https://socialistaction.org/2018/08/09/whats-behind-the-protests-rocking-nicaragua/
What’s behind the protests rocking Nicaragua?
/ 24 hours ago
Aug. 2018 Nica women (javier Bauluz-AlJaz)
Women build a barricade in Managua, Nicaragua, to protect themselves
from paramilitary and police after being after being attacked by them
few hours before. June 16, 2018.
By CHRISTINE MARIE
Since April, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have taken to the
streets in protest of the policies of the government led by FSLN
President Daniel Ortega. The protests at one point escalated to road
blocks and occupations and have been fiercely resisted by the
government. Undoubtedly, Nicaraguan society is in crisis. Here, we
present some important background information as to its origins.]
It is clear the working class is not in the leadership of the opposition
forces currently carrying out a “national dialogue” with the government.
A mis-leadership composed of the business group COSEP and the Catholic
Church seems to be in the driver’s seat in these meetings. Additionally,
the United States and other imperialist powers are intervening via the
Organization of American States and wooing student groups to demand new
elections without any regard for Nicaragua’s sovereignty.
Given the number of reactionary players attempting to shape Nicaragua’s
future, it is important to understand how students, the working class,
and small business people came to be ready to take to the streets when
the regime proposed to implement International Monetary Fund
recommendations to cut pensions.
Since the 2006 election of Daniel Ortega to the presidency, there has
been what the Latin American Studies scholar William I. Robinson called
an “intensification of capitalist development.” The Nicaraguan
government, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund, has
facilitated a dramatic growth in imperialist investment in Free Trade
Zones, infrastructure, agribusiness, and mining. At the same time,
according the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 7, 2011), large
contributions from Venezuela were used to bolster private companies tied
to key figures in the ruling FSLN party.
The resulting lop-sided economic growth, not unsurprisingly, has led to
a series of ecological crises that are threatening peasants and
indigenous peoples, and to new inequalities that must be faced by
workers, small businesses, and the people making a living in the
informal sector. Significant layers of the Nicaraguan population have
responded to these indignities over the last decade with protests.
Aug. 2018 Nica funeral (AlJaz)
A funeral for a protester shot by police.
In 2014, discontent with the state of affairs was threatening enough to
the ruling FSLN that it fought and won legislation to overturn the term
limits that would have prevented Ortega from running again for office.
In 2016, FSLN power was used to press the Supreme Court to disqualify
Ortega’s main opponent from the election altogether, bringing civil
libertarians into the forefront of the social movement.
One of the most graphic responses to the FSLN electoral manipulation was
a demonstration of 10,000 indigenous people who supported the Yatama
party in Puerto Cabezas-Bilwi. Yatama has been protesting the FSLN’s
failure to rein in a massive settler movement that is grabbing land in
the autonomous zones where the Miskitu people hold communal property
rights. Over half of the Miskitia rainforest region has already been
taken by colonists seeking timber, gold, and land for cattle-raising,
and the FSLN has not acted.
In April, these settler incursions onto indigenous land resulted in the
infamous fire in the Indio Maíz Biodiversity Reserve, a fire that
destroyed 6300 hectares or 15,567 acres of protected land. The
Nicaraguan government’s initial refusal to accept international
firefighting help was one of the sparks that ignited the April protest
movement, as the catastrophe was such a dramatic example of the “profits
before people” ethos of the new Sandinista economic plan for the nation.
The outrage over the Indio Maíz fire was prepared by years of indigenous
and rural protests against a concession signed by the regime with the
Hong Kong-based HKND Company for a massive and hugely destructive
shipping canal that would bisect the country, break up the Mesoamerican
biological corridor, and cut through four nature reserves, a globally
important wetland, and Central America’s largest body of freshwater. The
scale of the proposed digging and accompanying land expropriation is
hard to grasp. The canal has been slated to be 65 miles long, occupy 500
square miles, and displace at least 7000 people.
In the years since the canal project was announced, rural Nicaraguans
and indigenous groups have carried out at least 90 protests (Havana
Times, April 28, 2018). In the last year, news accounts have begun to
report that the canal itself may be dead in the water due to lack of
investment and a new deal between Panama and Beijing. But no one in the
movement is relieved, as the legislation that was signed for the canal
project, Law 840, allows subsidiary development of deepwater ports,
roads, and tourist areas under the same sovereignty-threatening and
people-displacing rules. The FSLN has announced that it is going
forward, for example, with a deepwater port in the heart of indigenous
territory, just north of the Indio Maíz Biodiversity Reserve, at
Bluefields (Rico, Today Nicaragua, Feb. 15, 2018).
The government’s facilitation of big investment by foreign mining
companies has led to a new protest movement as well. In Nicaragua, there
is no greater symbol of imperialist perfidy than a gold mine. In 1926,
the Nicaraguan hero Augusto Sandino famously began his guerrilla war
against the Yankees by occupying the San Albino gold mine and using the
funds from production to buy weapons for his army, a combat unit that
was initially composed of 30 gold miners. After four months of lucrative
extraction, he blew up the mine, making it a symbol of international
capitalist exploitation (Sandra Cuffe, “Nicaragua’s Golden Rule”).
In 2015, the residents of the agricultural town of Rancho Grande in the
department of Matagalpa, part of the buffer zone of the Bosawás
Biosphere Reserve, won a years-long struggle to stop the Canadian
company B2Gold’s “El Pavón” open-pit gold-mining project there. The
Yaoksa Guardians community environmental defense movement not only
repeatedly demonstrated despite police violence, but organized a civil
resistance campaign against the state that included a boycott of the
schools and keeping their children home until the Minister of Education
showed up to experience their protests.
The Rancho Grande victory was one high point in a grinding battle now
mobilizing regional anti-mining groups from the Chontales, León, and
Nueva Segovia departments, united under the banner of a new organization
called the National Environmental Movement Against Industrial Mining
(MONAFMI). One of the anticipated fights will focus on a proposed new
mine in the historic San Albino district, which is to be operated by the
Canadian Golden Reign Resources.
In August 2017, Ortega issued executive decree 15-2017, which repeals
the country’s historic Environmental Evaluation System and allows
environmental review of mines to be bypassed all together by a decree of
the Ministry of the Environment. At the same time, the people of Santa
Cruz de la India were in the streets contending with riot police in
order to protest an attempt to start a mining project, backed by the
World Bank Group’sInternational Finance Corporation (IFC), to be run by
the UK-based Condor Gold. Civil resistance prevented actual digging for
nearly a year but in July, the company submitted a revised permit plan
to Managua, which is expected to be approved.
Condor Gold expects to produce 80,000 ounces of gold a year from this
one pit. Its expectations are in line with the ecologically damaging and
demographically disruptive national output of gold and silver, which has
grown seven times since the 2007 election of Ortega (Cecelia Jasmine,
mining.com, July 6, 2018). It is easy to see why a large layer of the
Nicaraguan population feels that it is time to take down Nicaragua’s
“open for business” sign.
One of the greatest indignities for working-class Nicaraguans has been
the drastic expansion of Free Trade Zones. In 2010, Free Trade Zones in
Nicaragua accounted for 90% of manufacturing exports from the country
(Nathalie Picarelli, “Who Really Benefits from Export Processing Zones?”
August 2016). In 2017, the National Commission of Free Zones approved
the entry of new companies in the sectors of tobacco, textiles, and
agro-industry. There are now 115,000 workers in Nicaragua being
exploited by industrialists who have been given a 90% tax exemption for
10 years and pay their laborers an average of $157 per month, an amount
that only comes to 33% of what the government estimates is necessary for
a minimum existence.
Investors are not hard to come by, as the maquiladora wage in Nicaragua
is the lowest in Central America. However, the bravery of workers
demanding drinking water, health care, and lower production goals became
international news when a 2016 protest of 3000 workers at the South
Korean company Tecnotex in Tipitapa was stormed by government riot
police, and organizers were charged and found guilty of crimes with
prison sentences. Tecnotex produces garments for export to companies in
the United States, including Kohls, Target, JC Penney, and Walmart.
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August 9, 2018 in Latin America. Tags: Nicaragua
Related posts
Nicaragua: Dynamics of an interrupted revolution
Nicaragua hurts
Thousands resist pollution from copper smelting plant in India
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