Despite U.S. Threats, Voters Return Sandinistas To Power

By Steven Argue

Monday evening the impoverished barrios of Managua erupted in celebration as they heard reports of the victory of Sandinista (FSLN) leader Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua’s November 5 presidential elections. The Sandinistas got their name from Augusto Cesar Sandino, a popular hero in the resistance to the occupation of Nicaragua by U.S. marines in the 1930s.

Ortega won despite opposition and intervention from the White House and U.S. State Department. Direct intervention in the elections included statements from U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli saying U.S. aid to Nicaragua will end if Daniel Ortega is elected and going on to say, “clearly the Nicaraguan people will decide who their next president is, but they will have to live with the consequences”. Congressman Dan Burton and Oliver North also made campaign tours of Nicaragua leveling similar threats. Burton stated matter of factly, "if Daniel Ortega is elected it would be very difficult to maintain good relations after these elections."

It was the Sandinistas that first brought democracy to Nicaragua in 1979 through leading a popular revolution against the US imposed and supported Somoza dynasty. That democracy set up by the Sandinistas has, unfortunately, been a bourgeois democracy open to massive monetary intervention by the U.S. government and other corporate interests. The Somoza dictatorship was, however, much worse.

With U.S. backing the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist and virtually as their own private estate from 1936 to 1979. The Somoza dynasty was imposed on Nicaragua through a series of invasions by the U.S. marines that installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in the government and created the Somoza dynasty’s power base, the Nicaraguan National Guard. After Anastasio Somoza Garcia’s assassination by a popular poet in 1956, his two sons ruled Nicaragua: Luis Somoza Debayle from 1956 to1967 and Anastasio Somoza Debayle from 1967 until 1979 when he was thrown out of power by the Sandinista revolution. The last Somoza dictator was allowed by the United States to escape prosecution for his crimes to live out the rest of his life in exile in Miami.

Under the Somoza dynasty the political opposition were murdered in large numbers with the men and boys of whole towns at times executed and piled up in the streets or dropped from helicopters in attempts to silence the people or get them to give information on the whereabouts of rebels. While the poor often went hungry, the Somoza family, through corruption, became the biggest landowners in the country and accumulated massive wealth from the country’s cotton, coffee, and cattle exports. In addition in 1972, when an earthquake hit Nicaragua killing 1,000 people, Somoza pocketed the international aid that came pouring in for his own personal use.

The Sandinista revolution, upon coming to power in 1979, confiscated the land that had been held by the Somoza family and some of his closet cronies and redistributed it to the poor that worked it partly through establishing collectively run state farms. The Sandinistas also made literacy and healthcare a priority. Easily treated diseases that Somoza let kill and maim, such as polio, were vaccinated against and eliminated. Teaching everyone to read and write became a priority in the country where Somoza once declared he wanted “… uneducated people, little more than beasts of burden.”

The United States welcomed none of this and soon CIA operatives had organized former members of Somoza’s corrupt and brutal National Guard into a mercenary army called the Contras. Protected by the U.S. supported military dictatorship in Honduras the Contras carried out terrorist attacks across the border into Nicaragua. This U.S. sponsored war murdered 60,000 Nicaraguans, caused massive economic destruction and hardship, and displaced an estimated 150,000 people.

The Contras, that were given monetary support from the United States by Ronald Reagan and the votes of both the Democrat and Republican Parties in the House, were cited by human rights oganizations for abuses that included the widespread brutal and indescriminant targetting of civilians for torture, rape, and murder. The American Protestant watchdog group, Witness For Peace, documented the following crimes in just one year: murder, rape, cutting off arms, breaking toes and fingers, gouging out eyes, cutting out tongues, maiming children, torture, beyonetting pregnant women in the stomach, castration, cutting off breasts, tearing out beating hearts, scraping skin off faces, pouring acid on the face, and summary executions. Whole day care centers were blown up with kids in them.

Later as more and more Americans became outraged by direct U.S. support to the Contras, some of the overt aid was cut off by the House, but covert aid continued. Part of how the CIA continued to fund their illegal Contra operations was through importing Cocaine to the United States, as was exposed in Gary Webb’s thee part expose in the San Jose Mercury News. For those well referenced articles Gary Webb was fired from his job, and he later died in a “suicide” with two gunshot wounds through his face.

In addition Oliver North was partially responsible for the deaths of these 60,000 Nicaraguans by illegally funneling aid to the Contras through money made from arms sales to Iran. For the Nicaraguan people having such a war criminal on their soil this year warning of the consequences of a victory for Daniel Ortega in their elections must be truly ominous. In an absurd statement fit only for Bizzaro World Oliver North went so far as to compare Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez all to Adolf Hitler.

Despite the U.S. war against the people of Nicaragua, the FSLN organized the first truly democratic elections ever held in the country in 1984. All political parties were given equal access to the airwaves in the state owned media. Sandinista Daniel Ortega won the bid for president with 70% of the vote and a constituent assembly was set up with all parties that got a percentage of votes gaining seats. This included socialists to the left of the Sandinistas, but the top rightwing pro-Contra parties, knowing they had no support, boycotted the elections. International observers declared the elections free and fair despite Ronald Reagan’s claims to the contrary.

Yet despite this massive support for the Sandinistas in 1984, by the 1990 elections the Sandinistas were defeated. So what happened? Simply put the Sandinistas were defeated by massive imperialist intervention and an inability of the Sandinistas to deal decisively with the problems that created. The United States organized and funded the Contra terror war, an economic blockade, insisted on repayment of massive debts accrued under the corrupt Somoza regime, and gave massive monetary assistance to the rightwing political opposition led by Violeta Chamorro in the 1990 elections. Capitalist landowners and industrial owners sabotaged production and cheap credits that the Sandinistas made available in an attempt to encourage production in a mixed economy mainly ended up in Miami bank accounts. In the 1990 election, Violeta Chamorro, with her direct support from the United States, could promise an end to the Contra War and economic assistance from the United States if elected. The Sandinistas for their part failed to take the necessary steps of outlawing parties that got monetary assistance from the terrorist United States, failed to end payments of the foreign “debt” to the IMF and World Bank accrued under the Somoza dictatorship, failed to carry out a sweeping land reform and nationalizations of industry to end capitalist sabotage and use those resources for the benefit of the majority, and in short failed to implement a truly socialist program that would have offered a clear alternative in the face of the Contra gun that was being held to the people’s heads.

Before the election of Chamorro Nicaragua suffered deeply from the war and economic sanctions, yet things did not improve after Chamorro was elected. The Nicaraguan people have now suffered under 16 years of U.S. imposed rightist governments and the neo-liberal capitalist policies they have imposed. Meanwhile the economic aid promised by Chamorro and the United States has amounted to an estimated $38 million a year, not nearly a repayment on the damages the U.S. caused, and a tiny trickle compared to what is really needed. In fact, in 1987 the International Court of Justice ordered the United States to pay Nicaragua $16 billion for the damage caused by U.S. terrorism against Nicaragua. These factors combined have left Nicaragua the second poorest country in the hemisphere with Haiti being the only country doing worse.

The cost of living has doubled since 1990 but wages have not gained significantly, despite a small increase in the minimum wage in 1997. Sixty percent of the people live in poverty and people have literally starved to death. A million Nicaraguans now live and work in Costa Rica, most of them illegally, in an attempt to make a living. The chief source of Nicaraguan foreign exchange is now what is sent from relatives in the United States. Healthcare that was free under the Sandinistas is now in ruins and dependent on foreign charities. Sandinista programs for education, including free books for secondary education were also dismantled under the U.S. imposed government.

After Violetta Chamorro came to power, some of the capitalist landowners close to Samoza who had lost land in the revolution (and had been compensated for it) came back and evicted poor peasants from their land with the help of the government. The IMF and the World Bank, with their friendly government in tow, have pushed their capitalist agenda which has included a 44 percent cut in wages in the public sector since 1990 and the privatization of 300 small state enterprises between 1990 and 1995. The phone utilities and electricity have also been privatized, with capitalist monopolies now charging exorbitant prices for these basic services and driving the economy deeper into crisis.

In 2000 children were shown on TV in the coffee growing region of Matagalpa visibly starving in heart breaking pictures reminiscent of African famines. This author traveled to that same region during Sandinista rule in 1986, and despite that being a time of the height of the U.S. sponsored war and economic blockade, the people were fed and there was no visible starvation. Since the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas the counter-revolutionary government, while not directly dismantling all of the co-operative farms, they have also imposed credit policies that favor capitalist farms and have done nothing to mitigate problems caused by the world crash in the coffee market. The implications of the free market policies are clear, poor peasants are free to starve to death.

It is within the context of many decades U.S. imposed misery that Daniel Ortega will be taking power. To continue the neo-liberal policies started with the Chamorro counter-revolution the U.S. supported presidential candidate Eduardo Montealegre in the 2006 elections against Daniel Ortega and was defeated. Yet despite U.S. opposition, the Sandinistas are a leadership that did not take the revolution to its necessary socialist conclusions in the 1980s, and Daniel Ortega today has not only publicly renounced Marxism, he has gained the support of Salvador Talavera, the leader of the former Contra National Resistance Party (PRN).

As part of Daniel Ortega’s newly forged alliances with the right he supported Nicaragua’s new law that outlaws abortion, even in cases of rape or when a mother’s life is in danger. In contrast in revolutionary Cuba abortion is a free procedure for all women given on demand.

Revolutionary socialists, while calling for an end to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, recognize that the gains made by the Ortega presidency will be small unless Daniel Ortega adopts the socialist program that he failed to implement last time he was president. Such a program would go beyond the Sandinista’s past admirable reforms improving healthcare and education and would include a sweeping land reform, the nationalization of industry, a cancellation of “debt” payments and refusal to accept IMF and World Bank dictates, the enforcement of the outlawing of U.S. government money in the Nicaraguan democracy, and the building of a revolutionary internationalist working class alliance against U.S. imperialism and capitalism. Given the FSLN’s past history and current program it will likely be up to parties to the left of the FSLN to fight for and gain such a program.

Over a Century of U.S. Inflicted Pain is Too Much! U.S. Hands Off Of Nicaragua! End U.S. Imperialism Through Socialist Revolution In The United States!

References:

Brody, Reed. (1985). Contra Terror in Nicaragua: Report of a Fact-Finding Mission: September 1984-January 1985. Boston: South End Press.

Chamorro, Edgar (1987). Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation. New York: Institute for Media Analysis

Garvin, Glenn. (1992). Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras. Washington: Brassey's.

Jones, Alex and John Paul Jr. (2004) Evidence Appears to Indicate That Gary Webb Was Murdered Prison Planet.com Newsline

Solo, Toni (2003). Neo-Liberal Nicaragua, A New Banana Republic. Counterpunch

Webb, Gary (1998). Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Seven Stories Press (hardcover, 1998), (paperback, 1999).

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