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Vol. 82/No. 19 May 14, 2018
Nicaraguan workers protest social security
cuts, censorship
BY SETH GALINSKY
After five days of protests by tens of thousands of students, workers
and others across the country, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega
revoked his April 16 directive to raise social security payroll taxes
and cut benefits.
But even after the reversal of the anti-working-class measures protests
continued, condemning the killing of some 40 participants in previous
actions. Protest leaders say most were killed by the police or by
pro-government thugs. Two police were killed during the clashes. Ortega
also deployed soldiers around government buildings and shut down five
television stations for reporting on the protests.
On April 23, the day after Ortega reversed the directive, tens of
thousands joined a Managua protest initiated by COSEP, the main
organization of capitalist business owners, calling for an end to
violence and the initiation of a “dialogue.” This time the police and
thugs stayed away. The government has agreed to the dialogue.
Dozens of stores and commercial centers — including a dozen of Walmart’s
100 Nicaragua locations — were looted during the protests. Ortega and
Vice President Rosario Murillo, who is also his wife, seized on the
looting to claim protesters were being manipulated by criminals and
opposition political parties.
“We have to re-establish order,” Ortega said. “We cannot allow groups to
impose chaos, crime and looting.” Murillo blamed the protesters for the
violence. “Encouraging, stimulating, provoking, disturbing tranquility,”
she said, “is a sin.”
Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution
Ortega and Murillo lead the Sandinista National Liberation Front
(FSLN), but this has little but the name in common with the party that
led workers and peasants in Nicaragua in July 1979 to overthrow the U.S.
backed-dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
Along with the revolution in Grenada earlier that year, Fidel Castro
said in 1980, there were now “three giants rising up to defend their
independence, sovereignty, and justice, on the very threshold of
imperialism.”
Worried that the example could inspire others in Latin America and
around the world, Washington organized counterrevolutionary groups that
waged an eight-year contra war that left 30,000 dead and sabotaged
economic development.
The Nicaraguan people defeated the contras. But instead of using that
victory to organize workers and peasants to move forward, to take more
control of production and to give more land to the peasants, the FSLN
leadership rejected following the example of the Cuban Revolution.
Instead of deepening the revolution, the FSLN abandoned its historic
program. Ortega and the other leaders transformed the organization into
a bourgeois electoral party, increasingly divorced from the interests of
workers and farmers.
This course led to the party losing the 1990 presidential election to
Violeta Chamorro, a recognition that the revolution was no more.
Ortega’s alliance with capitalists
In 2006, Ortega won the presidential election, but not based on a
program to advance the interests of working people. He then forged an
alliance with COSEP and with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, both
of which had opposed every advance of the Sandinista revolution after
Somoza’s overthrow.
Ortega was re-elected in 2011 and again in 2016, this time with Murillo
as his vice president.
The attack on social security was first proposed by the International
Monetary Fund, which had been collaborating with the Ortega government
for years to improve conditions for local and foreign capitalists. The
government has recently increased sales taxes and cut subsidies for
electricity.
The attacks on protesters by police and FSLN-organized thugs ignited
simmering anger at government policies that favor the bosses at the
expense of the working class, attempts to censor the press and social
media and widespread corruption.
“The social security move was the drop of water that made the glass
overflow,” Javier Calero, a software technician in Managua, told the
Militant by phone April 27. “Every month prices are going up 5 or 10
percent, but our wages aren’t going up.”
Carrying Nicaraguan flags and handmade signs against the attack on
social security, protesters sang the national hymn, and shouted, “Free
homeland or death,” a slogan that was popular during the revolution.
“The big problem here is that the whole political class is discredited,”
Calero said. “There is not a single political party that has people’s
confidence.”
The newly formed April 19 Student Movement has called for the firing of
all police commanders responsible for the attacks on the demonstrations,
for freedom of speech, for a revamped electoral council, for early
elections and for a “state of law.”
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