For anyone who has witnessed Nicaragua’s development since the destruction and losses caused by the US terrorist war of the 1980s, the country has unquestionably become a dynamic modern society with strong social cohesion and a robust, competitive economy. Nicaragua is now entering the twentieth year of what people here call the second phase of the Sandinista Revolution. The country’s successful transformation is an outcome of the commitment of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), under the leadership of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, to making the concept of the People as President a reality, which they have done.
A stabilizing influence in the region
Nicaragua contributes greatly to regional stability through cooperation agreements with the armed forces and police authorities of other countries in the region, active participation in regional disaster mitigation and prevention structures, collaboration on regional health problems and cooperation on environmental issues. The country plays a crucial role in Central American economic integration because its central geographical position on the isthmus makes it an essential transit area for regional trade, transport and tourism.
Nicaragua has a political stability free of the internal conflicts that prevent the consistent development of public policies in some of its neighboring countries. The latest survey by the opinion polling consultancy M&R, widely respected at the regional level, shows approval ratings for the co-presidency of Daniel and Rosario of 89% and 85%, respectively. Nicaragua is by far the safest country in Central America and one of the safest in all the Americas. The country has the best public health system in Central America and the most modern roads. Nicaragua’s education system is considered one of the most innovative in Latin America and shares its experiences in constant exchange with other countries in the region.
Its phytosanitary control system, livestock sanitary regulation and tracing are among the best in the world. The country exports basic grains, dairy products and meat to the region and itself is practically self-sufficient in the production of food for domestic consumption. Likewise, Nicaragua’s contribution has been fundamental to ensure stable regional integration of electric energy and facilitate the adoption of renewable energy sources. Last year, more than 80% of the country’s electricity was produced from renewable sources. Nicaragua has been among the most proactive regional countries in promoting the development activities of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration.
How we got here
Back in 1990, Daniel Ortega and the FSLN ensured Nicaragua’s first ever democratic handover of power after elections that no impartial observer could describe as free and fair, given the grotesque intervention of the US government under president George H. Bush. Even so, the FSLN heeded the decision expressed by a clear majority of Nicaragua’s people and agreed to recognize the US government candidate Violeta Chamorro as president. Subsequently, through 17 years of woeful neoliberal misgovernment, the FSLN built up its grass roots support at municipal level year by year. For example, in the 2000 municipal elections it won just 52 of the country’s 153 municipalities, among them the capital city Managua. Then in 2004 it won 87 municipalities, and was re-elected in Managua.
Thus by the time of the national elections in 2006, it had enough electoral support to defeat a divided national right wing, even one supported explicitly with direct US funding and blatant US directed psychological warfare against Daniel Ortega and the FSLN. By that time, Nicaragua’s private business sector, as well as a significant body of opinion in what was then the still very influential Catholic Church hierarchy were prepared to contemplate an FSLN government led by Daniel Ortega. The FSLN promised a Government of National Reconciliation and Unity to address Nicaragua’s deep socio-economic crisis, while the right wing political parties offered only yet more futile neoliberal free market nostrums.
The general population was exhausted and exasperated by cuts in electrical power lasting as long as 12 hours a day. Small and medium sized private sector businesses struggled to survive. Peasant family and cooperative agricultural and livestock producers also struggled since they had practically no access to affordable credit or to adequate technical guidance. The health care and education systems were practically privatized, excluding tens of thousands of families and their children. The social security system offered constantly deteriorating services, depending entirely on the relatively small number of people in formal employment which meant diminishing resources to be able to guarantee pension and disability payments.
Afrodescendant and indigenous communities on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast were denied the resources they needed to be able to realize the far-reaching rights won under the revolutionary FSLN government of the 1980s but completely neglected subsequently. Bribery and corruption were widely prevalent in the judicial system, municipal authorities and central government. The national police force was starved of resources to combat organized crime effectively.
Emergency services were too underresourced to attend adequately to the needs of the population. The army was too underfunded to be able to protect remote rural communities against the armed gangs that preyed on them. The country’s highway, port and airport infrastructure was barely maintained, and in remote regions of the country not at all. Public transport, mainly owned by cooperatives, was outdated, using old second-hand buses purchased from the US, along with trucks and mini-buses supplied by the former Soviet-bloc countries during the 1980s.
Majority voter support for the right-wing parties divided after the heinous opportunist corruption and negligence of president Arnoldo Alemán’s Liberal Alliance government during and after the devastating catastrophe of Hurricane Mitch. Soon after, a faction of Arnoldo Alemán’s Liberal Alliance challenged his leadership and although they buried their differences to win the 2001 national elections, further bitter infighting caused even more division among the right wing political parties as they entered the 2006 presidential election. That year Daniel Ortega won the presidency against a divided opposition, although the Liberal parties and other right wing parties still had a majority in the country’s National Assembly.
A second phase of the Sandinista People’s Revolution
During his inauguration on January 10th 2007, Daniel Ortega pledged that Nicaragua’s people would be the protagonists of the new Sandinista presidency. He immediately decreed that health care and education would be provided free and formally joined what was then the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, led by Cuba and Venezuela. The FSLN government aimed at completing the party’s historic 1969 revolutionary program to create a far reaching process of socioeconomic democratization. The main components of that process have included:
- consolidating the radical land reform of the 1980s and guaranteeing property titles
- achieving food self-sufficiency via programs for small and medium producers
- enhancing access to credit for small urban and rural businesses and micro-businesses
- ensuring universal free access to good quality education and health care
- achieving national coverage of electricity and water supply,
- overhauling public transport and highway infrastructure
- delivering accessible dignified housing for tens of thousands of low income families
- developing port and airport infrastructure
- promoting the institutional and territorial integration of the Caribbean Coast
- prioritizing economic and political equality and security for women
- improving social security provision and enhancing labor rights
- restoring the rights of people with disability
- ensuring strong support for sports and all expressions of Nicaragua’s cultural life
- improving citizen security and defeating organized crime and drugs trafficking
- establish a prison system prioritizing rehabilitation and reintegration into society
- guaranteeing honest public administration
- greatly diversifying Nicaragua’s foreign relations and overseas trade
International organizations like the World Bank and the IMF or the InterAmerican Development Bank recognize that Nicaragua is a country with one of the best records anywhere for efficient use of development loans. Nicaragua’s Attorney General’s office has an audit and inspection unit dedicated specifically to controlling the appropriate use of funds by the country’s 153 municipalities. Under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, central government has worked very closely with local municipal authorities to complement national programs to democratize the economy, restoring people’s rights to health and education, to sport and culture, to attractive public spaces and a clean environment.
Apart from having the biggest and best equipped public health system in the region, Nicaragua’s innovative education system ensures good quality education in rural areas including at university level. The country is a regional leader in special needs education and applies strongly empowering employment and technical education policies for people with disability. Nicaragua has long been the leading country in the region regarding the number of women in positions of public authority and for gender equality in general. Indigenous and afrodescendant communities on the country’s Caribbean Coast enjoy institutional autonomy unparalleled in the region.
An important aspect of the country’s peace and security has been its enlightened policy of prisoner rehabilitation which periodically allows large numbers of prisoners conditional release to their families. The country’s deeply patriotic national police and armed forces are composed overwhelmingly of personnel from low income families across the country’s urban and rural communities and explicitly identify as “the People in uniform”. The country’s sports and cultural programs offer infrastructure and opportunities strongly oriented to encourage participation of young people of all ages which has been essential for fomenting the marvelous widespread pride in and commitment to Nicaragua’s national identity and traditions.
The challenge of Sandinismo
After 20 years in the second phase of its revolutionary process, Sandinismo is an even more integral part of Nicaraguan identity than ever. After 1990, the US ruling élites bet that the FSLN would break up and disappear, just as they thought the Cuban Revolution would collapse too. Instead, in Nicaragua, Sandinismo continues to challenge Western corporate capitalism through its unquestionably successful focus on the needs of the human person and the aspirations of the country’s families. Its success is a categorical indictment of conditions for the impoverished majorities in neighboring countries.
Nicaragua also challenges the many Western neocolonial progressives and self-styled radicals who try to impose long irrelevant political criteria on Nicaragua’s struggle to reduce poverty against an adverse international system of trade and finance designed to crush economic democratization. The revolutionary achievements of Sandinismo in Nicaragua have only been possible because the Frente Sandinista, under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have paid attention to people’s concerns across the whole country, among every ethnic group, among people of every age and every socioeconomic class. Their government’s openness and tolerance allowed the US and its local allies space and opportunity to mount the 2018 coup attempt and, after its collapse, to try destabilizing the electoral process of 2021, which also failed.
Now Sandinismo is stronger than ever in Nicaragua. Politically the government and the country’s institutions are more resilient and the population overwhelmingly feel great optimism for the future. The country’s economy continues to be among the most open and diversified in the region, with strong foreign investment, robust reserves, record exports and growing national production. The government’s foreign policy is unequivocal in its anti-imperialism and insistence on respect for basic principles of international coexistence. Above all, the challenge Nicaragua represents now is the same it has been for a hundred years, its people’s loyalty to the vision and example of their great national and universal heroes, Rubén Darío and Augusto Sandino.
