As foreign reporters descended upon Managua during the runup to last fall’s presidential election between Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and ex-Contra Enrique Bolaños, their favorite question was: “Has Daniel Ortega changed”? Bolaños, candidate of the governing Liberal Party, had been answering the question in the negative throughout the campaign by papering Nicaragua with photos of Comandante Ortega in his combat fatigues, usually juxtaposed with images of the long food lines of the Sandinista era and coffins coming home from the Contra war. Bolaños had a very clear message: Elect Ortega on November 4, and risk retaliation from the United States. In the end, voters were swayed by Bolaños’ warning. He defeated Ortega by 9% of the vote.
Ortega had been one of the leading comandantes of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) when the guerrilla movement ousted the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza—and his hated National Guard—in 1979. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the FSLN was founded in 1961 with the avowed goal of overthrowing the Somoza family dynasty, which had ruled Nicaragua since 1934. While the Carter administration bit the bullet in the summer of 1979 and tried to work with the victorious Marxist-inspired Sandinistas, the soon-to-be-elected Reagan administration unleashed a less-than-covert war against them, arming and funding a rebel army that came to be called the Contras. The Sandinistas fought the Contras to a standstill, and Ortega was formally elected president in 1984. He was defeated, with U.S. help, in his 1990 re-election bid, and in two subsequent attempts to regain the presidency. Despite this run of electoral defeats, he has maintained a tight grip on the FSLN, now the country’s principal opposition party.
Its revolutionary beginnings notwithstanding, by 2001, the FSLN was bending over backward to convince everyone who would listen that it had indeed changed, that the party no longer believed in the famous verse of the old Sandinista anthem calling el yanqui the “the enemy of mankind.” The FSLN hoped to capitalize on the rising discontent over the country’s severe economic crisis and on the national anger with the governing party’s venal corruption. Sandinista electoral strategists devised a “path of love” campaign for Ortega with pink posters adorned with flowers in attempts to reach out to non-Sandinista critics of the ruling Liberal Party.
In fact, the Nicaraguan electorate, along with Washington and foreign nongovernmental donors, all had good reasons to be angry with the outgoing Liberal administration of Arnoldo Alemán. Washington and the donors were furious when, in the wake of the devastating 1998 Hurricane Mitch, massive relief aid somehow found its way to the beach villas of Aleman’s financial partners—payment for not-always-apparent services rendered. And while Alemán and his friends replied they were simply practicing free enterprise and taking advantage of market opportunities, the World Bank and the IMF protested general economic mismanagement as many privatization deals lined the pockets of Alemán cronies. The doling out of bank credit to political influentials led to a collapse of four banks in a period of less than two years. Donors curtailed cooperation and the IMF even suspended debt relief plans.
But despite its misgivings with the Liberals, the United States had long resolved to keep the influence of the FSLN in check. Washington’s Nicaragua policy over the course of the 1990s—like its Latin America policy in general—was geared to eliminating all notions of revolutionary socio-economic entitlements and any alternatives to free market fundamentalism. It was at the beginning of the 1990s that the Bush Sr. administration had come to the conclusion that the Nicaraguan Contras, with their Miami-based, CIA-bankrolled leaders, whom Colin Powell once referred to as “Gucci commanders,” would never be able to defeat the Sandinistas in battle. The first Bush administration then took to waging war by political means. While keeping the Contras mobilized in Honduras, the administration funneled funds and covert support to anti-Sandinista candidate Violeta Chamorro in 1990, thus securing the first electoral defeat of Daniel Ortega and the FSLN.
So the most interesting question, clearly answered in the negative by the end of the 2001 campaign, was not whether Ortega had changed, but whether U.S. policy had changed over the course of the decade; whether, indeed, post-Cold War unipolarity might allow Washington to do normal business with a new Sandinista government headed by an old revolutionary like Ortega.
In addition to keeping the Sandinistas in check, Washington had resolved to prevent an economic collapse in Nicaragua. For ideological and strategic reasons, the United States could not afford to have a capitalist breakdown follow on the heels of the collapse of the Sandinista “socialist experiment.”Although U.S. aid dwindled over the course of the later 1990s, Washington was not able to claim “donor fatigue” and simply pull out of Nicaragua, as some of the West Europeans did. As in many places around the globe, however, free-market fundamentalism was at odds with itself in Nicaragua, as Washington demanded demobilization of the Sandinista military and massive privatization of the state economic sector inherited from the war. The combination proved disastrous; unemployment skyrocketed, and corruption followed hard on the heels of the privatization of state-owned industries.
Few in Washington, however, realized that this fundamentalist neoliberal onslaught, while provoking severe social suffering in the population, was also pushing the Sandinista leadership to rapidly make ideological concessions in order to get a share of the political and economic pie. Increasingly influential Sandinistas with major economic and bank holdings had developed a vested interest in capital-centered stability and a share of the spoils of liberalization.
This conversion in Sandinista ranks also had a foundation in the heavy blows suffered by unions and rural laborers as the result of the new economics. The “free market” policies steadily brought about what the United States and the Contras could not accomplish by force of arms—or the Chamorro and Alemán governments by force of laws—that is, the reconcentration of land, wealth and power in fewer hands. Without access to credit and repayment facilities, and with no protection from cheap imports, farmers, cooperatives, small-scale industrial shops shrank in numbers and influence. Many moved into the informal sector, which in time grew larger than the so-called formal economic sector. Revolutionary and even opposition politics gave way to strategic collaboration between the FSLN and the governing Liberal party chieftains. Leftist voices in the FSLN were effectively muzzled. A democratic development model was nowhere to be seen.
State weakness in post-Cold War Nicaragua, along with the gradual collapse of the export-oriented development model and the huge foreign debt—in 1994 the debt stood at $11 billion in a $1.8 billion economy—gave the international financial institutions (IFIs) and northern donors enormous influence over economic policy and the national budget. As the state’s ability to respond to the critical situation dwindled, however, episodes of violence multiplied and the country became even less attractive to foreign capital.
Meanwhile the Sandinista Party, unable to govern, would prove quite adept at making Nicaragua ungovernable when it so chose, promoting or supporting strikes and protests one moment, yet negotiating with the government the next. Much to the initial chagrin of the United States, the Chamorro administration, followed even more strongly by its successor, the Alemán government, felt obliged to enter into agreements with the FSLN that would leave key privileges and government posts in Sandinista hands. Daniel Ortega made good on his post-electoral loss pledge to “govern from below.” And given the recklessness with which structural adjustment and liberalization were pursued by the government and the IFIs, the Sandinistas had unwitting allies in their quest to make Nicaragua unstable and ungovernable; the economy and political order spun from crisis to crisis over the course of the 1990s.
In 1998 an infamous agreement—called the pacto—was signed between Alemán and Ortega. Under its terms Ortega not only secured de facto impunity from prosecution on charges of sexual molestation brought about by his step-daughter, but also constitutional changes that gave the FSLN direct presence in electoral, judiciary and legislative posts. Most important, the electoral threshold for obtaining a presidential victory was lowered to 35%. According to the independent analysts Etica y Transparencia, parties and candidates were improperly disqualified by an electoral board, now run by the two major parties. According to one U.S. observer, “Ortega and Alemán have rigged some of the good institutions of government that were created, ironically, under the Sandinistas.”[1]
The pacto shut out non-Liberal and non-Sandinista alternatives that might have been more to the liking of an electorate—and a U.S. administration—disgruntled with both caudillos. The point of the pacto was to deprive Nicaragua and Washington alike of a third option. Alemán’s proposition to the United States was the same as the one made to the Nicaragua electorate, to force a choice between the perpetuation of the rule of Alemán’s tightly controlled Liberal Party, or the return of an “unrepentant” and “unchanged” Daniel Ortega.
The U.S. fear of Ortega’s return to power may not, at that point, have had as much to do with the future of Nicaragua as with the future of the Americas as a whole. The Colombian conflict was now high on the U.S. agenda, Venezuela appeared unusually rebellious, and Cuba had reacquired importance under the new Republican administration. Ortega’s candidacy was coupled with the return, under Bush II, of key Sandinista haters of the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Washington’s revived Cold Warriors, always lurking in the background, began to worry about a Cuba-Venezuela-Colombia-Nicaragua axis. So by early 2001, with many observers and polls predicting that Ortega would win, the U.S. State Department began paying more attention to Nicaragua.
It was muscle flexing time. True to its historical colonialist behavior, the United States threw its considerable weight into Nicaragua’s electoral dynamics. As Ortega rose in the polls so did U.S. intervention, helping to ensure, as in 1990 and 1996, that non-Sandinistas would form a single bloc to stop the FSLN. The U.S. Embassy strongly pushed for the withdrawal of prominent Conservative Party leaders whose participation would have attracted voters who disliked the two hegemonic parties, and would have principally taken votes away from the governing Liberal bloc. A division of the right in Nicaragua spelled automatic electoral victory for the Sandinistas, the country’s largest and most coherent political organization.
Nicaraguan voters, trained by history, were no fools: Trouble between a new Sandinista administration and the U.S. government would be bad news. It seemed that no amount of nationalism could outweigh the fear of greater unemployment among dispossessed Nicaraguans, let alone the collapse of foreign investor confidence so treasured by Nicaraguan capitalists. In the closing months of the Alemán administration, the economy reached a crisis of unprecedented proportions, as droughts followed flooding while world coffee prices reached record lows. The felt needs of many Nicaraguans to secure steady access to remittances from relatives in the United States, combined with the fear that U.S. hostility would further disrupt life, all weighed heavily on the election.
FSLN leaders also had experienced history and were painfully familiar with the distorted and externally conditioned Nicaraguan electoral paradigm. Appealing to skeptical elements within Nicaragua and appealing to Washington seemed one and the same. Sandinista red and black banners gave way to pink; the clenched fist to flowers; Ortega’s Pancho Villa mustache to a pencil one; shirtsleeves to suits and ties; the discourse of resistance and anti-neoliberalism to one of love and God. The Sandinista Party platform became, in essence, no different from that of the Liberal Party: promotion of free enterprise, adherence to macroeconomic discipline, rapid integration into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and support for the “Puebla to Panama Plan” to make the maquiladoras the showcase of the Central American and southern Mexican economies. Bankers and big capitalists were promised control over key economic and banking portfolios in an eventual Sandinista led government. The Sandinista ticket became known as the Convergence option as shifty figures from Nicaragua’s past, including some from Somoza’s National Guard, were promised government posts in return for their suport.
By mid 2000, Sandinista leaders had taken to explaining to Nicaraguans that the United States had changed, that the Cold War was over, and that any U.S. government would work with any Nicaraguan administration that was the product of a free election. The election of George W. Bush, however, and the subsequent nomination of some “full-throttle” old Cold Warriors—Otto Reich, John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams among the most prominent—to powerful foreign policy positions all raised doubts.[2] Ortega and the FSLN went even more out of their way, ideologically and politically, to become “respectable.”[3]
With a stranglehold over the party, Ortega had steadily rid himself of serious opponents by skillfully playing up his populist standing with a rank and file desperate for social change. But the “new look” of pink shirts and social democratic slogans did not prove sufficiently convincing to win enough support to secure electoral victory and U.S. acceptance. Right wing strategy was simply to walk down memory lane, repolarizing the electorate so as to make the social chasm between rich and poor less important than the one between Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas. “I am a Contra,” Bolaños shouted during an early campaign speech, “I will be the first democratically elected Contra. And I will govern in their interests.”
In all, Ortega continued to be a symbol, even against his own will. As an emblematic figure, the Old Revolutionary’s re-election would have been a symbolic defeat for the United States and the historical record of both Bush administrations. That the symbol had shed itself of any questionable radical content did not matter to Washington. It did, however, matter to the mass of poor Nicaraguans, whose expectations of socio-economic justice barely received a hearing, let alone an echo. Yet no doubt about it, tens of thousands remained loyal to Ortega, even overlooking the sexual abuse accusations brought against him by his stepdaughter. He stood as their only perceived alternative to grinding poverty, economic crisis and corruption. Born-again Sandinistas in ties and jackets no longer spoke convincingly of ending the economic misery most Nicaraguans endured. But neither could they convince the Bush administration that they were harmless.[4]
Despite all the U.S. doubts, were it not for the September 11 terrorist attacks, Ortega might still have pulled it out. It was the new wartime atmosphere that demolished his aspirations to return to office. Coming less than two months before the Nicaraguan election, the attacks brought with them the U.S. government’s decision to intervene vigorously against the presidential campaign of the FSLN.
After September 11, symbols became paramount. While U.S. officials had never been shy about indicating their preference for Bolaños, Washington made a new push against Ortega as the Afghanistan conflict heated up in October. The U.S. Ambassador in Managua toned down his criticism of governmental corruption and mismanagement while becoming more partisan on each possible occasion. State department officials in Washington echoed the line, as did Secretary Colin Powell in interviews with the Nicaraguan foreign minister. In Managua, the U.S. ambassador invited Bolaños to hand out U.S.-donated food aid in a poor village. State Department officials publicly questioned Ortega’s democratic credentials, highlighting his ties with countries and leaders the United States regarded as terrorist.
Following September 11, Liberal Party posters and newspaper ads featured photos of Ortega with Muamar Gaddafi, Yasir Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Full-page ads featured a letter from the President’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, saying: “We in Florida want the Nicaraguan people to know that they are not alone in this decision.… It is inconceivable that a people would choose to return to a totalitarian past. Daniel Ortega’s past and present clearly indicate that he neither understands nor adopts the basic principles of freedom, democracy and the free market…. Some say that he has changed, that years out of power have convinced him of the need for a true democracy, of free markets and of having good relations with his neighbors and the United States. That is what Ortega wants us to believe. Daniel Ortega is an enemy of all that the United States represents. And he is also a friend of our enemies…. Latin America needs leaders like Enrique Bolaños.”[5]
Ortega and outgoing President Alemán outdid themselves in professions of solidarity with the United States and condemnations of the terrorist attack. The war on terror was brought home: “Say no to the terrorists, say no the people who want to frighten peaceful citizens,” Alemán said in a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Ortega. Bolaños, twice jailed under the Sandinista Government, made U.S. doubts over Ortega his campaign trump card, constantly running TV ads that repeated President Bush’s warning that countries were either with the United States in its fight against terrorism, or against it. One advertisement showed photographs of Osama bin Laden with a caption that read: “If bin Laden had the chance, he would vote for Ortega.”
It was the U.S. attacks on Ortega—whatever the pretext—coupled with the “war on terrorism” that scared many people into the Bolaños camp. Ortega fought back, going so far as to enlist Antonio Lacayo, ex-strongman of the Chamorro government and fervent pro-U.S. neoliberal, offering him the post of foreign minister. Lacayo’s first task was to send a message to both Washington and the electorate that Nicaragua, under the Convergence/Sandinista government, would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States in the war against terrorism, and that all outstanding problems would rapidly be addressed. U.S. Ambassador Oliver Garza promply replied that Lacayo’s pro-American statements did not ease U.S. concerns about Ortega.[6] The Ambassador also reminded the press that U.S. aid would remain conditioned to the return of property confiscated from Nicaraguan-born U.S. citizens.[7]
In retrospect, it was clear that the Sandinista party machinery had grieviously miscalculated that a makeover campaign would allow it to have its cake and eat it too; to keep the support of the poor and gain that of the rich; to have Ortega as its leader and acquire respectability in the eyes of the United States. Conceding defeat and promising collaboration with the new government, Ortega remarked bitterly that the “fear element was used again; there was a return to the dirty campaign; a terror campaign was used.”[8] No doubt many voters computed beliefs or fears about U.S. policy into their electoral choices, as did each of the major parties themselves.
But responsibility for the Sandinista’s latest electoral setback cannot be simply explained as the result of Washington’s policies. The FSLN remains under Ortega’s control, tenaciously resisting efforts within Sandinista ranks to allow fresh new leaders to appear. The absence of a credible left outside or inside the party made it difficult for Sandinistas to argue and organize around class, capitalism, non-authoritarian politics or neoliberal globalization. What’s more, the self-inflicted shame of a party that tolerated the looting of the public sector by many of its members as they left office in 1990 (the infamous “piñata”), that refuses to force Ortega to face the sexual-abuse allegations of his step-daughter in a court of law, and the cynical power sharing with the corrupt Alemán regime all block the path of a Sandinista renewal. One can only believe with certainty that the core libertarian and anti-imperialist values that inspired Sandino—and once inspired the Sandinistas—are still present and will continue to surface in unsuspected and enduring ways.
More than anything else, the dire social and economic reality stands as evidence of the need and logic of a new economic model. More than 70% of Nicaragua’s five million people now live in poverty. Alternatives are not only necessary, but viable, with or without changes in U.S. policy. The viability of a new model, of course, presupposes a political movement with the courage, vision and organization to bring it into being. In that light, we can only hope that the advance of democracy in the United States—particularly the advance of a democratic foreign policy—may some day help Nicaraguans forge their own democratic future. Indeed, a humane U.S.-Nicaragua relationship, far from being a padlock on democratic aspirations, could become a starting point for liberation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandro Bendaña is director of the Center for International Studies in Managua. He has been a frequent contributor to NACLA.
NOTES
1. Thomas Walker of Ohio University, quoted by Eloy Aguilar, “US Renews Nicaragua Military Aid,” Associated Press, October 20, 2001.
2. For profiles of Reich, Negroponte, and Abrams, see Kate Doyle,”Back to the Future,” NACLA Report, XXXV No.3, November/December, 2001. Available online at www.nacla.org
3. Marc Cooper, “The Lost Revolution,” Mother Jones (September-October, 2001), p. 71.
4. “EU analiza perspectiva de elecciones,” La Prensa (Managua), September 8, 2001.
5. See full page ad, “Hermano del Presidente de Estados Unidos George W. Bush Respalda a Enrique Bolaños: El pasado como prólogo,“ La Prensa, October 29, 2001, p. 9. Also see “US throws weight against Ortega in Nicaragua vote,” Reuters, October 31, 2001.
6. “The naming of personalities associated with previous democratic governments does not change the concerns we have,” U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza told a news conference on October 30, 2001. Also see “Nicaragua’s Ortega loses election, blames US,” Reuters, November 5, 2001.
7. “Garza reiterativo: Lacayo no borra percepciones de EU,” La Prensa, October 31, 2001.
8. “Nicaragua’s Ortega loses election, blames US,” Reuters, November 5, 2001. According to The New York Times account, “Ortega alluded indirectly to U.S. hostility as one reason for his defeat, but in an apparent effort to improve his relationship with U.S. officials he pledged that in Congress, he would battle against drug smuggling and terrorism, two key US policy concerns,” The New York Times on the Web, November 5, 2001.
