It is 30 years since the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinistas, writes Enrico Tortolano
It is 30 years since the Nicaraguan revolution first swept the Sandinistas to power, offering the people of Latin America hope in an era characterised by violent right-wing military dictatorships. On July 19 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional – FSLN) overthrew the brutal and corrupt dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family dynasty had ruled for 43 years (1936-1979).
After the fall of Managua, spirits were high and hope was infectious. An opportunity had opened to build a new Nicaragua underpinned by social justice and co-operation. In the months that followed, the FSLN enjoyed broad support for its policies, especially the initiatives in the cultural sector that led to an explosion of creative events.
However, the Sandinistas inherited huge problems. The war to oust Somoza had killed as many as 50,000 people. Most of the population lived in grinding poverty, hundreds of thousands were homeless or refugees in neighbouring countries, the cities were in ruins and Somoza had made off with the country’s reserves, leaving a foreign debt of about $1.6 billion.
The Sandinistas launched a series of initiatives to help rebuild the country and develop their revolutionary goals. To promote citizen involvement, local defence committees and public sector trade unions were formed in urban areas. In the countryside, unions were formed for farmers and agricultural workers.
A national literacy campaign was started in 1980 that greatly impressed international educational experts. In just five months, the Popular Literacy Army, consisting of nearly 100,000 Nicaraguan students, teachers, health workers, and women’s groups, worked together with the most impoverished sectors of society to reduce the illiteracy rate from 51 per cent to less than 13 per cent. Education spending expanded and the number of schools, teachers and students dramatically increased.
Universal healthcare became available, new public hospitals and clinics were built. Brigades of community volunteers carried out vaccination campaigns. Infant mortality rates and diseases were also significantly reduced.
In 1984, the first elections under the Sandinistas were won by its leader, Daniel Ortega, with a 67 per cent majority. This was the first time most Nicaraguans had ever voted and the first time since 1928 that the United States did not manage to distort the electoral process. However, the Sandinistas were not universally popular, particularly in the Atlantic Coast region where the Miskito, Rama and Creole people never really got behind the revolution, especially after the Sandinistas made attempts to bring about the forcible relocation of indigenous groups.
Convinced that Nicaragua’s socialist policies and friendship with Cuba and the Soviet Union meant the spread of communism in the “backyard” of the US, Ronald Reagan’s administration suspended aid to Nicaragua in 1981 and thereafter unleashed unparalleled military and economic aggression against the Sandinistas. Determined to overthrow Ortega but wary of public opinion in the US after the failure in Vietnam, the CIA – with presidential backing – gave military training and weaponry to the Contras, the exiled opponents of the Sandinistas. The Contra war was launched with nearly $20 million of US military aid. The troops, based in training camps in Honduras, were mostly made up of Somoza’s National Guard, who had fled the country on his departure. By the end of 1985, the Contras had killed 4,000 civilians and kidnapped almost 6,000. Ludicrously, Reagan described the Contras as “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers”.
Exhausted by war and deprivation, the Sandinistas were defeated by US-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro in the 1990 elections. The US had perfected its strategy of low-intensity conflict in Nicaragua.
Much has been written about the
$12.5 million the US Congress allocated for distribution through the National Endowment for Democracy in 1989-1990 to internal opposition groups, but less on the clandestine channels used by the CIA and other US agencies to provide the opposition with another $18 million. The administration of the first George Bush spent about $20 per voter in Nicaragua, compared to $4 per voter in the US elections of 1988.
Since 1990, World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies of privatisation and deregulation, supported by the local oligarchy, have created mass unemployment and poverty, reduced welfare spending and created unsustainable foreign debts. More than 400 essential state services were privatised between 1990 and 2006 under so-called “efficiency savings”. Illiteracy, which the revolution managed to reduce to less than 13 per cent, climbed to 34 per cent.
In 1989, despite the economic embargo and devastation of the war, the Sandinista government invested $35 per person annually in health services. By 2005, health spending had declined to $16 per person.
As a consequence, on November 5 2006, the Nicaraguan people voted Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas back into power. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in jubilation. The celebrations went on for days until it was clear that all the main political forces contending the election – and Washington, too, – would accept the FSLN victory.
“It has been 16 years in which the people have paid a big cost with the economic policies known as neo-liberalism”, Ortega told a vast crowd gathered at the Plaza La Fe in Managua. “Now we have the challenge to open a new road – a road that will permit Nicaraguan families to live in dignity.”
Ortega celebrated the victory with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivian leader Evo Morales. Ortega’s first official act was to sign up to the Alternativa Bolviariana para las Americas (ALBA): an agreement based on the principles of co-operation and solidarity. Morales pledged that he, Chávez, Ortega and other Latin American presidents would nationalise their countries’ industries and “bring death to American imperialism”.
A plethora of anti-poverty programmes such as Cero Pobreza are now being developed to help eradicate the extreme poverty that haunts Nicaragua. In a process similar to the national crusade that took Nicaragua’s poor barrios by storm in 1980, thousands of young people are again involved in a struggle to eliminate illiteracy.
Predictably, outside interference and violence from opposition groups is on the rise. As a result, Ortega wants to see a permanent Sandinista insurrection to “struggle constantly” against “the neo-liberal enemy”. He has called for a permanent Sandinista mobilisation in the streets. “The enemy is still the same and we cannot trust them. The enemy is mobilised because it can’t accept a government of the poor.”
The permanent mobilisation is part of the Sandinistas’ 30th anniversary of the revolution celebrations. However, the biggest source of joy springs from the recognition that there really are alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism and the depressing panorama of social disintegration and permanent economic crisis. In conjunction with other Latin American governments and international grassroots movements, the Sandinistas are beginning a genuine programme of fundamental economic change that places the economy at the service of collective welfare and social development. Who knows where this will lead? But there are hopeful signs.
