Freedom for Irving Larios, illegally detained in Nicaragua on 20 September

On 20 September my friend and long-term collaborator, Irving Larios, became yet another political prisoner who has been illegally detained and incarcerated by the Nicaraguan dictatorship led by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.  Irving has been to Scotland twice, in 2018 and 2019, hosted by Scottish Solidarity with Nicaragua and the University of Edinburgh, where he has spoken about the political situation in Nicaragua as well the work of his NGO, INGES, on disaster risk reduction. In July this year, the Scottish government issued a statement on Nicaragua in which it condemned “the violence against peaceful protesters, arbitrary detentions, media restrictions, and the use of live ammunition” and called on the Nicaraguan government to “release all political prisoners immediately and without conditions.” 

Irving Larios

I first met Irving in the late 1990s through a mutual friend, Sadie Rivas, when the Sandinista Front for National Liberation, who was then in opposition had signed a pact with the ruling liberals which enabled them to divide up quotas of power. It was a time when many revolutionaries, Irving and Sadie included, who had fought against the Somoza dictatorship had become highly critical of the once revolutionary party for their verticalism, the lack of internal democracy, and the fact that the party leadership had access to benefits denied to the poor majority who were exhausted by the war, military conscription, the US-imposed trade embargo, and shortages of basic goods. We met for the second time at Sadie’s wake. Sadie had been tragically killed in a car accident in 1999, and Irving and I united in our grief at the loss of our beautiful and inspirational friend have been firm comrades ever since. My research and his rural development projects converged and over the years we have collaborated in Northern León, San Francisco Libre, and the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, as well as in Costa Rica where we worked on the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) referendum. His commitment to social justice and in particular to trying to find innovative and less welfarist ways to get Nicaraguans out of rural poverty have never wavered. Over the past two decades, he has supported my research as well as that of my graduate students in ways that I can never repay, with transport, accommodation, food, introductions, and ideas.

Press release from the national police announcing Irving’s arrest

Irving gained his political education in the Sandinista revolution. In 1977, when he was just 19 years old, his university education was cut short when he joined the ranks of the FSLN and was forced into clandestinity to evade capture by brutal Somoza dictatorship. After the triumph of the revolution, he worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs. He is one of the many prominent Sandinista revolutionaries, along with Sergio Ramírez, Dora María Téllez, Victor Hugo Tinoco, Mónica Baltodano, and Gioconda Belli, who became highly critical of the FSLN.  Dora María and Victor Hugo are also currently in jail and the others are in exile. On 7 September, the government ordered the arrest of Sergio Ramírez, former vice-president in the early years of the Revolution and one of Nicaragua’s best-known writers. Sergio is currently away from Nicaragua but his home in Managua has been raided and his new novel, Tongale no sabe bailar, has been taken out of circulation in Nicaragua

The FSLN returned to power in 2006 after 16 years in opposition and began to rule through a mixture of authoritarianism, alliances with big business, restrictions on press freedom, electoral fraud, and clientelist anti-poverty programmes, driven by an anti-feminist, anti-environmentalist, and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous politics. The repression enacted against critics of the regime escalated dramatically after a popular rebellion in April 2018, when more than 300 protestors were killed by government agents and nearly 700 became political prisoners. Thousands more went into exile fearing for their lives and have fought to rebuild Nicaraguan democracy from there.  But Irving didn’t leave and has continued to denounce the human rights violations and work with various groups and networks including Reconstruimos Nicaragua and the Articulación de Movimientos Sociales to try and find a way out of the current impasse. In recent months, three years after the April 2018 rebellion and just before the presidential elections scheduled for 7 November, the repression has begun to escalate once again and has reached absurd proportions. In the past few months, the regime has arrested many of the critics of the government, on the right and the left, including all of the potential opposition presidential candidates who were hoping to run against Ortega in the coming elections. One of those arrested in June was Tamara Dávila, Sadie’s daughter, who was dragged away by police in front of her 5-year-old daughter and who is still in jail. As a new report by Human Rights Watch has clearly documented, the regime has engaged in practices of arbitrary detention on spurious grounds and fabricated charges without evidence, and political prisoners have been subject to horrendous conditions including prolonged solitary confinement, insufficient food, interrogation without legal counsel, and have denied visits from family members.  Like many of the other political prisoners, Irving is detained on the basis of Law 1055, the “Law of Defence of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty and Self-Determination for Peace”, passed last year as a means to go after opponents. According to yesterday’s press release from the National Police, Irving is being investigated for carrying out acts that undermine Nicaragua’s independence, sovereignty, and self-determination, for requesting military intervention, for the use of foreign funds to carry out acts of terrorism and destabilization, for the promotion of trade sanctions, and for damaging the supreme interests of the nation.

Last month, INGES, the NGO that Irving created in the 1990s, was one of 15 NGOs stripped of their legal status. This entailed handing over all of their accounts and assets, including their vehicles and their premises where their offices were located, a house purchased for them many years ago by an Irish donation. 

Irving has been strong and defiant for the past three years but after this attack and the forced dismantling of INGES and decades of work and commitment, he started to sound a little broken, as he tried to liquidate the organization in the short space of time demanded by the regime, lay off all his colleagues who are now unemployed, close ongoing projects that were bringing tangible benefits to rural communities and survivors of Hurricanes Eta and Iota, and deal with the constant intimidation. Everybody in Scottish Solidarity with Nicaragua demands his immediate release and that of all of Nicaragua’s political prisoners.

In November, Ortega, who has been president of Nicaragua for 26 of the last 42 years, will run unopposed, electoral participation will be low, and he will once again claim victory. Nicaragua deserves better.

Irving Larios on a visit to Edinburgh in 2018

In solidarity with Nicaragua: 42 years on

Today is the 42^nd anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Today, as I have done every day for the past few weeks, I woke up and remembered that Tamara Dávila is still in jail.

I stopped supporting the FSLN in the 1990s. This “socialist” party did a dodgy electoral deal with the right-wing liberals and formed an alliance with the ultraconservative wing of the Catholic Church, they refused to engage in an internal debate about the democratization of the party, and the leader and former president Daniel Ortega was accused of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez since she was 11 years old. The past 15 years working on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, where the Revolution was very differently experienced and accommodated and drove many Indigenous peoples to join the Contra forces, have also done much to complicate my understanding of the 1980s. Nonetheless, I have always celebrated this day in some way, distinguishing Sandinismo from Orteguismo, like many Nicaraguans do. The Nicaraguan Revolution is the historical event that more than any other has shaped my life, politically, professionally, and emotionally.  I first went to Nicaragua right after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 on a Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign brigade (Figure 1). I got hooked on this tiny country that had courageously stood up to US imperialism and tried to create a world that was on the side of the poor and dispossessed.

Figure 1: Santa Lucía, Boaco, 1990 environmental brigade. A Sandinista militant had just given me his beret and his t-shirt from the 1990 electoral campaign

I was in Nicaragua on the 11^th anniversary of the Revolution. In figure 2 is 24-year-old me with my brigade comrade Emma Dooks, both of us beaming with revolutionary fervour as we got to meet Comandante Daniel Ortega. I was also in Nicaragua for the 20^th anniversary of the Revolution when Daniel came to Matagalpa and spoke in a rally (see Figure 3). Since then, I’ve been back many times, mostly for research and my commitment to working with Nicaraguans in their struggles for social justice has remained as strong as it ever was.

Figure 2: 19 July 1990, the 11th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution

Figure 3: Daniel Ortega arrives in Matagalpa on 19 July 1999 for the 20th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution

Figure 4: Daniel Ortega speaks in Matagalpa on the 20th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution on 19 July 1999

It has now been 42 years since the triumph of that revolution and although all the signs of what the FSLN would become were already there in 1989 before the electoral defeat of 1990 and contributed to the 1990 defeat, and certainly were by 1999, it is truly horrific to see that they are now just as repressive, dictatorial, and murderous, and just as much into corruption, crony capitalism, perpetual re-election, and extractivism, as the Somoza dictatorship they overthrew. The FSLN returned to power in 2006 after 16 years in opposition with the same leader, Daniel Ortega. In those years, many Sandinista revolutionaries left the party or were expelled. Since returning to power, the government has turned against all of Nicaragua’s progressive sectors, including the feminist movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, the campesino movement, the environmental movement, pensioners, Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples, the NGOs, and independent media.  Daniel Ortega has now been president for 27 of the last 42 years and he is a neoliberal through and through, in spite of the socialist rhetoric he spouts.  In April 2018, when the people rose up in anger at growing authoritarianism, environmental destruction, and the erosion of pensions, Ortega and his wife and vice-president Rosario Murillo turned their thugs and their weapons against the protestors, many of them students. Hundreds were murdered and imprisoned, thousands fled in exile to other countries. One of my research participants, Bluefields journalist and broadcaster Ángel Gahona, was shot while reporting on the protests. Babies and children were caught in the crossfire too. The FSLN was expelled from the Socialist International in 2019 for grave human rights violations.

Tamara Dávila is a member of Unidad Nacional Azul y Blanco, the coalition formed to oppose the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and a political prisoner. She was arrested by government forces on 12 June while she was at home with her four-year-old daughter. She was arrested along with a number of prominent members of the opposition including several precandidates for the November elections. Many of those currently in jail – Cristiana Chamorro, Arturo Cruz, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Felix Maradiaga, Violeta Granera, José Adán Aguerri, José Pallais, Dora María Téllez, Hugo Torres, Victor Hugo Tinoco, Medardo Mairena, Lesther Alemán – are household names in Nicaragua. They are well known and respected for their political contributions and commitment to Nicaragua. They hail from right across the political spectrum and include former Sandinista comrades, as well as former business collaborators of the current government leadership. They were arrested thanks to the repressive Law of Sovereignty passed in 2020. On 16 July, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) requested that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights extend provisional measures in order to protect Tamara’s rights. They also requested her immediate release.

Tamara grew up with the revolution and its legacies. Her late parents, Irving Dávila and Sadie Rivas, both made major and historically documented contributions to the revolution. Tamara is a feminist activist whose progressive and revolutionary credentials have never been in doubt. She is a member of the new generation of political leaders needed to build a revolutionary Nicaragua for the 21^st century, but one without the masculinism, verticalism, misogyny, and racism of its 1980s variant.

Tamara’s mom, Sadie Rivas, was my most inspirational friend. She participated in the so-called Insurrección de los Niños (the Insurrection of the Children) against the Somoza dictatorship, so-called because those participating were so young. I first met her in 1991 on my second visit to Nicaragua and she came to the UK a few months later to participate in a scheme run by the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign to bring party members to the UK. We spent time a few months together having fun and campaigning in solidarity events to defend the gains of the revolution. In the 1990s, Sadie was one of the many revolutionaries who was expelled from the party for questioning its internal politics and the betrayal of its revolutionary politics. Today many of those who fought and sacrificed, the people who made revolutionary history, are no longer with the FSLN. They conduct their revolutionary politics outside of the party and have done so for more than two decades.

I was living with Sadie and her children in 1999 when she was tragically killed in a car accident on her way back to Matagalpa from Managua. I was doing my doctoral fieldwork and had my own children with me, then aged 4 and 7. Tamara was just 18 years old; the sadness of those days still grips my body from within. But Sadie would be so immensely proud of Tamara, for standing up for justice and fighting for Nicaragua and Nicaraguans who deserve something so much better than what they have.

Sadly, it seems that some people on the left (including bizarrely the current Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign that really should know better) are still taken in by Ortega’s anti-imperialist and socialist rhetoric and they ignore and overlook the repression that the government has unleashed on protestors, on Nicaragua’s Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples and on its lakes and forests, as well as the courting of local oligarchies and transnational capital and the nepotistic distribution of business contracts. I have activist friends who wake up to riot police outside their homes who monitor their every movement and that of anyone who comes to their homes. The faces of Ortega-Murillo are everywhere as they tried to manufacture a cult of personality (see Figure 5). Some commentators and activists on the left circulate the idea that all of Nicaragua’s problems are created by US intervention and even suggest in a rather colonizing fashion that all those in opposition are manipulated and funded by the empire, as if Nicaraguans don’t know how to lead and organize their own rebellion.  Respectable publications such as CounterPunch have fallen for this dangerous narrative. Yet, Nicaragua is full of Sandinista revolutionaries and their descendants, who can produce the sharpest Marxist-Leninist analyses, as well as excellent feminist and Indigenous ones, who are opposed to the current government.  Those in opposition are on the right and the left; some seek out the support of the likes of Marco Rubio in their struggle to topple the dictatorship, while many cannot abhor Rubio or his politics and remain vehemently opposed to any kind of US government intervention in domestic politics. Let’s try and understand the messiness and heterogeneity of the political conjuncture (it was messy in 1979 too).

Figure 5: A mobile clinic in Bluefields, November 2019. The ubiquitous faces of Ortega-Murillo.

But in the 1980s, the Nicaraguan Revolution attracted many activists and internationalists like me, who went to Nicaragua from the US and Europe to work on solidarity brigades in support of the revolution. Working alongside Nicaraguans, we picked coffee, planted trees, provided health care, built schools, shared stories, showed solidarity, and we learned about the struggle to make a better and fairer world against the odds. For most of us, these experiences were profound; they were utterly life-changing. But now hundreds of those brigadistas, internacionalistas, and solidarity workers in both the US and Europe have signed open letters denouncing the government. As Margaret Randall, author of Sandino’s Daughters, writes in response to the US letter:

The grandchildren of the Sandinista generation have no firsthand memories of the revolution but know the betrayal in its aftermath. They are part of a world-wide generation confronting authoritarianism, police brutality, domestic violence, and the devastating effects of climate change. It is time to make way for this new generation of Nicaraguans to determine the country’s future.

If you are not one of the signatories to our letters and you think you know what is going on in Nicaragua, please take a closer look. Nicaragua is the beautiful, inspirational and politically significant place it always was, except that contemporary demands for social justice also condemn the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and extractivist politics of the traditional left, as well as the necropolitics and carceral politics enacted by Ortega-Murillo, who are left-wing in name only. The new generation of activists are tackling political, cultural, and environmental issues that were taboo in the 1980s. Ortega-Murillo need to step down, they are politically exhausted with no shred of legitimacy. We need to renew the solidarity movement with Nicaragua that was so important in the 1980s as it is just as important today. We demand the release of all political prisoners and for free and fair elections to be held in November.

Why we are protesting against the government of Nicaragua

Español abajo

This is my translation of a document prepared by young people who are protesting in the streets of Nicaragua that has been shared and is circulating on social media. The original Spanish is below and can also be found here (https://www.facebook.com/oscarrene.vargasescobar/posts/1895756457124524).

This protest is not just about cuts to social security. It is because of corruption. It is because of electoral fraud in the municipal elections.

It is because young people as used as violent mobs. Because the Constitution was illegally amended. It is because democracy has been violated and because your vote doesn’t count because they create their own votes. Because dead people get to vote. Because dead people get to hold high office in the National Assembly.

Because there are no efficient public servants. Because public servants got a pay rise three days before they told pensioners that their C$400 (US$13) a month pension would be cut by 5%.

Because top ranking civil servants such as Roberto Rivas are immune from prosecution, corrupt and receive salaries of more than USD5000 a month plus benefits (vehicle, petrol, life insurance, health insurance that provides coverage outside of Nicaragua, private education for their kids).

Because the government creates metallic trees instead of real trees.

Because the police force lacks professionalism. The police attack students and other people with rubber bullets, tear gas and AK-47 bullets.

Because the government bought a bunch of tanks from Russia for nothing.  Because petrol is super expensive even though the price of crude oil is low.

Because Daniel Ortega should never have been re-elected. Because the wife of the president should never have become vice-president. Because the vice-president lies.

Because they don’t let people protest.

Because they take advantage of the poor by giving them handouts of piñatas and bags of rice and deprive them of education.

Because those of us who come from poor families and have made progess in life, we have done so because our parents have sold nacatamales, tortillas, have taken in washing and ironing and have paid for our education with honest work. Because they recognize they quality education enables you to succeed in life, to think critically. Education helps you out of poverty.

Because a school teacher who works two shifts a day doesn’t even earn US$200 a month. Just a few receive a few paltry benefits on top that amount to nothing more than an end of year basket with soap, a bag of rice and a bag of beans.

Because the government employees earn more than C$25,000 (US$800). They receive two extra bonuses per year. Because the INSS (Department of Social Security) pays US$1000 a month for each child in a private school while the state schools function by magic.

Because they give concessions to mining companies that take away the gold and leave poverty, disease and polluted water behind.

Because they don’t provide accurate press releases. Because they appropriated 98% of the media companies. Because they censor information. Because they shut down independent media.

Because the roundabouts are full of state employees, secondary school and university students who are forced by the police to be there.

Because they persecute those that defend human rights.

Because people who express an alternative point of view are repressed and murdered.

Because they pay delinquents and disguise them as Sandinistas to attack students.

Because they are shitting on the country.

One of the many metallic trees to be found in the capital moments before it was brought down by protestors. For many Nicaraguans, these trees symbolize government vanity, corruption and wastefulness, especially given the rate of deforestation in the country. Photo taken by Maynor Salazar

De https://www.facebook.com/oscarrene.vargasescobar/posts/1895756457124524

Esto no es, ni ha sido solo por lo del INSS! Es por la corrupción! Por robar alcaldías. Robar derechos y libre expresión. Es por Indio Maíz.
Es por usar a la juventud como turba. Porque se modificó ilegalmente la constitución Por violar la democracia y que tu voto no cuente porque inventan votos. Porque los muertos votan. Porque los muertos ejercen en altos cargos en la Asamblea.
Porque no hay funcionarios públicos eficientes. Porque a los funcionarios públicos les hicieron un aumento de sueldo tres días antes que se nos informara que a un anciano se le iba a quitar el 5% de los C$400 pesos que recibe al mes.
Porque Roberto Rivas y otros políticos son inmunes, corruptos y los mantienen en su cargos con salarios de más de U$5,000 dólares + beneficios (vehículo asignado, gasolina, seguro de vida, seguro de salud con cobertura fuera de Nicaragua.
Educación privada para sus hij@s, etcétera. Porque hay árboles de la vida y no árboles reales.
Porque la policía no es profesional. Porque la policía dispara balas de goma, bombas lacrimógenas y balas de AK-47 a los estudiantes y pueblo en general.
Porque compramos tanques a Rusia para nada. Porque la gasolina está carísima y el petróleo barato.
Porque no debió reelegirse Daniel. Porque la esposa del presidente nunca debió ser vice-presidenta. Porque la Vice-presidenta es mentirosa.
Porque no dejan marchar. Porque se aprovechan de los pobres dándoles piñatas, dos libras de arroz y NO Educación.
Porque quienes venimos de familias humildes y hemos progresado en la vida, lo hemos hecho porque muchos padres han tenido que vender nacatamales, tortillas, lavado, planchado y han pagado la educación de sus hijos con trabajo honrado.
Porque con Educación de calidad es posible superarte en la vida. Porque con Educación podes tener pensamiento crítico. Porque con Educación se puede salir de la pobreza.
Porque un maestro trabajando dos turnos no gana ni U$200 dólares y los pocos que reciben beneficios, esos beneficios son ridículos (una canasta con jabón de baño, una bolsita de arroz, de frijoles, a fin de año).
Porque los empleados del INSS, la DGI, las alcaldías y otros ganan más de 25 mil córdobas. Porque esos empleados reciben 2 aguinaldos por año o dos bonos más un aguinaldo.
Porque el INSS paga 1000 dólares por mes por cada niño de un centro privado mientras las escuelas públicas funcionan de milagro.
Porque dan concesiones a empresas mineras que se llevan el oro y dejan pobreza, enfermedades y aguas contaminadas.
Porque no dan comunicados de prensa objetivos. Porque se apropiaron del 98% de los medios de comunicación. Porque censuran la información. Porque cierran medios de comunicación.
Porque las rotondas están llenas de trabajadores del estado, estudiantes de secundaria y universidades obligados a estar allí, su presencia es resguardada por la policía.
Porque persiguen a las y los defensores de derechos humanos.
Porque quienes expresan otro punto de vista son reprimidos y asesinados!
Porque le pagan a delincuentes y los disfrazan de sandinistas para que golpeen a los estudiantes.
Porque se están cagando en el país.

 

UK solidarity with Nicaragua: Let’s get real

I like staying up to watch electoral returns, but there is no point in doing so when the results are already known in advance and the election lacks any kind of popular legitimacy. Nicaragua goes to the polls tomorrow in an election that will produce a landslide victory for incumbent president Daniel Ortega. These elections are of interest to anyone who cares about revolutionary struggle, power, and social justice in Latin America. For solidarity activism with Nicaragua in the UK and elsewhere, it is important to understand the conditions that underpin this electoral contest.

I was an activist with the UK solidarity movement long before I started to research Nicaraguan cultural politics. In my early 20s, during and just after the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1980s, my activist involvement, especially with the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign and the Central American Human Rights Committees, proved to be a wonderful political education and I am grateful for the insight and experience it gave me. As a result, I was able to work with and learn from Central American revolutionary leaders, human rights defenders, feminists, environmentalists and trade unionists both in the UK and Central America. While my efforts today are much more focused on research rather than solidarity organization, I appreciate the importance of international solidarity for making a difference in the world.

In the 1980s, when Reagan was in power, I believed in the FSLN and the Nicaraguan Revolution as a force for good, as an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle that in the early years achieved some remarkable things but later became unstuck as a result of a multitude of factors, including but not limited to US foreign policy. As many people know, the FSLN, the party of the Revolution led by Daniel Ortega, lost the 1990 elections and then spent 16 years in opposition, attempting to return to power. Daniel Ortega remained the FSLN leader throughout those 16 years, losing two further elections in 1996 and 2001. In the late 90s, the FSLN did a dodgy deal (el pacto) with the ruling Liberals to weaken the safeguards in the electoral law to make it more likely that the FSLN could return to power. Thanks to el pacto, Ortega returned to power in 2006 and was re-elected (unconstitutionally as the Nicaraguan Constitution forbids re-election) in 2011. He is now running for a third consecutive term with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as his running mate. This means therefore that in the 37 years since the triumph of the Revolution in 1979, Ortega has been the president of Nicaragua for 21 years and leader of the opposition for the remaining 16 years. This is the 7^th election in which he is running for president. The municipal elections of 2008 and the presidential elections of 2011 were widely denounced as fraudulent.

Like many revolutionary and progressive Nicaraguans, I ceased to support the FSLN a very long time ago. Indeed, many Nicaraguans, including many of those that fought in the revolutionary struggle, confirm that the existing FSLN leadership has betrayed its revolutionary principles, has embraced neoliberal capitalism, and has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive.

Yet these painful and highly visible realities seem however to have escaped substantial sectors of the UK solidarity movement. Instead, UK solidarity appears to be recycling a narrative that is dangerously inaccurate and obscures the desperate situation facing the country at this particular moment. Ignoring the tragic and disturbing events that afflict Nicaragua in order to circulate a highly simplistic anti-imperialistic discourse is not a form of solidarity that serves the needs of Nicaraguan citizens fighting for a better life nor is it useful for young activists in the UK who are seeking to understand the complex political situation and to figure out how to act in solidarity through anti-capitalist activism.

One example of this disconnect was evident in a tweet I saw last week while I was doing fieldwork in Nicaragua. The tweet was sent by @latamerica16 and it announced that Paul Oquist, Nicaragua’s National Policy minister, would be a guest speaker at the Latin America 2016 conference (https://latinamericaconference.wordpress.com/). This is a conference to be held in London on Saturday 26 November and is sponsored by the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and Unite. Even more disturbing was the accompanying photo (see Figure 1) that announced Nicaragua’s “phenomenal progress” with a bunch of quite astonishing statistics that would come as quite a shock to most Nicaraguans, including the idea that Daniel Ortega is enjoying an approval rate of 79%.

Figure 1: Poster tweeted by @latamerica16 on 26 October

For all those organizing and attending the Latin America 2016 conference, here is a quick overview of the current political situation in Nicaragua. It contains elements that should be central to Latin America 2016.

For the past few months, the country has been seen numerous street and online protests about what is widely understood to be an “electoral farce” (farsa electoral), because the Sandinista-controlled Supreme Court has eliminated the only viable opposition. The other parties who appear on the ballot are run by co-opted people that nobody has heard of and that have no popular base of support. Ortega has banned international election observers, despite their presence being enshrined in the electoral law. I worked as an international election observer with the Carter Center in 2001 and 2006, and Nicaraguan elections are usually intense affairs, with high levels of passionate civic engagement, well-attended rallies, and visible campaigning everywhere. Usually campaigning material is attached to every available wall, lamppost and tree. This year nobody has really bothered to campaign and the urban landscape is unusually bereft of campaigning material. Plenty of party flags and posters do however appear on the walls of the state institutions, also in contravention of the electoral law, and public sector workers are expected to demonstrate their inked thumbs on Monday to confirm that they did go to vote. On 26 October in Bilwi on the North Caribbean Coast, a couple of FSLN posters appeared, some of them had been immediately destroyed (see Figure 2). It was no different when I returned to Managua on Saturday 29 October. It was indeed hard to believe that we were in the final week of an election campaign. I caught the tail end of the close of campaign by the Conservative Party and there were certainly no more than 100 people there. Some were possibly locals, happy to get a free t-shirt. A campaign in favour of active abstention has gained traction, as according to many Nicaraguan citizens, there is nobody to vote for. In response, the number of booths in polling stations will be reduced to create queues outside and generate an impression of civic participation. The hashtag #yonobotomivoto (I won’t throw away my vote) is trending on Twitter. Last weekend saw large protests against the farsa electoral in Nueva Guinea (see Figure 3), San José del Bocay, Jalapa and Pantasma and yesterday university students from the Central American University (UCA) also held a protest.

Figure 2: A tiny amount of electoral campaigning material appeared in Bilwi on 26 October

Figure 3: The tweet reads: We continue to mobilize against the electoral circus. In La Unión, Nueva Guinea, the campesinos and campesinas from the communities are here.

In addition to recognizing that the 2016 presidential elections have no credibility and legitimacy, solidarity activists should also be aware of the following. Since returning to power in 2006, the government has taken control of all four branches of government. Public employees and government ministers that openly criticize the FSLN leadership are removed from office. Daniel Ortega commands intense and unprecedented levels of police protection. The streets around his home in Reparto El Carmen are heavily guarded at all times. Five per cent of the police budget and 10 per cent of the police personnel are used to protect the president and his close entourage. Anti-poverty programmes that have reduced poverty to a small degree have been administered to supporters in clientelistic ways, making it hard for people to express open opposition. Venezuelan aid has been privatized, in the sense that it is absent from the national budget, and directed into private projects. The government has spent more than $3 million on adorning Managua with dozens of metallic trees (see Figure 4) and $80 million on 50 armoured T7B1 Russian tanks. They send out the riot police or groups of violent mobs (grupos de choque) every time the opposition organizes a peaceful protest. They have criminalized therapeutic abortion, putting even more women’s lives at risks. The government is also pursuing the construction of a $50 billion interoceanic canal with Chinese investment that will produce irreversible environmental damage and will displace hundreds of campesinos and indigenous groups from their lands. Furthermore, there is a serious environmental and social conflict in the North Caribbean region, where colonos, subsistence farmers from the Pacific, have settled illegally on ancestral lands belonging to Miskito and Mayangna populations and have become increasingly violent. More than 20 indigenous community members have been murdered by the colonos in the past year, but no state protection or investigation into illegal activities (murder, land trafficking, illegal occupation of indigenous territory) has been undertaken.

Figure 4: Dozens of metallic trees adorn Nicaragua’s capital city Managua

So what we have in place is an authoritarian, repressive government that does not tolerate political pluralism and freedom of expression, does not respect or support the rights of indigenous peoples and women, is responsible through inaction (towards the colonos and rampant deforestation) and action (pursuit of a neoliberal megaproject such as the canal) for extensive environmental destruction. Ortega is in a precarious position – the fall in oil prices and the crisis in Venezuela along with the approval in the US Congress of the Nica Act are both likely to substantially reduce the external funds flowing into Nicaragua. The other pink tide governments that have been also been his allies are also in crisis to varying degrees. To compensate, Ortega is doing deals with Putin and Russian investment in transport, telecommunications and military hardware is already visible, but such an association is likely to isolate Ortega further. These issues are absent from the UK solidarity literature. If you read the latest news briefing from the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (NSC), it seems to suggest that all is well, that the elections are free and fair, and that the vast majority of the electorate are ready to vote for the FSLN. I understood why Ortega wishes to make his regime and the electoral process appear legitimate, but I do not know why a UK-based solidarity campaign would wish to do so. As a long term NSC activist, I am disturbed by such blatant and extreme political irresponsibility. If they cared about those that gave their lives for the revolution in the 1970s and 80s, about the freedom to participate in politics without intimidation, about the fate of Nicaragua’s indigenous groups, they would endeavour to engage honestly and accurately with Nicaragua’s messy complicated politics. There are lots of Nicaraguans fighting for something better. There are lots of Nicaraguans honouring the sacrifices made during the revolution, denouncing corruption, seeking to address poverty and marginalization in sustainable ways, and speaking out in defence of human rights and the environment. We should stand with them, not with a corrupt and authoritarian caudillo.

 

Adiós, presidente

Just because Hugo Chávez is a polarizing figure, which he is/was, does not mean we have to sit on one side or the other. It is not a matter of being pro-Chávez or anti-Chávez, especially for Latin Americans and Latin Americanists who are not Venezuelan. I got a little frustrated last night at the amount of airtime that CNN devoted to the views of Roger Noriega and Eva Golinger. For Noriega, who has often put his support behind coups and attempted coups in Latin America, Hugo Chávez was a dictator (Noriega is not really sure if he is socialist or fascist one though) and a threat to the US and his demise is wonderful news, while for Golinger, the man could do no wrong and his contributions to the creation of a better world are truly immense. What we need is a more complex picture of Chávez and what will be his legacy. Sure, Chávez put (some) oil wealth into social programmes, he provided a welcome and desperately needed challenge to US foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy and during the past decade or so, the Bolivarian revolution, along with the crisis of capitalism, has enabled socialism to become a thinkable and tangible political aspiration again in Venezuela and beyond. There is no end of history in Latin America today. Chávez also dared to complain at the smell of sulphur left by George Bush at the United Nations and got a new generation to read Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. On the other hand, the Venezuelan economy is in a mess and murder rates are astonishingly high. He was democratically elected, but he was also without doubt a masculinist, populist and authoritarian caudillo. Many people loved him, adored him, and many are grieving. Just as many will be rejoicing, and hoping that the opposition now stands a realistic chance of returning to power. Those grieving are largely poor, darker-skinned and disadvantaged, those rejoicing are largely wealthy and white. That class and racial difference is significant.

But Chávez’ political style actually jeopardizes rather than foments revolution, because it is built around a cult of personality, rather than around a dynamic and proliferating social movement. He changed the constitution so he could remain in power. And it is a model that he has helped to reproduce elsewhere, most notably in Nicaragua, where there is also a masculinist, populist, and authoritarian leader in power, who is also clinging onto power. Daniel Ortega was re-elected in 2011 although the Nicaraguan Constitution forbids re-election. Along with his wife, Rosario Murillo, he has taken Venezuela’s oil wealth, some $2.5 billion since 2007 (but they privatized it through a company called ALBANISA so it doesn’t appear in the National Budget), while ordinary Nicaraguans are struggling with the highest gas prices in Central America, people have lost faith in the electoral system and small children are still cleaning windscreens late at night at the traffic lights of the capital.  But what will become of Nicaragua’s ageing caudillo and his destructive and anti-democratic determination to remain in power, now that his mate is dead? As Nicaraguan journalist and author, Sofía Montenegro commented on Twitter yesterday, with the death of Chávez, Nicaragua’s inconstitutional couple (Ortega and Murillo) has lost the goose that laid the golden egg. The death of Hugo Chávez changes Latin American politics, he was a significant actor that enrolled many other actors, in quite dramatic and decisive ways, in Nicaragua, in Cuba, in Bolivia. Without him, his discourse, his embodied presence and his bankrolling of his allies in the continent, these other actors will inevitably be reassembled and they won’t look the same in the medium to long term.

Ortega, Chávez and Ahmadinejad
Source: The Daily Telegraph