from envio, july 2005:
[stability with pillage] Violeta Chamorro’s government liquidated almost all of the state-run industrial and agricultural companies, even selling off the railway system’s trains and tracks for scrap metal, paying people to rip up the rails. Arnoldo Alemán’s government sold off the state electricity and telephone companies at derisory prices and pillaged the public coffers. And Enrique Bolaños’ government’s budgetary priority is to pay local bankers usurious interest on the treasury bonds issued to cover the enormous fraud perpetrated by the owners of five bankrupt banks. US, Canadian, European and Taiwanese companies conduct a permanent pillage of our national wealth—timber, minerals, and fishing and water resources—while rewarding their workers with miserable wages. The rich don’t pay taxes. And ministers, magistrates, legislators and top public officials from all state branches earn the kind of salaries more associated with developed countries. Yet while all of this has been going on—and it still is—the three governments have enjoyed relative social stability. The reasons for such passivity are complex, interwoven and particular to this country.
(...) [on being organic] They played a leading role in at least two general strikes and several other specific strikes with great national impact. In the words of former CST leader Miguel Ruiz, “We stood up for the Sandinista Front,” which had not managed to put its party-government phase behind it and transform itself into an opposition party and was in the midst of a heated ideological battle between “renovators” and the “orthodox” over its identity and methods of struggle.
(...) [autonomy?] Up until 1997—marked by a failed national strike and roadblocks in April and May—these organizations were the Sandinista movement’s main political arm when it came to defending grassroots interests and maintaining its power bases. A year later, they were practically demobilized as a result of the first pact between Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán. Beyond their current numbers, what is most striking about all of these organizations is that most still operate according to basically the same model under which they were created. They still act as FSLN “intermediaries” and have leaders who respond to the political interests of the party leadership.
(...) [NGOization] While they do help palliate state deficiencies in areas such as health, education and housing, they have also acted as retaining walls against grassroots discontent towards the government and the system, as people tend to wait for outside charity rather than fight for their rights. Many of these organizations use attractive salaries in dollars and other benefits to contract officials, supposedly to promote citizens’ participation or stimulate grassroots organization. In this way, they turn activists into either professionals or simply employees who obey their bosses’ orders. ... And when it comes to organizing, NGOs very often tend to presume to represent their beneficiaries—or “target population,” as they like to call them—without even consulting them about the decisions being made in their name or their particular political position on any given matter.
(...) [autonomy again?] Above all, the union organizations have been subject to a phenomenon born of their own experience: their leaders on all levels no longer accept party control and have achieved an appreciable degree of autonomy in their protest actions. The most important examples are ANDEN and FETSALUD, each of which launched its own union struggles, including strikes, against the wishes of an important sector of the Sandinista leadership known as the Businesspeople’s Bloc. And each won its struggle, turning a deaf ear to the siren’s song of “governability” from legislators such as Bayardo Arce and prominent figures like Manuel Coronel Kautz. One FETSALUD leader privately said some months ago that “the sin lies not in the fact that we [FETSALUD leaders] are Sandinista activists, but rather that some of us place the dominant interests of the FSLN over and above those of our members.” This phenomenon of autonomy has also occurred among transport cooperatives, which have now turned into powerful businesses. In this case, autonomy has even led them to face off against other sectors of the FSLN, particularly those linked to grassroots organizations.
(...) [part of systematicity: creation of a political class] As a result, they do not exercise control of the business of politics. The political class, meanwhile, consolidates this false popular belief by concealing information and offering half truths to neutralize the people’s social and political awareness, even putting the brakes on any possibility of autonomous organization. Deep down, the political class knows that an aware and organized people would endanger its own privileges.
(...) [and the sandinistas, in this] This contradiction extends to the party’s whole national leadership, which has succumbed to the ferocious laws of the market in which honesty, the vocation for service and personal integrity are disposable merchandise.
(...) [to a more organic future] All of this has generated a profound crisis in the current model of representative democracy, and makes finding a path to participatory democracy more urgent than ever. Núñez sustains that “the political parties, union organizations and social movements have to redeem politics and participate in a new way of doing it. Depoliticization is suicide... Political participation without social and economic participation is an illusion. Political democracy without economic democracy is not enough. The workers have to take the economy and the market.”
(...) [ftz in context] In a country plagued by maquiladora assembly plants with ruthless and despotic owners and managers protected by the state itself, workers prefer to put up and shut up. Most have accepted the confiscation of their right to organize in a union. In this context, the few cases of total rebellion—particularly in Managua’s Las Mercedes Free Trade Zone—stand out more as exceptions than as examples.
(...) Although there is no reliable census, the number of Nicaraguans resident abroad is between 1.2 million and 1.5 million, or around one in every four Nicaraguans. Of these, from 50% to 60% send home money to maintain their families, while the rest have either completely broken their ties or have brought their families over to join them. Calculating an average of five people in each family nucleus, some 700,000 to 900,000 Nicaraguans are living off family remittances.
(...) [social movements combating systematicity] Among the most significant are the peasant marches against hunger and for land, carried out by thousands of families. In two consecutive years, 2003 and 2004, they marched on Managua from the mountains of Matagalpa and Jinotega, forcing the government to negotiate and agree to many of their demands. ... The thousands of victims of Nemagón and other pesticides used for years on banana plantations in the west of the country have provided another example of impressive mobilization. ... Teachers also achieved an overwhelming success with their national strike at the beginning of the year. ... The Consumer Defense Network has also had significant successes, though based on legal actions rather than mobilization. ... But perhaps the greatest political awareness has been displayed in the mobilization of the women’s movement. Thus far, it is the only movement that has gone beyond the scope of its own particular demands to take on national demands against the system and against the anti-democratic results of the Ortega-Alemán pact. Its main leaders have publicly stated that they will not be able to achieve gender equity or sexual and reproductive rights unless they first recover the democratic rights wrested away from the whole population by the top PLC and FSLN leaderships.
(...)