It might be helpful to read max Blumenthal's coverage of what has recently
been happening in Nicaragua which appears on The Grayzone Project. There is a
split within the Ssandnista Movement now. The article that is posted below,
represents the point of view of, I think, the old guard Marxist faction.
There's another point of view that I've heard on several podcasts. Blumenthal
reports what has actually been going on, but his coverage doesn't include the
reaction to the Chinese project that took place a few years ago, if I remember
correctly, and it doesn't include any political rhetoric.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2018 12:29 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Faced with Nicaragua’s social and political crisis:
Solidarity with popular demands and against Ortegista repression!
https://socialistaction.org/2018/11/01/faced-with-nicaraguas-social-and-political-crisis-solidarity-with-popular-demands-and-against-ortegista-repression/
Faced with Nicaragua’s social and political crisis: Solidarity with popular
demands and against Ortegista repression!
/ 1 hour ago
Nov. 2018 Nica canal protest 2017
Peasants in 2014 protesting construction of the Great Nicaraguan Canal, to be
constructed by a Chinese corporation through Lake Nicaragua and environmentally
sensitive land.
This statement was adopted by the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
on 28 October 2018.
The Sandinista Popular Revolution
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was born as a “vanguard
organization” with an anti-imperialist and revolutionary orientation, as
established in its Historic Programme (1969), “capable of taking political
power (…) establishing a social system that wipes out the exploitation and
poverty that our people have been subjected to in past history.”
When the Somoza dictatorship was defeated in July 1979, the FSLN had the broad
support of the bulk of the population and tried to lay the objective and
subjective foundations of a revolutionary project of a socialist character,
although there were great challenges to face in a country with a highly
dependent economy and a profound social destructuring, not to mention the
counterrevolution that the United States promoted in the 1980s, which was
decisive in this stage of Sandinism. The Fourth International immediately
celebrated the overthrow of the dictatorship and was in full solidarity with
the revolutionary popular movement.
Aware that radical economic and social transformations would be gradual, the
FSLN promoted a Junta de Gobierno de Reconstrucción Nacional where the
Sandinista bloc and the bourgeoisie were represented. It was therefore
proclaimed that the principles of the revolution were the mixed economy,
political pluralism and non-alignment, as necessary strategies in the short
term.
In the long term, the Historic Programme of the FSLN was the general framework
to be developed, although it was not carried out in its entirety, leaving
important deficits with respect to women’s emancipation (in particular leaving
untouched the restrictive abortion laws which only permitted terminations if a
woman’s life was at risk) or the demands of the peasantry, as well as very
serious errors such as respecting the foreign debt contracted by Somoza and the
implementation of monetarist policies at the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless
from 1988, the Sandinista leaders introduced a structural adjustment plan that
degraded the conditions of the poor without affecting the rich. These policies
very much resembled the usual conditions imposed by the IMF and World Bank
while at the same time, under pressure from Washington, the two institutions
had suspended their aid to the Sandinista authorities.
These adjustment policies were very much criticized by certain tendencies
within the FSLN because they burdened the popular classes with the adjustment
effort.
However, the Programme of the FSLN did include the construction of a
Revolutionary Government that allowed full participation of the whole
population, both at the national and local level, respect for human rights,
freedom to organize the union movement in the cities and countryside, the
freedom to organize groups of peasants, youth, students, women, etc.
Latifundios were expropriated, land was redistributed and trade unions and
peasant associations were formed.
There was also the nationalization of factories, buildings and other assets of
the Somoza oligarchy.
During the following eleven years, education was generalized, the university
was opened to the popular classes, social assistance programs were created and
a universal health system and other basic services were set in motion, and
Sandinista Defence Committees (CDS) were launched to organize the population of
the neighbourhoods.
The FSLN also established a fair tax policy, labour rights, and historic social
justice for the Caribbean Coast, because of the exploitation and discrimination
against native indigenous peoples. It was therefore a socialism-oriented
programme that prepared the material conditions for it, with tactical and
strategic approaches, which, despite the difficulties of the context and the
threat of U.S. imperialism, opened new promises of rupture with the hegemonic
system.
However, the agrarian reform did not go far enough: the expropriations focused
mainly on the assets of Somoza and his allies, and spared the interests of
major capitalist groups and powerful families whom certain Sandinista leaders
wanted to turn into allies or fellow travellers.
Furthermore, instead of giving priority to small and medium farms, the FSLN
quickly created a State agrarian sector and cooperatives, which was not in line
with the attitudes of the rural population, parts of which became attracted by
the counterrevolutionary Contras.
Self-organization and workers’ control were not encouraged enough. Part of the
FSLN leadership was trained in Cuba in the 1960s-1970s, which, under the
influence of the Stalinized Soviet Union, was then promoting popular
organization within a very controlled and limited framework. As a result, the
masses could not fully participate in their own emancipation.
The betrayal of the FSLN’s Historic Programme and the establishment of an
authoritarian corporate regime
When the FSLN was defeated electorally in 1990, the new international situation
favoured the right, capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe deprived Nicaragua
of international allies. But people were also increasingly discouraged by the
direction the revolutionary process was taking. In the Sandinista rank and file
there was uneasiness due to the bureaucratization and verticalism of the
National Directorate of the FSLN, which elected the members of the CDS, union
posts, territorial cadres and intermediate commanders. Gradually, the absence
of democratization in these structures led to the development of a bureaucratic
Sandinista leadership that enjoyed privileges that contrasted with the reality
of the great majority who were asked to make economic and social sacrifices in
the name of the revolution.
When the main commanders of the National Directorate, public offices and middle
management grabbed – in what is popularly known as the piñata – the lands,
coffee plantations, mansions, haciendas, automobiles and other state properties
that the revolution had taken over in the name of the vast majority, this
malaise deepened. The arguments presented by the Commandantes were that this
was to prevent the enemy from taking possession of what had cost so much blood,
but this was not enough to explain to the population the personal enrichment of
the then incipient Sandinista bourgeoisie.
Subsequently, the FSLN under Daniel Ortega adopted an attitude that swung back
and forth between compromise and confrontation with the government of the
National Opposition Union (UNO) of Violeta Chamorro.
The National Directorate of the FSLN, controlled mostly by Daniel Ortega’s
Democratic Left current, on the one hand encouraged the struggles against
privatizations, while on the other, in the National Assembly, it supported the
Chamorro government that carried them out.
At the end of the 1990s, Ortega concluded a pact with the Constitutionalist
Liberal Party (PLC) of Arnoldo Alemán, who had been President since 1997, in a
sort of coexistence with the most conservative and corrupt right wing. These
were “dangerous friendships”
for a revolutionary project. However they were profitable for Daniel Ortega’s
FSLN and Alemán’s PLC, who obtained different benefits from such pacts. This
was seen with the PLC’s support of Ortega faced with the denunciation of the
sexual abuse of his stepdaughter Zoilamérica Narváez. And years later, when
Alemán, who had been sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for the galloping
corruption of his government, was allowed to serve out his sentence under house
arrest thanks to the men Ortega had placed in the judicial system, until the
Supreme Court quashed the conviction in 2009 during Ortega’s presidency.
The reform of the Electoral Law in the year 2000, promoted by Sandinista and
liberal deputies was another product of the Ortega-Alemán pact. The reform
allowed the presidency and vice-presidency of the Republic to be won with a
minimum of 35% and outstripping the second place candidates by a difference of
five percentage points. This new Electoral Law allowed for Daniel Ortega, who
had lacked enough support since 1990, to be elected in 2006 with 38.07% of the
votes.
As part of the opposition, the Sandinista parliamentary group voted in 2006, in
agreement with the conservative deputies, for a law that completely prohibits
abortion. They did so as part of the pact with the right wing that allowed the
FSLN to return to the presidency of the republic with the elections at the end
of 2006. And it was under the presidency of Daniel Ortega – who refused to
reverse the law – that this prohibition was included in the new penal code that
came into force in 2008. This prohibition does not allow for any exceptions,
even if the health or life of the pregnant woman is in danger, or the pregnancy
is the result of rape.
This move accompanied the progress made in consolidating other dangerous
friendships: this time, with a former FSLN adversary, Cardinal Miguel Obando y
Bravo, whom Ortega reinstated to public life as President of the Peace and
ReconciliationCommission, a body set up to ensure that those demobilized from
war complied with the agreements. This was the beginning of another privileged
relationship between Ortega’s FSLN and the de facto powers. In order to win the
votes of the conservatives, Daniel Ortega married Rosario Murillo in church
before the election of November 2006, with Cardinal Obando officiating.
It was also after Ortega’s return to the government that the FSLN formalized
the agreements with COSEP, establishing an alliance between these two sectors,
presented as a space for tripartite agreement between the government, the
private sector and the unions. However, the participation of the unions was
token, since they had been co-opted by the interests of the FSLN, that is, the
Ortega-Murillo tandem, as evidenced by the positions of the Central Sandinista
de Trabajadores
(CST) in cases of workers’ struggles against large employers such as the Pellas
family or the minimum wage agreements. Thus, little by little, from the
formulation of laws to wage negotiations, the Nicaraguan political economy was
subordinated to the interests of the big national capital. However, a pact of
this nature cannot be restricted to big national capital, since its own dynamic
leads to transnational capital, in particular to the extractive industry and,
above all, to mining.
Underlying all this is the neoliberal logic prevailing in the region:
the channelling of public resources to private investments, the outsourcing and
privatization of services, tax exemptions and benefits for capital, etc.
The free trade agreement with the United States was adopted in 2005.
Although the FSLN parliamentary group, then in opposition, voted against its
ratification in October 2005, in 2006, FSLN parliamentarians supported changes
in a series of laws that allowed the conditions imposed by the US to be
confirmed. Moreover, once in power from 2007, Daniel Ortega’s government did
not attempt at all to repeal this free trade agreement with the US superpower.
This was a further shift in the FSLN’s orientation as it had previously accused
the government of President Enrique Bolaños of subjugating Nicaragua to
Washington’s economic interests. The approval of this treaty by the FSLN MPs
was accompanied by support for changes in a whole series of laws to conform to
the conditions imposed by the USA. Other free-trade treaties were approved with
the FSLN’s support: a treaty with Taiwan (which came into force in 2008), one
concerning Central America with Mexico (2011) and another between Central
America and the European Union (2012).
In 2006, Nicaragua was a beneficiary of debt relief within the framework of the
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative – the IMF cancelled
$206 million of Nicaragua’s debt. When Ortega came back to government in 2007,
the IMF programme was over and the Fund saw no necessity to sign a new one as
it considered Nicaragua’s debt to be sustainable. Daniel Ortega’s government
nevertheless insisted on implementing a new programme in order to attract
foreign investors. The IMF eventually agreed, demanding from the government to
deepen the neoliberal policies pursued by the Right and to apply fiscal
austerity in order to have a primary fiscal surplus.
Thus the Bretton Woods institutions have no reason to reproach the Nicaraguan
government. The IMF notes “Nicaragua’s success in maintaining macroeconomic
stability” (March 2016). During the last visit of its technical staff (February
2018), this organization has declared that “economic performance in 2017 was
above expectations and the 2018 outlook is favourable”. As for the World Bank,
it chose the very moment in April 2018 when Ortega’s government had just
announced neoliberal measures concerning social security to congratulate Ortega
on his sound economic policies. In other words, Nicaragua has functioned within
the guidelines that these organizations impose on the region.
All this has been possible with FSLN majority control of the Assembly.
In addition, in November 2013, Ortega introduced an initiative for a Law to
Reform the Constitution of the Republic, which included the proposal to elect
the President with a “relative majority” of votes, independent of the
percentage achieved, and to allow indefinite presidential re-election.
Currently, Ortega’s FSLN has absolute control of the Assembly, with 71 deputies
out of a total of 92.
But there remain two great betrayals by the FSLN of its Historic Programme that
cannot be left unmentioned. The first is the demobilization and destruction of
the grassroots organizational fabric and of the large social movements, mostly
co-opted by the regime. This takes place through control at different levels,
from the legal normative, with the ban on standing in elections with
independent lists, and by the control exercised through the Councils of Citizen
Power (CPC), which are vertical forms of organization that pursue the control
of citizens for the purposes of power of the presidential couple.
The other betrayal is of women’s rights which, given the total prohibition of
abortion, the reform of the law of male violence, the persecution of the
feminist movement critical of the regime, impunity for years of sexual abuse of
Zoilamérica, etc., challenges the entire political and social system built
around Ortegismo. In 2012, after a major campaign by grassroots women’s
organizations – which started at the time of the revolution – Nicaragua
introduced Law 779 against violence against women. This law removed the
previous requirement for mediation in cases of abuse. This law was the result
of a progressive campaign, but there was a reactionary one against it, driven
by the Catholic hierarchy which labelled it as “anti-family”. This resulted in
the law being seriously weakened by an amendment reintroducing compulsory
mediation 15 months after it was first passed, with no resistance from the FSLN.
Feminist and worker-peasant based fronts of struggle. State repression as a
response.
At this point, it has been demonstrated that the Historic Programme of the
FSLN, committed to rights and equality among people, is contradictory to the
drift taken by Ortegismo. Within all the open fronts of struggle, it has been
the women’s movements, critical of the government, who have not given up on the
denunciation of the changes to Law 779, which reduces feminicide to the realm
of the relations of heterosexual couples or which includes mediation with
aggressors as a mechanism for conflict resolution. In other words, the law has
been vilified, as are the bodies of Nicaraguan women exposed to these laws or
demonstrating in the streets for their rights.
Other fronts are located in the fight against extractivism and there are
different examples of conflicts between the accumulation of capital and the
sustainability of life itself, derived from the incompatibility that
extractivism has as an engine of development that does not benefit the great
majority, nor the communities that suffer its negative effects, as was seen in
Rancho Grande or Mina El Limón. In both cases, in the face of community
organization and mobilization, the response has been repression. The same
happens with mining, hydroelectric and agribusiness projects.
But of all these projects that are a threat to communities and the environment,
there is one that has provoked an important mobilization, nationally and
internationally that Ortega has not been able to hide:
the projected construction of an inter-oceanic canal that proposes to split the
country and the region in two, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean,
crossing Lake Nicaragua, the main freshwater reserve in Central America. In
this case, the response has been the persecution, repression and stigmatization
of social movements.
Thus, the government, which serves the interests of private capital (whether
owned by local “traditional” capitalists, or bureaucratic or foreign ones) not
only acts to repress the people in favour of the transnationals, but is also
complicit in the destruction of the environment and guilty of widespread
violations of human rights.
April 2018 and the popular mobilization against the regime: Ortegismo crosses
the rubicon.
Eleven years have passed since Ortega’s return to government, a time in which
enough social discontent has accumulated for two events to trigger the upsurge
of April 2018: the government’s inaction in the face of the Indio Maíz Reserve
fire and the proposed reform of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute
(INSS). This reform would have cut current pension benefits by 5%, limited the
indexation of the pensions over the inflation rate, and introduced cuts to
future pensions for around one million wage-earners that could have been as
high as 13%.
The social outburst brought the gaze of the international community onto
Nicaragua and the popular discontent against the regime.
On April 18, demonstrations and protests erupted spontaneously and peacefully
in important cities, such as León and Managua, and were immediately violently
repelled by the government. Various human rights reports refer to organized
pro-government groups or “shock forces”
recruited from the Sandinista Youth, in addition to riot police. This
disproportionate use of violence fed the protests and mobilizations of April 19
through the so-called “autoconvocados”: tthat is young people, students,
workers, etc., who organized takeovers of streets and cities through the
“tranques”. This gradually spread through the country to cities like Masaya,
Granada, Matagalpa, Rivas and Estelí, adding to other collectives and
movements. Since that day, the government of Ortega-Murillo has continued with
police and military repression and, in particular, the actions of paramilitary
groups, which have indiscriminately shot the population. These groups are
masked, heavily armed and operate in full impunity, in the daylight and
alongside police forces. This indicates that they act in full agreement with
the regime.
On April 22, given the broad participation in the demonstrations, Ortega
cancelled the INSS reform. On April 24, the Government agreed to initiate a
National Dialogue through the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy,
composed of civil society organizations, students, peasants and even the
business sector, and with the Catholic Church as mediator, with the goal of
resolving the conflict. At that time, the social movements already had clear
demands for establishing dialogue: no negotiation without the cessation of
repression, a guarantee of justice and reparation for the demonstrators killed
in the previous days, and the departure of the Ortega-Murillo duo from power,
as a non-negotiable objective. The demand of the social movements was thus to
negotiate a post-Ortega transition. However, after insisting on these points,
the government decided to suspend the dialogue. For the social mobilization, to
continue negotiating in this context would have meant a reinforcement of
Ortegismo and its repressive regime.
At the same time, there has been a rapid response from state institutions to
legitimize repression, for example, with the enactment of the Anti-Terrorism
Law, which criminalizes and persecutes specific profiles of leaders of social
movements. Thousands of exiles and more than 400 dead, as well as the expulsion
of national and international human rights organizations, including the UN
itself, show the point of no return at which the regime has arrived. After the
massive use of terror meant to repress and intimidate the population, the
government took back control of the streets by the middle of July. Since then,
several hundred people, labelled as “terrorists” by the government, have been
arrested and are still imprisoned, with their rights not respected – the
associations of defence of human rights are not allowed to access the prisons,
nor are the lawyers of some detainees. Some of them have been intimidated and
tortured in order to force them to give false confessions that would support
the claim that the government faces a plot to remove it by force.
As a result of the repression, sections of the population have been
sufficiently intimidated that they do not take part in street protests.
Nevertheless, many demonstrations have been organized, but they have not
gathered as many participants as between April and July 2018. They have been
organized by a diversity of movements and organizations:
Articulation of Social Movements and Civil Society Organizations, Civic
Alliance for Justice and Democracy, Student Movements, April 19 Movements
(throughout the country), community-based organizations, Mothers of April,
Political Prisoners Committees, Women’s Movements and feminist networks, LGTBIQ
collectives, University, unions and independent trade associations … But there
is a consensus that Ortega and Murillo must leave the government and the need
to rebuild Sandinismo without Ortega.
But all these organizations are also against external interference that seeks a
way out of the conflict towards an “Ortegismo sin Ortega”; that is, the
maintenance of a clientelist structure that safeguards the economic interests
of national and transnational capital. Hence, one of the major current
challenges for the movements is the debate and consensus on that transition and
roadmap and that actors such as COSEP, currently key to the exit of
Ortega-Murillo, do not pose a threat to an emancipatory social and economic
project.
At this point of no return, the regime is using anti-imperialist rhetoric to
portray an attempt at a “soft coup d’état” as has occurred in other countries
in the region. The current orthodox anti-imperialism is reduced to a useful
screen for self-legitimizaton on the international stage, but it reduces a
conflict with deep and complex roots in the national reality to external
interference. Internally, it benefits only a group of people privileged enough
not to suffer the worst effects of the regime they have constructed in
Nicaragua.
A section of the international left supports this view of the conflict.
It considers imperialist powers – starting with the United States and their
allies in the region – to be largely responsible for destabilising the country,
and that a dominant sector of the protest movement is being led or manipulated
by the reactionary right. This part of the international left is suspicious of
reports asserting that the regime bears the main responsibility for the
hundreds of deaths that resulted from these dramatic events, or even considers
these as outright false claims.
Yet Ortega and his supporters cannot prove this so-called attempted coup
d’état. Most demonstrators have not used terrorist methods. The government
cannot prove the involvement of a single foreign mercenary.
No sector of the army has been denounced by Ortega for supporting the idea of a
coup, and in the last analysis the army has stayed on the side of the regime up
to now.
Faced with the facts presented here, it is simply fallacious to see soft coups
d’état in the Nicaraguan case. It is equally irresponsible to argue that
current mobilizations can be reduced to vandalism by some, or that human
rights, and especially women’s rights, are objects of negotiation or currencies
of exchange for any society. This is even less the case for the society that we
aspire to build as a revolutionary left. It is also fallacious to present
Ortega’s government as a socialist or leftist government, given the policies
which have been implemented for the last eleven years in favour of capital – as
is shown in the support of the IMF, the World Bank and big capital for Ortega,
as well as the support from capitalist powers, including US imperialism, until
the repression became too strong for them to continue supporting the regime
publicly. No people has to be satisfied with less than the noblest aspirations
of freedoms, democracy, social justice and human rights that it has achieved,
in this case, synthesized in the Sandinista ideals. The logic of the lesser
evil ends up being the shortest way to the greater evil!
For all these reasons, the Fourth International, which from the beginning buil
solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution, supports the leftist and democratic
sectors of the resistance, rebellion and popular power against the current
Ortegista regime and demonstrates solidarity with the sectors struggling to
refound a Sandinismo that is anti-capitalist, democratic and respectful of
human rights, and that is capable of getting rid of the neoliberal and
repressive despotism that is crushing the Nicaraguan popular classes.
Stop the repression of Nicaraguan popular movements! Immediate liberation of
all political prisoners!
For women’s rights! Legalize abortion now!
Down with the criminal neoliberal regime of Ortega-Murillo!
Against any kind of imperialist interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs!
For the right of the people in Nicaragua, in Central America and beyond to take
their fate into their own hands!
For the Sandinista refoundation! Towards an ecosocialist alternative to the
extractivist export-oriented model and to the capitalist system, which implies
a break that needs the highest level of democracy and self-organisation!
We will articulate these demands in a campaign of internationalist solidarity
with the victims of the repression in Nicaragua.
Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
Amsterdam 28 October 2018
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November 1, 2018 in Latin America. Tags: Nicaragua
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--
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after
death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence
will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
