Since its 1990 electoral defeat and ouster from power, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) has gone through several political crises, leading a large number of its most charismatic founders and leaders to defect. On top of these defections, questions have been raised about the ethics of the party's main leader, Daniel Ortega, splitting the party into what can be seen as “the two Sandinismos.”
The Sandinista movement will come to the November 5 presidential and legislative elections divided into in two camps: Daniel Ortega heads up the FSLN's ticket while Edmundo Jarquín and the singer-songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy will run on that of the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (MPRS),1 following the untimely death of Herty Lewites. Lewites was to be the presidential candidate of this dissident faction, in which the principal historical stalwarts of the Sandinista movement are grouped. An extended interview with comandante Mónica Baltodano sheds light on some key elements of the rift between the two factions.2
Ethical and Political Crisis
The first major scandal following the FSLN's 1990 ouster was the “piñata,” or doling out of assets. Land was given to thousands of campesinos and houses to urban shantytown dwellers, but money was also divided up among high Sandinista officials who illegally enriched themselves. By 1992, 30 large companies were owned by the FSLN or its leaders.3 Over time, top Sandinista leaders continued amassing wealth thanks to agreements and alliances with the country's powerful.
In 1994, some veteran leaders defected from the FSLN, creating the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) two years later. Mónica Baltodano says: “[S]ince 1994 groups of important party members have left in droves. The first large exodus occurred with the formation of the MRS, with Dora María Téllez, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, and Ernesto Cardenal. Then, following the expulsion of Herty Lewites and Víctor Hugo Tinoco, the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo was created, and was joined by our group, Democratic Left.”
In 1999, Daniel Ortega signed an unprecedented pact with President Arnoldo Alemán—later tried on corruption charges—dividing up the principal functions of the State. “Through that pact, Ortega has gained, if not total control, an important share of the control, over the country's main institutions. In exchange, he provided governability to successive neoliberal governments, demobilizing the [Nicaraguan] people and permitting the laws and decisions that have plunged us into the most absolute neglect,” says Baltodano.
More blunt, Revista Envío called the agreement a “political obscenity.”4 According to Envío, a publication of Central American University, the new rules of the game established through the agreement have two objectives: To “[t]urn the electoral institution into a bipartisan body at all levels and channel the will of the voters toward a two-party system. They also have a common philosophy that suits the two big parties: the majorities rule and the minorities are ignored.”5
Since then, power has been shared between Alemán's Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) and Ortega's FSLN. The Comptroller General of the Nation, Augusto Jarquín, was even dismissed and jailed in the wake of the pact between Alemán and Ortega. In Baltodano's words, “in our country, there is the perception that we are controlled by two groups of mafiosi, one belonging to Alemán, and the other belonging to Daniel Ortega, who use power spaces to favor [their] two groups. Scandals frequently break out because of verdicts in favor of drug-traffickers, who are said to pay juicy bribes. Or political assassinations that are never solved, such that of the journalist Carlos Guadamuz, one of Ortega's leading protégés, who distanced himself after Ortega stripped him of one of the most important radio stations in Nicaragua, Radio Ya, after which he came to be a bitter enemy of Ortega and his group.”
Guadamuz staunchly criticized the deputies of the FSLN, to which he belonged and from which he was expelled for taking issue with the pact. He even called Daniel Ortega “the new Somoza of Nicaragua.” According to Envío, Guadamuz, “fearing reprisals from Ortega, gave up the legal battle to defend his rights as an FSLN member.”6 While ruthless with his party's dissidents, Ortega treated Sandinismo's enemies with kid gloves: on November 26, 2003, the pact was reactivated, when “justice” authorities freed Alemán, a “defendant accused of very serious crimes of corruption.”7
The Zoilamérica Case
From an ethical standpoint, this case is the most serious faced by Ortega and the top FSLN leadership. As noted by the Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli, it underscores “the handiwork of our native Machiavellian Prince Daniel Ortega.”8 In March 1998, Daniel Ortega's adopted daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez (daughter of Rosario Murillo, Ortega's wife), publicly accused the FSLN leader of incest, declaring that he had sexually abused her for 19 years.9 Zoilamérica's disclosure sent shock waves throughout Nicaragua and among the Sandinista faithful, but failed to faze Daniel Ortega or his wife, while the Sandinista machinery ranks around him. A Sandinista veteran, Alejandro Bendaña, confirmed the accusation and apologized: “Today, as a man, I apologize to you, Zoilamérica, for not having done enough to stop Daniel Ortega in his aggression against you, an aggression that I even witnessed ... I apologize on behalf of all the men and women who also knew of this situation and did not have the courage, either then or today, to speak and side with justice.”10
Sandinista men and women, including professed feminists, supported Ortega. The FSLN lashed out at his accuser, charging her of doing the enemy's bidding and being part of a CIA-led conspiracy. Gioconda Belli said that if the FSLN was incapable of listening to Zoilamérica, “it will have become a party at the service of the political career of one man.”
The case was ignored by much of the left in the continent, perhaps because they considered it a private issue and because they believe that Daniel Ortega is a comrade facing the enemy who constitutes a real alternative to neoliberalism rule in Nicaragua. Much has been made of the corruption of the top Sandinista leadership following the piñata, which allowed the party's leaders to become affluent entrepreneurs. And much criticism was made of the Alemán-Ortega pact, through which Sandinismo gained control of important levers in the State machinery. But little, if anything, is said of the Zoilamérica case.
Margaret Randall, an American feminist who came to Nicaragua in the 1980s to support the Revolution, has authored, among others books, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. After looking into this case, she concluded that there will be no social change in Nicaragua without an examination of power from a women's perspective. “I have come to believe,” she says in a January 2000 article in Envío “that the failure of revolutionary movements to listen to all social groups, analyze their potential, and assure their full agency has been in great part responsible for the inability of these movements to remain in power. The enemy from the outside was certainly overwhelming. But the enemy from within contributed to revolutionary demise in ways we are only now beginning to understand.”
Towards a New Sandinismo?
Former comandante Baltodano argues that in Nicaragua there are two Sandinismos: “The FSLN of the high-ranking leadership has been privatized by Daniel Ortega, who manages it like a company in which he is the majority shareholder. This enterprise is used to obtain all types of concrete material benefits and privileges for a small group of persons on the basis of their unconditional support for Daniel.”11 She adds that after the electoral defeat in 1990, the Sandinista leadership “regressed to autocracy: power in the hands of a single person,” since Daniel Ortega allowed no leaders to rise within the party. He also has a stranglehold on candidacy for president—says Baltodano—establishing the doctrine that without him as candidate Sandinismo will be beset by chaos. When the base rises up, “the response has been internal repression, smear campaigns, isolation, even the use of power within the judicial institutions, to ‘create cases' and initiate proceedings against those of us who rebelled. He is not interested in debate, diversity of thought, alternative information, or political training.”
The vast majority of critical Sandinistas have now joined forces in the MPRS, with the hope of winning the elections . The sudden death of presidential candidate Herty Lewites in May left an important vacuum in the MPRS. “Herty Lewites did an effective job as Tourism minister in the 1980s and then as mayor of Managua, and he had high approval among Nicaraguans. Another strong suit of his was excellent communication—which people found down-to-earth and appealing. He was also recognized for his courage in standing up to Ortega. His death is a severe blow to the alliance, and for this reason we have chosen a ticket made with Edmundo Jarquín, who was Lewites' vice presidential candidate, and Carlos Mejía Godoy, a grassroots leader and the most prestigious and well-known Nicaraguan singer-songwriter in the country as well as internationally. With this ticket we hope to meet the challenges, although now, naturally, with less favorable odds.”
In a situation of extreme weakness for the movements, it appears that only the electoral path can bring about change. The large organizations, those created in the 1980s, are tightly controlled by Daniel Ortega and to a certain extent they continue to allow their struggles to be subordinate to the interests of the party machinery. Their top leaders are always on the rosters of legislative candidates or present in the State institutions divvied up through the agreement.
In 2005 the Global Action Committee was formed and has rallied to reject capitalist globalization and the Central America-United States free trade agreement (CAFTA). The Autonomous Women's Movement has also maintained its own agenda, most notably by criticizing the system and reclaiming political action outside of party channels. One of the most emblematic autonomous social movements has been that of workers and campesinos harmed by Nemagon, a synthetic agrochemical used in the banana fields several years after it had been taken off the market in developed countries because of its detrimental health effects. Composed of organizations of banana workers and sugarcane cutters and persons suffering from chronic renal insufficiency, the movement has expanded its scope from legal action against transnationals responsible for pesticide use to a comprehensive denunciation of neoliberalism. The movement has organized several sit-ins with thousands of campesinos outside the National Assembly, demanding an agenda to vindicate rights. It has gained the support of important sectors in the country.
The United States, through the meddling of Ambassador Trivelli, has attempted by every means possible to unite the two liberal groups, which for the first time are running on separate tickets. In 1990 all the forces on the right formed the National Opposition Union, and in 1996 and 2001 they came together as the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC). Now, however, the PLC and the Liberal-Conservative Alliance are competing separately. “The efforts unleashed by the United States to ensure a united right wing ticket have been carried out in a brazen, openly meddling manner,” says Baltodano. This interference has been accompanied by the discrediting of Arnoldo Alemán and his group, who have not been forgiven for acts of money-laundering in the United States, or for [Alemán's] pact with Ortega, which, in the opinion [of the United States,] has allowed him to control the branches of government. Alemán is no longer useful to them and the White House is seeking to control a united right, although it has not yet succeeded.
Baltodano and a broad group of Sandinista veterans are attempting to rebuild what was once the main current in favor of change in Nicaragua. They know that to accomplish this they need to recover the best of the past and at the same time criticize the mistakes made in that period. Hence, she says, “our revolution failed to sufficiently develop democratic mechanisms,” and she emphasizes that “we would not return to quashing freedom of expression, nor should we pointlessly get involved in international conflicts.” She also finds that “the revolution's eagerness to nationalize” was mistaken, as was “the disregard for macroeconomic equilibria,” because “in the end, inflation is paid for by the low-income sectors.”
She adds, however, that anti-imperialism and solidarity and the role of a State concerned with people's problems, which made enormous efforts in education, literacy, and free healthcare, need to be conserved. She argues that, overall, the Sandinista decade left some not-at-all negligible positive results: “The opening to formal democracy, with the eradication of the dictatorship, the conquest of national independence and dignity, the awareness of women's rights, the abolition of repressive agencies at the service of the dictatorship, and the construction of professional and constitutional institutions for internal order and defense.”
With this baggage, Sandinistas critical of the FSLN believe they are in a position to combine the political struggle for power with ethics, something that for a generation of Nicaraguans seemed impossible. Father Ernesto Cardenal, perhaps the greatest living symbol of Sandinismo, reminds us that recovering the best of the Sandinista tradition required breaking with the FSLN's high-ranking leadership: “It's Daniel Ortega who's doing that, who destroyed the revolution, betrayed Sandino ... All the disasters we are seeing now are thanks to him.”12
Endnotes
- The MPRS is composed of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, the Nicaraguan Socialist Party, the Civic Action Party, the Ecologist Green Party, Democratic Left, and several social movements such as the Autonomous Women's Movement (MAM) and the Association of Victims of Pesticide (that is, of Nemagon).
- Mónica Baltodano was minister of Regional Affairs during the Sandinista government. In 1996 she was elected deputy in the National Assembly, but in 1999 she was expelled from the FSLN for rejecting the Alemán-Ortega pact, through which then-President Alemán and the leader of the opposition divvied up power and granted each other impunity.
- Envío, Jan.-Feb. 2000, p. 17.
- Ibid., p. 4.
- Ibid., p. 7.
- Ibid., p. 6.
- Envío, Dec. 2003 p. 3.
- Gioconda Belli, “La gritería que necesitamos,” El Nuevo Diario, Managua, 10 Dec. 2003.
- Her complete account can be found at www.sandino.org/zoila.htm.
- Envío, March 1998.
- Brecha, 11 Aug. 2006.
- Envío, Dec. 2003, p. 9.
Translated for the Americas Program by Alan Hynds.
Raúl Zibechi, a member of the editorial board of the Montevideo weekly Brecha, is a teacher and a researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina as well as an advisor to several social groups. He is also a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org).
