Critical comment on the Nicaraguan election campaign has tended to
neglect the nitty gritty of life for the country's impoverished
majority. The closer the November 5th election looms the nastier the
campaign becomes. Attacks have focused on the Unida Nicaragua Triunfa
coalition led by the FSLN and its presidential candidate Daniel Ortega.
From across the political spectrum the barrage seems almost
choreographed, so closely do the various blasts follow the US State
Department's aggressive anti-FSLN line. Especially vociferous are local
US embassy representatives, led by ambassador Paul Trivelli from his
diplomatic Castle of Despond in Managua's Batahola district. For its
part, the FSLN-led coalition refuses to react, focusing on its message
of reconciliation. Its restraint seems to have paid off. Its lead in
all the opinion polls is on or above 10%. With between 32 to 37 per
cent voter preferences in the latest opinion polls, they need 35% and
an advantage of 5% over the nearest rival to win the presidency on the
first round.
A recent attack from poet Ernesto Cardenal(1), one of the Sandinista
Revolution's sacred cows now aligned with the centrist Movimiento de
Renovacion Sandinista party, regurgitates the standard line, reserving
especial venom for Unida Nicaragua Triunfa's presidential candidate
Daniel Ortega. Alongside poisonous personal attacks from former
colleagues, Ortega faces demonization by TV and radio from longstanding
enemies on the right. TV spots for the Right's leading candidate, the
Alianza Liberal Nicaraguense's Eduardo Montealegre, end with a red
stamp landing across footage of Ortega. The stamp reads "Peligro" -
"Danger!" This is identical to the television campaign Mexico's PAN
government and institutions waged against progressive candidate Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador. The ALN's rival right wing Partido Liberal
Constitucionalista party runs fierce attacks painting Ortega as a
warmonger. All this is in addition to declarations from US government
representatives and political figures like Congressman Dan Burton (2)
condemning Ortega as undemocratic, corrupt and incompetent.
One is tempted to allegorise the US inspired campaign against the
FSLN-led coalition as an effort to build an archipelago of dismal
Castles of Forgetting with thought-dungeons across Nicaragua's
political landscape - a psychological Guantanamo-Bagram-Diego Garcia to
contain and torment "worst-of-the-worst" political sympathies and
memories. Sometimes the structures are modelled on Bluebeard's
Castle(3) with secret rooms, full of skeletons and rotten body parts,
inside which the servant-voters are forbidden to look. Other variants
incorporate elements of Axel's Castle(4), where heroic,
noble-managerial politicians live pure, unsullied ideal lives. Outside,
all around them, servant-voters slave to pay off domestic and foreign
debt so as to ensure the non-nose-picking, non-farting aristocracy
within the castle's luxurious precincts live untroubled by want or need.
But first, the Beans
From the cramped pre-school where we had seen about 30 sick children
the day before, we left the car, crossing a relatively rubbish-free
bald patch of ground towards the edge of the barrio, which is also the
very edge of the city. The doctor I was interpreting for wanted to
follow up a four-month old child he had injected the day before with
ceftriaxone. The child had presented with multiple skin infections and
needed a second jab for the treatment to do its work. The treatment
might get one of the infections under control allowing him to deal with
the other stuff the infant's tiny body was struggling to resist.
Out here on the edge of town, people had squatted haphazardly on virgin
land, erecting shacks of cardboard, plastic sheeting, old corrugated
zinc and ripio (the bark-covered outer part of a tree discarded by
local timber yards). In these parts there is no piped water, no
electricity, no sewerage. Shacks and cabins are built at random
wherever the ups and downs of the land, beginning to slope up the
lowering hills, permit. Someone had told us the baby was with the
grandmother.
Grandmother's house turned out to be a single room made of ripio with a
dirt floor and a roof of old zinc. Peering through the gaps between the
badly lapped timber, we could see three small children locked inside.
The eldest, maybe six or so, timidly told us grandmother was out
selling corn-cobs and fresh maize foods, guirilas and tamales, out in
the barrio. Reassuringly, women in a neighbouring house some thirty
yards away shouted over to see what we wanted. At least some adult
presence was watching out for the children.
Saturday afternoons plenty of adult males in these kinds of barrios
drink themselves stupid. We passed a couple of houses where men already
well drunk launched into greetings we returned warily before a local
girl who was with us pointed out the woman we were searching for. She
carried a pana - a large plastic basin - on her head still half-full of
her maize foods. They sell at two or three cordobas a time yielding her
a daily profit of between two and three US dollars after hours
traipsing through town with the laden pana on her head. In her
turn she gave us directions to the house where our infant patient might
be. We found the house seven or eight blocks away in another barrio
more recognizably urban with street lights, water meters and recently
dug trenches made ready for infrastructure, water or maybe drainage.
Despite its concrete block walls, which might have indicated relative
comfort inside, the front and only room had a lumpy and uneven dirt
floor practically bare. One corner had been partitioned off with rough
rickety timber and well-worn cardboard to create an area holding a
wooden table with a broken leg on which sat an old television. Apart
from that, the only furniture was a short bench and a child's tiny
chair. Sure enough, the mother appeared from the backyard with the baby
we were looking for. The tattoo on her shoulder I had wondered about
the day before made more sense when a gaggle of heavily tattooed young
gang members followed her into the gloomy interior.
They were cheerful enough, seemingly glad of light relief from their
usual routine. The doctor did his job, using one syringe to prepare the
suspension and another to inject, tapping the syringe to expel any air,
swabbing as if he worked all the time in semi-darkness, in conditions
bereft of hygiene with an unwelcomely-attentive substance-abusing
audience of smart, aggressive young toughs. Later on people told us we
had been hosted in a safe house of a local gang known as the Frijoles
Metalicos - the Metal Beans. The young mother, sometimes alert,
sometimes on another plane, earned about US$65 a month doing unskilled
work in one of the local cigar factories. We wondered who looked after
the baby. Someone out of their minds on some substance or other,
judging by the baby's multiple skin infections. Some days later, a
local community leader made sure mother and child had the necessary
blood tests carried out, paid for by us. Mercifully, the tests for
AIDS, hepatitis and syphilis proved negative.
That was one of the more extreme of the hundreds of cases we saw over 6
weeks giving clinics across northern Nicaragua. A little girl one of
the doctors thought might have TB did, in fact, as subsequent lab tests
revealed. So did her mother and her grandmother. In some places skin
complaints prevailed with patient after patient presenting fungal and
bacterial infections. In one semi-rural community, it turned out almost
everyone in the town of several hundred people did their family laundry
and bathed in the same meagre river along with local livestock and
domestic animals. Not surprisingly, some of the nastier intestinal
parasites like tapeworm were not uncommon. In more rural communities we
were impressed by local health centres' record keeping. A few too many
children weighed in at the lower end of their growth curve or below,
better than we had feared. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization
reckons 30% of children under five in Nicaragua suffer some degree of
malnutrition.
The wider picture
This is regular, day-to-day Nicaragua after 16 years of free market,
neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the World Bank, the IMF, the
Inter-American Development Bank and the aid conditionality applied by
the United States, the European Union and their Pacific allies. Almost
all State enterprises have been sold off at knock down prices to local
and foreign big business. In the case of electicity distribution,
privatization created a private monopoly owned by Spain's Union Fenosa
multinational. It now requires a large State subsidy in order to
guarantee electicity for both domestic and business use. In the capital
Managua and elsewhere, power cuts are frequent and devastating for
small businesses of all kinds. The privately owned generating companies
have failed to invest so as to guarantee secure energy provision. Over
80 per cent of Nicaragua's generating capacity comes from thermal
generating plants dependent on diesel fuel. Attempts by the FSLN
controlled local government organization AMUNIC to import fuel on
preferential terms from Venezuela have run into persistent obstruction
from the right-wing government of Enrique Bolanos, fearful of giving
the FSLN any advantage in the upcoming elections.
Cut-backs in public spending mean health care, education and
environmental services are in constant, deepening crisis. The Education
Ministry itself acknowledged earlier this year that at least 800,000
and perhaps as many as over a million school age children may be
failing to attend class. Our own team's experience of health services
indicated a caste of medical practitioners demoralised and hardened by
a system starved of resources and on the threshold of privatization.
Some of the more serious cases we saw did receive adequate care once we
helped the patients access the State system. But plenty of such cases
fail to get the attention they need because basic healthcare resources,
let alone social work and other auxiliary services, are scarce or
non-existent. People don't bother seeking medical care when all they
will get is a prescription for medicines they cannot afford.
Likewise government environmental protection, preventing pollution,
conserving water and forestry resources, barely functions, because the
budget for the Ministry of Natural Resources is so reduced. Government
policy lurches between alarming laissez-faire and temporary total bans
on timber felling. Consultative groups make recommendations only to
have them completely ignored by government. Desertification around the
Gulf of Fonseca creeps further eastwards every year. Migration by rural
families seeking viable agricultural land pushes the agricultural
frontier ever deeper into the still surviving forests of Nicaragua's
Atlantic Coast. The massive Inter-American Bank funded Copalar
hydroelectric project near Paiwas, part of the IADB's regional
corporate blueprint Plan Puebla Panama, threatens to repeat the
unsustainable environmental disasters of mega-projects like El
Cajón in Honduras and Chixoy in Guatemala.
In most of the urban barrios we visited, people reckoned adult
unemployment was well over 50%, making nonsense of official
unemployment figures putting open unemployment at around 12%. Most
adults and many children depend for their living on irregular, badly
paid work in the informal economy. The minimum wage has lost over 50%
of its purchasing power since 1991. Members of gangs like the Metal
Beans mix occasional legitimate work and dealing with petty crime
creating their own kind of free market in accordance with best
neo-liberal practice. But young people like them need to be in school
or college if Nicaragua's economy is to claw its way out of the trap of
a low-wage economy. For the Beans, as for around 80% of Nicaragua's
long-suffering people living on US$2 a day, little or nothing has
trickled down over the last 16 years except exclusion and deprivation.
Right wing - locked rooms
Commanding voices from the Nicaragua's thought-dungeon archipelago try
and explain away their 16-year-long failure to improve people's lives.
To do so they try and keep their current and historical failings
compartmentalized and out of mind. But the skeletons of the US financed
Contra war and the junk and lumber of corruption and mis-management
accumulated under the governments of Violeta Chamorro, Arnoldo Aleman
and Enrique Bolanos are simply too much. People in Nicaragua like
people everywhere may assimilate suffering, setbacks and injustice but
they do not forget. With each new election it gets harder and harder to
keep Nicaragua's servant-voters from nosing around the injustice-filled
rooms shut tight against remembrance.
For the right wing parties attacks on the revolutionary period are
double-edged. They studiously avoid their role in fomenting the Contra
War in collaboration with the US. When their anti-Ortega TV spots show
film footage of empty supermarket shelves from the period, they omit
all mention of the US economic blockade and their own economic
sabotage. They think people will forget and that people will forget too
the universal free health care and education services provided by the
revolutionary government despite the terrible costs of the war. They
think people will forget the US financed terrorist bombings of buses,
the burnings of clinics and schools, the murder of community leaders
like Felipe y Mery Barreda. The room in which the Barredas were
tortured and bludgeoned to death by CIA sadists is one Eduardo
Montealegre, Jose Rizo and their overseer, US ambassador Paul Trivelli,
must constantly hope no voters should remember to peek inside.
Leading Right wing candidate, Eduardo Montealegre poses as an
anti-corruption candidate. But even the purest Bush regime
Bluebeard-speak fails to keep entirely hidden his role in Nicaragua's
immiseration. As Treasury Minister under President Bolanos, Montealegre
oversaw the introduction of the now notorious Certificados Negociables
de Inversion (CENIS), financial instruments issued to manage internal
debt in Nicaragua caused by the suspicious failure of three major banks
under the presidency of Arnoldo Aleman. Nicaraguans are paying for
hundreds of millions of dollars of internal debt created by these bank
failures.
The huge debt portfolios and extensive assets of those three banks were
bought up at knock-down prices by cronies of the Liberal oligarchy in a
similar festive process to the privatization of State assets under
Violeta Chamorro in the early 1990s. Among the beneficiaries, as a
director of one of the banks - Bancentro - that scooped up some of the
juiciest prizes offered up in the CENIS tombola was .....Eduardo
Montealegre. Still and all, the US and European Union governments trot
out the anti-corruption praises of the Bolaños government and of
Montealegre as their preferred presidential candidate. The Chamorro
government privatizations and the CENIS are a couple more of the locked
rooms off limits to servant-voters.
Corruption is the main issue preventing Jose Rizo and his running mate
Jose Antonio Alvarado from obliterating the brittle electoral
attraction of the media and public relations creature Montealegre
represents. Although Montealegre himself held junior ministerial posts
under disgraced former president, Arnoldo Aleman, Rizo and Alvarado
were much more important figures politically within Aleman's Liberal
Alliance. Personally, they themselves are regarded as decent and
upright. But there seems little they can do now to convince most
Nicaraguans to forget the massive fraud perpetrated against the country
by Aleman's gangster regime between 1996 and 2001. Their positive
campaign pitch is a pale and unconvincing repetition of the false
promises touted by Aleman and Bolanos in the Liberal Alliance campaigns
of 1996 and 2001.
US State Department - the party not running
The most influential right-wing political group active in Nicaragua's
election is not even putting up a candidate. The US government and its
quasi non-governmental (quango) partners like the International
Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs are working ruthlessly to get the result they
want. USAID helps fund the Nicaraguan electoral authorities while the
quangos fund local "pro-democracy" NGOs like Hagamos Democracia and
Etica y Transparencia. So the US State Department is able to further
its imperialist meddling from inside the official electoral process as
well as outside via both local NGO proxies and collaborationist
politicians.
Apart from its efforts to affect the behaviour of Nicaragua's electoral
institutions, the US government has also tried to set the electoral
agenda. Amabassador Trivelli, his colleague Oliver Garza and other
State Department officials have repeatedly identified Montealegre's ALN
and Edmundo Jarquin's MRS parties with approval as being "democratic"
as against the allegedly "undemocratic" FSLN and PLC. Corruption has
also been a theme shamelessy exploited by the US embassy, less so once
the PLC in particular pointed to the locked room marked "CENIS".
Another theme the US and the Nicaraguan Right have had to soft-pedal
lately is intervention by Venezuela. The Bolanos government's pathetic
mismanagement of energy policy and its relations with Venezuela has
been uniformly embarrassing. Accusations of intervention by Hugo Chavez
cut both ways. Venezuela and Cuba's Mision Milagro health program and
their Si Puedo literacy program have benefited thousands of people in
Nicaragua and throughout the region. People may welcome more such
intervention rather than less.
More direct threats against people in Nicaragua have come from
politicians in the US Congress. They reinforce diplomatic intimidation
from the State Department and offer State Department functionaries like
Paul Trivelli deniability and opportunities for insincere head shaking
as if to say, "but it sure would be a shame about those family
remittances and visas....." Dan Burton's threats early in October were
reinforced later this month by Californian Congressman Dana
Rohrabacher who has asked US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff
to plan for blocking vital family remittances to Nicaragua should
Daniel Ortega win the election(5). Such family remittances from the
hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans forced to emigrate in search of
work as cheap labour in North America and Europe are now Nicaragua's
largest sources of foreign exchange.
MRS - we are what we say, not what we do
This was a gift for Edmundo Jarquin of the centrist MRS (6). Jarquin
rejected Rohrabacher's crude extortion, saying "we repeat our position
of being against any foreign intervention in the internal political
process." Jarquin and his MRS colleagues want people to forget the
repeated meetings in which the MRS leadership sat down to negotiate
endorsement from the Bush regime with Ambassador Trivelli, with then US
State Department number two Bob Zoellick or with Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet's bosom buddy Jean Kirkpatrick. Nor do they want
people thinking too hard about their funding from the International
Republican Institute - of which Kirkpatrick is a board member - to
cover training costs for the MRS electoral campaign. One person's
intervention is another's stealthy road to quotas of political power.
For the MRS it is OK for them to strike deals with US government
representatives and quangos like the IRI, but they condemn Ortega for
routine negotiations with the leadership of the PLC, which dominates
the country's legislature or for normalising the FSLN's relations with
the local Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. MRS apologists like Carlos
Mejia Godoy, Henry Ruiz, Monica Baltodano and Ernesto Cardenal have yet
to explain the deal the late Herty Lewites, then MRS presidential
candidate, struck with Jose Rizo and Eduardo Montealegre at a meeting
in Miami in June (7). Lewites agreed to support either Rizo or
Montealegre if either of them made it to a second round run-off against
Daniel Ortega. Edmundo Jarquin has not rejected that deal, which can
only mean that the MRS leadership is ready to facilitate a right-wing
electoral victory in Nicaragua.
The MRS apologists preen themselves on their party's ethical purity
and, by extension, their own. But their regular opportunism indicates
this ethical fetish is bogus and self-serving. They too, like
Montealegre and Rizo and Trivelli, want people to forget too much. The
MRS only abandoned the FSLN led Convergencia coalition in 2005, a
little over a year ago, once it was clear Herty Lewites' campaign had a
chance of some success. Monica Baltodano abandoned the FSLN
coincidentally when it was clear she would be denied the chance of
running for a seat in the National Assembly. Cardenal rants at Ortega
for driving a Mercedes as if the MRS leaders ride around on bicycles
rather than in top-of-the-range expensive Japanese-made air-conditioned
SUVs and pick-ups, usually with some employee driving. The MRS leaders
seem to think all they have to do to win any argument is wave their
biographies at people. But as the opinion polls show, few Nicaraguan
voters have fallen for the kind of disingenuous negative campaigning
the MRS has waged.
Ernesto Cardenal : "Romantic Agony"-uncle
Cardenal's attack spins the regular old yarn that the MRS are clean,
modest, humble. He wants people to forget the MRS origins in the
Sandinista revolution when property confiscations and land reform
benefited many FSLN militants, including current members of the MRS.
Cardenal writes as if former members of the FSLN governing executive
now leaders of the MRS like Luis Carrion and Victor Tirado were not
extremely wealthy businessmen, to forget that Edmundo Jarquin is
married to former president Violeta Chamorro's daughter and worked for
the Inter-American Development Bank for over a decade until a couple of
years ago. MRS support is concentrated largely in Nicaragua's NGO
managerial class, economically dependent on foreign aid either from
major international NGOs or big international instutions like the
various UN bodies or the main development banks. So they naturally tend
to sympathise with the neo-colonial policies those institutions and
foreign NGOs promote. The MRS have found there is an electoral price to
pay for that narrowly based identification.
Cardenal's venomous attack on Daniel Ortega will only surprise those
who still treasure an image of Cardenal they remember from another,
less mean-spirited time. The give-away line in his article that
appeared in Spanish online magazine Rebelion, comes when, listing MRS
supporters, he cites the main pesonalities of the MRS movement along
with "so many other writers, artists, ambassadors and government
ministers of the revolutionary government" - as Muriel Spark's
Franco-worshipping Miss Jean Brodie put it, "la creme de la creme". As
an afterthought at the very end, almost by way of bathos, Cardenal adds
"y mucho pueblo humilde" - and many humble people, as much as to say,
the great unwashed. For Cardenal now, as for the eponymous Axel, the
first shall be first and the last shall be last.
This is the logical political terminus for a poet who very consciously
carried forward the literary modernism Wilson writes about in his
analysis of symbolism in his book "Axel's Castle". It is clear Cardenal
is now not just a literary descendant of W.B.Yeats and T.S.Eliot and,
hovering beyond them, Ezra Pound. By advocating the
imperialist-friendly, neo-liberal agenda of Edmundo Jarquin, Cardenal
becomes their political descendant too. The MRS leaderhip represents a
banal, smug, social democrat political-managerial class. Its members
seem never to ask themselves what they might look like to young
Nicaraguans like the Metal Beans who live a harsh, abrupt reality about
which the MRS leaders shed crocodile tears while offering by way of
remedy nothing but neo-liberal orthodoxy.
That is why Edmundo Jarquin, stuck between 10 and 14% of voter
preferences according to the latest opinion polls, is unable to make an
electoral breakthrough. But that may still be enough for them to
achieve their objectives - a few seats in the legislature and a right
wing government to the liking of the Bush regime in Washington. With
MRS leader Dora Maria Tellez publicly fantasising about winning the
November 5th elections in the first round, she and her colleagues
obviously hope to emulate the phenomenal electoral success of Tony
Blair's New Labour in Britain. But the political project they are
actually copying is New Labour's prototype, the Social Democratic Party
of David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley William and William Rodgers. In the
closely fought UK 1983 election, the SDP split the Labour Party vote,
guaranteeing Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party power well into the
1990s. The MRS prefer to see the Nicaraguan right return to power than
the anti-imperialist FSLN. November 5th will tell whether the MRS and
the US State Department get what they both so very much want.
Notes
1. http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=40139
2. http://www.counterpunch.org/jennings10062006.html
3. http://www.counterpunch.org/solo08102004.html
4. "Axel's Castle" is a study by the critic Edmund Wilson of writers
influenced by Symbolism
5. http://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/n85763.html
6. "Téllez: “MRS es una opción de centro"", Nuevo Diario,
15-07-2006
7. "José Rizo se distancia de Arnoldo Alemán" Nuevo
Diario 13-06-2006 The report's fifth paragraph reads "Lewites dijo por
primera vez que, en caso de no ganar en primera vuelta y si no tiene
oportunidad de lograr el triunfo en la segunda oportunidad, sus
simpatizantes van a apoyar al candidato liberal, ya sea Rizo o
Montealegre. Incluso, se puso a la orden de ambos para
acompañarlos en el gobierno."