October 8, 1996
A version of this article appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 17, 1996, under the title "In Nicaragua, grass roots push through the rubble left by U.S. 'missionaries'." Thanks to Charles Dunsire, Editorial Page Editor, for his collaboration.
"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work," said Henry Kissinger in 1976.
Dr. K's wisdom notwithstanding, fresh evidence confirms that apostles of a later C.I.A. project, the Nicaraguan contras, helped bring a new opiate of the masses, crack cocaine, unto the cities of California. Contra drug trafficking is old news, first reported by the Associated Press in 1985. But Knight-Ridder's new documentation of the contras' mass-marketing zealotry recalls the conquistadores, spreading the one true faith with cross and sword while doing a little gold-mining on the side.
Overt action by the Reagan and Bush administrations to exorcise Nicaragua's elected government was carried out with equally evangelistic fervor. A decade of military, economic, and political jihad bled Nicaragua white: proportional losses for the U.S. would equal 2.4 million dead and $25 trillion in damages. Hell hath no fury like a superpower spurned.
"Washington believes that Nicaragua must serve as a warning to the rest of Central America to never again challenge U.S. hegemony, because of the enormous economic and political costs," explained Reagan ally Richard John Neuhaus of the Institute for Religion and Democracy. "It's too bad that the poor must suffer, but historically the poor have always suffered."
Then, after a decade-long run as the focus of evil in our hemisphere, Nicaragua vanished into the media's Bermuda Triangle.
On October 20, Nicaraguans go to the polls to choose a new president, national assembly, and local governments. But unlike the 1990 and 1984 votes, you'd barely know it from reading U.S. papers.
In a surprising reconciliation, two old enemies have joined forces to try to revive Nicaragua's countryside. Daniel Ortega-president from 1984 to 1990 and current candidate of the left-nationalist Sandinistas-recently made an electoral pact with several former contra field commanders. And for vice-presidential candidate, the Sandinistas chose a conservative cattle rancher some of whose land they had confiscated during the '80s.
Sandinista land reforms redistributed more than half the country's arable land, along with credit and technical support, to 60 percent of rural families. In 1990, President Violeta Chamorro also promised land to ex-combatants of the contras and the army, but failed to deliver much, instead slashing credit for small farmers.
Small groups from both sides took up arms again in desperation, some pressing political demands, some simply pillaging. The Sandinistas are now betting that peace among warring factions will help jump-start agricultural production.
The front runner for president, however, remains Arnoldo Alemán, the mayor of Managua. A right-wing populist, Alemán has been an energetic administrator and magnet for U.S. funds. But he's also been charged with corruption. Taking personal credit for each pothole filled, he's built up his Liberal Constitutionalist Party from a splinter to a serious machine.
Alemán's deep-pockets include many wealthy Nicaraguans who fled to Miami after the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. The revolution expropriated the properties of some, and now they want them back. Alemán, with the support of Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate, has pledged to return them.
Some of these properties were grabbed by bitter Sandinista leaders after their 1990 electoral loss. But most were given to urban squatters and dirt-poor peasants, who will surrender their land over their dead bodies.
The Sandinistas have bashed Alemán on his past as president of Somoza's youth group. They've also pointed to former Somoza officials among his advisors and accused him of planning to bring back leaders of the dictator's National Guard.
The Sandinista strategies seem to be working. One of the few polls which called the 1990 elections correctly now shows Ortega closing from twenty points behind to nearly a dead heat with Alemán.
Whoever wins will face an economy lacerated by what a Polish commentator likened to "a dive into a pool with no water in it.". Following a structural adjustment plan, the economic shock therapy prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Chamorro government has devalued the currency, privatized public assets, opened the economy to world markets, and decimated social services.
The plan has ended hyperinflation, stabilized the córdoba, and boosted exports. Since 1993, the economy has begun to grow feebly; gross domestic product rose one percent per capita last year.
But some 70 percent of Nicaraguans now live in poverty, with un- and underemployment over 50 percent. The country's once-extensive health-care system, created by the Sandinistas, has been ravaged: preventable diseases are pandemic, and child malnutrition and infant mortality are rising. Education spending per capita has been sliced by more than one-third from its high point in the '80s. Illiteracy, reduced to from over 50 percent to 13 percent by Sandinista literacy campaigns, has risen to around 30 percent again. Nicaragua has been reduced to the second poorest country in the Americas, after Haiti.
Crushing the economy is one of the highest foreign debts per capita in the world. Forty percent of foreign aid since 1990 has gone right back to creditor nations for debt service. And the government continues to miss economic targets set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
"Aid is not the answer," said Xabier Gorostiaga, president of Managua's Central American University. He called foreign assistance "an opium which has left Nicaragua waiting for outside solutions to all its problems."
Back in Washington, in contrast to President Bush's public support and financial backing for Violeta Chamorro in 1990, the Clinton administration doesn't seem to care much about these elections. There's no longer a need for intervention from the vantage point of Washington: IMF and investor pressures will likely push either Alemán or Ortega toward the center.
In the Senate, though, Jesse Helms continues to hold aid to Nicaragua hostage to his land-to-the-oligarchs program. For the Grand Inquisitor of Sins Against Property and his Miami allies, Nicaragua is a rehearsal for the crusade against Cuba.
A recent IMF and World Bank debt-relief plan for the world's poorest countries could forgive some fraction of Nicaragua's unpayable debt. If the U.S. wanted to bolster international law, it would forgive its share and encourage other countries to follow suit. The total owed is less than damages claimed by Nicaragua before the World Court, which ruled the U.S. war and embargo illegal in 1986. The U.S. ignored the ruling.
In the new market gospel, cross and sword have been replaced by Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility and bridge loan. Eventually, orthodoxy may be enforced by inclusion in an expanded NAFTA. At the gates of the temple of international finance, Nicaragua is just one more supplicant for alms.
But history has not yet ended in Nicaragua. In parts of the countryside, former contras and demobilized soldiers have come together in joint peace commissions and work projects. And in the maquiladoras of Managua's new free-trade zone, predominantly women workers are organizing clandestinely for living wages and decent working conditions. Beneath the rubble left by Washington's missionaries, the tough Nicaraguan grassroots will continue to push up shoots.
Peter Costantini wrote about the 1996 Nicaraguan elections for MSNBC News. He previously co-led an observer delegation to the Nicaraguan elections of 1990 for Northwest-Nicaragua Electoral Watch and taught at the National Engineering University in Managua in 1986. He has also covered elections in Mexico and Haiti, and is Seattle correspondent for Inter Press Service, an international newswire based in Rome.
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