War threat overshadows holiday season
Rolf BERGKVIST and Maria SUNDV ALL MANAGUA - They were preparing for
In the Roberto Huembes market, they were selling plastic Christmas trees, garlands, and gift-wrapping paper.
In the upper class neigborhoods, we saw the first plastic Christmas trees decorated with painted metal balls. But it is not just the upper and middle classes that celebrate Christmas.
A dressmaker we knew talked about how her people deck a branch of a lemon tree with garlands and use that as their Christmas tree.
But the Christmas time 1982 in Nicaragua could not be shopping rush. The holiday season was over-shadowed by two immediate threats, which were reflected daily in the newspaper headlines and in the conversations of people in the street - the threat of war and the economic crisis.
War is coming; all the signs here in Nicaragua point to that. It might even be more correct to say that the war is already underway. Speaking to a meeting of the Organization of American States on November 18, Nicaragua's deputy for foreign Hugo Tinoco, said that up to that time Nicaragua had been subjected to the following acts of aggression:
-30 incursions by counterrevolutionary groups.
-127 violations of Nicaraguan air-
More than 200 Nicaraguan have died in these attacks, and a hundred have been kidnapped or disappeared. There has also been great material damage. Every day we read in the newspapers about new disappearances, new savage murders of Nicaraguan peasants in the areas near the border. On all the official buildings, flags are flying at half-mast in for those who have been
War was coming sometime in December, people thought. There were rumors about big joint U.S.-Honduras maneuvers near the Nicaraguan border. And Nicaraguans are preparing for war. On a Sunday in November, the neighborhood committees, the CDS, held civil-defense practice. They learned how to build barricades, dig trenches, to give first aid. The slogan for practice was "The Contras shouldn't in Nicaragua defend ouselves neighborhood by neigh-
The threat of U.S., and Americans are not very popular in Nicaragua these days. So, it was not surprising one evening that, after we told our taxi driver that we were Swedes, he said that if we had been yanquis he would not have driven us but would have left
"We don't want to have anything to do with imperialism."
gestures how Yankees should best be handled.
### ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES
With war approaching, Nicaragua has been hard hit by the economic crisis from which all the Central American countries are suffering. Its exports are almost exclusively agricultural products. And now its exports are down because of the economic decline in the imperialist countries; at the same time rawmaterials prices have dropped. On the other hand, the prices of imports have gone up.
The result is a growing deficit in the balance of trade. In order to make up for the deficit, they have borrowed dollars, and the foreign debt now amounts to three billion dollars. And in recent speech, Commandante Henry Ruiz from the Sandinista movement said that in the coming year the payments on the interest and principal on this debt is going to total 90% of income from exports!
of everything, the economy has been hit by natural disaster. In May, floods caused 350 billion dollars worth of damage and these were followed by a estimated to have caused 80 million dollars worth of damage. affected every Nicaraguan directly.
In the first year after the victory over the dictator, Somoza, the government succeeded in cutting unemployment from 25% to 17%. But now it is going up again. This year, 10,000 industrial workers, out of a total of perhaps 90,000 in the entire country, have been put out of work because their factories have been forced to close for lack of foreign cur-
There are not enough dollars to import even essential raw materials and
Prices have also increased by about 30% this year. On the other hand, wages have in general stood still in the last two years, and it has been promised only that the worst paid will have their wages lower in Nicaragua than in any other Central American country. Price controls have been established for a lot of goods, distribution network, ENABAS distributes necessities to People's Stores in the neighborhoods of the capital city.
it is difficult to control And the CDS complains that there are too few People's
There are also scarcities of a lot of necessities. At the moment rice, sugar, and gasoline are rationed.
In October, Standard Fruit broke its contract with Nicaragua and stopped its activity in the country. Some 3,500 banana workers are faced with losing
In all 20,000 people are affected, and Nicaragua is losing 400,000 dollars a week. But the banana workers rallied in a protest meeting. They mounted a guard on Standard Fruit's installation to make sure that there was no
And now it seems that the crisis has lessened somewhat, since Nicaragua has found new banana buyers in
Despite the crisis, it seems that some people have money. In a letter to the labor ministry on November 21, the national cement workers union pointed to owners who bought dollars on the black market for 50 cordobas (five times the official rate) so that they could leave the country. The cement workers also pointed to factory owners who have increased their prices for cement 90%, although the cost of raw materials and production costs have not risen. workers demanded that the authorities step in to deal with such abuses.
The economic crisis and unemploy ment are not just a threat to the standard of living of the working people; they are also a threat to the FSLN's plans to build a new society. Over the past three years, the Sandinista front has sought to transform its spontaneous mass support into a firm base in the working class. It has tried to accomplish this by encouraging the working people to organize in trade unions and other mass organizations and by giving leadership to this process.
But when workers lose their jobs and are put on the street, then organization of the class is also weakened. Against this background, it can be under-
are murdered by the counterrevolution- pression of the discussions about the stood why, despite a galloping economic crisis, the FSLN is giving priority to setting up relief work projects in order to hold the working class together.
The crisis also has to be seen as a threat to the FLN's mass support. There has been considerable discontent for some time. The letters columns in the newspapers are filled with complaints about scarcities in the People's Stores and about the unjust division of what products are available. Moreover, it is a serious situation when the CDS in Managua has rather pointedly asked the Ministry of Trade when the rice problem is going to be solved:
"We are having a hard time explaining 'An armed people will never be defeated.' (DR) to the people in the neighborhoods why there is no rice in the stores. And it does not make things any easier when you still have not even answered our earlier ques-
The revolution has brought big social improvements, schools, clinics, day-care centres.But that is easily forgotten when families cannot make ends meet, or when their breadwinners lose their jobs. And at the moment the FSLN can promise nothing but continued hard times. The poster campaigns going on now are on the need to raise labor productivity and the need for stepping up revolutionary vigilance.
But to say that there is discontent is not the same thing as saying that the masses have lost their that they now longer support the FLN. is true can be seen in the mobilizations the counterrevolutionaries. numbers of the revolutionary guards who do voluntary night watch in every neighin Managua in November. more people are joining people's militias.
aries, the funerals have been transformed into mass protest marches.
### SHARPENING CLASS
CONFRONTATION
At the same time, the class conflict is sharpening. On May Day the Sandinists union, the CST, declared that the goal in Nicaragua is socialism: "Socialism is
'" the CST posters everywhere
As could be expected, this aroused sharp reactions from the representatives of the bourgeiosie. The latest example of the bourgeois opposition campaign is the proposal from the Conservative Democratic Party for negotiations between the government " and the external and internal opposition" - that means negotiating with the Somocistas in Honduras! It goes without saying that this proposal has been rejected by the government and the
In a recent speech, Minister of Internal Affairs Tomas Borge made a frontal attack on the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie.
"In Cuba," Borge said, "the imperialists had the bourgeoisie leave the country so that they could prepare an armed invasion from outside. But here the imperialists have kept the bourgeoisie in the country to cause us internal problems."
Certainly, it is being said more and more often that "socialism is the future." But at the same time one might wonder what the model for this socialist future is. In the union headquarters, visitors are being asked to sign a letter of condomourning the death of companero Brezh-
Is this uncritical hailing of the Soviet Union only diplomacy? This situation seems all the more contradictory because the Sandinistas do not at all want to build a Soviet-type society.
It is hard for foreigners to get an imcountry's future that must certainly already have taken place at the top levels. And it must be difficult for the Nicaraguans too. In fact, it must be a big problem that there are so few possibilities to discuss the country's situation openly and to express justified discontent.
On the basis of the threat of war, press censorship was established in 1982. But that has not prevented a full-scale press war from going on between the FSLN's Barricada and the opposition's La Prensa. The latter publication is the bourgeoisie's most effective instrument, and it is more and more playing the sort of role that the scandal sheet El Mercurio did in Chile to prepare the way for the 1973 coup.
However, Barricada is often distorted and one-sided in its reporting. The result is a "press debate" that is sometimes almost absurd. An example is the reporting of the civil war in El Salvador. Prensa, you the government army. In Barricada, you read only about advances by the FMLN-FDR. And the Nicaraguans cannot rely very much on the news that they get.
example of this problem is the position of the mass organizations. In the paper of the CST, a lot of concrete cases of bad conditions in the workis an account of how in the state factory ENVACA the administrators only work three hours a day and draw salaries of 9,000 cordobas (six times the minimum wage). The chiefs of the maintenance division often do not show up at all for work, and when a machine breaks down they take it to repair company that they themselves own, and then let ENVACA pay big bills.
The CST can, to be sure, take up problems, but how can it attack them? Strikes are banned on the grounds of the crisis situation, and since it is a loyal Sandinista union it knows that the most important thing is to increase production so that imports can be increased and more foreign currency can be brought in. So, the editorials in the CST paper stress that workers should not demand that administrators be thrown out, because that could endanger production. stead, workers are encouraged to start discussions with the factory management about how production can be maintained and unemployment avoided.
Reading such statements, a number of thoughts occur to you. Isn't there a danger that justified discontent will be shouted down with revolutionary appeals? Isn't there a danger that the most conscious and active groups inside the FSLN and the mass organizations may isolate themselves from the broad masses, who despite everything have to be able to look forward improvements in their
On the other hand, what other way out is there? How can press be relaxed in a war situation? And how can the trade unions call for strikes when the economic crisis is so deep and there is a real need to increase production?