Sandinistas move to the right pond to the disappearance of the pro-Sandinista vote! [CA] *
* Nicaragua In October, Arnoldo Alemán was elected as President of Nicaragua, defeating FLN leader Daniel Ortega by 13%. Articles in this and other left publications argued that Alemán's Liberal Alliance won the elections through fraud.' As the debate continues, we publish an article by Cesar Ayala, arguing that the real problem is the rightward shift of the Sandinistas. Were it not for the 1979 revolution led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, there would not be any elections in Nicaragua today. The Sandinistas came to power through armed struggle and left the government after their defeat at the ballot box in 1990. The possibility of elections and of a change of parties in government are themselves conquests achieved by the 1979 revolution. This simple fact, often overlooked by right-wing observers, must be the starting point of any analysis of the Nicaraguan situation.
The 1996 Sandinista defeat is the second major electoral upset for the party that led the 1979 revolution. In 1990, the Sandinistas lost to Violeta Chamorro's Union Nacional Opositora. The 1990 result has been the object of much debate about the relative Electoral fraud?
weight in the FLN defeat of international factors such as the U.S. financed Contra war, as compared to internal factors such as unpopular Sandinista policies.
Through a long war of attrition that began in 1981, the United States was able to skew the playing field of Nicaraguan politics by forcing upon Nicaraguans the following two choices: either elect UNO and obtain peace and economic aid, or re-elect the Sandinistas and risk a continuation of the war and the U.S. economic embargo. U.S "humanitarian" aid kept the Contras in operation, thus discrediting the FSLN claim that a Sandinista victory would mean an end to the war and eventual peace. FSLN recognises "negative" policies
In June 1990, the Sandinistas met in El Crucero to identify aspects of their own policies that could have contributed to the 1990 electoral defeat. The Sandinistas pointed to a long list of mistakes, among them the forced relocation of Miskito natives on the Atlantic coast, abuses by some FLN cadre in the mass organisations, failure to shield the poorest segments of society from the ensuing economic hardships, particularly after the 1988 measures that benefited the agro-export sector, incorrect procedures and untenable convictions in the trials of former Contras and collaborators, and last but not least, the late realisation that peasants wanted individual titles to land.?
Any fair study of the process of erosion of support for the Sandinista cause shows that the Contra war was the primary factor. Of those who voted for the FSLN in 1984 but for UNO in 1990, 28% stopped supporting the Sandinistas by 1985, another 13% by 1986, and an additional 15% by 198%. The erosion of support was greatest during the years of heaviest fighting against the Contras, i.e.before the 1988 austerity measures. Much of the attrition of support (particularly after 1988) was due to economic factors: the effects of the Contra war, foreign hostility, exhaustion, and to many Nicaraguans desire for light at the end of the tunnel. Much of the electoral effect attributed to "unpopular" Sandinista policies, particularly conscription, was directly or indirectly a product of the Contra war.
The elections of 1990 took place in a complex international scenario that did not bode well for the FSLN. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European regimes, the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, and President George Bush's declaration that an UNO victory would mean an end to the U.S. embargo did not help the Sandinistas.
Yet even within this context of foreign aggression and violent interference in the country's internal affairs, it is possible to identify problems that may have corresponded exclusively to Sandinista errors. The shrinking rural vote
The decline of FSLN support in the countryside varied widely according to class. Pre-Sandinista Nicaragua had no vast peasant movements. Nor did it have indigenous
Of course there were electoral irregularities, argues Cesar Ayala, But
"not of sufficient magnitude to alter the final results
While the Alemán forces no doubt at- ballots of entire polling stations -which tempted to influence the total vote count by all kinds of licit and illicit means, there were too many local and international checks on the electoral process to permit fraud on a scale capable of overturning the results nationally.
The independent Nicaraguan magazine Envio certainly documented irreguarities in the electoral process, but they were not of sufficient magnitude to alter the final results of the national elections.
In addition to winning 65% of mayoral races, the Liberal Alliance won the post of mayor of Managua, beating the favourite (independent) Viva Managua candidate into second place. The
Sandinista candidate finnished third
Envio's analysis speaks of "electoral
, rather than systematic fraud.
chaos"
Most of the discrepancies in the Supreme Electoral Council's results corres-
12 International Viewpoint affect all parties-, probably as a result of the long queues waiting to hand in the polling stations' ballots to the CSE One Envio report argues that "if it were a matter of fraud, the logical thing would be losing the ballots for the party against which the fraud was aimed." 2
The Sandinistas share of the vote declined by 3% relative to 1990. Their principal opponents' score also declined by 3% relative to 1990, while the independent parties increased their support from 4% to 11%. Broad sectors of the population identified the social ravages caused by the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s not only with the UNO government of Violetta Chamorro, but also with the Sandinista-UNO parliamentary majority which approved these attacks. Memories like this hardly encouraged a significant surge of the communities capable of demanding a return to a pre-Hispanic communal past. It did have a substantial small and middle peasantry.
The FSLN distributed Somocista properties and the idle lands of large landowners, and gave land titles to peasants. But investment under the Sandinistas went mainly to the state sector, large, modern farms, and, thirdly, to cooperatives.
The decline of rural support for the FSLN from 65% in 1984 to 36% in 1990 * was partly due to this "developmentalist" bias: the absorption of resources by the state sector, with "little impact on the population." " In 1990 the FSLN won the votes of agricultural workers from state-run enterprises, but not the middle peasants.
Workers from state enterprises were mobilised for the war on a voluntary basis. and the Asociacion de Trabajadores del Campo cushioned the blow which enlistment in the armed forces caused by providing financial aid to these soldiers' families. But for many poor private peasant families, recruitment meant a serious economic loss to the household, which was not compensated As a result, may poor peasants voted against
the FSLN, while the rural proletariat remained loyal to it in 1990?
The Contra war gave the FSLN an extremely reduced margin of error, making every mistake extremely costly. Within this context, top-down decision-making and ineffective transmission of grassroots input prevented the Sandinistas from realising the extent of the economic hardships and the magnitude of the problems created by conscription, leaving Nicaraguans to communicate them in the elections.
La Piñata
In reaction to the unexpected defeat in the 1990 elections, the FSLN embarked on a brisk process of transferring state properties to mass organisations and local Sandinista organisations. The previous lack of separation of state property from that of the Party left the FSLN facing the possibility of losing many of the assets the party needed to function, such as printing presses, buildings, vehicles.
The hasty transfer process left many local organisations, and eventually the local leaders of those organisations, in charge of assets, and led to the enrichment of a sector of the FSLN at the expense of the state and the party. This process became known as La
Piñata.
The international context and the Sandinista defeat, in turn, pushed a sector of the FSLN into a
"realistic"
accommodation with the recently elected
UNO forces. When
Chamorro took office in
April 1990, and promised to overhaul the government in the first 100 days, the Sandinistas called on the popular forces to "gover from below" and practically paralysed the country. Barricades were erected all over Managua. At that point, the Sandinistas came to an agreement with the Chamorro government: in exchange for an end to the far right's plans and accepting the agrarian reform, the Sandinistas pulled back from their mobilisations and acquiesced to the return of the financial elite's control of the Nicaraguan economy via privatisation.
During the next three years, the FSLN was in virtual co-government with Chamorro's ruling
UNO through an alliance in the National Assembly: In
January 1993, the UNO parliamentary caucus formed a majority with the Sandinista legislators.
This parliamentary alliance formalised the process of rapprochement which began under the Chamorro government, between the enriched sector of
Sandinismo and the "anti-oligarchic"
wing of the UNO bourgeoisie. The
Sandinista "new bourgeoisie,"
which got rich through La Piñata
Nicaragua and their UNO counterparts shared a common opposition to the oligarchic forces of the Old Order, but were perceived by increasing larger sectors of the population as responsible for the deepening economic hardships. In April 1994, the IMF and World Bank signed an agreement with Nicaragua that imposed typical structural adjustment constraints on the country. The Sandinistas had earlier unilaterally repudiated the foreign debt.
The acquisition of properties and money by some Sandinistas during La Piñata has caused, in the words of FSLN vice-presidential candidate Sergio Ramirez, "irreparable moral harm." " There are some, according to Sandinista sociologist Oscar Antonio Vargas, who seized a home as a means of ensuring survival in the future, but then grabbed a second home on the seashore, then a third house, then 600 manzanas of land and 800 head of cattle. A "new class" thus emerged, with the standard of living of the dominant top 5% layer, for which the logic of profit is increasingly important to the preservation of their acquired social status. This new bourgeoisie seeks acceptance by the traditional dominant class, and increasingly joins it or enters into pacts with it. The rapprochement of the enriched sector of the Sandinistas with the Chamorro government had the immense advantage of rendering the country "governable" through a "pact between the elites" and allowing it to over-
April 1997 #287 13
* Nicaragua/Québec come conditions inherited from the civil war after the 1990 elections."
The properties seized in La Pinata include assets the FSLN and many popular mass organisations utilise legitimately. In addition to these collectively-held assets, the mansions and multiple homes seized by Sandinista leaders on an individual basis have been the object of much controversy. In 1991, a bill was introduced into the National Assembly to guarantee the rights of small property owners, while requiring those with mansions, multiple homes or huge land tracts to return them or pay a fair price." In January 1997, after the FLN's second electoral defeat, Daniel Ortega returned the home he had occupied since the revolution. More than the assets held by mass organisations and the FSLN, it was the individual properties held by prominent Sandinistas that sparked an uproar and were exploited by the right wing as symbols of Sandinista hypocrisy and of the individual enrichment of its leaders
As the commotion provoked by La Piñata and by calls for the return of the properties held individually by prominent Sandinistas subsided in 1991, the Chamorro government broke with the extreme rightwing elements in the UNO coalition and reached a compromise with the FSEN, with the goal of "rebuilding the center". Meanwhile, Chamorro's orthodox privatisation program, perceived by broad layers of the population as the product of the ChamorroSandinista "co-government", together with deregulation and economic "liberalisation", produced a social disaster in Nicaragua. The pact between the elites" carried out under the Chamorro government is part of a long tradition in Latin American politics. Another "pact of elites" will surely emerge after the 1996 elections to cushion the impact of Alemán's victory, preventing the country from moving outright into a new "Somocismo without Somoza" , but nonetheless continually moving to the right. Privatisation
Under Chamorro, a rapid process of privatisation has been undertaken. In 1987, the state held more than 13% of cultivated lands, 50% of industrial production, and many service sector businesses, including hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and the national airline. Prime Minister Lacayo directed a large scale sell-off of state-owned businesses at very low prices.
"The government appears to have gained little, or no income from these sales, even though these businesses (however run down or damaged by the war) used to amount to 30% of GDP. This process has generated suspicions of a second piñata, "this time via the gross under-valuation of assets sold and/or the return of properties for which former owners had already been compensated by the Sandinista government." Not surprisingly, the Lacayo government did "little to reverse the Sandinista piñata, much less examine allegations of corruption within its own ranks." To be privatized were 351 urban and rural enterprises and 280,000 hectares of land. The new private banks give credit to commercial firms and large-scale producers, but not to small or medium rural producers. The state banks do the same, under strictures from international financial institutions.!
Workers opposed many of these measures. The Sandinistas were pulled in two directions: on the one hand, they supported the workers' struggles, and the independent workers' and farmers' organisations while on the other they backed the Chamorro/ Lacayo government, fearing that the more revanchist" UNO right wing, backed by sectors in Washington would overcome the more moderate currents with which the Sandinistas were in alliance. The FLN leadership, "was publicly backing the workers while also negotiating (more moderate) deals with the Chamorro administration." 16
In 1989, Nicaragua spent $35 per capita for health; by 1996 that figure had fellen to $14. Infant mortality increased from 58 perthousand in 1990 to 72 per-thousand in 1995. In 1995, 70% of the workforce was in the informal economy. In that same year, 71% of export income went to pay the foreign debt. Nicaragua is one of the poorest Latin American countries. Its per capita GDP of $597 is half that of El Salvador ($1,192), a third of that of Peru ($1,885), a fifth of that of Mexico (3,041), and about one eighteenth that of Puerto Rico ($10,820)."
Even though under the Sandinista government 78,000 families received land between 1979 and 1989, lack of credit has pushed them into subsistence farming and has prevented the development of diversified agriculture. The FSLN did not pay attention to providing clear, individual registered titles to most beneficiaries and in many cases the land register continued to contain the name of the old owners. Chamorro's structural adjustment policies have led to a sharp reduction in agricultural credit. The main