Reply

In roughly two weeks’ time, between the day I submitted my essay for comments and the writing of these lines (mid-June 2021), Ortega and Murillo escalated their persecution of political adversaries to levels unprecedented in a pre-electoral context. As of late June 2021, 11 high-profile opponents have been detained, including 3 Sandinista dissenters, a former COSEP president, and 4 presidential precandidates. In addition, as noted by Martinez, “all opposition leaders have either police presence outside their homes (and are followed) or are under house arrest, and political opposition meetings are regularly broken up by police throughout the country.” As Wade suggests, under these circumstances any hope of last-minute arrangements that could lead to a fair electoral contest in November 2021 appears to be virtually gone.

The commentaries by Kovalik and Ellner are the most critical of my arguments. In his defense of the FSLN government, Kovalik rightly points out that the Sandinistas “have done much to address the needs of [their] people.” Albeit an important part of the equation, the conditions for achieving material well-being are insufficient for people to attain their full potential. They need to believe that they can shape their futures, and any regime that stands in the way of that aspiration cannot be termed progressive. Ellner calls for the substantiation of several claims, including that NED and USAID funding to Nicaragua is comparable to and often significantly less than elsewhere in the region, and questions the basis for arguing the limited effects of U.S. sanctions. Regarding the funding, between 2016 and 2019 Nicaragua and Guatemala both received NED grants of roughly US$4 million, while in 2019 (the year that Ellner references) Nicaragua received US$27.4 million from USAID, significantly less than Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador, which received between US$146.3 million and US$204.6 million. As for the limited impact of the sanctions, suffice it to say that both the IMF and the World Bank approved multimillion-dollar loans to Nicaragua (in 2020 and 2021, respectively) even as the NICA Act specifically called for blocking aid coming from the international financial institutions. ¹

The latter is a clear example of what I called Washington’s two-tiered approach to Ortega-Murillo, which at times may seem forceful but turns out to be ambiguous in the implementation phase. Here there is some complexity in the foreign-policy-making apparatus, which, as Ellner suggests, is not a “monolithic group.” Rather, as Gordon puts it, “the U.S. right continues to see in the Ortega-Murillo government of 2021 the revolutionary fervor of 1979.” For better or for worse, the same is true of many on the U.S. left, leading Washington to an erratic policy-making process founded on what Nicaragua stood for and meant in the twentieth century but no longer does today.

Most of the other commentaries lend support to the idea that the main reasons for the regime’s foreseeable continuation in power are two: what Jarquín identifies as Ortega-Murillo’s successful implementation of a “coherent bargain” for the masses, entailing “authoritarian control in exchange for ultra-conservative social values, stability, and nonredistributive but still significant social programs,” and the lack of a unified opposition capable of articulating a more dignified path toward the achievement of people’s individual and collective goals. Not even organized civil society has been able to fill this void. In the words of Morales-Gamboa, “social movements became bureaucratized . . . development agencies dependent on external support . . . [that] managed to achieve a certain presence in the political arena at the expense of distancing themselves from the masses.” This distancing from the masses —which is not limited to social movements—is partly due to the opposition’s failure to identify and incorporate into its agenda key elements of Sandinista management that have had positive resonance in the population. Instead of validating the government’s social programs, public infrastructure projects, and poverty reduction achievements, the opposition has demonized everything that the Sandinistas stand for, generating—as noted by Marti i Puig—“a violently anti-Sandinista discourse when part of its social base belonged to the FSLN before being swallowed up by Ortega.” Although distorted and co-opted by Ortega-Murillo, the Sandinista imaginary continues to be a powerful referent even among those who are no longer in the ranks of the FSLN but continue to believe in the cause of social justice and revolutionary change.

Buben and Kouba rightly argue that in the 1980s, during the war, “the FSLN government acted in a much more conciliatory and democratic manner despite the shameful hostile campaign organized against it. The level of repression it used was much lower under circumstances that could have led to a more authoritarian approach.” The reason for this has to do with the different degrees of legitimacy of the Sandinista government then and now. In the 1980s, reason was on the FSLN’s side: it was a battle between David and Goliath in which–—aside from the Cold War context—the fairness of Nicaragua’s claim for sovereignty and self-determination was plain for everyone to see. Despite the irregularities associated with the transition, in 1990 the Sandinistas left power holding their heads high, as a legitimate opposition party credited worldwide with having facilitated the first peaceful democratic transition in Nicaragua’s history. In the years to come, however, the FSLN gradually abandoned its idealism in favor of a more pragmatic approach, entering into pacts with political adversaries and making meaningful but corporatist-inspired gestures aimed at conveying a nominal sense of national unity. One example of the latter was the designation of Francisco Campbell as ambassador to the United States. A native of the Caribbean coast, Campbell became the first black Nicaraguan to occupy that position. Notwithstanding his merits as a diplomat, the designation served as token recognition of the historically abandoned population of that region, which, as noted by Morris, has “been a testing ground for many of the most repressive tactics that the Ortega administration has deployed against the protest movement.”

Not that there is anything wrong with being pragmatic. In fact, back in 2013 I coauthored a piece in Latin American Perspectives that sought to explain the challenges confronted by the FSLN in the twenty-first century and how those challenges led to what could appear as contradictions from a leftist perspective. As objectionable as they could be, at that time some of the contradictions seemed justifiable and even acceptable in light of what the government had achieved and what still appeared as the positive transformative potential of the Sandinista project. The problem, however, was that, ever more frequently, pragmatic policies and approaches were implemented at the expense of inclusiveness, popular participation, and attention to the changes that people wanted to see, both nationally and within the FSLN. Ortega-Murillo became an oracle. Alternative views or opinions saw their influence diminish in public policy making, increasingly regarded as subversive or counterrevolutionary even if they came from longtime card-carrying Sandinista militants.

Nicaragua’s current situation is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the Soviet-bloc governments at the end of the twentieth century that ultimately led to their demise. They forgot that the essence of socialism is liberation—not only from physical constraints but also from less tangible ones—that leads to self-realization and fulfillment. Over two decades later, Ortega-Murillo seem to have forgotten that lesson and are making similar mistakes. As with the Soviet bloc, the outcome, sooner or later, will be no different.