted? The first thought is that a good part of the coast population has no confidence in either the political class or the ability of regional governments to solve society’s specific daily problems. They know about the corruption cases and lack of transparency and it’s common to hear the rational, “Why vote if everything’s going to stay the same?”

After several years of working on the North Caribbean Coast and making this post-election visit, I see many problems that are worrying the citizenry and remain unresolved. Among those most talked about are territorial insecurity, which is generated by the continued advance of the agricultural frontier, with mestizo cattle ranchers pushing onto indigenous-owned territories; high unemployment levels; crime and the precariousness of an economy that grants concessions to companies exploiting sea, forest and mineral products, undermining the possibilities of thousands of local people to improve their income.

There’s also the lack of secondary schools; a health system that has broken down in the urban areas and has a minimal presence of medical staff and medicines in the rural areas; the negligence of institutions responsible for protecting the forests from deforestation by large companies—including Albaforestal, one of the FSLN-run businesses created with the income from Venezuelan oil sales—and a road system in extremely bad condition, making transportation within and between the two regions very difficult. None of the political parties put forth concrete ideas for dealing with these deeper problems.

The electoral pace continues

Two other factors influence people’s decision to vote or not. The first is that a good part of the mestizo population—mainly those who have lived only a short time in the region and those who live far from Bilwi or Bluefields—don’t feel represented by the autonomous regional structure or its political structures.

The second is that the rural indigenous population and those of African descent feel caught up in a whirlwind pace of elections. They elect the communal judge once a year, the síndico (a community authority in charge of resource allocation) and the territorial government every two years, the municipal mayor every four years, and since the constitutional reform earlier this year they will now elect the regional government every five years instead of every four, as well as the national government every five years.

Beyond what these governments mean symbolically and materially to the people, it can be deduced that this constant electoral exercise, combined with the little immediate societal gains, has eroded the desire to participate. In any case, to better understand the electoral behavior it would be important to take a reading of the general percentages, looking at the numbers by municipality, territory, electoral district, polling station, ethnicity, gender and age. But to do this the CSE would have to publish all the voting tallies signed in each polling station. For example, a report on these elections by the Center for Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast (CEDEHCA) gave the approximate participation in the city of Rosita as 34% while in Siuna it was 65%. It would be interesting to analyze this difference but that would necessitate more information from the CSE.

The FSLN with a majority
and no one to challenge it

After the March 2 elections, the media mainly concentrated its attention on three aspects. One was that for the first time the FSLN won the majority of Council seats in both autonomous regions. The second was the technical fraud the FSLN would have had to apply to get such results. And third was Yatama’s decision to split from Sandinista bench in the National Assembly and break the alliance the two parties have maintained since 2006.

The Caribbean Coast’s political-administrative structure is made up of two complimentary pillars: the Regional Council, which legislates, and the Regional Coordinator, or Governor, who applies the laws and decisions and administers the resources. The FSLN’s new majority in both regions theoretically gives it the legal ability to pass laws and make decisions without requiring any votes from the other political parties as well as the ability to implement whatever laws it passes.

The stated concern of the other parties and of public opinion is that the FSLN could promote measures and approve projects that could hurt the population and that the other political forces, with their minority of votes, could do nothing to stop it. This fear should be put in perspective, however, since it assumes two facts that in reality almost never exist.

The FSLN’s majority and
the real correlation of power

First, the political parties don’t necessarily defend different ideological positions with respect to public policies or fight to promote different forms of management. Outside of their public declarations could we show, for example, that the parties have different positions in actual practice about the natural resource exploitation, the dangerous work of lobster divers or the pollution of rivers by the mining companies in Rosita and Bonanza? Has any party done anything to reverse the negative effects of these environmental tragedies on the people’s health?

It would be interesting for the national media to inform us of the debates in the Regional Councils on such topics or on the transoceanic canal, which might well cut through the Rama Kriol territory in the south, or on the oil exploration rights granted in Miskitu territory. Would there be opposing positions between the FSLN and other parties?

Second, decisions about the important economic, political and social projects for the Caribbean Coast are made in the monthly Regional Council sessions where they pass resolutions. For both this reason and the Regional Government’s dependence on the transfer of money from the central government in Managua for its functioning, political autonomy is still very weak.

It’s a problem of correlation of power. The central government is in the FSLN’s hands. Thus, if it didn’t hold the majority in the Regional Councils, there’s no guarantee that the other Council members wouldn’t align themselves with it anyway, or the business community wouldn’t lobby hard for or against a given law. This is the reality of today’s political scene.

In any case, the other parties are obliged as social forces to argue against what they consider the FSLN is doing wrong, mobilize people to make change and make concrete proposals for how to do things better.

On another level, it’s also true that making effective political decisions isn’t just about passing laws but also about the work undertaken in each of the Regional Governments’ 15 work commissions. They are where the objectives, projects and laws are accomplished or not. Moreover, they are where the citizenry can play a fundamental role. Although it’s obvious, it’s easy to forget that political dynamics in the Caribbean Coast happen in other arenas, where the number of Council members each party has isn’t the determining factor.

So was there fraud?

Can we say for sure that there was electoral fraud? It’s not an easy question to answer. First, no political party presented evidence of fraud, nor were the polling tables challenged. As far as we’ve been able to investigate, only Yatama made a formal complaint to the CSE, arguing that it should recognize two Yatama Council members instead of one in electoral district 7 of the CCN. To back up its claim, it submitted as evidence the final summary tally of votes prepared by the Puerto Cabezas Municipal Electoral Council. We don’t know what the response was.

Apparently the handling of the electoral rolls showed more irregularities this year than in previous years. The population itself, the media and all political parties reported cases of people whose name appeared on the rolls of a polling station far from their residence, in other neighborhoods or even in other municipalities. Or the name had been eliminated from the voting rolls entirely, which meant the aspiring voter went from polling station to polling station without finding where to vote—an experience also known on the Pacific side of the country, which has earned the term “crazy mouse syndrome.”

Leaders of both Yatama and PLI pointed out that the rolls they received several weeks before the election were different from those the officials used the day of the vote, and confirmed that people who were on the first list had been erased or transferred on the second list. They maintain that the people unable to exercise their right to vote were sympathizers of these two parties, which would suggest evidence of the FSLN’s intentions to reduce opposition votes. However, I also heard FSLN party sympathizers in Bilwi say they experienced the same irregularities. How can one quantify how many party sympathizers this happened to? Translated into results, it’s one thing if Yatama had 500 less voters, and quite another if it had 15,000 less, which is what it’s saying in its latest official pronouncement, dated May 5.

Yatama presented the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) four files with a list of 1,400 people in Waspam and Puerto Cabezas who presumably went to vote for it and couldn’t. However, even if one could show that all these people had the correct documents and weren’t allowed to vote, how can one prove each person’s political intention?

A conspiratorial fraud?’

In addition to the irregularities in the voter rolls, there’s an accusation that the FSLN increased its final results by using other strategies: allowing its militants—including police and army members—to vote two or three times in one polling station, buying votes by giving money to groups of youth or legalizing lands for mestizo settler families. Brooklyn Rivera claimed that the FSLN offered liberty to people arrested or sought by the authorities in exchange for their families voting for the FSLN.

The more conspiratorial analyses maintain that the FSLN analyzed the history of the voting behavior of each electoral district and each polling station and based on its calculations designed a strategic reorganization of voters. Thus it sent its militants and other people to polling stations in which it usually lost even though they weren’t registered on their voter roll. Likewise they removed a number of non-FSLN voters from the voter roll of those same polling stations, sending them to other areas where the FSLN held a majority so that if these “crazy mice” actually found the station they had been moved to, their vote wouldn’t affect its results. How can one prove this manipulation?

The parties’ responsibility

Although it’s not an easy task to pull together all this evidence, talk isn’t enough to influence reality even if it does influence perceptions. It’s essential that the political parties document the irregularities, review the voter rolls used and cross check the data against the ballot count tally copies they are supposed to be given. Recording the magnitude of the irregularities, demonstrating its logic and explaining the internal connections would allow the intentionality of the actions to be reconstructed and show us if we’re facing a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud or only isolated errors and offenses within a normal process.

Without a rigorous and public report complaints always lose strength and won’t hold up legally. Even when the CSE is unwilling to review a situation that might damage its image or that of the FSLN, informing the citizenry is a social responsibility of the parties and a vital tool in consolidating the country’s governance.

One interesting fact worthy of analysis is that although the FSLN received 27,485 votes more than in the 2010 election—a supposed milestone in the history of the Caribbean Coast—Yatama received 4,338 more.

Break-up of the Yatama-FSLN alliance

News about the break-up of the Yatama-FSLN alliance centers on the alleged electoral fraud that led National Assembly legislators Brooklyn Rivera and Nancy Elizabeth Enriquez to resign from the FSLN bench. The two Yatama members were elected in 2011 on the FSLN ticket as part of that alliance, since Yatama, as a regional party, cannot directly put up candidates for national office.

But the underlying issue isn’t about that political scandal. The emphasis should be placed on Yatama’s responsibility to the people of the Caribbean Coast as part of a political agreement that involved social commitments that go back years and weren’t limited to the power plays in the National Assembly. To talk about Rivera as either a victim or a demon distorts the discussion of Yatama’s real past performance. Given the obvious fact that Rivera, shielded by Yatama, will continue cutting secret deals with the FSLN on behalf of his personal interests, it’s essential to look at what that alliance, signed in 2006, has produced.

While the agreement never had the sympathy of the Yatama’s grassroots, due to historic mistrust, the leaders on both sides viewed it from a pragmatic standpoint. Crudely we can say that the FSLN attempted to improve its national image, especially in the coast itself, by projecting an appearance of reconciliation and consensus. Meanwhile Yatama saw it as a path to access arenas of power and publicly legitimize itself as a key counterpart in developing a work agenda on the coast. Carlos Alemán, just re-elected as president of the Regional Council in the CCN, sums it up as “a governability agreement and an agenda for joint work.”

Throughout the years a good part of the governability was based on the incorporation of Yatama militants into government institutions at all levels—regional, national and international. They were given top posts in the local Social Security and Internal Revenue offices, the Ministry of Environment, the National Assembly and even the Central American Parliament PARLACEN. It was also based on the guarantee that Brooklyn Rivera, as Yatama’s top leader since its inception as a military organization opposing the FSLN in 1987, would keep the grass roots from mobilizing around topics that could hurt the FSLN’s interests. At least in the northern Caribbean Coast both these achievements helped maintain relative political stability.

The 13 points of the “Alliance Agreement”

As for the work agenda, it was presented in a document signed by both parties and known as “the Alliance Agreement” in which they pledged to promote 13 important points, above all for the non-mestizo population.
These 13 points are:

1) Resume the process of demarcating and titling the indigenous and Afro-descendant territories
2) Reform the Autonomy Statute
3) Reform the Electoral Law to take into account the verdict by the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Court on Human Rights regarding political participation by the population based on its traditions and not only on political parties
4) Implement the Court’s verdict
5) Restructure government institutions to include local people
6) Contain the advance of the agricultural frontier
7) Schedule the rebuilding of Wangki after the damage caused by the armed conflict of the 1980s
8) Promote regional production
9) Promote social projects
10) Improve the transfer and implementation of the regional budgets
11) Sustain regional governance on the equitable distribution of Council members among the various executive and legislative positions
12) Achieve national unity for autonomy
13) Form a commission of guarantors and witnesses of good faith.
This isn’t the place to take stock of each of these points, but we can mention that some of them, particularly 11, have been accomplished; others, such as 1, have been partially fulfilled; others, including 2 were discussed and others, for example 3, were never even mentioned. In an interview, Brooklyn Rivera complained that the Sandinistas hadn’t fulfilled virtually any of these 13 commitments. One can only wonder what concrete political actions Yatama has taken to do so. And now that it has broken the alliance with the FSLN, is it still going to honor its commitment to what it signed up for or does the break-up signify a clean slate?

Yatama: Guarantor of stability?

Beyond the fact that the FSLN now holds the majority in both Regional Councils, Yatama still has enough social strength to destabilize the region, especially in the north. Yatama not only considers itself the representative of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean Coast—especially the Miskitus—but also maintains an ideological monopoly that can activate the use of violence among hundreds of men who fought in the eighties and feel an historical loyalty. It is this inheritance that Yatama uses as a guarantor in negotiating social stability. What consequences will the break-up of the alliance have for the governability of the Caribbean Coast? It remains to be seen, but it will surely depend on how the political scene is organized, how political positions are doled out and the agreements between the leaders of Yatama and their base.

Initially Yatama refused to acknowledge the election results but it ended up accepting them. The same occurred with the other parties that won Council seats in the election. On May 4 during the swearing-in ceremony for the new authorities, Yatama organized protests against the CSE members who arrived for the event.

Certainly there’s discontent among Yatama grass roots who believe the CSE stripped them of 7 of the 18 Council members they say won. This discontent serves Brooklyn Rivera by publicly demonstrating the strength of his political organization, warning of its dangerousness and demonstrating his ability to move masses of people.

Verdict of the Inter-American
Court on Human Rights

After a long silence, Yatama has again denounced the failure to comply with the 2005 Inter-American Court on Human Rights verdict ordering Nicaragua to reform the Electoral Law to give space to other types of political representation than parties and more in line with the Caribbean Coast’s communal and territorial traditions.

Although Yatama hasn’t presented any proposals on how these reforms might look, it has vaguely expressed its intention to get the present electoral districts annulled and see to it that the new Indigenous, African-descent and Multiethnic Territories (23 in all) function as official spaces to elect the candidates who will govern the Caribbean Coast. One problem, however, is that the combined area of all these territories is less than the area of the North Caribbean and South Caribbean regions, which represent approximately 30% of Nicaragua’s total land area.

This obviously raises some unavoidable concerns in any discussion of this topic. What would happen to the population that remains outside of these territories? What would be the requirements for being a candidate and being able to run for office? How would the budgets be assigned for the campaigns? Would the existing electoral districts remain for use in national elections? How would the votes be tallied for the election of Regional Council members? Would there be modifications in the political make-up of the Regional Councils and Governments?

And the basic question: Do the FSLN and the other parties have the political will to reform the law, given that it means including cultural logics that are different from the rules of the game currently governing the political parties?

We can deduce that...

Given that the Inter-American Court verdict has been in place for almost ten years since it was handed down and that Brooklyn Rivera chairs the National Assembly’s Ethnic Affairs Commission, it’s striking that Yatama still has neither a clear political agenda nor a technical proposal on how to accomplish this. We can deduce that for this party to now call attention to the Court’s ruling is more a strategy to influence the CSE and have a political platform to give the party a national media presence and thus negotiate a share of power in the new post-electoral scene on the coast.

Salvador García Babini is an anthropologist.

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