By Jorge Capelán, Tortilla con Sal.
Dear friend
You wrote wanting to know what makes me
convinced that people like Fernando Chamorro (and, broadly speaking, the
so-called "Renovadores") have ulterior motives, and in that case, what
those motives are. You also want to know if Nicaragua is doing as well
as alleged at the moment.
Let me start by your final question:
Nicaragua is doing very well, indeed. It is still a very poor country
and, of course, it has the smallest economy in the region, with the
lowest GDP per capita and low yields per hectare in agriculture,
etcetera, but it is very fast finding its feet, I dare to say, for the
first time in its entire history.
FIDEG's independent UN-funded study from
June this year, confirms a strong tendency towards poverty reduction,
especially in the countryside—the most affected part of the population.
Poverty in that sector has fallen from 67.8% in 2009 to 62.8% en 2010
and 61.5% 2011. Extreme rural poverty (according to experts, the hardest
to eliminate) has fallen from 11.2% in 2007 to 5.5% in 2011. The Gini
inequality index has fallen from 0.41 in 2005 to 0.34. According to the
Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), Nicaragua's poverty
reduction has been second only, in Latin America, to Venezuela's.
Employment has increased by 40% since the
Sandinistas came to power, the economy has grown considerably. Today,
Nicaragua is, along with Panama, the fastest-growing economy in Central
America. Exports have doubled between 2006 and 2011 and Foreign Direct
Investment has more than tripled. Last year, Nicaragua had the highest
rate of increase in formal employment (employees registered with the
Social Security Institute) in all of Latin America, with 8.9% - it was
the only country above 6%.
The other day, FAO's representative in
Managua, Luis Mejía, announced that the country, from having been
regarded as a strong candidate to become a so-called "failed state",
today is on its way to achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals,
not only in agriculture but also in key sectors such as education,
health and the preservation of soil and water resources.
I could go on for hours lining up all the
figures but, as I wrote in my article last year, it's a reality one can
see with the naked eye. The country is making progress by the week in
virtually every respect, from laws that give women at least half of
public offices at every level in municipal and public administration to
the citizens' tax compliance and garbage collection. The country is
steadily becoming more organized by the standards of many other poor
countries similar to Nicaragua around the world.
All this development has strong roots. It
is not only dependent on the Venezuela's important aid. Overall,
foreign aid so far this year has increased by over 17% in spite of
Venezuelan aid falling somewhat. This is due to a very realistic policy
by the Sandinista government, which is able to build strong alliances
with many different countries from Iran to Japan, from Russia to South
Korea and from the People's Republic of China to Taiwan - as well as
some European countries which, like Luxembourg and Germany, but most
importantly Spain, in spite of the claims of Western media, continue to
work with Nicaragua. This foreign policy has neither compromised the
country's independence (as its vocal performance in various
international forums shows) nor has isolated it.
The Sandinistas are making this country
work for the very first time in its history. They have not obliterated
the contradictions in society, but they are building a framework so that
those contradictions can be resolved for the benefit of the whole
country.
For example, the cooperative movement and
labour unionization have had explosive development since 2007 and
minimum wages have increased considerably. But this has not meant that
capitalists are fleeing the country - on the contrary, they are
investing here. This is because the Labor Ministry in today's Nicaragua
acts as a real mediator in the negotiations between employers and
workers. Before 2007, the only way the poor had to defend their rights
was to resort to violent actions. In that context, not even the rich
felt safe.
Today, basic services function relatively
well both for the general population and for so-called economic actors:
big and small capitalists, as well as the strong cooperative and
associative sector, which today accounts for about 70% of the jobs and
40% of GDP. Appropriate policies of credit have enabled consolidation of
the vital small and medium business sector, which some estimates
suggest make up 70% of Nicaragua's economy.
Back in 2005, nothing worked:
transportation, electricity, water supply, nothing. Today, education and
health care are free, urban transportation is subsidized, as are basic
foodstuffs. Many poor people have access to cheap credit and so on. That
kind of stability has meant a lot for the Nicaraguan people as well as
for business, which in turn results in the strengthening of the
country's economic foundations. These kinds of policies run contrary to
17 years of neo-liberal dogma that led the country do the brink of
collapse in 2006.
What is the situation today? An overwhelming majority of the population thinks this government is good for the country.
They basically agree upon the assertion
that the Police and the Armed Forces are doing a good job, that Daniel
Ortega is a good leader who respects democracy, that institutions
broadly speaking function better today, that the Sandinistas have won
the elections fairly and so on. That doesn't necessarily mean that
everybody identifies himself as a Sandinista, nor that there are no
criticisms. What it means is that the political discourses that portray
today's Nicaragua as a "dictatorship" or even as a "family fiefdom" have
been totally discredited in the eyes of most Nicaraguans.
According to CID Gallup's latest poll
(CID Gallup is regarded as being favourable to Nicaragua's policical
opposition), 55.9% of Nicaraguans regard themselves as FSLN's supporters
whereas only 8% say they support any of the opposition parties. 35.4%
define themselves as "independents", a heterogenous group of sectors
that either are somewhat positive, indifferent, or outright oppositional
towards the Sandinistas. Those supporting the government today are
roughly the same 64% who voted for Ortega during the last elections,
even taking into account those who did not vote.
CID Gallup cannot be suspected of a
pro-Sandinista bias. What these numbers show is a profound crisis for
all political discourses that are radically confrontational towards the
FSLN and Daniel Ortega. They show that the opposition line followed to
the present has failed because it has not been able to offer any
solutions to the problems of the country. On the other hand, the poll
shows that the priorities of Ortega's administration: to fight poverty,
to guarantee the basic social rights of the people and to create jobs,
were the ones that were most in touch with both the real and perceived
needs of the country.
According to CID-Gallup's study, 86.1% of
the Nicaraguans trust the Army; 73.2% trust the Police and 65.3% trust
the FSLN. 80.1% mistrust the opposition. 75.5% have a positive view of
Daniel Ortega. His wife and Sandinista leader, Rosario Murillo, scores
even higher than him. 74.3% think Daniel Ortega won last year's election
and 66.4% think he did so with the right figures. Such opinion numbers
are hardly the ones to be expected for a country in the brink of
collapse, which is how much of the Western media portray Nicaragua.
Such media routinely silence what an
overwhelming majority of the Nicaraguan people think. Those media are
entitled to a negative view of what this government does. But if they
were serious about their job, they should start a discussion about what
this government has been doing right in order to get and hold its
current levels of support.
It is an understatement to note that a
big dose of slander and hypocrisy taints all discourses about corruption
and democratic institutions in Nicaragua today. Within the region,
Nicaragua is not a country in the grip of drug lords as it is the case
in other Central American countries or Mexico. Actually, the drug
cartels have not been able to establish themselves in this country due
to the effectiveness of the police and the armed forces and the
country's migration and judicial authorities.
A strident chorus of small but
influential groups have claimed fraud on the local elections in 2008
(when you were here to visit Nicaragua) and also last year when Daniel
Ortega was re-elected. But they have never presented any substantive
evidence of such fraud to the electoral authorities. They have set up
web sites and published tons of leaflets, books and articles, but they
have never submitted any of the alleged evidence to due administrative
or legal process. The reason for this is that there never was any
electoral fraud beyond minor anomalies that would not have affected the
results.
The members of the Supreme Electoral
Council have been roughly the same people during the past 15 years. When
Liberals regularly won elections from 1996, through 2001 and up until
2006, those officials were not seen as corrupt. It was only when Daniel
Ortega showed that he was serious about making some changes to the
existing neoliberal system that problems with the Electoral Authority
began. The Liberal parties in the parliament consistently reneged on
their Constitutional obligation to appoint new members to the Supreme
Electoral Council and other institutions. So Daniel Ortega was forced to
issue a presidential decree ordering those officials to stay in office
as long as the National Assembly did not appoint their replacements – a
commonly used procedure in many other countries all over the world when
contradictions between the executive and legislative branches of power
arise.
This video (http://www.tortillaconsal.com/video1.html
) gives an authentic account of the constitutional issues of which the
opposition made so much through 2010 and 2011. It contains innformative
interviews with members of the Supreme Electoral Council and the Supreme
Court of Justice. It speaks volumes about the cynicism and hypocrisy of
mainstream corporate media and their local Nicaraguan allies that this
and similar material is only available on avowedly pro-Sandinista web
sites.
By and large, last November's elections
took place in an exemplary atmosphere of civic participation, except for
some isolated hot spots where violent incidents had been planned in
order to disrupt voting. In such areas, some groups of liberal
sympathizers actively went out in search for Sandinistas in order to
terrorize them. There were some deaths on both sides. In another area,
several schools used as voting centres were burned down by the Liberal
mobs.
Before the elections, some incidents took
place, such as a shooting against a procession with thousands of people
in August last year, when a Liberal faction staged a provocation
handing out political propaganda during a religious activity. Another
incident was a provocation staged by a small group of youths, one of
whom chained himself to a statue as tens of thousands of Sandinistas
were marching towards Managua's Plaza de la Fe to celebrate Somoza's
overthrow on July 19th 1979. Suddenly, one of the Sandinistas
fell into the trap and punched the enchained youth in the face, which
was promptly recorded and broadcasted as a “proof” of the “Sandinista
mob's” violence. In fact, the 19-year-old Sandinista who hit the
provocateur was judged and found guilty for what he did.
These acts of violence are not the
product of massive frustration or rage about injustices or wrongdoings
by the authorities. They are provocations deliberately planned in order
to get pictures and videos that later can be publicized abroad with the
aim of constructing an artificial, virtual reality.
All international observers, even the OAS
and the EU, ratified the Sandinista victory last November. Opposition
leaders claimed fraud and based their accusations on certain criticisms
expressed by the representative of the head of the mission of observers
of the Organization of American States (OAS), Dante Caputo. In his
report, Caputo made several recommendations about aspects that should be
changed in future elections in order to improve the quality of the
electoral process. Since then, several leaders of the opposition have
said that the coming local elections in November this year lack
credibility because the country hasn't followed OAS' recommendations.
However, this week, OAS' representative
in Nicaragua, Ricardo Seitenfus, said that he was quite satisfied with
the changes of the Electoral Law adopted by the National Assembly
earlier this year - changes that have been approved by the same
politicians who claim there was a fraud. Seitenfus said that although
the wording in the reforms wasn't the same as his organization would
have used, the adopted changes followed the spirit of OAS'
recommendations.
The OAS can certainly not be suspected of
a pro-Sandinista bias. In fact, the OAS has been harshly criticized by
the Sandinista government on many issues. The opposition's claims of a
fraud in those elections turned out to be a smoke screen to camouflage
their own poor electoral showing, their complete lack of a plausible
political programme and the abysmal failure of their disparate factions
to unite.
It is legitimate for people opposed to
the FSLN government to say that some judges or some Sandinista officials
may be corrupt, that institutions should be more efficient, that
bureaucracy affects the State's administration, that Sandinista
organizations have one failing or another. Indeed, responsible
opposition politicians and bodies like AMCHAM or COSEP regularly point
to problems they perceive in current policies and propose alternative
ones.
But it is quite another thing to make the
utterly grotesque, factitious allegation that Nicaragua is becoming a
dictatorship like Somoza's, that the country is a family fiefdom or that
corruption is rampant, which are routine claims by people like Fernando
Chamorro, Vilma Nuñez de Escorcia, Dora Maria Tellez and other
“Renovadores”, along with other NATO-country sponsored groups. That is
to force a truly violent rupture from reality, no matter how broadly one
might choose to define it.
Take things like the prohibition of
therapeutic abortion (abortion when the mother's life is in danger –
which also means common cases of very young pregnant girls). I and many
other people are against that law – but we are a small minority. One
thing is to criticize that, but another thing is to ignore that the
medical regulations demand that the doctor will save both the mother's
and the child's life, leaving much room to the doctor's discretion and
interpretation. Besides, in such cases the health authorities are
demanded to put all the resources at their disposal in order to
guarantee the well-being of the mother and all her family. That still
does not make the prohibition right, in my opinion, but nor does it mean
that the Nicaraguan State is mass-murdering its children, as some
Western-funded feminists in Nicaragua, and some big Western NGO's claim
in their smear campaign, using figures it is impossible to check.
Those smear campaigns ignore that both
maternal and child mortality is going down very fast because free health
services today are available to many women who never had received
appropriate medical attention in their lives before. Those smear
campaigns also ignore the fact that this year the National Assembly
passed a law on violence against women which meets the most advanced
standards and resembles the most progressive laws on the matter in
Europe.
After the Sandinista victory in the last
elections, Nicaragua's National Assembly ranks among those with highest
female representation in the world, and after the coming local
elections, the representation of women as mayors and local councillors
will increase dramatically, as recently enacted legislation demands that
every party includes at least 50% female candidates in their lists. If
women get that much power, it is reasonable to expect that they will
manage to pass laws according to their interests in all areas,
including, for example, the issue of abortion.
Opposition claims collapse on any
rational appraisal. It is surely a weird kind of patriarchy that
guarantees at least 50% of political power to women. Only a weird kind
of rampant corruption would dramatically multiply the number of
asphalted roads, paved streets or new buses, massively extend
electrification, add numerous airport and port facilities, massively
upgrade classrooms, or build new health centres and hospitals. If
violence is widespread, why then has Nicaragua in recent years attracted
record numbers of tourists? If it has a repressive state, why then are
its armed forces the most underpaid and the smallest in the region?
There are two kinds of realities in
Nicaragua. One reality belongs to a historical heritage of economic,
political, and in some senses, even cultural underdevelopment – that
structural reality will take years if not decades to be overcome. It
demands a generational change in the country – a change that is
underway, as the FSLN's recent policy of electing at least 30% of young
people in all party decision-making structures at all levels shows. And
there's another reality of dramatic changes taking place – a reality
that, as little as the first one, can hardly be denied.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his like
never cried “Dictatorship!” under 17 years of neoliberal rule when every
day they saw those structural traits of Nicaraguan society such as
corruption, pervading class-privilege and poverty. When they vociferate
today, they are not acting in good faith. When they claim “Repression!”
after actions that leave mostly policemen (often women officers) in
hospital, they are not acting in good faith. When they complain about
isolated acts of violence by Sandinistas (a virtually non-existent
phenomenon today) but keep silent on the several deaths of Sandinistas
in recent years, at the hands of violent extremist right wing groups,
they are clearly not contributing to solve problems, but to exacerbate
them.
It is important to bear in mind that
countries like Nicaragua, in the era since independence from Spain, have
never had a fair chance to build a Nation State. All contradictions
between poor and rich, native peoples and European descendants, men and
women, old and young, have been permeated by colonial and imperial
powers. The Spanish Conquest decimated the male population of Nicaragua
in a matter of years and took the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Millenary civilizations and forms of social organization were destroyed
or severely altered overnight.
The whole region's inchoate independence
happened after the collapse of Spanish rule and the ensuing bitter
struggle between local elites. Very soon the US showed interest in
Nicaragua, Central America's largest country and the only one apart from
Panama with a promising inter-oceanic route. You will no doubt know
about William Walker's invasion and of his plans to establish slavery in
Nicaragua. Most countries in Central America have been invaded by the
US and no country that once invaded escaped a further subsequent
interventions. Nicaragua itself was invaded on numerous occasions.
By manipulating key sectors of the local
elites and the impoverished majority population, the US has always
attempted to keep Nicaragua's Nation-Statehood within the framework of a
subjugated and docile producer of export goods or of a springboard for
US imperial troops. For example Anastasio Somoza's support played a key
role in the CIA's Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.
In Nicaragua's first modern era
elections, it was US marines who managed the counting of votes – so the
results were the right ones, from the US point of view. When Sandino
forced them out of the country, the US authorities arranged his murder
and rewarded the murderer with dictatorial control of the country’s
riches. For over forty years, Anastasio Somoza ruled over Nicaragua,
sharing part of the spoils with the Conservative elite. Together, they
packed the Supreme Court (6 Liberals, 4 Conservatives) and established a
pecking order ruled by the principle of big bucks for friends, beatings
for dissidents and bullets for the belligerent. "Peace" reigned for 45
years and Nicaragua's CONDECA troops were in charge of the Central
American franchise of the US Southern Command. The poor died before
their time of curable diseases, and worked for miserable wages. Those
who cared about the situation were called “Sandino-communists”.
It is common knowledge that to change all
this, the Sandinistas, supported by the vast majority of the Nicaraguan
people, had to fight a bloody war against Somoza. After Somoza, they
had to fight another bloody war against the US government trained,
equipped and funded Contra, to defend the new nation they were trying to
build up. In the end, after 10 years of that proxy war and of merciless
economic blockade Nicaraguans were again forced to vote under US
government menaces of military aggression. But it was no longer US
marines who controlled the counting of votes and the guns in the country
were no longer all held by the US Southern Command and the CIA.
In 1990, it may be the case that
Nicaraguans were forced to vote against their own Revolution, but for
the first time in history, they had a Nation that ultimately belonged to
them. They had the 1987 Constitution, written with their massive
participation. They had a politically institutionalized autonomous
solution for the integration of the Atlantic Coast. Of equal importance,
they had a police and a military created, not to massacre their own
people, but to serve it.
Besides all this, for the first time in
their history Nicaragua's impoverished majority had a political party,
the FSLN, that expressed their needs and aspirations. The opposition UNO
electoral alliance that won the 1990 elections was just an ad hoc
mishmash of interest groups financed by at least 20 million dollars from
the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy while at the same time
the Contras continued their "armed propaganda" provocations from
Honduras under the benevolent eyes of the OAS and other observers, even
in the weeks before the election.
Subsequent to the 1990 election, the Bush
(Sr.) administration, as well as the Clinton administration after him
and later the Bush (Jr.) administration, had a clear set of priorities
in order to get Nicaragua back to the colonial status assigned to it
prior to July, 19th, 1979:
-
To neutralize, if not to destroy, the FSLN by fomenting division and weakening its ties to its political base among the most impoverished sectors of society;
-
To neutralize, corrupt and if possible destroy, the Army
-
To co-opt, corrupt and if possible dismantle, the national Police born out of the revolution.
They failed to do those three things even over 17 years. Now the Sandinistas are back in government and doing very well.
I think all this gives sufficient context
in which to try and answer your first and second questions: Who are the
"Renovadores" like Carlos Fernando Chamorro? What is their agenda?
First, it has to be said that an
overwhelming majority of the Sandinistas who have disagreed with the
policies of FSLN or Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo at various times
since 1990, today either sympathize with this government or are actively
engaged in the processes of change taking place in the country. Many of
the people who supported the so-called “Renovadores” have returned to
the FSLN. A large number returned after they saw MRS leaders Edmundo
Jarquín and Dora Maria Tellez openly campaigning with the extreme right
wing candidate Eduardo Montealegre on the ticket of Arnoldo Aleman's
hopelessly corrupt PLC party in the 2008 municipal election for Managua
and then again for extreme right wing gerontocrat Fabio Gadea during the
2011 Presidential elections.
I know many people who until recently
were very critical of Ortega and the FSLN and today support his
policies. I work for a radio station, La Primerisima, which, trhoughout
the neo-liberal period became known for its critical support of FSLN and
for its criticisms of the organization. Nobody in the FSLN today
discriminates against us for that. I myself publicly stopped doing
solidarity work for the party after the infamous “pact” with Arnoldo
Alemán, a political agreement between the country's two largest parties,
at the end of the 90's. Nobody has ever told me I was a traitor or
anything like that.
It turns out that the “pact” divided the
opposition and allowed the Sandinistas to win, first, key municipal
elections and then, in 2006, the Presidential elections in the first
round.
Actually, most “Renovadores” come from a
list of people with high posts during the revolution back in the 80's,
many of them with heroic contributions to the struggle against Somoza –
something nobody in today's Nicaragua disputes. Many of them were FSLN
deputies in the post-1990 National Assembly, and, largely instigated by
former FSLN Vice-President Sergio Ramirez, decided to build a
purportedly social-democratic fraction, abandoning the political program
on which they had been elected. In 1995, this faction became the
“Movimiento Renovador Sandinista” (Movement for Sandinista Renewal),
also known as the MRS or “Renovadores”.
This group allied itself with Nicaragua's
political right wing in order to change a number of Articles in the
1987 Constitution. Besides enabling a favorable future shot at the
presidency for politicians like Violeta Chamorro's son-in-law, Antonio
Lacayo, and the “Renovador” Sergio Ramírez, those changes were tailor
made to try and ensure that the FSLN would never return to power,
especially with Daniel Ortega at the helm.
Sergio Ramirez and his “Renovador”
deputies did all this against the will of hundreds of thousands of
Sandinistas who had elected them into office as became clear in the 1996
elections when they won barely 6% of the vote and the FSLN was able to
regain control of its legitimate parliamentary representation.
It is against this background that one
can see the significance of the “pact” with Arnoldo Alemán, and later,
the validity of the September 2010 decision by the Supreme Court to
declare inapplicable the reformed constitutional Article prohibiting the
re-election of Daniel Ortega – because it contradicted prior
fundamental equality provisions in the 1987 Constitution. When the
Renovadores along with the Liberals hastily passed those ill-conceived
reforms in the National Assembly, they didn't realize that such a reform
conflicted with a higher-ranking paragraph stating that no citizen
should be discriminated against in his or her right to run for office at
all levels.
The President of the Supreme Court
explains this in the above mentioned video. Neither the Renovadores nor
the Liberals said anything when these same criteria were applied by the
respective countries' Supreme Court's in favour of Óscar Arias in Costa
Rica or Álvaro Uribe in Colombia. The matter only became a “problem of
democracy” when it applied to Daniel Ortega.
One fact that highlights the ruthlessly
machiavellian opportunism and downright double-talk of those same
“Renovadores” accusing Ortega of being a master manipulator, is that
they were the FSLN's allies during those years of the “pact” with
Arnoldo Alemán they so much criticize today. Back then, Dora Maria
Tellez, Edmundo Jarquin and Herty Lewites (qepd) saw no serious
democratic flaws in the Sandinistas. But today, when the FSLN are back
in government, the Renovadores call the Sandinistas “fascists” – and
argue, on the other hand, that the Liberals, especially oligarch robber
baron Eduardo Montealegre's faction, are true democrats after all...
When the “Renovadores” meet left-leaning
foreigners, they show off their revolutionary credentials and language,
but when they act in Nicaragua or in Central America, they ally
themselves with the most extremist, corrupt forces of the right. So, for
example, in the last elections in El Salvador, they issued a public
letter calling on the Salvadorans to vote for ARENA (the party that
created the death squads during the war in the 80's) so as to prevent a
victory for FMLN – an ally of the Sandinistas. In June 2010, Edmundo
Jarquín, then leader of the “Renovadores”, wrote a piece with the
extravagant thesis that Ortega's “dictatorship” was worse than putschist
Roberto Micheletti's in Honduras. A week earlier, he had participated
in a workshop on “transparency and governance” at the University of
Tegucigalpa in an operation designed to whitewash the bloody coup and
subsequent repression that cost hundreds of lives of Honduran citizens
and continues to this day.
These “Renovadores” are both a political
party, a network and a fraternity. They can be seen inside the Liberal
right-wing parties or outside, working from an externally constructed
“civil society”. They can be found acting as members of organizations or
as individual personalities whose careers have been boosted by
international prizes like Vilma Nuñez de Escocia and Carlos Fernando
Chamorro. Always published by the same outlets, La Prensa and El Nuevo
Diario (and the NATO countries' global corporate propaganda media), they
have one thing in common - their dependence on foreign money, most
prominently European, but also from the United States.
The “Renovadores” political course cannot
be understood without reference to a foreign agenda attempting to
influence Nicaraguan politics in order to prevent the country from
achieving independent, sovereign development.
The funding of US political intervention
through NGO’s goes a long way back in Nicaragua's history. In fact,
together with the Philippines and Chile, the country was among
Washington's first laboratories after the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) and its network of “toxic” (politically-financed) NGO’s
was first built in 1982. One of the network's founders, Allen Weinstein,
declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years
ago by the CIA", meaning to fund, counsel and even lead all kinds of
organizations that may consciously or unconsciously serve US
geopolitical objectives in a given country at a given moment.
During the 80's, the NED channeled at
least 20 million dollars to organize UNO, the political opposition's
united front against the Sandinistas, while at the same time, via scams
like Irangate, the US government continued financing and training the
Contras under the table. This model of political intervention through
networks of purportedly "non-governmental" organizations (in reality,
consciously engineered Fifth Columns) has been used and widely
documented, from the process of preparation of the invasion of Panama in
1989 to the coups against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002, against Aristide
in Haiti in 2004 and also in the so-called "color revolutions" in
countries from Serbia and Georgia to the Ukraine.
In spite of having achieved its main
geopolitical goal, after the 1990 elections, the State Department did
not abandon its efforts to manipulate Nicaraguan society through
political intervention. USAID documents from that time show frantic
activity in order to influence groups all over the political spectrum
intended to weaken and divide the Sandinistas.
USAID supported all the networks they had
built during the 80's in order to win the 1990 elections, but they knew
that those groups would not be able to attract a considerable number of
supporters away from the FSLN due both to the elitist character of
their reactionary right-wing agenda and, in many cases, to their
outright criminal nature, since many of them had been involved in the
narcotics network that was part of what became known as the Iran-Contra
scandal.
In order to influence the Sandinistas,
they also attempted to integrate some of them into a kind of
progressiveness that could be functional to the neo-liberal project
around abstract ideas such as “transparency” and “governance”. One of
the pioneering groups in this regards was the right-wing CPDH human
rights organization.
On the other hand, accompanying US
manipulation of the NGO sector, a number of European NGO's had been
active in the country since the revolutionary decade of the 80's,
channelling considerable amounts of aid from countries such as Sweden,
West Germany, France, and so on. As those European countries began to
re-align their foreign policies with the Washington Consensus and the
objectives of US Foreign policy, those networks shifted from being
sympathetic to the Sandinista project, to embrace policies based on the
“free market”, unregulated capital flows and privatization. Donor
governments' political control over development cooperation started to
tighten. As part of that process, these donor governments actively
undertook to co-opt the NGO sectors in their respective countries.
Back then, many Nicaraguans worked with
NGO’s, and as neo-liberal policies of privatization became a general
phenomenon in the country, many more people, previously employed in the
public sector, were forced to work for them. All the popular movements
that the Sandinistas built in the 80's were forced one way or another to
apply for funds from big and small NGO's in order to finance their
activities. Many of them were co-opted over time, as is the case with
the members of the so called Coordinadora Civil and the formerly
well-respected Centro Nicaragüense de los Derechos Humanos, CENIDH, both
today are politicized appendices of the North American and European
embassies.
The 1996 election campaign saw a clash
between those wanting to consolidate the neoliberal order at the behest
of the US and the EU and those seeking to retake the revolutionary path
the country followed after the toppling of Somoza's dictatorship in 1979
(the FSLN). Discontent with neoliberal politics gave much support to
the Sandinistas and Daniel Ortega looked strong in the polls and most
observers saw the possibility of an uncertain two-round election.
The US supported the Liberal mayor of
Managua, Arnoldo Alemán. US influence led all influential voices across
the right-wing spectrum to publicly encourage the people to vote against
Daniel Ortega. However, facing the scenario of an uncertain two-round
election, the US authorities and Aleman's PLC party staged a massive
fraud in order to prevent both a victory of Ortega in the first round
and so avoid a two-round election altogether. "This was the fraud:
elections so murky that they made it impossible to see clearly what the
will of Nicaraguans really was in many parts of the country," wrote local political analysts at the time.
In order to stage the fraud, the USAID
made use of groups to the right and to the “left”. Former Sandinista
intellectuals and functionaries were either manipulated or recruited in
order to legitimize well-funded "electoral observation" organizations
with a strong rightist bias created by the USAID such as Ética y
Transparencia, which still today ranks among the main Nicaraguan
recipients of grants from the National Endowment for Democracy.
Prior to the actual fraud, the
Nicaragua's Supreme Electoral Council had been carefully destabilized in
order to prevent it from reacting to the massive irregularities that
would take place. In this work, "Renovadores", were also
instrumentalized. One of them, Rosa Marina Zelaya, was president of the
CSE and oversaw a controversial post-electoral administrative process
which ensured her partner Jorge Samper won one of the few seats gained
by the MRS.
Among the reforms to the Constitution
passed by the “Renovadores” in the National Assembly in order to prevent
a Sandinista victory, was a change in the electoral law which took away
from the Supreme Electoral Council the power to appoint the heads of
the electoral authorities in the departments of the country on account
of their competence on electoral matters, giving it to the political
parties, which would base their decisions on purely partisan
considerations. This move gave Liberal politicians decisive control over
the electoral body in the departments where they held strong
majorities.
US State Department's pressure to
politicize an electoral body that had already organized Nicaragua's
first two truly democratic elections, the one in 1984 and the one in
1990, where the Sandinistas lost power but immediately recognized the
defeat, proved to have devastating effects. The president of the
electoral authority resigned, and just weeks before the election, the
"Renovador" politician Rosa Marina Zelaya was appointed CSE president,
thus enforcing the National Assembly's reforms.
Current CSE president Roberto Rivas, the
object of ceaseless vilification by the MRS and its right wing allies
has himself criticized the wholesale confusion and corruption of the
1996 elections under Rosa Marina Zelaya's administration when he was a
relatively junior CSE official. Rivas has questioned how it is that the
same people who accepted that chaos and confusion back in 1996 when
their side won, now question the legitimate results of well organized
elections which they have lost.
Furthermore, the United States managed to
overrule UN electoral advisers who argued for various independent
observer groups so that different charges of irregularities could be
cross-checked and validated by the electoral body. Instead, the US and
its "Colonial Ministry", OAS, favored an engineered "unified" organization of Nicaraguan elections' observers.
The Civic Group "Ethics and Transparency"
(Ética y Transparencia), the largest of the local observation agencies,
had 4.200 observers on the ground. It was to this organization, and to
others such as the CAPEL NGO (a Costa Rica based electoral observation
network created by the NED back in the 80's with the aim of influencing
Nicaraguan elections), that some 3.5 million dollars' worth of political
US money was channeled in 1996. (See William I. Robinson, “A Faustian
Bargain”).
To most Nicaraguans, the composition of
"Ethics and Transparency" was blatantly partisan with a strong anti-FSLN
bias. The lack of credibility of this organization forced the US
American operators to introduce some cosmetic changes in it.
It is here that Carlos Fernando Chamorro,
former editor of the FSLN daily Barricada, comes into play: He was made
a member of the clearly biased Ética y Transparencia's board of
directors. Former Sandinista human rights network CENIDH reluctantly
joined the group, which ultimately and in spite of its strong criticism
of the elections, ended up lending authority to the Western view that,
in spite of serious flaws, the elections should be regarded as
legitimate. At the same time, openly Sandinista social movements such as
the Movimiento Comunal were carefully kept out of the allegedly
politically plural "Ética y Transparencia".
The elections had so little
"transparency" that they made it impossible to clearly see the
electorate's preferences in various parts of the country. Nothing
worked, neither the voters' IDs nor the electoral material. Many voting
centres changed venue the very same day of the elections and the
counting of the votes took many more hours that expected. In Managua
alone, hundreds of voting centers weren't counted amounting to the votes
of close to 70.000 people. In the hours after the elections, thousands
of votes as well as voting protocols were found in the ditches of the
Capital. Elections in the Liberal-controlled departments of Managua,
Matagalpa, and Jinotega, which alone accounted for half of the
electorate, were in a state of chaos.
The same night of the election, with only
2.7% of the electoral centers counted (about 50.000 votes out of a
universe of over 2 million voters), the Liberal Arnoldo Alemán
proclaimed himself the winner and the international corporate media
followed suit. Most international observers from the big NGO's and
Western governments flew back to their countries or rushed to the
beautiful Nicaraguan beaches to enjoy some long awaited vacations in the
tropics. The big networks did the same as Nicaragua again fell in the
media shadow. Only Nicaraguans and self-financed observers from small
solidarity groups as well as USAID's hard-core operators were left face
to face on the ground to sort out the mess.
Although
in the coming weeks and months the Sandinistas succeeded in forcing the
authorities to carry out a recount of the votes, the process was done
in such a disorderly manner, and the votes to be counted had been so
widely tampered with, that the official results
did little more than to increase Aleman's advantage, most of the 20
participant parties being almost wiped out from the political scene. To
Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, the elections had been "legal" but
hardly legitimate. Most Nicaraguans were suspicious about the outcome.
Ética y Transparencia was one of the
organizations that contributed to bestow this electoral farce with a
thin coat of legitimacy in a country that had managed to organize two
very difficult and exemplary elections before and whose people were
firmly determined to settle its internal conflicts through peaceful
means in view of the traumatic lessons it had learned from history. In
power remained the same highly voracious and corrupt elites that have
ruled Nicaragua during most of the country's history.
The US had succeeded once again in
imposing the imperial status quo in Nicaragua and, in the wake of this
intervention, built the main components of what later would become an
externally engineered "civil society" with its "right" (Liberal) and
"left" (“Renovador”) factions.
Let me make a brief pause at this point to make the following reflection:
99% of the Nicaraguans, from the last
peasant family deep into the mountains in Matagalpa to Daniel Ortega, to
the large majority of those who do not agree with the Sandinistas
today, never want another war like the “low intensity” war that the US
waged against this people in the 80's. I lived and fought through that
war and I can guarantee you that it was terrible. When the Sandinistas
lost the 1990 elections, some small groups advocated that the FSLN
should not hand over the power to the Contra leadership. Daniel Ortega
was firm: the power must be handed over and regained through political
work. Almost everybody agreed with him. Even those who didn't agree at
that moment later told me they were glad the FSLN chose the political
path.
Nicaraguan politics have always been
totally corrupted and distorted by imperial influence. That corruption
was never more rampant than during the 17 years of neo-liberal rule
between 1990 and 2007. The challenge for Daniel Ortega and the
Sandinistas was, and still is today, to build up a country with the
people living here. They cannot import new, ideal, uncorrupted citizens
from some other planet.
The FSLN has had to rebuild a country
using the strength of a political movement with a base of about 40 per
cent of the electorate, trying to increase that base and to use the
spaces of power that come with having the biggest and strongest
political force. They had to do it negotiating with all political forces
– including the “Renovadores”, who had betrayed them, and with Arnoldo
Alemán, who had stolen the 1996 elections.
By the year 2000 it was clear that the
“Renovadores” were aligned with US and European Union interests. In the
2001 presidential elections and in the 2004 local elections, their
electoral oversight officers received training from the International
Republican Institute – a strange thing for a social-democratic party to
accept indeed! What is more, before the 2006 elections, the CSE found
out about this training, discovering that the documents used were copies
of the old, outdated electoral law with many paragraphs that were not
applicable anymore in the country's electoral process.
As you probably know, Carlos Fernando
Chamorro runs a media NGO called CINCO which is a regular beneficiary of
money from the US and other governments. CINCO's sister organization
MAM, the Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres (Women's Autonomous Movement)
operates under the leadership of CINCO board member Sofía Montenegro.
CINCO allows Chamorro to run or finance several rabidly anti-sandinista
outlets, whereas MAM focuses on “women's rights”.
It is important to understand that CINCO
is a non-profit organization subject to the authority of the Ministerio
de Gobernación. MAM on the other hand is a political organization, not a
non-profit, which in recent years was part of the MRS Alliance and took
part in national and municipal elections.
In March 2010, I found out that
Chamorro's CINCO was receiving money from USAID's program
CamTransparencia which was run by Casals & Associates, a subsidiary
of the Pentagon's contractor DynCorp. This is serious, taking into
account DynCorp's record of involvement in various US-sponsored wars and
interventions all over the world. Casals & Associates' involvement
in Nicaragua goes back to 1995, also as a USAID contractor running an
“anti-corruption” project. As I noted earlier, 1996 saw the big
electoral fraud against Ortega.
According to official figures (search for
“oda data site:gov” in Google), during 2010, CINCO received at least
40,500 dollars from the NED – that money comes directly from the US
State Department. One of CINCO's associates, Red Nicaragüense por la
Democracia y el Desarrollo Local, received USD 51,979 in 2008; USD
55,000 in 2009 and another 55,000 in 2010 from the same source.
According to WikiLeaks cable 10MANAGUA240 from February 22nd,
2010, Sofía Montenegro from MAM requested USD 100,000 to the US
ambassador in Managua, Robert J. Callahan. The project was focused “on
the promotion and defense of women's civil rights, but would by its
nature reach a broader community”, wrote Callahan, and he added:
“MAM is known to the Embassy and has a
proven track record of not only promoting women's rights, but promoting
democratic values in the general population. As various civil society
groups begin to coordinate their efforts to counter an increasingly
authoritarian government, MAM has been an instrumental player in the
creation and operation of the civil society network Citizens' Union for
Democracy (Union Ciudadana por la Democracia, UCD). For these reasons,
Embassy Managua fully supports S/GWI's funding of MAM's project.
Following is the proposal as presented by MAM.”
In
October, 2010, Carlos Fernando Chamorro received the María Moors Cabot
Prize from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism – a
prize that every year is given to the most vocal journalists who advance
the US interests all over the world. Just to give you an idea of the
prize's character, I'll mention that he shared it with Miami Herald's Tyler
Bridges, who specialized in writing stories about the production of
weapons of mass destruction in Iran-financed dairies in Bolivia (that's
fantasy, not journalism), Norman Gall who among other things is a member
of the board of the Fernand Braudel World Economy Institute together
with US-exiled former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada – an
individual whose extradition Bolivia continues to demand on charges of
genocide after a massacre of 60 demonstrators in 2003, and Catalonian La
Vanguardia's journalist Joaquim Ibarz, widely known for his
pathological invention of sheer lies about Hugo Chavez.
The figures above are the tip of the
iceberg. Much of the money is triangulated in ways that are difficult to
track without using a great amount of resources. Besides US government
funding, there is a considerable amount of money coming in from European
governments. US$40,000 in Nicaragua will pay good US$500 salaries over
80 months. Many journalists here make little more than US$350 dollars or
even less. These sums are trivial in Europe but can buy many
consciences here in Nicaragua.
Nor should one forget the episode in 2008
in which it was discovered that CINCO, in clear violation of its
non-profit status, had been channelling tens of thousands of dollars to
Sofia Montenegro's Renovador political organization MAM. Much of that
money was from OXFAM UK. That subterfuge was clearly designed to permit
development cooperation funding to be diverted for political purposes.
At the time Chamorro raised a scandal about government “repression” to
cover up his and Sofia Montenegro's abuse of aid money for political
purposes.
It may also be worth noting that the
Ministry of Government investigation into CINCO's activities discovered
that CINCO routinely sub-contracted work to four private companies whose
boards included Chamorro family members. So when Carlos Fernando
Chamorro sounds off about nepotism in the Nicaraguan government, he
himself has funded his own brand of nepotism with foreign taxpayers'
money. This is just one more example of Chamorro's ingrained cynicism
and hypocrisy.
The use of smear and disinformation is
massive with regard to Nicaragua and the Sandinistas and has been going
on for much longer than the campaign against Chavez in Venezuela or
Correa in Ecuador. We actually need people who come here, see with their
own eyes what's going on and to spend less their time with people like
Carlos Fernando Chamorro and fake-progressive “Renovadores”. I know it's
very difficult for journalists to get through in the West with stories
about this country that go against prevailing opinion. But if you can
convince any of your friends (journalists or otherwise) to come here
with fresh eyes, I'm sure they'll be surprised at what they'll find.
And, of course, you are always welcome in Nicaragua.
Truly yours,
Jorge Capelán
