Nicaragua, Back from the Dead? An anthropological View of the Sandinista Movement in the early 21st Century

358 Pages·2011·8.41 MB·English

by  Johannes Wilm (Author)

Contents
Why this book?
Introduction
On Nicaragua
How I ended up in Nicaragua
What is so interesting about Nicaragua?
Getting in contact with Nicaraguans
Where I stayed
My initial blunders
Social science literature on the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience
Revolution studies
Post-Sandinista studies
Sandinista II studies
1 Recent political history of Nicaragua and the Sandinista movement
Before 1920
Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino
Somoza
The organization of resistance against Somoza
The Sandinista years 1979–90
Foreign Involvement
The FSLN structure
Popular participation and direct democracy
The FSLN electoral defeat in 1990
The FSLN as an opposition force
The FSLN electoral victory 2006
Subjective aspects of the history as it is presented
2 The politics of history
What parts of Nicaraguan history are important?
Political identities in Nicaragua
The controversies around historical representations in Nicaragua
From the 1850s to 1920s
Calderón Sandino
The Somoza years
Under the Sandinista in the 1980s
Reasoning the electoral failure in 1990
Three neoliberal governments
Governing without a majority
Problems understanding the discussion of Nicaraguan history
Concluding remarks
3 Economic development, expectations and perceptions
Development theories
Mainstream modernization development theories
Counter-hegemonic development theories
Nicaraguan economic history
Economic policies between Zelaya López and the Somozas
Economic policies under the Somozas
Economic realities and policies under the Sandinistas of the 1980s
Liberal economic politics
Nicaraguan economics during the second Sandinista government
Popular ideas about economic realities and models of the past
The 1970s
The 1980s
The 1990s–2007
The current Sandinista government
Concluding remarks
4 Shaping politics
Transport worker strike (May 2008)
The MRS protests (May – November 2008)
Award given to last Minister of Education of East Germany and alliance
with Honduras (19 July 2008)
The Georgia conflict
León FSLN candidate for mayor clashed with police (September 2008)
FSLN won local elections (November 2008)
Parliament stopped working (November 2008 – February 2009)
Military coup in Honduras (June 2009)
30 years of revolution and some advances (summer 2009)
Concluding remarks
5 Sandinista projects of change
The historic structure of the FSLN
The principle of alliances
The new FSLN as part of a Socialism for the 21st Century
Ways of exerting power by individuals and groups
Concluding remarks
6 Historic relations with Eastern Europe
Nicaraguan particularities in the current global system
Connections to a former center
The experience in East Germany in perspective
Dependence on Russia?
Concluding remarks
7 Factors that differentiate Sandinistas
Age as a defining factor
The literacy campaign celebration
The lack of ideological models among younger Sandinistas
Little focus on theoretical knowledge among organized Sandinista
youngsters
Term redefinitions
‘Seriousness’ and acceptance of younger Sandinistas
Current studies of political theory
Professionals and Sandinismo
MRS Sandinismo
Concluding remarks
Conclusion
Developments since…
…and into the future
What is to be done?
Glossary
Bibliography Notes
Why this book?
In the 1980s Nicaragua was almost constantly in the news. A revolution in 1979
catapulted the leftist Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) into
power, and the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, financed a bloody
contra-revolution for most of the decade. The Sandinistas lost national elections
in 1990, and that ended the last experiment of socialism on the American
mainland. Little more was heard from the central American Republic in the
following years.
The Sandinistas returned to power in 2007, but surprisingly little has been
heard about them. In the few cases the media has brought attention to it, it has
focused on certain aspects of some policies of the new FSLN government, such
as abortion rights. What these portrayals all have in common is that they say the
current government diverges from the program of revolutionary transformation
of the 1980s. No-one has looked at current Sandinismo in its totality and how the
country is progressing.
In this book I try to show what it means to be part of the Sandinista
movement in the 21st century. This includes common points of reference all
types of Sandinistas share, and how the web of different types of Sandinistas is
structured in a way that emphasizes popular participation of people with very
different backgrounds and perspectives.
The Sandinista movement puts a particularly strong emphasis on Nicaragua
and the movement’s own history over the last 100 years. In the 1980s they
received military and economic support from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and
now Venezuela plays that role. Sandinismo has changed with the change of
alliances in ways that Nicaraguans seldom recognize.
Foreigners writing about Nicaragua in the 1980s looked enthusiastically at
the revolutionary transformation, while in the 1990s everybody just saw decay
and how the Sandinista movement fragmented. I show that most looking at
Nicaragua in the 1990s incorrectly assumed that the Sandinista movement would
disintegrate completely into identity politics, while really their work turned more
clandestine in preparation for another takeover of the state.
The Sandinista movement includes people who believe in many different
ideologies (nationalism, social reformism, Marxism and anarchism). Sandinismo
did in the past include, and still includes, many of the individual aspects of
identity politics in a way that may have led some anthropologists to believe it
was the sole center point of Sandinistas’ engagement with politics. I look at how
the current unity of the movement depends on a limited number of common
reference points in the last 100 years of Nicaraguan history, which are
interpreted very differently by other groups, but which at all times emphasize the
part of Nicaraguans in international relations. Although Liberals and Sandinistas
both have groups of supporters, the models of political participation and how
political success gets measured for the two groups is fundamentally different.
Related to the internal ideological difference within the Sandinista movement is
an informal structure of different groups of Sandinistas who engage in concrete
actions to change society. Oftentimes this works without provoking conflict
between different groups of Sandinistas, and is therefore not immediately
noticeable to the outside observer.

Introduction
On Nicaragua
Nicaragua is situated in Central America, between Honduras and El Salvador to
the north and Costa Rica to the south, and is the largest of the five Central
American republics. It extends over an area of roughly 130,000 km². Its climate
is tropical though somewhat diverse, with rainfall ranging between 1,000 and
6,000 mm annually in different regions. Its soil is very fertile, and among the
country’s top agricultural exports are exotic fruits, meat, fish, coffee, tobacco
and sugar cane (Taylor, 1963). The total population is 5,666,301, of which 57%
live in urban areas. The median age of Nicaraguans is 22.9 years (July 2010
estimate). In 1975 the population was estimated at 2,798,000, so population
increase has been rapid. It was estimated that in 2010, Nicaragua was the poorest
country in Central America and the second poorest country in the Americas
(CIA, 2011a; World Population Prospects 2008). Nicaragua is divided into 15
departamentos, mainly in western Nicaragua, and two regiones autónomas on
the east coast. The departamentos and regiones autónomas contain a total of 153
municipios. Municipios and regiones autónomas have separate locally-elected
governments, but departamentos do not. The borders and jurisdictions between
the different regions and governments are not always completely clear. Although
departamentos do not possess their own governments, they are used as
administrative units by the central state, and Nicaraguans operate around them as
significant units. Some of the political parties also use departamentos as
organizational units.
In the port of El Rama passengers switch from boat to bus on their way to
western Nicaragua.

Western Nicaragua is almost exclusively Spanish speaking, while on the
eastern Atlantic coast, several groups speak creole languages and English in
addition to Spanish. Transportation between the coasts is not very developed. A
road between Managua in western Nicaragua and Bluefields, the capital of the
Región Autónoma del Atlántico Sur (RAAS) on the east coast, has been planned
for decades and under construction for years. For now, the only way of going
from one to the other is by taking a bus from Managua to El Rama and then a
boat from there to Bluefields, or by flying directly from Managua to Bluefields.
Transportation between western cities is relatively easy, with many bus lines of
different speeds operating between major cities, and at least one bus line
reaching to every major village. Transit between settlements on the east coast is
still conducted exclusively by boat.
Most Nicaraguans live in western Nicaragua, where all the largest cities lie.
In western Nicaragua there are nine cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants:
the capital Managua (pop. 1,051,258), León (197,549), Masaya (160,551),
Chinandega (158,185), Matagalpa (145,750), Estelí (125,684), Granada
(119,083), Tipitapa (111,923) and Jinotega (108,806). The largest city in the
regiones autónomas on the Atlantic coast was until 2011 Nueva Guinea (83,433),
which is connected by road to Managua. In April 2011, President José Daniel
Ortega Saavedra moved three municipios from the RAAS to the departamento
Chontales by presidential decree, arguing they had little connection to the rest of
the region culturally and that it was often difficult for these municipios’
inhabitants to travel to Bluefields. The three municipios that were moved to
Chontales included the two most populous of the RAAS, Nueva Guinea and El
Rama (62,732), leaving Bluefields (50,960), the largest city in the RAAS and
Siuna (73,888), in the Región Autónoma del Atlántico Norte (RAAN), the most
populous in the regiones autónomas (2010 estimates Serrano, 2007; Martínez
and León, 2011, pp. 96–99). Border crossing checkpoints are operated in the
north entering into Honduras and in the south into Costa Rica, and the country
can easily be crossed north to south within a day on the Pacific side, even when
taking cheaper and slower local buses. It is less common for Nicaraguans than it
is for their northern neighbors to seek work in the United States, and more
Nicaraguans migrate south to Costa Rica1, where wages are considerably higher.
Most Nicaraguans believe that Nicaragua is the safest country in Latin America,
and they are generally very proud of this.
How I ended up in Nicaragua
Nicaragua served as a major topic in European and US American news
throughout the 1980s, but that is not how I learned to know the country. My
journey started in Mexico.
In the second half of 2006 I traveled through Mexico. I wrote about the
occupation of the Zócalo in Mexico City by the left-wing presidential candidate
Andres Manuel López Obrador and blogged about the teacher uprising in the
city of Oaxaca. In late November of 2006, the uprising in Oaxaca was quelled.
That same month, I remember sitting at the university radio station in Oaxaca
one morning with a group of protesters. I was with the last stand of the
protesters, 13 of us. I was the only foreigner in the group, but I knew of two
other young foreigners still in town. The group decided I should help them get
out of town, and after first assigning me a young girl to help, changed their mind
and asked me to help a teenage punk rocker from Mexico City named Daniel. I
immediately went to take Spanish classes that morning before doing anything
else. Looking back, it seems strange I would take the time to do that – or that