Nicaragua: 47 years and a day

Having snacks with an old friend on Monday, I told him about how Sunday had been the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, and how Daniel Ortega had declared that Nicaragua should not hold elections any more because they just open the door to interference from the United States.

My friend didn’t respond well to my bitter laugh and old soldier’s grin.

I felt that the revolution had now finally and totally died. My sarcastic remark was that it lasted 47 years and one day. He got on my case because it’s not funny, and I should not act like it is.

No, it is not funny. It isn’t surprising either.

Liberation Day in Nicaragua is July 19, 1979.

The first election was in 1984. Even at that time there were people who did not want open elections, because they felt the United States would pour money into them the way they pour money into their own elections, and their little country would not keep its independence.

It did not happen in ’84, but it did happen in ’90.

I don’t really think that the outside money was the biggest influence on the Sandinistas getting voted out in 1990. The polls didn’t seem to say that either. What swung the vote was the Contra War dragging on and the draft. The opposition had a credible claim to be able to put an end to both the draft and the war. Hard to beat. And no democracy does well with the same party in power for eleven years.

It had been dying in stages since ’86.

After the first election, the Sandinista majority became less open to compromise with the opposition groups. In some ways, the open discussions and willingness to bend was greater under the Junta than with an elected president and legislature.

The government elected in 1990 was indeed bent toward the U.S. and the new world capitalism, and this went on for a long time.

By the time Daniel Ortega came back to the presidency in 2007, it was a different Sandinista front with a different leadership. Some say that Daniel was always an authoritarian, but he had never held such a post before, because it did not exist.

Leadership in the old Sandinista Front placed him in a committee of nine. Leadership of Nicaragua placed him as the member of a Junta of five, and eventually only three. He had only been constitutional president for four years and, during those four years, other voices also had influence inside and outside of his party.

The story of a political party becoming corrupt and authoritarian after many years in power is an old song. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista movement became more corrupt and authoritarian when out of power.

Just before they left power, individual Sandinistas took a significant amount of public property into their personal hands. Nicaraguans call this “La Piñata”. The excuse was to save it from coming under the control of the new government. Less effort was made making sure that farmers who benefited from land reform got deeds to their parcels.

Many members of the Front handed back their pins and quit. So, it left the wrong people in charge.

During the Sandinistas’ long time in opposition, many political alliances were made and broken, including with one of the Liberal Party presidents to follow. Friends who went to Nicaragua told me that they just thought of the Sandinistas as being part of the affluent.

The wide gap between the rural and urban poor and the affluent never narrowed.

Yet Nicaragua was still a country that was working on roads, expanding the electrical grid, sending kids to school, running healthcare centers, providing police protection, and doing many other things that had started during the revolution and advanced a lot easier without a civil war.

When the Sandinistas were voted back in, it was with a plurality. Progress continued, albeit under a set of policies that were more liberal capitalist than socialist.

Then it was a slow slide to 2018. The Sandinista administration had placed their people in the army and police. They had taken a hard line with opponents. And they had their hands on a lot of money. Ortega’s son is one of the richest people in the country.

Protests blew up in 2018, which is not that unusual, but the repression that followed was harsher than ever. That carried on through pseudo elections, and Nicaragua drifted into a nearly mono-party state. Opposition mayors became a thing of the past.

The boot has been coming down ever since. Revolutionary heroes were jailed. With them were civil rights defenders, priests, and basically anyone who criticized the new “presidential couple”.

Eventually a few hundred were stripped of Nicaraguan citizenship, saw all their property seized, and were put on planes to leave the country. Many more had left already.

Daniel Ortega is an old man now. He sometimes says things that never happen. Here in the U.S., we should know what it’s like to live under an eighty-year-old authoritarian.

I told my friend that I do not think it is funny, and he should not mistake my bitter smile for some kind of lack of concern.

What I feel is betrayed.

Don Macleay is the author of Internacionalista: Working and Living in Nicaragua 1982-87, to be published by Blue Ear Books.