Chapter Two

Nicaragua: A country that did not finish its revolution

1. Introduction

The insurrection of July 1979 overthrew the inhuman and despotic Somoza regime in Nicaragua in the most thorough-going democratic revolution in Latin America since the victory of the 26 July Movement in Cuba twenty years previously. All sections of Nicaragua’s 3 million population participated: young, old, men, women, workers and peasants and the middle class. It was an event of enormous and worldwide importance, offsetting both the defeat suffered in Chile six years earlier when US-sponsored generals overthrew the Social-Democratic government of Salvador Allende and unleashed a regime of vicious repression against workers and peasants, and the 1976 coup in Argentina which replaced Isabel Perón with a military junta that ‘disappeared’ some 30,000 Argentinians.

The Nicaraguan revolution triumphed as part of a rising wave of revolutionary victories from which it drew strength and to which it contributed. As 1979 began, the Shah of Iran was overthrown, and in March a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the New Jewel Movement took power on the Caribbean island of Grenada. These advances followed the overthrow of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique and Angola (1974-75), the defeat of both US imperialism in Vietnam (1975) and the South African invasion of Angola (1976), and the Soweto uprising (1976), which marked the political emergence of a new generation of revolutionary-minded youth in South Africa. Victory in Nicaragua, spurred on the urban and rural revolutionary struggles, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala.

It was an inspiring revolution, raising the hopes, sympathies and support of workers and youth around the world. Very few people can remember a more inspirational revolution than the Sandinista. In 1979, the people of the poorest Latin American country rose up and overthrew one of the most bloodthirsty and hated tyrants in the world, Anastasio Somoza, capturing the imagination of young people and workers in a way not seen since the victory of the Cuban guerrillas led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

But the experience of Cuba had created high expectations, so that when, a decade later, a reactionary government regained control of Nicaragua the disappointment was all the greater. Today, Nicaragua is again the poorest country in Latin America and the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. But how did the reaction triumph in Nicaragua? By what process did it regain governmental and state power? Was the revolution doomed from the start? What lessons can we draw for today? What should have been the course of action of revolutionaries to maximise the chances of success?

Notwithstanding criticisms of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN), its structure, programme and policies, the Nicaraguan revolution was a great advance, demonstrating how the seemingly invincible military dictator supported by US imperialism could be defeated. It was, correctly, common ground among both socialists and democrats that imperialism’s attempts to crush the Nicaraguan revolution had to be resisted at every level.

2. Some History

Like all of Latin America and the Caribbean, Nicaragua was invaded, looted and exploited by imperialism, first by Spain and Britain, and then by the USA. Having achieved independence from the Mexican Empire, the United Provinces of Central America (now Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador) under the leadership of Francisco Morazán, attempted to establish a Federal Republic of Central America in 1824 as a single, progressive bourgeois nation. There were two major obstacles, the medieval privileges of the church and the interests of the ultra-conservative caudillos, the wealthy landowners.

The Republic began a programme of building schools and roads, enacted free trade policies, abolished slavery, invited foreign capital and immigrants, separated church from state, proclaimed religious liberties such as secular marriage and divorce, confiscated church property and removed education from church control. These measures both downgraded the authority of the oligarchs and scandalised them. It was the Nicaraguan oligarchs who launched the civil war that began the Balkanisation of the region, its division into mini-states none of which were economically viable. The common history of the region presented these countries with common problems both economically and socially, and what happens in any one is strongly echoed in the others.

The USA saw this division of Central America as very much in its own interest, particularly in controlling trade routes between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. In 1882, Ferdinand de Lesseps had started work on a canal, but the effort ended in bankruptcy. The US Congress agreed to take over the project in 1902. However, at that time Panama was not a separate country, but the base of the Colombian Liberals, who were fighting a civil war against a US-backed Conservative government. Philippe Banau-Varilla, closely linked with the US Administration, arranged for a small revolt in favour of Panamanian independence in Panama City. Simultaneously, President Roosevelt dispatched the USS Nashville to ensure that no Colombian troops could reach Panama City. On 3 November, 1903, after some sixty years of supporting the government in Bogotá, the US switched sides and the Republic of Panama was born. Banau-Varilla was immediately appointed Panama’s ambassador to Washington and within a fortnight had signed a treaty allowing for perpetual US sovereignty over the ‘Canal zone’, a strip of land sixteen kilometres wide and eighty kilometres long, with permission for the US Army Corps of Engineers to build a canal.

Prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Nicaragua had been considered strategically essential by the US bourgeoisie because it offered an alternative route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Between 1896 and 1912, US marines invaded Nicaragua four times to ensure US control over any canal built across the Central American isthmus. After the 1912 invasion, the US marines provided Nicaragua with ‘internal stability’ in return for not competing with the Panama Canal. They stayed for over two decades.

Until the last third of the nineteenth century, when coffee production was introduced, Nicaragua’s economy was based largely on great cattle latifundios dominated by an oligarchy centred in the cities of Granada and León. The introduction of coffee brought wealth and power to a new ‘coffee bourgeoisie’, which was soon translated into control of the government which enacted laws facilitating the appropriation of Church, communal and public land by private individuals anxious to extend their estates. The dispossessed, with increasing numbers of immigrants, formed a free labour force working for minimum wages.

Suppression of civil liberties was acceptable to the US, but opening negotiations with European companies on the possible construction of a second canal was too much. In 1909, the traditional landed oligarchy, in a feudal-imperialist alliance backed the US overthrow of the government. Henceforward, American private banks had almost complete financial control of the Nicaraguan economy, and direct control over the collection of customs duties, taxes and the National Bank.

For fifty years this Conservative government preserved and encouraged the most backward forms of surplus extraction and, under its rule, the latifundios were generally characterised by stagnant production, primitive cultivation, lack of soil conservation, and labourers bound to the estate by their debts. By 1950, as a result of lack of innovation, of economic and social stagnation, Nicaragua’s coffee producers had the lowest average yields per hectare in Central America (half those in El Salvador and Costa Rica).

The first to organise a nationalist struggle for freedom from imperialism was Augusto Cesar Sandino, the illegitimate son of a landowner and an Indian woman employed by the Sandino family. By seventeen, he had been radicalised by his mother’s suffering and the actions of General Benjamín Zeledón who, in 1912, unsuccessfully fought the invasion of Nicaragua by US marines. At twenty-five, Sandino was forced to flee Nicaragua and for three years (1923-1926) worked in the Mexican oil fields, becoming acquainted with the organised workers’ movement then dominated by the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (the ‘Wobblies’) and the Mexican Communist Party, and experiencing first-hand the results of the Mexican Revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1920.1

Sandino began a struggle for national independence in 1927, with just twenty-nine rebels, building a fighting force of 3,000 guerrillas coming predominantly from among the campesinos and urban poor but also, and importantly, including a significant group of miners from the San Albino gold mines. Sandino offered the vision of a capitalist Nicaragua based on co-operatives of small landowners, free from imperialist domination. This was, of course, an impossible goal in a world dominated by imperialism but, based on practical experience, Sandino did contribute to the understanding that the national bourgeoisie of Nicaragua were too servile, too weak, too tied to imperialism to carry through the struggle for national liberation; that “only the workers and peasants will take the struggle through to its ultimate conclusion”. Essentially this echoed the view of Georgy Valentinovitch Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism, that the Russian (bourgeois-democratic) Revolution “will triumph only as a working-class movement or else it will never triumph”.2

In its initial stages, Sandino’s guerrilla war gained substantial support from the Communist Parties of Central America, particularly Mexico and Cuba. At that time the Communist International was led by Nikolai Bukharin and its policy was stagist – the national bourgeoisie would lead their own revolutions for national independence from imperialism, and Communists should limit themselves to assisting that struggle. The ‘Hands Off Nicaragua’ campaign run by the Mexican Communist Party was a major part of the international support for Sandino’s struggle. Simultaneously, he was joined in his fight against US occupation by Salvadoran Farabundo Martí, who was one of his closest collaborators until he returned to El Salvador in 1930 to help launch the Salvadoran Communist Party.3

A sharp turn to the left by the stalinised Communist International meant that for six years, 1927-1933, social-democrats and national revolutionaries were considered as great a danger to a socialist revolution as fascists. In such a scenario, co-operation between national Communist Parties and local national liberation fighters was, at best, lukewarm. This policy precipitated the nonsensical accusation by the Mexican CP that Sandino was an agent of US imperialism, and the demand that the Nicaraguan struggle for national independence should wait for the formation of a Nicaraguan Communist Party. Sandino was left puzzled and angry by these accusations and demands, he accused Martí of spying for the Communist International and severed relations with him.

The puppet regimes of, first Adolfo Diaz and then José Moncada, were unable to smash the Sandino movement, even with the direct support of US marines, regular troops and air attacks. As part of the fight against Sandino the US created, organised and trained a National Guard (Guardia Nacional) that combined many of the functions of the army, police and secret police. The Guards were trained in the use of terror tactics against the campesinos and urban population, conducting mass executions and systematic torture described by Fonseca as:

[T]he ferocious National Guard maintains the cruel practices inculcated by its creator, the United States Marines. The bombarding of villages, the butchering of children, the raping of women, the burning of huts with peasants still inside, mutilation as a form of torture: these were the subjects that the North American professors of civilisation taught the Guards during the epoch of the guerrilla resistance (1927-32) led by Augusto Cesar Sandino.4

Nicaragua was a test-bed for US shock tactics that would later be used world-wide. From 1950 to 1979, nearly 5,000 Nicaraguan soldiers would be sent to the US to receive counter-insurgency training. Nicaragua would become the strategic base of the imperialists in Central America, from where the CIA-sponsored invasion of Guatemala in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion against the Cuban revolution, in April 1961, were launched.

Despite Sandino’s heroic struggle he was not victorious. A fundamental and fatal flaw existed in his analysis that was to reappear in the programme of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) fifty years later. Sandino believed it was possible to free Nicaragua from US domination with the collaboration of the ‘national-colonial bourgeoisie’. In 1932, Sandino naively agreed to lay down arms in exchange for the withdrawal of US marines from Nicaragua, and the promise that the lives of his guerrillas would be spared. The following year, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the son of a wealthy coffee grower, was appointed commander of the National Guard.

On 21 February, 1934 after a dinner with President Bautista Sacasa, the ‘liberal’ puppet of Washington, Sandino and two of his generals were arrested by National Guard officers, executed, and buried in unmarked graves in the rural village of Waslala. Somoza was later to say:

I went to the US embassy where I had a chat with Ambassador Arthur Bliss who confirmed that the Washington government recommended the elimination of Augusto Sandino because they considered him a threat to peace in the country.

After Sandino’s murder, in less than a month, the National Guard had slaughtered the former guerrillas.

Sandino’s assassination prepared the way for the coup d’etat by Somoza, who took power as President on 1 January, 1937, and established a forty-two-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. As head of the National Guard, Somoza was more the direct agent of US imperialism than a representative of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie. The fact that the US Embassy in Nicaragua stood next door to Somoza’s palace was, most Nicaraguans believed, symbolic of who actually ruled.

Within Nicaragua, Somoza promoted the production of agricultural produce for export, primarily to the United States. His policy for maintaining profits for himself, his family and US accomplices was simple: falls in the world market price for, e.g. coffee, meant campesinos were dispossessed of their land to increase the area under cultivation. The National Guard stifled any resistance and, naturally, no campesinos ever had their land returned.

After the death of Sandino, the two decades from 1934 to 1956 saw a sharp decline in the national liberation struggle. However, despite the repression and the general downturn, not all opposition was smashed. In Managua for instance, the Managuan Workers’ Confederation (CTM) managed to organise 3,000 workers in underground conditions. The party most involved in the unions was the clandestine Communist Party, which faithfully followed the line of the Stalinised Communist International.

After the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the policy of the Communist International underwent a complete reversal. On 3 July, 1944, the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Nicaragüense, (PSN) the Nicaraguan Communist Party) called a public meeting in the Managua Gymnasium in which it proclaimed its support for Somoza as an anti-fascist. It was legalised and allowed to campaign for increased production as part of the war effort. To secure social peace, Somoza offered a Labour Code guaranteeing wages and a minimum level of social services and, to win over the campesinos, promised to divide the idle lands of the latifundios between small farmers. When, on 5 March, 1946, Winston Churchill announced the start of the Cold War with his now famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, Somoza began the repression of the PSN and the de-facto end of the Labour Code.

Despite a boom in prices and demand during the Second World War, Nicaragua emerged from the war with a very backward economy and extremely low productivity of land and labour. The cotton boom, which began in 1949, was a turning point for Nicaraguan agriculture. After 1949, Nicaragua’s real GDP increased at nearly ten per cent per annum. Despite sharp cyclical swings in both demand and prices, this period was, generally, the most economically dynamic in Nicaraguan history and, unsurprisingly, one consequence of this was a sharp increase in union membership.

The most noticeable features of cotton production (a highly capital-intensive crop on large farms) were accelerated mechanisation and increased use of agrochemicals. Credit and tariff policies were introduced to encourage investment in labour-saving machinery, to the benefit of large, export-oriented, capitalist producers. In 1950 there were fewer than 500 tractors in Nicaragua, by 1955 there were more than 2,500. Labour was no longer needed on a year-round basis, and fewer than one in ten agricultural workers had permanent employment. However, the harvest itself remained labour intensive, and increases in production required parallel increases in the seasonal labour force.

The state also contributed by providing additional port capacity and extensive road construction. The latter facilitated access to land previously used for subsistence farming, and the 1950s to the 1970s saw a massive expansion of cattle raising and cotton production. By 1955, the area planted with cotton was more than five times what it had been in 1950. By the 1970s, seasonal cotton workers numbered some 200,000, over half of the economically active population in agriculture. With cotton came herbicides, pesticides and toxins, the careless spraying of which contaminated the meagre fare of the agricultural workers giving Nicaraguans the highest levels of DDT in their bodies of any country on earth.5

In the late 1950s exports of chilled, boneless beef to the United States began, to feed the US hunger for burgers. Beef exports rose from a negligible level before 1958 to $6.7 million in 1965, and then increased rapidly to $26.6 million in 1970. Most of Nicaragua’s cattle production continued to be based on traditional, extensive grazing practices. The expansion of cattle production meant a doubling of the land area used for pasture. Soon the largest cattle ranchers (two per cent of the total number) controlled more than half of the total area under pasture. The Somozas were not left out, by the late 1970s, they controlled, directly or indirectly, most of the seven export slaughter-houses in Nicaragua.

These developments meant the wholesale displacement of campesinos (small food producers) to farm in increasingly remote areas where they engaged in slash and burn agriculture,6 or became semi-proletarian or proletarian rural labourers. Sub-family farms (those unable to provide for an average family) tripled between 1952 and 1963 (from nearly 18,000 to nearly 52,000). These farms, sixty-four per cent of the total, covered just one per cent of the arable land, while just two per cent of farms covered eighty-six per cent. However, having cleared a forested area and cultivated food for a year or two, the newly-cleared land would be seized by cattle ranchers for pasture and the campesinos expelled to repeat the process elsewhere, compounding the problems of rural hunger and poverty, with increasing numbers forced to migrate to the towns and swell the semi-proletarian population.

In 1959 the urban population had been about one third the total, but by 1977 it had grown to about half, most of the increase occurring in Managua, which grew from about 100,000 to 400,000. The widespread expropriation of the peasantry and rapid differentiation of classes in the countryside was the result of a growth in capitalist agriculture. Dispossession and lack of stable employment led to pervasive rural poverty and considerable discontent expressed in violent landlord-tenant confrontations and organised land invasions by the dispossessed.

It is estimated that, at the end of the 1970s, as much as one third of the economically active agricultural population was completely dependent on wage labour – three months of harvest after which they transferred from agricultural work to other types of labour, often in the towns. Another third owned plots of land too small to survive on, and had to sell their labour.7

On 21 September, 1956 Anastasio Somoza was assassinated by Rigoberto López a Nicaraguan poet, artist and composer. López had infiltrated a party attended by the President and shot him in the chest. López died instantly in a hail of bullets, and Somoza followed a few days later. Somoza’s son, Luis Somoza Debayle, replaced his father as president and inaugurated his period in office with brutal repressions and extensive reprisals.

Within three years, the Cuban revolution had overthrown the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a powder flash that sparked workers’ strikes, the creation of trade unions, student demonstrations, land seizures, and the creation of peasant federations across Latin America. These spontaneous actions confirmed the revolutionary potential of the Nicaraguan people, and the need for a revolutionary organisation.

Nicaraguan industry was small, accounting for twenty-three per cent of the GDP in 1970. It was highly capital intensive and geared to exports rather than to developing an industrial infrastructure for Nicaragua. This made the country highly dependent on imports of machinery and spare parts, especially agricultural machinery. The industrial proletariat was therefore small, about 113,000. In the 1970s a much larger number of city workers was involved in petty commerce or artisan production – street vendors, shoe-shiners, fruit sellers, etc. The factory workers tended to be concentrated in large plants, seventy-five per cent working in factories of over 170 workers. There was also, as elsewhere in Latin America, a large and expanding white collar ‘salariat’ – technicians, professionals, administrators and managers, and a growing and radical student population.

State support continued and, as previously, the largest cotton growers benefited disproportionately. These activities were highly concentrated. Five exporters, most owned by or associated with foreign firms, controlled over half the trade. As the land devoted to beef and cotton rose sharply, domestic food crops fell dramatically as small producers of corn, beans and rice were dispossessed. There was an increasing polarisation and a sharpening of the struggle between exploiters and exploited, a process continually denied from the pulpit and at the banqueting tables of the bourgeoisie.8

The short-lived Central American Common Market launched in 1960, was a US initiative to counteract the impact of the Cuban revolution. IP (Intercontinental Press, 12 December, 1983) reported how Nicaragua and other Central American countries were supposed to industrialise and improve living conditions, but not enough to significantly change relations between Central America and the USA. It was, at best, a half-hearted measure. Semi-obsolete plants were brought from the USA to process American supplied materials, to the extent that Nicaraguan factories received Colgate toothpaste to package and label, ‘Made in Nicaragua’.

During the 1960s, sugar and tobacco production expanded, stimulated by the Cuban Revolution, with Somoza and associates controlling five of the six enterprises that dominated the sugar industry. They were also heavily involved in tobacco production, in plantations that were characterised by permanent labour forces as well as a high level of development of the productive forces.

Numerous loans from private sources at high interest rates were obtained by the Nicaraguan state for vague and undefined purposes. As much as half of these went into the Somoza family coffers, but the repayments took an ever-increasing proportion of annual export revenues (thirty-eight per cent in 1978) leading to a serious balance of payment crisis.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, some two-thirds of rural families had an income which was incapable of providing minimum nutritional requirements, seventy per cent of the population suffered from malnutrition and ninety per cent lived below the poverty line. Diets were so bad that entire villages suffered from dementia and there were schools where every single pupil had tuberculosis. In some villages, most of the population would die of hunger, giving Nicaragua the lowest life expectancy (between fifty-three and fifty-five years) of any Central American country.9

While the general conditions experienced by the people of Nicaragua were awful, the burdens fell heaviest on women. Some forty per cent of the population was literate but the illiterates were predominantly women. In some rural areas, not a single woman could read or write. In the poorer areas, lack of any kind of medical care meant two babies died for every three that lived. Women’s unemployment was much higher than men’s, forcing them to take the worst paid jobs, so they made up the majority of seasonal labourers harvesting the cotton and coffee.

This work pattern, and the machismo attitude prevailing amongst men, massively disrupted family life due to abandonment by fathers and husbands. Hence, a large proportion of mothers had to raise their families alone, bearing the full brunt of the brutal and inhuman conditions. By 1978, despite the patriarchal propaganda in the teachings of the Catholic Church, an estimated one-third of all families in Nicaragua were headed by women, and two-thirds in Managua.10 Of single mothers, eighty per cent were wage earners. Because of the extreme oppression they faced, and the lack of perspective for improving their lives under capitalism, women in the colonial and semi-colonial countries were thrust into the vanguard of the struggle for social change.

The Somoza state continued to preferentially assist its own supporters amongst the capitalist farmers via subsidies and infrastructure investment, subsidised construction of cotton gins and slaughterhouses, etc. However, the process was uneven in geographic, social, and sectoral terms. Capitalism was most advanced in the Pacific coastal region, where most of the export-oriented activities were concentrated, and considerably less advanced in the central or interior region, where small food producers and subsistence farmers predominated. Economic activity in the Atlantic Coast region was relatively low, limited to subsistence farming, mining (largely owned by the Somoza family, but with significant US investment), and timber.

The expansion of capitalist production brought vast wealth to a few and increased dependence on the US market, giving imperialism a tighter political and economic grip, and increasing cultural subjugation to Coca-Cola and Hollywood. The rural workers, the poor and middle peasants, and the urban poor were all experiencing hunger, impoverishment, degradation, and facing the brutality of the National Guard, arbitrary arrest and torture. They were all subject to a system of police spies and provocateurs but would be the force that smashed the Somoza state.

3. Founding, Development and Differences within the FSLN

In 1957, Carlos Fonseca Amador (with Tomás Borge) established the first all-student branch of the PSN in Léon. He subsequently travelled to the Soviet Union as a PSN delegate to the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students.11 In late 1960, Fonseca, still officially a law student, travelled to Cuba to see the revolution first hand. There, he met Che Guevara, was inspired and sought aid and training for the struggle in Nicaragua. He began to host meetings in his apartment which were frequented by people, many of whom would become leaders in the liberation struggle.

On his return, he gathered like-minded young people (mostly students) around him and walked out of the PSN in disgust at its acceptance of the Somoza regime. In 1961 he founded (again with Tomás Borge) the Frente de Liberación Nacional, which changed its name in 1963 to Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. That became the nucleus of the Sandinista guerrillas. The name change was because Fonseca understood his struggle was the continuation of Sandino’s, and accepted the Cuban strategy that any serious struggle against imperialism would be in the form of guerrilla warfare based on the workers and peasants.

The Historic Programme of the FSLN, written by Fonseca in 1969, talked of “agrarian revolution”, and of a “revolutionary government” that would “create a Nicaragua that is free from exploitation, oppression (and) backwardness”.12 But its actual economic demands were limited: the expropriation of “landed estates, factories, companies, buildings, means of transportation” would be restricted to those of the Somoza family and their closest associates. There would be nationalisation of foreign companies that exploited natural resources, but not enough to control foreign trade or to develop a planned economy. The programme contained the promise of workers’ control, that the banking system would be nationalised, that there would be a degree of state control over foreign trade, and a national economic plan for a mixed economy containing elements of workers’ control. Whilst a very radical programme it was, at heart, reformist.

Actually, the public face of the FSLN was not Fonseca’s Historic Programme. The adoption of the programme was completely overshadowed by a gun battle in Managua on 15 July, 1969, in which Comandante Julio Buitrago was killed by the Guard. Buitrago, twenty-five years old, holed up in a small house in the barrio de Las Delicias del Volga, armed only with a sub-machine gun, held off some 300 Guards, two tanks, two helicopters and an aeroplane. The regime televised the entire event, believing that the population would be further intimidated by seeing a top FSLN militant gunned down. However, events didn’t work out that way: the lessons the young people of Nicaragua learned was that heavily armed Guards ran in fear of their lives when Buitrago opened fire. The Guards were not invulnerable, they could be wounded and killed, and they were certainly not heroic. Young people were inspired, not terrified.13

However, the details of the Programme, at that stage, were not decisive. The FSLN, like the 26-J Movement could, faced with reality, take the actual revolution beyond what was written in its programme. That said, what did not bode well, and what separated the FSLN from the 26-J Movement was the Stalinist theory and experiences of many of its key leaders. The rigidity imposed by this framework could mean the flexibility exhibited by the Cuban leadership might be missing from the FSLN.

The Stalinist political education to which Fonseca had been subject within the PSN was now endorsed by the Cuban leadership (Che had been killed two years previously in 1967) who raised little or no objection when the FSLN adopted the Stalinist/reformist theory of a two-stage revolution: first the national democratic to bring the country to an acceptable level of capitalist development, later, at some indeterminate time, the fight for socialism. For example, although Fonseca was a great supporter of Sandino, he never defended him against the political attacks by the Central American Communist Parties resulting from the ultra-left policies of the Communist International, policies originating with Joseph Stalin. This reflected an important theoretical weakness in Fonseca’s writings.

By the 1960s, Nicaragua had a small newly-created, hereditary working class. A constant theme throughout the history of capitalism is that self-awareness by the working class usually occurs in the second and third generations of those who migrate to work in industrial centres. This new generation of Nicaraguan workers had a much greater awareness of workers’ rights, of ways to protest and a sense of self-worth. For Marxists, these workers had an importance out of all proportion to their numbers because they would be expected to take the lead in the coming struggle, determining the programme and character of the revolution for national independence. To be successful this struggle would require a close alliance between workers and peasants, invariably based on the demand: ‘Land to those who work it.’

When the FSLN launched its first offensive in 1963 it already had a clearly-defined ‘guerrilla-ist’ organisation; Guevara’s ‘foco’ strategy, whereby a small group of guerrillas with support of the campesinos, would wear down and eventually defeat the superior armed forces of the state. Later, Comandante Henry Ruiz summarised the FSLN attitude to the proletarian struggle during this period as: “A (single) worker who transfers to the mountains becomes a far greater danger to the Somocista regime than an economic strike carried out by hundreds of workers”.14 The FSLN at this time regarded workers’ fighting for their own interests as ‘Economism’, an attitude that would be alive and well when it was in government.

The conditions of life under the Somoza tyranny meant any revolutionary organisation had to work clandestinely, which meant it could not become a mass organisation. In the cities an FSLN cadre would not know other members of the FSLN, or their activities. A major problem with such an organisation is the absence of the participation of the members in decision-making processes regarding policy and the election (and possible recall) of leaders. A clandestine meeting on a street corner would whisper instructions to be implemented without question. Such organisations are very dependent on the quality of the individual top leaders. Those that were sloppy and inefficient did tend to be removed quite quickly by the National Guard, but they could compromise many others in the process. Too often cadres only discovered who other members of the FSLN were when their names were broadcast after the Guard had killed them. Another severe drawback with such an organisation was that membership was small: Cabezas in his book Fire in the Mountain claims that, during his activities in León, the membership in that city was six, of whom four or five were students.

The FSLN received a bloody nose in its first major guerrilla sortie at Río Coco in 1963, and for a while the FSLN barely existed. The entire national membership was estimated at less than thirty.15 Coincident with the attack at Río Coco, US President Kennedy announced the so-called Alliance for Progress. In response to the Cuban Revolution, the US changed its tactics and strategy for defending the economic interests of US imperialists in Central America. The dictatorships in such countries as Nicaragua were to be given a liberal facade. In response, the Somoza family engineered the election of a lawyer, René Schick to the Presidency. He substituted for Luis Somoza Debayle, who had ruled since his father’s assassination in 1956. Despite a certain relaxation of oppression during 1963-67, the Somoza apparatus remained firmly in place under the watchful eye of Luis’ brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (educated at West Point), Chief of the National Guard.

On 29 June, 1964, Fonseca was arrested for the eighth time. The government refused to confirm his detention and there was serious concern that he might be murdered. The Sandinista-led Revolutionary Student Front (Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario, FER), the youth group of the Independent Liberal Party, and even the youth group of the Conservative Party launched a series of petitions, strikes, marches and sit-ins which probably saved Fonseca’s life. On 9 July, 1963, he was put on trial and, following Castro’s ‘History Will Absolve Me’ speech, made his own statement, ‘From Jail I Accuse the Dictatorship’. In late January 1965 he was secretly deported to Guatemala (his family is rumoured to have paid a ransom) and from there travelled to Cuba where he stayed until the end of 1966.

During this period of Schick liberalisation, and with Fonseca in jail or Cuba, the FSLN stepped back temporarily from the foco strategy and worked to consolidate and expand the FER in high schools and colleges, to collaborate with the PSN and the bourgeois Republican Party, in a broad electoral organisation called Republican Mobilisation.

For the latter half of 1964 through to 1970 the FSLN cadres were heavily engaged in legal political work, and began to attract significant support as they extended their activities to campaigns for, e.g., safe drinking water (out of a population of about 3 million only about 350,000 had running water16). However, the main purpose of the so-called ‘intermediate organisations’, the most important of which was the FER, was to provide support for, and recruit members to the FSLN guerrilla force.

Strangely, the Somoza regime gave the universities and students considerable leeway (relatively) to protest and agitate; university students became the spearhead of nationalistic and anti-Somoza movements. The official student union was the CUUN (The University of Nicaragua Student Council, Consejo Universitario de la Universidad Nicaragua) and was allowed offices on university premises, to openly recruit, to have its own financial resources and, even hold processions and demonstrations. The FER, founded in 1961, was the FSLN student organisation and was, at best, semi-legal. Naturally, the FER militants worked within the CUUN, campaigning for office and seeking to win the student body to its points of view.

As part of its successful campaign to gain control of the CUUN (and its facilities) the FER organised campaigns on issues such as the relevance of the university curriculum. This included mass demonstrations of students around the university grounds and even into León. The demonstrations were made entertaining for participants and onlookers. The Somozistas were colloquially called toads. On one demonstration the call went out “If you don’t jump you’re a toad”: soon everyone took up the chant “El que no brinque es sapo, el que no brinque es sapo” and jumped up and down as they marched.

Cabezas has described the level of activity amongst the students at León University over the period up to 1971. The FER had seven study circles amongst the students, each with three or so members and each meeting weekly with Cabezas as facilitator. These concentrated on theoretical discussions using the Communist Manifesto and Marta Harnecker’s Elementary Principles of Historical Materialism. From then until the insurrection and civil war the student milieu was of major importance for revolutionaries. FER militants did achieve important successes, winning elections at León and Managua universities, e.g. as editor of El Estudiante a national student journal. However, there were two major factors hampering their activities, they were very small numerically, and the PSN did all it could to isolate them.

A natural extension of student activities in the barrios, on such questions as the provision of electricity and drinking water, was organising study circles and the FER soon had a real presence. Many of these circles would later be foci for the local Civil Defence Committees formed during the uprising of 1979. In all of this, the FSLN had one huge advantage, they had the field to themselves, there was no other group calling for getting rid of Somoza lock, stock and barrel, either in the universities, in the barrios or amongst the peasants. By claiming to be Sandino’s heirs they accessed a generation of older campesinos.

On 3 August, 1966, President René Schick died of a heart attack, and within a month Anastasio Somoza announced his candidacy for President. The pro-Moscow PSN formed an electoral alliance (the Democratic Union for Liberation, UDEL) with dissident capitalists including bankers, exporters and landlords, who had broken with Somoza because his economic stranglehold prevented them from receiving their fair share of surplus value. The PSN also tied its trade union federation (CGT-I) to the UDEL. In this the stalinist PSN was, of course, acting quite the opposite of Lenin who, during the Russian Revolution, argued that it was precisely the task of revolutionary leaders to “clarify proletarian minds by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie”.17

The UDEL organised a mass anti-Somoza demonstration for 22 January, 1967, mobilising their support in preparation for the presidential election scheduled for 1 May. At 5 p.m., as the 50,000-strong demonstration made its way down Avenida Roosevelt toward the National Palace, soldiers of the National Guard blocked the way. On the pretext that the demonstration was the cover for an armed coup, the National Guard opened fire on the crowd with automatic weapons, gunning down hundreds. The FSLN took this as confirmation that the guerrilla approach was the only one likely to get results.

Anastasio Somoza, running on a Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN) ticket, won the election on 1 May, 1967, with some seventy per cent of the votes cast and was duly elected President. His views were summed up when asked about education and training: “I don’t want an educated population; I want oxen”.18 The same election gave the PLN an absolute majority in both Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The interlude of relative liberality was quickly ended, and the Somoza family returned to accumulating wealth. By the time of the revolution in 1979, they personally owned twenty-five per cent of Nicaraguan industry (150 factories), twenty per cent of all workable land, the national airline, a TV channel, and numerous other enterprises such as the Nicaraguan branch of Mercedes Benz.19

During the election campaign, and with Fonseca’s return, the FSLN assessed itself as strong enough to relaunch the guerrilla struggle and follow the Cuban example of having the base for its armed actions not in neighbouring Honduras, but within Nicaragua’s central mountains. Wheelock described the organisation and leadership of the FSLN during this time to Marta Harnecker for the Mexican journal Punto Final, available in English in IP, 14 November, 1983. Because the interview was for public consumption Wheelock was at pains to play down the very sharp differences existing within the FSLN at that time.

His description of the day-to-day activities of the FSLN during this guerrilla period revealed the fluidity and unstructured nature of the leadership, not least because active guerrillas tended to have short lives. It was also necessary for leading figures to flee Nicaragua for quite lengthy periods, during which times they could well be out of contact with the active cadres within the country who would, consequently, form their own leaderships. It was, thus, extremely difficult to maintain any coherent structure.

True, the FSLN had a democratic constitution that allowed its members to express themselves freely and to participate in the political life of the FSLN, to be elected and to elect who they wished to the leadership bodies; but the promises were constrained by the reality of a dispersed membership, where communications were difficult and membership meetings almost impossible. Democratic discussion, debate and decision-making gave way to the more robust, top-down, military-political, hierarchical chain of command.

As in Cuba, the guerrilla foci were to be sustained by a network of supporters, the backbone of which were women who established safe houses, clothed and fed the guerrillas, organised first aid and medical supplies, carried messages and ammunition, and rallied support for political prisoners.

Starting with Gladys Baez, a twenty-six-year old, factory worker from a working-class family who had been active in the PSN for ten years before joining the FSLN, the FSLN began integrating women into their guerrilla forces. Unlike other left-wing guerrilla groups in the region, the FSLN championed progressive views on gender equality because they believed that winning women’s support and their participation in the revolutionary process was essential for the success of the guerrilla struggle. At the time there were very few women members of the FSLN, perhaps no more than five or six, about ten per cent of the membership, mostly student activists.20

Fonseca’s second attempt to reopen the foco campaign was in the remote Pancasán region. The guerrillas were also better prepared but fewer (forty as compared to sixty) than they had been in 1963. Several leaders including Fonseca, entered the region and began locating campesino families who would provide shelter and food. However, now for the first time, a woman, Gladys Baez, fought in the guerrilla ranks.21

As the guerrilla struggle progressed, women’s participation in the FSLN came to represent a new stage in Latin American revolutionary history. Women participated more massively and more significantly than in any other twentieth century revolution. They were integrated into the FSLN’s actual fighting forces, even in combat and positions of command, something unprecedented in Latin American history. ‘Exceptional’ women had been part of the guerrilla organisations in the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. Never, however, had there been so many women in combat in such high positions of responsibility, with men as well as women under their command. One such was Dora Maria Tellez who was second in command at the seizure of the National Palace in 1978 and would command one of the most important fronts during the insurrection. Chinchilla estimated that, by 1979, women comprised thirty per cent of the guerrilla armies in Nicaragua and were active at every level of Nicaraguan society where opposition to the Somoza dictatorship existed – neighbourhoods, farms, factories, offices, universities and schools (even the private schools of the rich).

3.1 Growth of Differences within the FSLN

The Pancasán foco was crushed in August 1967, with thirteen senior members of the organisation killed. The defeat raised profound questions. October 1967 saw the capture and murder of Che Guevara in Bolivia. In country after country in Latin America, government armies crushed rural guerrilla movements, some of them much larger than the FSLN. A discussion began at the very centre of the FSLN. Was the FSLN a party? An armed group? A foco? Members were interpreting the lessons of Pancasán in sharply divergent ways. Some wanted to maintain the focus on rural guerrilla warfare, but others favoured abandoning guerrilla warfare and concentrating on political work in the student movement and urban barrios.

Cabezas claims that after Pancasán the FSLN existed in only Managua, Esteli and León. By 1970, it had been reduced to “only a dozen militants” in Managua and had ceased all armed actions, although a small number of combatants with a long-term guerrilla perspective did remain in the mountains. Differences developed within the FSLN through 1971 and 1972 and, by 1973 the organisation had splintered into three tendencies and, “for some time the practical work for armed struggle was interrupted”.22 Over the next two years the differences deepened until the tendencies worked in virtual isolation from each other.

The first tendency, which was closest to the ‘orthodox’ FSLN position, saw a protracted guerrilla war in the countryside as the only possible strategy for the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. This Prolonged People’s War Tendency (GPP) was led by Tomás Borge, Henry Ruiz and Bayardo Arce and believed the ‘political backwardness’ of the masses necessitated a long, armed struggle, which would educate those masses and develop a socialist consciousness. The orientation was rural guerrilla warfare for an extended period, outside the cities amongst the peasants. This was a perspective similar to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the early 1930s; revolutionaries should leave the cities and move to the guerrilla bases. The GPP along with the CCP falsely believed that moving a proletarian militant into a petty-bourgeois milieu proletarianised the milieu when, in reality, it gave the militant a petty-bourgeois perspective.23

A second tendency around Jaime Wheelock, Luis Carrión, and Carlos Nuñez drew the conclusion that there had to be a greater orientation to the working class in the cities. This ‘Proletarian Tendency’ (TP), as it came to be called, spoke of the need for a ‘Marxist-Leninist Party’ and saw itself as an “embryo of the future revolutionary party of the working class”.24 The TP called for the ‘liquidation’ of the large landowners and the redistribution of idle land to the poor and landless peasants, for the nationalisation of the banks, a state monopoly of foreign trade, and the nationalisation of foreign firms and basic industry. The TP was the smallest of the three tendencies within the FSLN but, nonetheless, Marxist revolutionaries would have had considerable interest in encouraging the development of this Tendency as a possible nucleus of a Leninist Party.

The third tendency, the Terceristas or ‘Insurrectionary Tendency’, developed a short time after the other two. Its analysis was that the growing alienation of sections of the bourgeoisie and the supposed ‘floating’ nature of Nicaragua’s middle classes indicated insurrection in the short term. For the Terceristas it followed that the insurrection would be the work of a broad multi-class alliance. The leading figures in the Terceristas were the brothers Humberto and Daniel Ortega, and the Mexican Victor Tirado Lopez.

The Terceristas had close links with international social-democracy, especially, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). Contacts made with Christian Democratic Parties of Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico resulted in promises of aid. These connections with international social-democracy and ‘progressive’ regimes and parties in the rest of Latin America gave the Terceristas a respectability amongst bourgeois sectors that the other two tendencies lacked, and the Ortega brothers soon become the leading figures in the FSLN. They had grown up in Managua where their parents, both of whom had been imprisoned for anti-Somoza activities, ran a small import-export business. Both brothers studied at private and church schools, and joined the JPN, youth arm of the PSN, where they received their political education. They were active guerrillas from at least 1966, were both captured, imprisoned and tortured under Somoza. Humberto was freed in 1970 in exchange for four kidnapped United Fruit Company officials, and Daniel was freed by an FSLN commando group in 1974 after seven years in jail.

Prior to the revolutionary upsurge, the divisions between the Tendencies were acrimonious, the one Tendency expelling members of another from ‘the FSLN’. The Tendencies operated virtually independent of each other, the Terceristas were the most active guerrillas, though the GPP was also active in ambushing National Guard units. The TP was the only one of the three that never fielded its own guerrilla units and was criticised by Fonseca for that. Both the GPP and the TP were active in the student milieu, each with its own groups of students though the GPP had the formal leadership of the FER. This meant that the FER, despite the good response to its literacy campaigns and projects demanding neighbourhood improvements, was held back by having as its major goal providing personnel for the guerrillas.

Latin America at this time experienced an upsurge in humanitarian socialism, expressed most widely as Liberation Theology. The call was for an improvement of the lives of workers and campesinos by placing legal restraints on unacceptable behaviour by individual capitalists. But the capitalist system would not be challenged. In January 1969, the Catholic Bishops in Nicaragua held a Pastoral Conference which dared to criticise the Somoza government by calling for the democratisation of the regime.

By the early 1970s, Catholic priests had well-established grassroots Christian Base Communities in poor neighbourhoods, using the Bible to question and criticise the Somoza regime’s repression, lack of democracy, and the country’s backward economic and social situation. This movement led protests against higher bus fares, increases in food prices, etc. Many paid for their commitment with jail and torture. The FSLN reached out to the leading Christian radicals and recruited as many as it could. This was reflected in the Historic Programme of the FSLN, which included the statement that it would “support the work of priests and other religious figures that defend working people”. There were so many active Christian members of the FSLN that they were referred to as the revolutionary Christian current or the revolutionary Christian wing. While they did not coalesce into an actual Tendency, they did vote as a bloc on occasions. For example, five of the twelve FSLN delegates on the constitutional commission combined to insert into the preamble of the constitution “(to) those Christians who inspired by their belief in God have joined and committed themselves to the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed…”

The Popular Church in Nicaragua, especially, wanted to play a part in the revolutionary changes affecting the masses, and Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest, played an important role when, in 1976, he testified in Washington before a congressional committee investigating human rights abuses by the Somoza regime. However, such activities were distrusted by the Catholic hierarchy who opposed both the Popular Church and the Sandinistas.

The exploited masses suffered terribly between 1969 and 1974 due to an economic slump worsened by a severe earthquake that destroyed the entire downtown section of Managua (1972), killing up to 20,000 of the city’s 400,000 residents, leaving 50,000 homeless and causing the temporary closure of thirty-seven per cent of industry. Somoza took direct charge of the reconstruction activities, pocketing the relief funds that flowed into Nicaragua. His scheme was to purchase, at knock down prices, the real estate on which the former commercial and light industrial centre of the country had stood, re-develop it and sell it back to the previous owners at a massive profit. The result – seven years later, at the time of the revolution, an area of some 500 hectares (about two square miles) remained gutted, empty and overgrown with weeds.

It was this action in particular, that alienated many of the national bourgeoisie. Not because of Somoza’s cold-blooded selfishness, but because they saw themselves as being robbed twice, of their property and of what they considered their fair share of the profits that would come from redevelopment. It was also the final insult to many of the urban salaried population, who faced unprecedented housing, transport and food problems. By 1974, the middle and petty-bourgeoisie were flocking to UDEL and it grew considerably. It was led by Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a Conservative Party dissident, and editor of the leading bourgeois daily, La Prensa. While supported by the PSN, UDEL was condemned by the FSLN as “Somoza-ism without Somoza”, politically tied to the US, the very force which had generated Somoza in the first place.

The massive corruption and incompetence revealed by the earthquake had a radicalising effect on the masses, deepening the socio-political crisis and further radicalising many Christian activists working in poor barrios. The Terceristas were considerably influenced by this, and internal FSLN documents now available show that by mid-1973, the Terceristas were already arguing for a more relaxed approach to ideological questions, for loosening restrictions on recruitment, and for building a wider base for the popular armed uprising by proposing strategic alliances with other sectors of society, including Conservatives and Liberals.25

As the economic and political crisis developed in the late 1970s, the Terceristas grew rapidly, and soon overtook the other two tendencies numerically. Because the FSLN saw itself as an armed revolutionary army, not a political party, it found it quite acceptable to recruit “very diverse sectors of national life”. Wheelock, as part of his Harnecker interview, explained in IP (28 Nov, 1983) that the FSLN (that is the Terceristas) incorporated “in an organised way, young people who had come together around a Christian movement that was active at a student and neighbourhood level and included a few progressive priests… to link up with as combatants”.

It was the PSN, not the Sandinistas, that led the industrial struggles, which followed the 1972 earthquake, and in 1973 did what many had believed impossible – led 3,000 construction workers in a victorious strike over Social Security registration and unpaid wages.

Despite having severe internal differences, the FSLN still managed to launch spectacular actions, epitomised in 24 Dec, 1974, when a Tercerista team of ten men and three women seized the house of an associate of Somoza and held party-goers hostage until eighteen political prisoners were released, US$1 million paid as ransom, and a lengthy FSLN communique published. This action was followed by Somoza declaring a ‘state of siege’, with massive military repression against the Sandinistas and other oppositionists. As many as 3,000 people, mostly peasants, were murdered during the three years of the emergency. Nevertheless, the FSLN took hold of the mass consciousness as the only real alternative to Somoza.

Fonseca had returned to Nicaragua from Cuba to unite the three tendencies. Betrayed, he was ambushed in the mountains of Zinica by the National Guard and wounded. He was shot dead the following day, 8 Nov, 1976, at the age of forty. The military initiative was now firmly in the hands of the Terceristas, whose actions were much bolder than the other two tendencies and whose numbers were relatively much larger, though objectively still very small.

Displaced and unemployed peasants continued to leave the land for the cities, by 1977 the agrarian population had fallen to forty-four per cent of the total, light industry was expanding and workers numbered nearly twenty per cent of the total population (estimated at over 60,000 industrial workers by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 1979). In 1977 the building workers, the most militant sector, went on strike at the same time as the Tercerista Tendency staged a guerrilla offensive in the countryside and in some smaller towns in the provinces on the border with Costa Rica. These developments occurred virtually simultaneously but they were uncoordinated because the FSLN had no established roots amongst the workers and because any such joint action would have been opposed by the PSN. In an interview with Marta Harnecker, in Granma, 27 January, 1980, Humberto Ortega described how, by 1977, most of the FSLN’s leaders had been killed during the emergency, and the remaining guerrillas launched a limited offensive “to make their presence felt” and demonstrate their continuing existence. Estimates put the strength of the FSLN at no more than 200 active members at that time.26

Increasingly, the regime was called into question by all sectors of Nicaraguan society, from sections of big business, which saw Somoza as a threat to their economic well-being, through layers of the middle and small bourgeoisie (many of whose children had been targets for National Guard brutality) to the campesinos, semi-proletarians, and proletarians. The Terceristas now approached twelve well-known and respected Nicaraguans comprising industrialists, businessmen, priests, lawyers and academics; these would be known as The Twelve (Los Doce). This was an attempt to form a bridge to establish a popular front with important sections of the bourgeoisie on what the Terceristas were convinced was the eve of the insurrection.

The question remains as to whether it was correct to form a ‘multi-class alliance’ in the struggle against the brutal Somoza dictatorship. When sections of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois take concrete actions against an imperialist-backed regime, communists and socialists should participate. This would be correct even if some of the parties or mass formations are under openly bourgeois leadership. The litmus test is the willingness to fight. Such a united front is not a new concept; it was present in Lenin’s writings as early as February 1905.27

Lenin called for a united front of all revolutionary forces to participate in an uprising against the Tsar, on the basis of the slogan “march separately and strike together” but, as always, he emphasised the absolute necessity of maintaining the complete political independence of the working class. A pre-condition of unity in action is that the revolutionary socialists maintain their own objectives in the struggle, always fighting to strengthen the workers’ organisations, ‘striking together’ in demonstrations, general strikes and armed actions, but never confusing their banner with that of the bourgeoisie. Above all, revolutionary socialists, even whilst whole-heartedly supporting democratic slogans such as the rights of assembly and free speech, and the right to strike, should never forget they are fighting to win the workers and peasants to the goal of an anti-capitalist government in which all the revolutionary petty-bourgeois elements, especially the campesinos, are welcome but in which the proletarian party is the determining factor.

The perspectives of the Terceristas and the PSN, had nothing in common with this method. Rather, they pursued the policy of a class collaborationist People’s Front, tying the workers and peasants to the programme of the bourgeoisie, guaranteeing the bourgeoisie that there would be no expropriations after the revolution, nor the establishment of a workers’ state.

In May 1977, the Terceristas, in the name of the FSLN, issued its own General Political-Military Platform of the FSLN, a sixty-page document written by Humberto Ortega.28 Surprisingly, for the time, the document made no mention of the Cuban revolution, and Fonseca was demoted to a single mention, as contributing to the FSLN’s Historic Programme. Zimmerman quotes Humberto as defining the Terceristas’ perspective as a “revolutionary democratic popular government”, which had all the hall marks of Stalin’s theory of stages. A theory which, amongst many other things, had laid the basis for the defeat of the Chinese revolution in 1925 and the military coup in Chile in 1973.

In fact, the Tercerista Tendency demonstrated its commitment to limit the FSLN to a secondary role in the post-revolution government by dropping ‘Revolutionary’ from its description of the ‘Democratic and Popular Government’. It stressed that nationalisation of property should be limited to that belonging to the Somoza family; the land reform proposal was limited and vague. Previous FSLN demands for the immediate abolition of the National Guard and formation of a ‘Revolutionary, Patriotic and Popular Army’ and armed popular militias disappeared. The Terceristas now accepted a call for a new army that would include elements of the National Guard. The Historic Programme had pledged solidarity with those struggling against US imperialism, for the withdrawal of US military bases from around the world, and championed the struggles of North American black people against racism. The new Tercerista programme omitted mention of US imperialism, stating that post-revolution Nicaragua should “have relations with all the nations in the world”. The Historic Programme’s references to the “odious discrimination” suffered by Miskito and Sumo Indians and black people of the Atlantic Coast was omitted.29

In the Pancasán guerrilla foco it is claimed there were just ten books to read, one of which was Margaret Randall’s, Cuban Women Today [La Mujer Cuban de Hoy]. Building on the experiences of Cuba, but in contrast to Cuba which did not establish the Cuban Women’s Federation until one year after the revolution (1960), the FSLN decided to launch and to channel significant energies and resources into establishing a mass women’s organisation at an early stage of the struggle. In 1977, the FSLN launched the Association of Women Confronting the Nation’s Problems, (AMPRONAC) and in doing so, declared it had broken with the concept that women’s organisations should be totally subordinate to the parent organisation.

There is no doubt that AMPRONAC, one of the few mass organisations allowed by the Somoza regime, generated considerable support for the FSLN and this was attributed to its being an organisation in which the masses of women could participate, obtain political education, raise their questions, voice their opinions openly and without fear, and learn leadership skills. Molyneux claims that, by the summer of 1978, AMPRONAC, with some 8,000 members, was stimulating and coordinating “a large part of women’s grass roots involvement in the revolution.”30

On the women’s question, the practice of the FSLN was ground-breaking but the content of its programme was limited. The 1969 Historic Programme as it appears in Sandanistas Speak had:

Emancipation of women: The Sandinista people’s revolution will abolish the odious discrimination that women have been subjected to compared to men, it will establish economic, political, and cultural equality between woman and man. A. It will pay special attention to the mother and child, B. It will eliminate prostitution and other social vices through which the dignity of women will be raised, C. It will put an end to the system of servitude which is reflected in the tragedy of the abandoned working mother, D. It will establish for children born out of wedlock equal protection by the revolutionary institutions, E. It will establish day-care centres for the care of children of working women, F. It will establish a two-month maternity leave before and after birth for women who work, and G. It will raise women’s political, cultural, and levels through their participation in the revolutionary process.

The programme, as re-written in 1977, by Humberto Ortega stated:

We Will Struggle to End Discrimination Against Women: Women will be treated equally with men. We will struggle to end prostitution and servitude. Mothers will receive the complete protection of the state and all women shall be encouraged to organise in defense of their rights.

When this latter version was published, there were world-wide mass demonstrations demanding the right for every woman to control her own body. A woman’s right to choose was a major concern for any political activist. This omission from the FSLN programme was especially worrying because of the toll in human misery due to the Somoza regime’s ban on abortion. Molyneux had shown that poverty meant that many pregnant women sought illegal, back-street or self-induced abortions, so many that botched abortions accounted for nearly two-thirds of admissions to the main women’s hospital in Managua.

By the end of 1977, revolution was in the air and the Terceristas responded by showing that the petty-bourgeois could be revolutionary, launching a series of attacks on National Guard barracks, which were claimed successful because they demonstrated that the FSLN was still in existence and active as a fighting force, and when the dust settled, found its numbers had increased from about 150 to nearly 500.31 Interestingly, many of the guerrillas captured during these attacks identified themselves as ‘Radical Christians’.

4. Revolution: The FSLN comes to Power

Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the well-known editor of La Prensa, and popular journalist had gained the respect and sympathy of broad sectors of the population, and had become the major spokesperson of the national bourgeoisie opposed to the Somoza family. On 10 January, 1978, the Somozas made a grave error in celebrating the New Year by having Chamorro murdered on his way to work. Over 120,000 mourners, predominantly workers and lower middle-class people participated in the funeral.

There followed an explosion of popular protest. The trade unions and the UDEL called a general strike on 23-24 January, which, according to the US Embassy, successfully shut down eighty per cent of businesses not only in Managua but also in the provincial capitals of Granada, León, and Matagalpa. However, the big capitalists of the Banamérica Group (representing interests in sugar, cattle, coffee, and retailing) and the BANIC Group (with interests in cotton, coffee, beer, lumber, and construction) did not participate.

The Somoza dictatorship had created the conditions for a ‘national revolution’. As in tsarist Russia, and in Iran under the tyranny of the Shah, the bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry, salaried and proletariat shared a common interest in the overthrow of the autocracy. The crucial question was which class would give the political leadership to that revolution and determine its class content. The opposition forces, from the Partido Conservador (the traditional bourgeois opposition party) across the political spectrum to the PSN and FSLN, organised themselves into a bloc, the child of UDEL, called the Broad Opposition Front (Frente Amplio Opositor, FAO).

The small employers launched a shut-down with the slogans: ‘peaceful resistance’, and ‘don’t leave your homes’ to dampen popular mobilisation. The shut-down lasted twelve days. Under pressure from the US embassy to end its actions, the FAO capitulated, and thereby demonstrated what hopeless and treacherous allies they were. In a country like Nicaragua, with a weak bourgeoisie closely tied to the apron strings of imperialism, any popular front deals could only be episodic and partial. Events in Nicaragua fully confirmed the Trotskyist perspective that the national bourgeoisie in semi-colonial countries will never carry the democratic and anti-imperialist struggle to completion because the independent mobilisation of the workers and peasants threatens their material interests, especially their profitable links with US imperialism.

Many of Somoza’s businesses and factories were burned to the ground. The first to be torched was Somoza’s plasma business, known to the Managuans as the ‘House of Dracula’. This was where blood was taken from Managuan drunks and down-and-outs brought there by the Guard. The blood was then sold on the international market. But Somoza felt reassured, major sectors of the bourgeoisie were not supporting the action and he believed he could ride out the storm.

On 26 February, 1978, in Monimbó, a community on the outskirts of Masaya the country’s fourth largest city, a protest march against the murder of Chamorro was brutally dispersed by the Guards. Monimbó exploded with rage, releasing decades of pent-up bitterness. The inhabitants held off the National Guard for a week, rocks against bullets, handguns against tanks. The fighting continued until some 200 people were dead and the Guards triumphant.32 Members of the Tercerista Tendency arrived soon after and awarded the Monimbó leaders the status of FSLN militants, with rank of military commanders in the guerrilla organisation. In this way they were recruited to the FSLN. During the rest of 1978 and increasingly in the early months of 1979, growing numbers of popular urban insurrections against the Somoza regime occurred. Sometimes they were spontaneous, as in Monimbó, sometimes they were part of a planned offensive by the FSLN.

It was during the spring of 1978 that the FSLN began organising coffee and cotton workers into Nicaragua’s first rural trade union, the Association of Agricultural Workers (Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo – ATC). Because of the nature of the FSLN as a guerrilla organisation, its work within the ATC was, at first, sporadic and often ill-sustained, waxing and waning as the guerrilla struggle required.

On 22 August, 1978, the FSLN staged the most daring and spectacular guerrilla action in Latin American history. Led by Edén Pastora,33 a group of FSLN guerrillas dressed in National Guard uniforms infiltrated and seized the National Palace while both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies were in session. The action was seen by the FSLN as hugely successful. After two days, the government agreed to release about fifty FSLN members held in Somoza’s prisons.34 On the very same day, 12,000 hospital workers (on a national strike for a month) were joined by the Union of Carpenters, Fitters, Bricklayers and Allied Trades (Sindicato de la Construcción, SCAAS) and workers at the University of León.

The FAO called for another nationwide lockout, but with no pay for the workers, and by 4 September, eighty per cent of all economic life was again paralysed. Simultaneously, the FSLN launched a series of actions across the country, intending to occupy a number of towns and cities and proclaim a provisional government. One major battle was in the city of Matagalpa, in which about 500 students played an important role. This action was not organised by the FSLN, but red and black flags and bandanas flooded the city while the uprising lasted. The events in Matagalpa demonstrated two things: that events and the masses were ahead of the FSLN leadership and that, by default, the FSLN was popularly accepted as the leadership of the revolution.

Before the revolution, the situation in which the FSLN had placed itself, with a guerrilla-ist structure, meant it could not be a mass organisation. Nevertheless, the revolutionary upsurge was, itself, placing the FSLN in the leadership. In every student demonstration, in every strike, in every confrontation, even where the FSLN was entirely absent, the masses were raising the Sandinista flag and the dead were being buried wrapped in Sandinista colours. Cabezas claims three factors played a major role in this popularity: the FSLN was the only organisation that was seen as prepared to go all the way to get rid of Somoza, the example of the Cuban revolution, and the glamour of guerrillaism.

However, the FSLN forces allocated to taking the cities were ridiculously small, the bulk of their cadres being retained in the rural areas along the frontiers with Honduras and Costa Rica. FSLN commandos reportedly occupied Masaya, León, Jinotepe, Diriamba, and Estelí but soon retreated before National Guard and army units supported by air attacks. Estelí was the last to be retaken and was made an example of. Only torrential rains saved Estelí being razed to the ground by a blizzard of phosphorus bombs. This fierce repression, including attacks on the middle classes, led to the complete and total political isolation of the Somoza regime.

On 13 September, 1978, Somoza suspended all constitutional rights for a period of thirty days throughout the country. Previously he had suspended constitutional rights in only the Departments of Managua and Estelí. On 12 October, the suspension of rights was extended for a further six months. It became clear that Somoza’s strategy was to affect the greatest slaughter possible under the cover of the armed actions to break the will of the people. Thousands of homes were destroyed, the harvesting of cotton and coffee crops seriously disrupted, and over 5,000 people killed, with ten times that number injured or wounded. During these operations Somoza took pains to ensure all army officers (even those in nominally administrative positions) bloodied their hands, so that a coalition between officers with ‘clean hands’ and the FAO was not possible.

It became clear that, while the actions of the FSLN were widely welcomed by the local populations, at least initially, there was an almost complete lack of organised support. A serious weakness of the armed offensive was that it was made according the FSLN’s timetable and not by the level of activity of the masses. The activities of the FSLN commandos – mainly collecting arms and ambushing National Guardsmen – left little room for the locals to participate. Such an approach revealed a serious lack of appreciation or historical knowledge of the ways in which masses mobilise to overthrow oppressive regimes. In Cuba it was quite clear that there was a general uprising against Batista. This was not yet the situation in Nicaragua, the actions of the FSLN were separate from, and to a certain extent, counterproductive for the mass movement.

The result of the September actions was that Somoza’s reign of terror was imposed with increased ferocity; the violence was terrible, disappearances and murders were widespread, carried out by paramilitary gangs acting with total impunity. The National Guard was given a free hand and killed indiscriminately. After the September events a sharp downturn in mass struggles occurred, but it was only three months before the workers dared to come out on the streets in a demonstration.

Internationally, the atrocities being committed by the National Guard had become an embarrassment to President Carter and the US Administration. In November, the Organisation of American States published a report charging the National Guard with many gross violations of human rights. The United Nations passed a resolution condemning the actions of the Somoza regime.

At this moment, the PSN and Nicaraguan Communist Party (PCN – a small breakaway from the PSN favouring armed struggle) and fellow travellers formed the United People’s Movement (MPU) and launched themselves as a working-class organisation independent of the bourgeoisie, calling for the establishment of Workers’ Defence Committees and Civil Defence Committees. However, in early December 1978, the MPU revealed its Stalinist nature when it called for a government of Democratic Unity of all anti-Somoza forces, with a political platform determined by the national bourgeoisie.

The surge in revolutionary actions had its effect on the FSLN. In circumstances where the movement is going forward, it is usual for differences between tendencies and factions to be reined in, and this is what happened in the FSLN. With the help of Cuban intermediaries, the three tendencies re-unified at the end of 1978, with a nine-member National Directorate, with three representatives from each of the three tendencies.

It is claimed that Castro himself was party to the discussions and pushed strongly for unification. In January 1979, representatives of the three tendencies of the FSLN visited Cuba. The visit was not made public and all those who travelled did so with false identity papers. Fidel Castro, the only person with sufficient authority to do so, explained that Cuban help was conditional on a re-united FSLN.

Fidel Castro… made unification of the tendencies a condition of his help… Castro told the FLSN leaders to stop messing around, to unite because (otherwise) they would be destroyed.35

At the organisational level, Castro’s action was entirely correct, but at the political level he advised a class-collaborationist perspective, for a mixed economy that would encourage private industrialists and capitalist farmers, for a bourgeois democratic regime. These views would be publicly expressed in two speeches, both made on the anniversary of the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks. The first was only days after the victory of the Sandinistas, the second, a year later on 27 July, 1980.

A communiqué from the nine-member Joint National Directorate (Dirección Nacional Conjunta – DNC), the new ruling body of the FSLN, made no suggestion that the struggle in which they were engaged was to establish a workers’ state. It has been suggested that the FSLN was being duplicitous, that it had a ‘secret’ policy document, ‘The Seventy-Two-Hour Document’, in which it defined itself as a Marxist-Leninist Party committed to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.36 In La Botz’ book the phrase ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ was placed within single quotation marks, suggesting it to be a quote when, in fact, the phrase does not occur in the document. There was nothing in the Seventy-Two-Hour Document that contradicted the public statements of the FSLN.

The Terceristas had been responsible for initiating the discussions with bourgeois parties and for the August/September offensive. Despite the serious political and military errors that had been made, the GPP came out in support of the Terceristas, as did the TP after a short delay. The TP, the most left-leaning of the three tendencies, in complete opposition to everything Lenin wrote, stated (emphasis added):

For us the (Somoza) dictatorship was and still is the main obstacle ... For this reason we have appealed for the unity not only of the democratic and progressive forces, but of the people as a whole without excluding the bourgeoisie itself… the proletariat is never sectarian, and always seeks the general interest of the nation, without having separate intentions of its own or putting its own interests first.37

By the end of 1978 there appeared to be no fundamental differences within the FSLN. Unification of the three tendencies had been on the acceptable basis that unity with elements of the national-bourgeoisie was a means of getting rid of the Somoza dictatorship, but also on the totally unreal expectation that national independence could be obtained with a bourgeois-democratic state.

1978 had seen a general upsurge of protests across the country; student demonstrations, workers on strike, rallies, factory closures, spontaneous urban uprisings, and even condemnatory sermons from the pulpits. The anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, together with the Roman Catholic Church, recognised the highly explosive state of the class struggle in Nicaragua. Seeking to avert the threat of a revolution by the workers and peasants, these elements turned for support to the Carter administration in the US and European Social Democracy. They hoped to establish a bourgeois democracy which would limit or eliminate Somoza’s power before there was a revolution, leaving them free to develop the exploitation of the workers and peasants for their own profit.

The Nicaraguan national-bourgeoisie desperately pressed the US to insist Somoza resign and prevent the ‘Marxist’ FSLN seizing power at the head of a popular rebellion. Their hopes had been raised by President Jimmy Carter and his ‘human rights’ policy. The US ruling class was, however, far from willing to dump its trusted stooge, though arms supplies were suspended (because they could quickly be replaced by supplies from Israel and Argentina), and Somoza was urged to reach a deal with the bourgeois opposition. Unfortunately for US policy, Somoza, was intransigent, having no intention of allowing democratic elections, and refusing to resign, believing that sheer repression would crush the opposition.

But by the end of 1978 many Nicaraguan businessmen, and the international banks, were re-assessing the security of their investments. Capital to the value of US$220 million flew abroad, while investment dropped like a stone. Military expenditure rose sharply, the balance of payments deficit rocketed, and, with it, came inflation. The GNP fell sharply (by about twenty-five per cent), real wages decreased by as much as ten per cent, while unemployment rose; employers responded by requiring those still employed do the work of those they had just sacked.

4.1 The Fall of Somoza

Alfonso Robelo Callejas, a key bourgeois figure, an industrialist and President of the Nicaraguan Development Institute (INDE) with close links to BANIC, warned the US Administration in a newspaper interview, that “if Somoza continues in power, giving the people no option but armed insurrection, the country will be in danger of falling under communist rule”. In March, Robelo would establish the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Nicaragüense, MDN) and soon after would be a major figure in the FSLN’s ‘Government of National Reconstruction’.

The Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was now so brutal and inefficient that, by the start of 1979, the US Administration understood his remaining in power would spark a revolution. President Carter moved to replace the Somoza family with a bourgeois regime with a broader base. No-one was expecting the mass upsurge of late May to early July 1979. Carter would be in the process of ditching Somoza even as the revolution began.

On 1 February, 1979, on the initiative of the Tercerista Tendency, the FSLN established the National Patriotic Front (Frente Patriótico Nacional, FPN) in partnership with the Group of Twelve, the Independent Liberal Party (Partido Liberal Independiente, PLI38), the Popular Social Christian Party (Partido Popular Social Cristiano, PPSC39), the Maoist Workers’ Front (Frente Obrero, FO40), and the MPU.41 The FPN had a multi-class appeal, including political support from elements of the FAO and the private sector. For the FSLN, this approach was a natural consequence of its perspective that, in the national struggle, the contradiction between ‘the people’ and Somoza was primary, and class contradictions within ‘the people’ were secondary.42

The three tendencies were now working together with formal unification in March 1979. Soon after, heavy fighting broke out throughout the country. By then the FSLN was better equipped with weapons flowing in from Venezuela, Panama, and Cuba, mostly through Costa Rica.

By this time, women within the FSLN were officially participating in all aspects of combat and civilian life equally with men. They were obliged to carry the same twenty-kilogram backpacks as men; and men, likewise, were required to engage in traditional ‘female tasks’ such as food preparation. Men heavily outnumbered women in leadership positions within the FSLN but a feature was made of women-only battalions which marched in rallies organised by the FSLN, such as the one held in 1979 in the town of Carazo where walls were adorned with the slogan: ‘No revolution without women’s emancipation; no emancipation without revolution’. Being equal within the ranks of the organisation was extremely important to the morale of the women of the FSLN:

Women here participated in the revolution not at the level of the kitchen but at the level of combatant and at the level of political leadership. … In fact, women acquired a tremendous moral authority … It would be difficult for any woman combatant to allow some man to raise his hand to hit her, to mistreat her. Because there is an authority to her, a moral authority (that is) reflected even in intimate relations. The conception of the relationship has changed…43

At the end of May 1979, as the 15,000-strong National Guard began to crumble and lose control of many areas of the country in the face of spontaneous mass actions, the FSLN decided to launch a final offensive. On 4 June, the FSLN, as part of its insurrectionary strategy and to show its strength, called a general strike which was massively supported by both workers and peasants. By 8 June, as many as twenty-five towns and villages in the north-west of the country were fully under Sandinista control.

FSLN leaders Daniel Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, and Tomás Borge, called for a general mobilisation, and for a final offensive. The masses in Managua and the main cities had been self-mobilising since May, so the FSLN guerrilla columns often arrived after the main fighting was over. It was the speed with which the workers’ mobilisations took place, “the sudden and abrupt increase in the number of ‘ordinary citizens’ who began to participate actively, independently and effectively in political life” as Lenin had put it, that showed Nicaragua was experiencing a ‘real revolution’.44

On 9 June, fierce battles broke out in the working-class districts of Managua as part of the general strike; attacks were made on the National Guard HQ, the very heart of Somoza’s regime. Barricades were built with whatever materials were available. Thousands of people demonstrated in their own areas, with the middle-class districts joining in. The National Guard patrols remained active on the streets, but their morale was cracking and Guards soon began to desert in their hundreds, if not thousands.

Local barracks fell to the demonstrators who proceeded to arm themselves as local militias under the control of local Civil Defence Committees (CDCs) which arose spontaneously on a block-by-block basis, becoming the basic unit of self-organisation of the rank and file of the urban masses. Despite their membership being overwhelmingly the young and very young, they assumed such vital tasks as defence against National Guard patrols, provision of first aid, and soon many took over city administrative tasks such as food distribution. In the early days of the revolution, the militias and the CDCs were hardly separable, both in terms of personnel and in tasks undertaken. CDC militias dispensed justice to Somoza’s National Guard and kept public order. At this moment, the CDCs were the armed bodies of men and women who held state power.

On 17 June, 1979, the FSLN agreed to the formation of a five-person Junta of the Nicaraguan Government of National Reconstruction, a provisional government in exile. The five members met in Costa Rica; Daniel Ortega for the FSLN Directorate, Moisés Hassan of the FPN, and Sergio Ramírez Mercado of The Twelve, (both members of the FSLN). The two business representatives were Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (the widow of La Prensa’s editor), and Alfonso Robelo Callejas. This body reached an agreement known as the ‘Puntarenas Pact’, which called for the establishment of a mixed economy, political pluralism, and a non-aligned foreign policy. Free elections were to be held at a later date.

The proposed Junta and the Puntarenas Pact were endorsed by the FAO and the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), the largest employers’ grouping. On 22 June, 1979, the Junta agreed that the Constituent Assembly, which had been part of the FSLN’s programme, should be dropped in favour of a non-elected consultative, Council of State which would represent “all political, economic and social forces who contributed to the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship” and would share legislative powers with the Junta. The thirty-three appointees to the Council were to be divided amongst about twenty organisations, on the understanding that the bourgeois elements would have a clear majority.

The Junta agreed to incorporate ‘patriotic’ elements of the National Guard into a new non-partisan army. The programme guaranteed the rights of private property, apart from that belonging to Somoza, which was to be nationalised. The Council could approve laws submitted to it by the Junta or initiate its own legislation. However, it would require a two-thirds majority for the Council to veto Junta-initiated legislation. A separate Supreme Court was appointed by the Junta and approved by the Council. The combination of Junta and Council of State – with the undertaking to preserve capitalism in the form of a mixed economy, to preserve elements of the National Guard as the basis for a new army and with the masses effectively excluded – was undoubtedly a Stalin-style, Popular Front. But this was all decided in the unreal, secluded atmosphere of the Costa Rican capital, begging the question of which direction the FSLN would travel when the masses intervened.

The New York Times45 explained that a seventeen-person advisory group, composed overwhelmingly of bourgeois figures, had been established to guide the proposed government’s economic thinking. Figures such as Arturo Cruz, a former economist with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington was appointed President of the Central Bank, Roberto Mayorga ex-secretary of the US-inspired Central American Common Market was appointed Minister of Economic Planning, Joaquín Cuadra Chamorro, with his close connections with Banamérica, was in charge of finance, and the Minister of Defence was Bernardino Larios, an ex-colonel in the National Guard who had deserted only in 1978. Only four ministries: Agricultural Reform, Culture, Interior, and Social Welfare were allocated to known FSLN members.

The FAO, with such eminent persons as Miguel Obando y Bravo, Catholic Archbishop of Managua, met to endorse Carter’s plan to remove Somoza from office, but their proposals included no governmental role for the FSLN, which was asked to surrender its weapons.46 Ortega had been prepared to be part of a coalition regime with a majority of bourgeois elements, even accepting the incorporation of National Guard units into the new army, but not prepared to be excluded and disarmed. The FSLN representatives walked out of the meeting and, before any further discussion, the revolutionary upsurge blew any agreement out of the water.

Isolated, Somoza attempted to retain power through a series of bloody actions by the National Guard. But without US support, his regime rapidly disintegrated and the mass killings of women and children triggered a national uprising centred on the towns, so that when the guerrilla forces arrived they found them already liberated by the urban populations.47 The USA desperately tried to salvage something from the wreckage, calling for the Organisation of American States (OAS) to send a so-called ‘peace-keeping force’ and prevent a Sandinista take-over. But, so great was the enthusiasm generated by the overthrow of Somoza, that not one Latin American regime agreed. When Estelí was liberated by a guerrilla column, Somoza knew the situation was hopeless and handed his resignation to the US ambassador. He fled to Miami on 17 July, leaving behind a national debt of US$1.6 billion. A report by John Pilger claims that most of this had been stolen by the Somoza-ists and never actually arrived in Nicaragua.48 But there was also US$80 million material damage to the infrastructure – water, electricity, housing, etc., – and reserves of only US$3.5 million.

On 13 July, the Junta made a number of ceasefire proposals, including agreeing to the USA’s last desperate attempt to retain some direct control in Nicaragua by the integration of ‘healthy’ elements of the National Guard into any new army. On the same day, President Carter ordered two amphibious assault ships to assume positions off the Nicaraguan coast. But this was an empty threat: neither the Carter nor, subsequently, the Reagan administrations were capable of moving directly against the Nicaraguan revolution. The revolution occurred too soon after the defeat of the US army in Vietnam, largely due to opposition to the war by millions of youth, workers and the soldiers themselves.

The numbers spontaneously demonstrating on the streets were many orders of magnitude greater than those that could have been mobilised by the FSLN, who had fewer than 500 lightly-armed guerrillas. Mostly, small columns of guerrillas, often as few as twelve, entered already-liberated cities although there was a real battle for Léon, where the National Guard rallied and put up a fight, to be defeated by a guerrilla column in which four of the seven commanders were women.49

Humberto Ortega, the main military strategist of the FSLN later described the situation:

[W]e always took the masses into account, but more in terms of supporting the guerrillas, so that the guerrillas could defeat the National Guard. What actually happened… was that it was the guerrillas who provided the support for the masses… It was not a mass movement responding to a call by the Sandinistas; it was a response to a situation nobody had foreseen… thousands of people fought with machetes, picks and shovels and home-made bombs.50

When the FSLN columns reached Managua on the afternoon of 19 July, the city was already in the hands of the popular militias formed during the insurrectionary general strike and under whose onslaught the National Guard had disintegrated. The remnants surrendered to the Sandinistas or fled to the provinces and into Honduras. The Bunker, the National Guard HQ in the heart of Managua and symbol of the Somoza regime, was captured by the urban masses who distributed the thousands of weapons they found there amongst themselves. The self-mobilisation of the working class, the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie was decisive in bringing about the collapse of the Somozista state. The last US hope of engineering a ‘controlled’ hand-over of power was gone.

Virtually all studies of the revolution note two things: that the revolutionary masses were, by and large, concentrated in the urban slums and consisted of casual labourers, artisans, and petty merchants; and that the ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of the FSLN followed rather than led the insurrection. The entry of the masses pushed the FSLN to the left, not only in terms of accelerating the war against Somoza but also in terms of the radicalisation of the FSLN and the revolution’s goals.

By the spring of 1979, committed FSLN militants recently recruited from CDCs, often only a month or so previously, were leading the day-to-day activity of the revolution, distributing the weapons available, organising community support, food supplies, and care of wounded, deciding when and where to strike, and, in the process, recruiting and training new cadres.

The Junta of National Reconstruction arrived in Managua on 20 July, 1979. Almost all of the twenty organisations that were to have been allocated seats on the Council of State, had been by-passed by the revolution. It was obvious that the composition of the Council, as decided in Costa Rica, did not reflect the reality of mass action on the streets, and the balance of forces within Nicaragua. It had been agreed that the FSLN would name only a minority of the thirty-three appointees on the Council, but with the change in the relationship of forces, the FSLN Directorate proposed (and the Junta agreed) that the Council be increased to forty-seven; fourteen new organisations formed during and since the revolution needed representation, eight organisations were dropped.

The Junta allocated nine seats to the Sandinista Defence Committees (Comités de Defensa Sandinista – CDSs), three to the Sandinista Workers’ Federation, and two to the Agricultural Workers’ Association. Two seats were given to the National Union of Agriculturalists and Cattlemen (UNAG), and one seat each to the Sandinista Women’s Organisation (AMNLAE), the teachers’ union, the health workers’ union, the Sandinista youth organisation, and the armed forces, even though these were still in the process of formation. To give the FSLN a majority, six seats were allocated to the FSLN itself. Two seats went to the CGT-I, and one to the PCN-led Confederation of Trades Union Action and Unification (CAUS). The remaining seats were allocated to big business, right-wing political parties and the two right-wing union federations.

This action, together with the FSLN having control of the “coercive instruments of the state apparatus” – the Sandinista People’s Army (Ejército Popular Sandinista, EPS) and the new police force – was seen as an event similar to that in the Cuban Revolution when the bourgeois ministers began to quit the government.51

Opponents of the FSLN cried ‘foul’, viewing the addition of the new members as a power grab. A recurring theme in La Prensa from then on was for the immediate convocation of the Council with its original composition, for the FSLN to respect the Puntarenas accords and behave ‘democratically’. This call was echoed by all bourgeois organisations; but the Junta assumed power in a very different situation than had been originally envisaged. The effects of the civil war in 1978 and 1979 were far more devastating for the country than the Cubans had faced. The National Guard had left the economy in ruins, the cities were in ruins, many factories, stores and shops were in ruins, much of the housing in the poor districts had been razed. The first and immediate problem for the new regime was organising the collection and distribution of food and water. The next would be to reactivate the economy.

The Frente’s influence among the young was overwhelming and the Sandinista Youth (JS-19) had the very important job of organising those young people who had made up the bulk of the anti-Somoza fighting forces, and tying them in a more permanent way to the FSLN.

The US Administration was fearful that the Nicaraguan Revolution would spread throughout Central America. The Nicaraguan masses had shown, above everything else, that when the workers and the poor peasants united in struggle, the might of US imperialism could not stop them. The overthrow of Somoza had sparked sit-ins, strikes, land occupations and marches in sympathy, especially in El Salvador where the US hurriedly organised a preventative coup against General Carlos Humberto Romero. US policy focussed on how best to contain the revolution and ‘promote stability’ in the region.

US policy flew in the face of reality: the revolution meant a rapid and substantial improvement in living conditions, an increase in employment and many fewer people going hungry. Poor peasants and farm labourers, backed by militia, launched their own land reforms. Workers formed defence committees and took over and managed factories owned by those who had openly supported Somoza. Rationing improved nutritional standards and protected the value of workers’ wages.

5. The Junta of National Reconstruction (July-December 1979)

The Junta of National Reconstruction was a governing body comprised of the petty-bourgeois FSLN in alliance with the bourgeoisie, whether the latter liked it or not. On 22 August, 1979, the Junta issued the ‘Fundamental Statute’ abolishing the constitution, Presidency and Congress. The Junta would rule by unappealable decree under emergency powers. Policy came from the nine-member Directorate, the ruling body of the FSLN, transmitted by Daniel Ortega for the Junta’s discussion and approval.

It was clear that the Directorate expected a degree of hostility, at least initially, from Nicaraguan capitalists, and the Statute contained clear statements to the effect that the trade unions should be integral to the drawing up, operation, control and assessment of production on both farm and factory. This was an important mechanism by which the FSLN hoped to overcome the ‘arrogance’, ‘excessive centralism’ and ‘hierarchical methods’ of the Nicaraguan capitalists and their managers, and so increase production and modernise the Nicaraguan economy.

Much space was given in the columns of Barricada (the central organ of the FSLN) to union representatives’ attempts to persuade companies to form production councils to ensure they were following government guidelines on pay but also, and more importantly, to ensure that production targets were met and there was no industrial or economic sabotage. Economic sabotage included withholding of investment, disinvestment through allowing plant and machinery to run down, illegal sale of plant and machinery for dollars, which were then sent to banks abroad, pocketing of government credits and low interest loans and even direct sabotage of machinery.52

The CGT-I raised the question of how workers’ representatives could be expected to detect economic sabotage without having direct access to all aspects of management and investment decisions, but the Ministry of Labour was entirely unsympathetic to such a common-sense approach. These gentlemen were reformists who, like so many before them, stopped short before the threshold of the business enterprise and its ‘commercial confidences’. Their accounts remained the capitalists’ secrets. The principle of ‘non-interference’ dominated but, of course, only by opening the books of all Nicaraguan businesses, and not just those going bust, could the FSLN hope to end economic sabotage. Such a move would prove impossible within the constraints of the mixed economy.

Union representatives on the factory floor exerted real pressure on the owners and managers to increase production and better workers’ conditions, but by no stretch of the imagination was it workers’ control. It soon became clear that the prime purpose of this style of ‘workers’ control’ was to establish greater labour discipline and increase production. The workers quickly found they had very little input to the process, apart from working harder and/or longer.

While the workers did gain many benefits initially, the system was essentially a means of increasing the rate of exploitation, and in a so-called mixed economy, that meant capitalist exploitation. The FSLN were relying on a layer of managers and technocrats from the Somoza era and a new layer of party members and trade union officials to extract more surplus value from the workers. In a society where there is generalised want no better way could be found for the generation of a bureaucracy separated from the masses of people.

But the scheme was not effective even by its own goals. Economic sabotage, referred to as ‘decapitalisation’ was too weighty a problem to be overcome by pressurising individual workers to increase their output, because decapitalisation meant that the workers had no machines and no raw materials to work with. Nor did the scheme have any means whereby the workers could inspect financial records such as invoices and delivery notes, so there was no way of checking where company funds or products were going – Miami bank accounts or the black market. Such a mechanism was essential to combat the most common form of decapitalisation – over-billing imports and under-billing exports with the difference being paid into a Miami bank account. Nor was there any vehicle whereby the workers could take control of an enterprise if they found corruption and industrial sabotage. The FSLN version of ‘workers’ control’ had a fundamental flaw – it was geared to increase capitalist production and profit, not to rationally plan production for the needs of the Nicaraguan workers and peasants. The Christian Science Monitor estimated that between 1979 and 1988 nearly US$2 billion was lost to Nicaragua through decapitalisation.

The new government inherited a country in ruins, with an estimated two per cent of the population (50,000) killed in the civil war, 120,000 in exile in neighbouring countries, 600,000 homeless and 40,000 orphans to be cared for. Food and fuel supplies were exhausted yet the attitude of the vast majority of Nicaraguans toward the revolution was decidedly optimistic. Most Nicaraguans saw the Sandinista victory as an opportunity to create a system free of the political, social, and economic inequalities of the universally-hated Somoza regime.

The first phase was taking into public ownership (under the now-famous Decrees No. Three and No. Thirty-Eight) of all rural properties owned by the Somoza family and its associates, a total of 1 million hectares, 2,000 farms, representing just less than one quarter of Nicaragua’s cultivable land. These were generally amongst the most modern farms, more accurately agro-industrial plantations, and so were usually retained intact with the farm workers encouraged to organise as state farms, worked as profitable enterprises. Contrary to popular opinion, the FSLN did not have ‘Land to the Tiller’ as a priority; its goal was to increase production, so very little of this land went to individual peasants, possibly as little as one per cent. Generally, large agro-export farms not owned by the Somozas were not affected by the agrarian reform. Other interests of the Somoza family which were expropriated totalled a quarter of all manufacturing.

Prior to 1979, Nicaragua’s banking system consisted of the Central Bank of Nicaragua and several domestic and foreign-owned commercial banks. The three national banks, Banco America, Banco Centroamerica, and Banco Nicaraguense had been bankrupted by Somoza’s economic policies, and were nationalised for the same reasons the UK government nationalised sections of the UK banking industry – to save it from the bankers.

Barricada, of 26 July, 1979, boasted Somoza’s debts to Israel and Argentina for weaponry were abrogated, but failed to make clear that the Nicaraguan state had assumed bank debts of over US$200 million, repayment of which, with interest, would effectively bankrupt the country. In addition, shareholders were given very generous compensation, to assure the private sector, both abroad and at home, that the FSLN were ‘good guys’, people you could trust and work with. The class-collaborationist (mixed economy) perspective of the Sandinista leadership meant that even as they introduced much-needed reforms, they simultaneously implemented economic measures to appease imperialism, such as transferring private bank debts to the Nicaraguan people. The FSLN was locking Nicaragua into the international money market. By 1983, there would be a net outflow of half a billion US$ paid to overseas private banks.

To stop the haemorrhage of funds, foreign banks were prevented from receiving deposits from the public. However, in 1985, a decree loosened state control of foreign exchange by allowing the establishment of privately-owned local exchange houses. Insurance companies were nationalised and a National Insurance Institution established to take future payments and fulfil the terms of policies already held. That was done because the insurance companies were foreign, which meant an outflow of capital.

The new government nationalised all foreign trade in the principal agricultural products and established a state monopoly, greatly benefiting small and medium producers because the prices they had received previously were very much less than those on the international market. State monopoly of trade, a measure used in Russia, China and Cuba as part of establishing a workers’ state would, however, in Nicaragua’s mixed economy, become a means whereby the big landowners manipulated the government to extract fortunes.

The largest denomination notes, C$500 (500 Córdobas) and C$1,000 were withdrawn from circulation, to hit the pockets of those who had fled abroad taking with them suitcases of banknotes. Estimates put the loss to Somoza supporters at nearly C$200 million (US$20 million).

On 7 August, 1979, the Junta announced that all land and property seized during the revolution that had not belonged to the Somoza family had been taken ‘illegally’ and must be handed back to its owners. ‘Land to the Tiller’ was ended before it had properly begun. The FSLN was prepared to use the police to restore these lands to anti-Somoza bourgeois. National Guards who had fled to Honduras, frightened peasants in the border regions with no title to the land they worked, by saying that the FSLN was taking the peasant’s land from them. This was the only time when the Contras made even the slightest headway amongst the peasants. These gains were soon reversed by changes in the land laws and the slogan of the Sandinistas in the border zones did become ‘Land to whoever works it’.

To alleviate the disappointment of the landless, the government enacted a series of popular measures: laws were passed which forced landlords to rent underused or unused land at low rents which benefited thousands of peasants and squatters, a new credit policy was introduced which greatly increased available loans to peasants and small farmers. For peasants a moratorium was declared on debt interest repayments for bank loans.

The judicial system was left largely unaffected. While numerous court officials were dismissed, the basic court structure remained, with many openly bourgeois figures in positions of authority. The Supreme Court’s authority was re-established with FSLN approval, and the appointment of a number of bourgeois figures including members of the Liberal Party and PPSC.53 A special Agrarian Tribunal was created to deal with land seizures and rural property and, in several well-publicised cases, land seized from people other than the Somoza family was returned to its former owners.

In December 1979, the Directorate decided to shuffle Ministerial appointments to reflect the strength of the FSLN in the country. The Junta placed all nine Directorate members in charge of one or other Ministry. Including Humberto Ortega to Defence and Commander of the EPS, Henry Ruiz to Economic Planning, others continued in their posts, e.g. Jaime Wheelock as Agrarian Reform Minister.54 This, together with the Junta’s decision the previous October to put off the convening of the Council of State in order to increase its membership to forty-seven and alter its composition, sparked off a period of struggle with COSEP, which would result in the resignations of Violeta Chamorro and Robelo. This important consolidation of power in the hands of the FSLN was made under pressure of the masses, and appeared to be a deepening of the revolutionary process.

The establishment of an FSLN government gave a big impulse to the struggle of Nicaraguan women for equality and against oppression. The Fundamental Statute gave women legal equality with men, enacted stronger child-support laws; gave women the right to own land and join co-operative farms; and required wages to be paid to the woman worker not her husband. Attempts were made to implement these decisions, but the available resources were not always sufficient. For example, the Statute required the provision of child-care facilities in larger factories and state farms; Borge, at the time, observed that it was easy to legislate that factories and farms should have day care centres but, due to the cost of construction, equipment, maintenance and staffing, few had actually been built.55

Divorce procedures were changed to the benefit of women, but there were delays. It was 1988 before restrictions such as a woman having to wait 300 days after a divorce before being allowed to remarry, or a woman convicted of adultery facing a two-year jail sentence and never being allowed to remarry, were removed from the statute book.

Marx explained that, even though a petty-bourgeois party was a contradictory phenomenon, it could still be revolutionary, but the contradictory nature of its goals (to harmonise the interests of capital and labour) meant that it is pulled in opposite directions.56 Any resulting regime is highly contradictory in character and its course of action will depend on the character of the leadership, and the degree of involvement of the masses. Many welcome and progressive reforms were implemented after the seizure of power, but the tragedy of Nicaragua was the inability of the FSLN leadership to break decisively with its political roots, take the revolution forward and overthrow capitalism. All the efforts, courage and sacrifices of the Nicaraguan masses would not be enough to overcome this missing subjective element.

5.1 The Role of Moscow and Havana

Leading figures on the left were enthusiastic about the Nicaraguan Revolution, drawing parallels between what was happening in Nicaragua with what had happened in Cuba twenty years previously. Both revolutions were correctly described as beginning under the leadership of a radical petty-bourgeois current, the J-26 and the FSLN. Both were distinguished by having ejected a military dictatorship by revolutionary means and having carried that struggle through to the end. In the process, the armed forces and the police had been smashed and replaced by a people’s militia.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, itself in the last stages of decay and soon to collapse, made no effort to encourage a radical programme in Nicaragua, not only because it did not want problems with US imperialism, but also because it feared a successful revolution in any part of the world would open the question of workers’ democracy in the USSR and threaten its position and privileges. The Moscow bureaucracy had, in reality, detested the Cuba revolution and it was two years after Castro’s coming to power that it had been forced to accept the eradication of capitalism in Cuba as an accomplished fact. With Nicaragua, Moscow did its best to curtail the revolution and prevent its extension to the rest of the continent.

In a dialectical irony, as the Soviet bureaucracy collapsed, the Stalinist theory of revolution by stages was being played out by the FSLN. Stalinism had taught that only the fight for democracy was on the agenda in colonial and semi-colonial countries. The national liberation struggle had to be carried through to completion by the workers and peasants in alliance with the progressive elements of the national bourgeoisie. However, to maintain the alliance the oppressed layers had to curb their demands so as not to alienate the capitalists and landlords.

The Cubans needed allies in Latin America and had themselves only recently overthrown capitalism, but simultaneously, they saw the aid they received from the Soviet Union as their lifeline. This latter consideration combined with the realisation that they had failed to export guerrilla warfare to the rest of Latin America, would dominate their advice to the FSLN.

The initial aim of the Castro leadership had been to preserve capitalism, but this goal rapidly evaporated under the pressure of events. Cuba had carried out a sweeping and thorough-going agricultural reform; dividing the land between the peasants and co-operatives, expropriating foreign holdings and establishing a monopoly of foreign trade. On 17 May, 1959, the Cuban government enacted the Agrarian Reform Law which gave over 200,000 Cuban families their own land for the first time in their lives. Any holdings over 400 hectares (1,000 acres) were expropriated by the government and, crucially, foreign ownership of land was prohibited, incurring the undying hatred of the US sugar and fruit plantation owners, who had owned three-quarters of Cuba’s most fertile land.

For the Cuban leaders, their priority was the needs of poor Cubans not rich Americans, to stand by the promises they had made and not bow to ‘reality’. They chose to carry through the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, which in the twentieth Century meant facing up to imperialism and its allies within Cuba. The Cuban leaders were truly committed to ending the social injustices inherent in imperialist domination and had faced each new challenge by taking the revolution forward. They broke with the programme on which they had taken power and, in confrontation with US imperialism, took steps which left them with one foot in socialism. This did not happen with the revolutionary leaders in Nicaragua and, as a consequence, the masses in Nicaragua – despite important gains – have been thrown back into misery.

Marxists should, of course, go by the facts. Unfortunately, all too often the events in Nicaragua were analysed not as they applied to Nicaragua but presented as parallels to Cuba. Well-known figures overstated the seizure of the Somoza holdings, gave too much importance to the resignations of, for example, Violeta Chamorro and Alfonso Robelo from the Junta, and presented the perspective as – “the ‘Cuban Road’ is undoubtedly taking shape”.57 Others, such as the SWP(USA), were so enamoured of the FSLN that they accepted the mixed economy perspective as the correct path for Nicaragua and ditched Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as no longer valid. An infamous edition of their theoretical journal gave fifty pages to Carlos Rafael Rodríguez (long-time Cuban Stalinist and CP member of Batista’s cabinet in 1942) to justify Stalin’s theory of stages.58

In 1979 and 1980, the Cuban government called for an international campaign of solidarity with Nicaragua. On 19 July, 1980, President Fidel Castro spoke in Managua to half a million participants celebrating the first anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution. He likened Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua to “three giants rising up to defend their right to independence, sovereignty and justice, on the very threshold of imperialism”.59 At the time, the actions of the FSLN government had given a powerful impetus to the revolution in Grenada and the guerrilla struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala, and inspired many young people in the imperialist heartlands of America and Europe, who greeted the Nicaraguan victory enthusiastically and gave it unqualified support.

But the Cuban leadership without Che had, what for the Nicaraguans would turn out to be, a fatal flaw. Central to the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution would be the FSLN’s lack of understanding of the nature of the bourgeoisie. The theory which guided Sandinista practice was a peculiar and eclectic mix of the Stalinist theory of stages and the Social Democratic mixed economy, enhanced by ideas gained from co-operation with Catholic priests in the Liberation Church. These found their way into the FSLN via the dominant Tercerista Tendency.

The view of the Soviet bureaucracy – opposition to a socialist revolution in Nicaragua – was reflected by the leaders of the Cuban Communist Party. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January, 1984, the Vice President of Cuba, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, endorsed the stagist perspective of the FSLN, saying:

[T]hey will have private enterprise in agriculture, industry and trade. They are not going to socialism, least of all to the Cuban model. We don’t believe that the Cuban model is to be exported either to Central America or to the rest of the world.

In December 1975, Castro, in his speech to the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, had said of the Cuban revolution:

[I]n the conditions of a country like Cuba, could the revolution limit itself simply to national liberation while maintaining a regime of capitalist exploitation? Or was it not necessary to move forward toward full social liberation as well?

Imperialism could not even tolerate a revolution of national liberation in Cuba. From the time of the first Agrarian Reform Law, the United States began to organise a military operation against Cuba. They were even less disposed to tolerate socialism in our country. The simple idea that a victorious revolution in Cuba could provide an example for all Latin America frightened the Yankee ruling circles. But the Cuban nation had no other alternative. The people could not be stopped.

Our national and our social liberation were inextricably bound up. Moving forward became a historic necessity. Standing still would have been an act of treason and cowardice that would have transformed us once again into a Yankee colony and wage slaves.

The Cubans had prioritised education and healthcare, making them the envy of most nations of the world. Cuba had launched a vast literacy crusade, an example the Nicaraguans followed and which helped convince many that Nicaragua was a Cuba in the making. A vast national network of Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (the Nicaraguan CDSs were very similar) was organised against counter-revolution. But the final steps taken by Cuba were what was missing in Nicaragua: the implementation of the agricultural transformation, introduction of central planning, and state ownership of the means of production.

Ten years later, on 11 January, 1985, Fidel Castro declared in Barricada:

Daniel Ortega… has been serious and responsible… the aims of the Sandinista Front (are)… a mixed economy, political pluralism and legislated foreign investment… You can have a capitalist economy. What you are not, without any doubt, going to have is a government serving the interests of the capitalists.

This is a good demonstration of why the Cuban leaders were described as men of action and not theoreticians.

The views expressed by the Cuban leadership, from the moment the FSLN came to power in July 1979, served to obstruct the course toward socialist revolution in Nicaragua. They approved the Sandinistas’ preservation of the capitalist mixed economy; the lessons articulated in 1975, that a government cannot serve the interests of the working class and at the same time grant capitalism a free hand in the national economy, were reversed. The Cuban revolution, of course, had clearly shown it was impossible to satisfy the demands of the workers and campesinos, and the national bourgeoisie, and that it was impossible to develop the economy in any meaningful way, within the framework of capitalist property relations.

One area Castro steered well clear of was Nicaragua’s need for a Leninist Party with internal democracy, and a society organised to give the working people a decisive say through Soviets. Not only were (and are) these missing from Cuba, but the support Cuba received at that time from the Soviet bloc would have ended overnight had Castro made such a statement.

Nicaragua is an economically-backward, dependent country, and its level of development at the time of the 1979 revolution was lower than Cuba’s in 1959. Its resources, moreover, were heavily drained by the wars forced on it, first by Somoza and then by the Contras. It was both illusory and dangerous to act on the belief that Nicaragua, in an imperialist dominated world, could develop economically within its national borders on the basis of a regulated capitalist economy. Attempting such a strategy required major and ongoing political and economic concessions by the workers and peasants to the capitalist class, which could only undermine the revolution and pave the way for defeat. However, the notion that a poor and isolated country like Nicaragua could achieve socialism is ludicrous. All that Nicaragua could do was to take the first steps towards socialism by following the Cuban example and establishing a workers’ state. That would have permitted the Sandinista government to respond to the economic sabotage of the national bourgeoisie and to eliminate the deformations inherent in the mixed economy.

However, to cite Cuba as an example for Nicaragua must allow for the exceptional circumstances under which the Cuban revolution developed and which may never be repeated. But one thing we can be absolutely sure of, the road to a workers’ state and the dictatorship of the proletariat could not have had any worse consequences for the workers and peasants of Nicaragua than the mixed economy. At the very least, it would have bound the government and the working masses together in common cause. Such actions would have helped extend revolution to the rest of Central and Latin America. This was particularly the case in El Salvador and Guatemala where there were revolutionary movements which developed almost in parallel with and were heavily influenced by the Sandinista Revolution.

6. How FSLN Gained and Retained Leadership of the Revolution

The speed at which the mass upsurge developed, and with which the Somoza regime was overthrown meant the FSLN, even if it had wanted to, was unable to recruit widely before the revolution had succeeded. It rode to power with a structure suited to guerrilla activities that did not allow for the participation of either FSLN members or the masses in decision-making processes regarding policy and the election (and possible recall) of leaders. The FSLN did not use the revolutionary period from September 1978 to July 1979 (when those active on the streets were genuine anti-Somoza-ists) to transform the FSLN into a political party with a mass membership.

Instead, the FSLN preserved an organisational form suited to the foco strategy, but which could not provide a structure by which workers and peasants could genuinely control either the party or the state apparatus. The structure of the FSLN remained one of command; the mass organisations were expected to implement the decisions of the Directorate, not to debate them. In line with this, one of the most common slogans at street demonstrations and meetings was ‘National Directorate, we await your command’.

The FSLN membership was small, possibly only about 500, so there was an acute lack of personnel with either political or administrative experience. Moreover, the FSLN had to rely on middle-class professionals and technocrats, self-proclaimed Sandinistas, to administer the post-revolutionary state. Experience of every revolution from Russia onwards has shown the careerists are first in the queue for jobs, declaring their undying commitment to the regime.

True, the FSLN did recruit selected workers and peasants, but it did not open its doors to the masses, not least because, within the organisation, no structure existed to accommodate such numbers. Nor did the Directorate envisage introducing any organisational mechanism by which the masses could change governmental policy. But it appeared to have very well understood the actions required to preserve its unchallenged position as leader of the revolution.

Immediately after the revolution, the FSLN leadership adopted a strategy of bureaucratising the organs formed by the workers and peasants during the revolution and its immediate aftermath, and incorporating these into the reconstructed state apparatus. Five major mass representative organisations, with government support, enabled both a much greater degree of self-help for the people while allowing the FSLN to better exercise control over society. By the end of 1980, these mass organisations embraced a quarter of a million Nicaraguans and were key in consolidating Sandinista governmental and state power.

6.1 The Local Civil Defence Committees and the Popular Militia

The social and political demands of the urban elements were more radical and far-reaching than those of the FSLN, and challenged the bourgeois social and economic order. The relatively high level of self-organisation of the urban masses and their combativity meant that the FSLN, to maintain its undisputed leadership of the revolution, had to simultaneously assume a more radical and anti-bourgeois face than had been originally intended, and to take quick action to curb the activities of the masses. FSLN militants took the lead, the better to channel demands in safe directions.

First, the FSLN had to maintain a monopoly of military power. That meant immediately taking control of the urban CDCs that had been established, mostly spontaneously and independently of the FSLN. These were the core of the local militias, which had armed themselves by confronting and defeating the National Guards. The essence of the technique was simple and direct: visit the CDC, introduce yourselves as the FSLN, applaud their efforts and appoint one or more of the leading activists as FSLN militants subject to FSLN discipline. This was possible because, for the masses, there was no alternative to the FSLN.

In this way the local CDCs were taken under the wing of the FSLN, centralised, co-ordinated and transformed into mechanisms to implement orders from the top. To make their point the FSLN changed the name of the Civil Defence Committees to Sandinista Defence Committees and brought them within FSLN discipline. Encouraged by the FSLN, the CDSs became a symbol of the new regime.

However, by about mid-1985 the CDSs were in a profound crisis. El Nuevo Diario,60 published a lengthy article on a stagnating membership due, primarily, to a lack of democracy. Orders from the top were issued in a heavy-handed manner; the quality of the leadership was poor, being those prepared to accept the authority of the Directorate without too many questions; and there was a lack of internal democracy, the CDSs couldn’t decide their own response to local issues they had to deliver what the FSLN had already decided, and so on. Despite their heroic beginnings, the CDCs/CDSs would, within a decade, degenerate into little more than a means of providing jobs for corrupt state officials, though they were feared by the bourgeoisie up to and after the 1990 election.

Based in their localities, the urban militia were important armed forces that were not part of the guerrilla army. These militia were much more numerous and just as well equipped as the guerrillas, but totally uncoordinated and without a political programme. The most important elements within the armed militias were those units that had been established in factories and urban workplaces. The FSLN acted swiftly. On 27 July, 1979, a week after the taking of Managua, army chief Humberto Ortega announced that the popular militias would be re-grouped and integrated into a conventional army framework, the EPS.

The EPS was under the command of Humberto Ortega with Cuban military personnel as advisors. The FSLN was not prepared to make any compromises or concessions regarding its control over the military apparatus. Even during the revolutionary period itself, the FSLN was concerned to strengthen its military base, to strengthen and professionalise the army that emerged from the revolutionary war. This is why the CDC militias were disbanded and disarmed so quickly; they represented a major threat to the FSLN’s military monopoly, and hence to its political monopoly. The new army was constructed incredibly rapidly. It was already holding parades through Managua by 1 September, 1980. It could be said that the revolutionary army and its associated militia, which enjoyed tremendous popular prestige, substituted for the FSLN’s lack of organisational links with the working class.

On 28 September, the General Command of the EPS issued an order for all weapons and military equipment to be turned in. The militias were to be disarmed with sections of them integrated into the EPS. The militia were to be maintained with regular training sessions etc., but their weapons would be in the hands of the EPS. The Sandinista National Police (PNS) was created, with one of its immediate and important tasks being to remove responsibility for public order from the CDCs/CDSs. This was doubly necessary because, generally, new members and activists within the FSLN were supporting the demands of workers and peasants, and spoke openly of their determination to carry the revolution through to the end.

The militias handing their weapons over to the EPS was significant because it marked a qualitative change in their function. These moves curtailed any possibility of a Marxist opposition developing, that could have advanced the struggle for democratic workers’ power and derailed the popular frontist project of the FSLN leaders. A crucial task for socialist revolutionaries in this period would have been to campaign to defend the CDCs and turn them into real Soviet-type bodies, democratically representing the workers, and the barrios and drawing in the small and poor peasants. These would have been linked, as in Russia in 1917, by a national Congress. And, let us not forget, the Russian Revolution was launched on the basis of defence of such a Congress.

At their height, during the Contra War, the militia was about 250,000 strong, based on communities and workplaces. But this militia was very different from the militias existing in the first months of the uprising.

6.2 Luisa Amanda Espinosa Nicaraguan Women’s Association (AMNLAE)

Strictly, the first of the FSLN mass organisations was the AMNLAE (Luisa Amanda Espinosa Nicaraguan Women’s Association, named after the first woman cadre to be killed in action). This was the successor to AMPRONAC which had been launched in 1977 and had a track record of successfully mobilising women in support of the FSLN. AMNLAE was notionally autonomous, its leadership acquired its legitimacy from its ability to lead and win the confidence of others. However, there was always a substantial overlap between the officers of AMNLAE and the FSLN. Its top leaders were always relatively high-ranking FSLN cadres ensuring that AMPRONAC carried the party line on all important questions, such as when the majority Tendency (Tercerista) supported the class collaborationist MPU, AMPRONAC was on board. There were open debates within AMNLAE on questions of key importance to women, such as the abortion issue but the FSLN leadership never changed its mind on the basis of AMNLAE recommendations. AMNLAE unfailingly mobilised its forces, possibly 50,000 card-carrying members, behind the Directorate’s proposals.

With government support, women peasants and workers began taking up the fight for their right to participate on an equal basis in all aspects of economic and social life, seeking to win the unions and mass organisations to this cause. The fight was led and organised at the national level by AMNLAE, which gave support to those women who began to participate in the government-sponsored unions in their work-places. Particularly active were women members of the ATC, building on the work done by AMPRONAC.

Several of the provisions contained in the Statute were designed to protect and strengthen the family as the basic unit of society, promoting greater family cohesion and reducing gender inequalities. They were intended to strengthen the institution of marriage by making it more of a partnership; ending the feudal father-right law (giving the father total parental rights), requiring the father to support his children whether born in or out of wedlock, and giving courts the power to garnish his wages. All these provisions reduced the likelihood of the father absconding. In 1982 legislation stating that the relationship of all family members must be reciprocal and supportive, including the sharing of domestic labour strengthened this initiative.61

With the support of the government and AMNLAE, women activists made use of the 1979 decree, ensuring the courts enforced the changes in divorce procedures to the benefit of women, and carried out the stronger child-support laws. They also obtained a ruling to outlaw the exploitation of women in advertising. They fought and won the right for women to join the militias and armed forces, including some combat units; the creation of women’s producers’ and sellers’ co-operatives. But, arguably, their most magnificent achievement was the advancement of literacy among women during the literacy campaign in 1980.

With the advance of the fight for greater women’s equality came greater participation of women in many aspects of political life, particularly in the unions and the CDSs where the majority of members were women. However, while women formed a substantial part of the CDSs, militia, and were strong in the unions, there were – at that time – almost no women leaders at the national level; for example, in the summer 1981 elections to the national committee of the National Union of Nicaraguan Students not a single woman was endorsed.

6.3 The Worker’s Organisations

Instead of basing the new regime on genuine workers’ democracy, the FSLN leadership retained a model that did not permit democratic control of the state apparatus. Quite the opposite, the trade unions, movements and associations formed before and during the revolution were transformed into mechanisms for implementing decisions made at the top. True to its Stalinist roots, the Sandinista regime, far from counteracting bureaucratisation, actively bureaucratised the workers’ and peasants’ representative organisations.

The Directorate understood the need to exert control over the workers and established the Sandinista Workers’ Federation (Central Sandinista de Trabajadores – CST). It had launched the ATC for the peasants and small land farmers the previous year. The primary task of both bodies was to increase the surplus value produced. Neither organisation existed to politically mobilise working people to actively participate in, and advance the social goals of the revolution in a way to benefit themselves.

6.4 The Association of Agricultural Workers

The ATC had been launched in the spring of 1978 as Nicaragua’s first rural trade union and, within two years of the victory of the revolution, it had mushroomed to include over a quarter of all rural workers.

Cabezas, who spent years amongst the campesinos later wrote:

The landowners, or the fathers or grandfathers of the landowners, had over a period of years gradually been stripping the campesinos of their land. So, the generation of campesinos we knew would tell us about how their great-grandfathers had owned land. And the story of what happened was passed down from great-grandfather to grandfather to father to son… The landowners had appropriated the land through a process of violent evictions, or through legal means… They had been corralled… working the landowner’s land and tending his cattle… growing their crops on land lent them by the local landowners…

We invited them to fight for the land, which was too great a temptation for a campesino to resist! How could they stand by and not fight for what was for them a mother, a wife, a way of living, affection, feeling, secret rapport? It would be very hard for the campesino to refuse to fight, particularly when we were awakening in him the feeling and the idea of class struggle.

The Sandinista government enacted several subsidiary regulations applicable to, amongst other things, land rents and wages, and the extension of government credit to agricultural producers. The ATC was very active in ensuring that workers were paid the correct minimum wage, that peasants were not charged too much rent for their properties, and that co-operatives were able to access their full credit entitlement, and in this way built for itself a solid base amongst the campesinos.

However, a central task of the ATC was not to take forward the peasants’ demands for land, but to contain those demands within the economic perspective of a mixed economy. During the period immediately following the revolution, between 1979 and 1981, the seizure of the lands of the Somoza family and the creation of state farms, and co-operatives of poor campesinos, temporarily kept the peasant demand for land in check as the peasants waited to see what would happen. However, they soon acted and occupied land, breaking through the limits imposed by the Sandinistas. The government was forced to enact a series of limited reforms that it hoped would defuse the situation. In July 1980, on the first anniversary of the revolution, the FSLN announced that all fallow lands or lands not adequately cultivated could be expropriated.

But land occupations continued, and in July 1981 the government was forced to enact a moderate Land Reform Programme which extended expropriation to de-capitalised farms. The bourgeois revolution in Mexico, which had so inspired Sandino, had accepted the seizure of the landed estates by the peasantry and their distribution amongst the peasants. The bourgeois land reforms in Chile and Peru had been more radical in the expropriation of landholdings over a certain size. The truth was, as the Sandinistas themselves admitted, their agrarian reforms were “most conservative and most respectful of the private agricultural sector”.62

Any land redistribution had to be sufficiently constrained not to challenge the alliance with the major agrarian capitalists who dominated the country’s export sector and were the organised in COSEP. These supposedly anti-Somoza landlords were now transformed into so-called ‘patriotic producers’, required only to use their land productively. Indeed, with most agricultural production in capitalist hands, government measures to provide cheap credit and farm supplies tended to boost the profits of wealthy landowners without increasing agricultural production nor improving the lot of toiling peasants.

As with so many petty-bourgeois politicians, the FSLN leaders would increasingly use language as a smokescreen, obscuring political realities. Here, to better maintain a social pact with capitalist landowners and manufacturers, the FSLN leaders transformed the term ‘producers’ from a scientific one meaning exploited working people to one that included wealthy capitalist farmers and ranchers. For the toilers to advance their historic class interests, political clarity is essential, but the FSLN wanted to avoid such clarity; it did not want the operations of its social system to be laid bare, but rather to hide the ongoing class conflict inherent in the exploitation of working people.

6.5 The Sandinista Workers’ Federation

The CST was formed shortly after the insurrection on the initiative of the FSLN Directorate to give leadership and direction to the factory workers, and to take the initiative away from the Workers’ Defence Committees and other factory committees which had emerged during and after the revolution. Unlike the ATC, which could legitimately claim to have roots among the rural proletariat and poor peasants, the CST was artificial, as demonstrated by the fact that the CST had to wait to 1983, three-and-a-half years after it was formed, to hold its First Congress. Early 1980 saw a determined push by the FSLN to bring the workers’ (and peasants’) organisations under its unchallenged control; to have a FSLN-dominated workers’ movement. This was especially the case with the workers in the factories, where, unlike the campesinos, established trade unions existed with organisations and traditions of their own, and often affiliated to political parties opposed to the FSLN.

Working-class men and women took advantage of the victory of the revolution to immediately demand better pay and conditions and also payment of wages lost during the revolutionary strikes called by the FSLN. During its first days, the CST was forced to support these actions, but as it grew into the largest of the unions it began to openly oppose any activities that hindered production. Barricada63 explained: “The role of the union is not the same as previously, it is now to be the controller of production in the workplace… to increase production”.

From its foundation, the CST’s assigned role was to undertake the organisation of workers within the overall context of support for the FSLN’s programme. It emphasised the necessity of increasing production and improving productivity not only in the new state sector but especially in the private sector where workers often gave priority to settling accounts with employers who had frequently used Somoza’s laws and police against them. The FSLN showed no favour to workers in the private sector even during this early stage of the revolution, and both factory and agricultural workers were often thwarted in their attempts to gain wage increases. Its actions soon led the FSLN into a series of clashes with workers’ organisations, first with the PSN trade union organisation, the General Confederation of Workers – Independent (CGT-I) founded in 1963, which included the construction union, SCAAS, one of the largest and historically most militant unions in Nicaragua.

While the FSLN was carried forward on the tidal wave of the revolutionary upsurge and doing much to better the working and living conditions of the masses, its actions with respect to most advanced workers gave worrying indications of less than democratic views amongst the leadership. It used government power to ensure the CST would become the major industrial union in the country and split established unions to achieve this. For example, it engineered a split-off from the SCAAS and then ensured its group obtained official recognition. This led to a wild-cat strike by SCAAS construction workers and the arrest of the union leader, a PSN member. A demonstration by striking workers to the Ministry of Labour successfully obtained his release. Soon after there was a successful strike by over 4,000 construction workers on a large government project in Managua against an arbitrary reduction in wages by the government.

Inevitably, this strategy involved suppression of the activities of forces to the left of the FSLN. Barricada64 excused the FSLN campaign, launched under the slogan ‘Sandino Lives – Death to the Counter-Revolution’, as against those who were fomenting industrial unrest, and who were bracketed with Somoza-ism as enemies of the revolution. Included in this amalgam was the Frente Obrero, which considered the new Sandinista regime bourgeois nationalist, and thus it was right and proper that trade unions should pursue a higher standard of living for their members. Also included was the Revolutionary Marxist League (Liga Marxista Revolucionaria, LMR), a very small Trotskyist organisation associated with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, which had fought alongside the FSLN. This now called for peasants to occupy the lands of the large landowners, for independent unions, for back-payment of lost wages, against the disarming of the militias and bureaucratisation of the CDCs. These attacks on the so-called ultra-lefts became an integral part of CST activities, so much so that any new branch seeking to join the CST had first to denounce the FO and the LMR.

Clashes with the FO became more serious, not least because the FO had played an active role in the struggle against Somoza and was to have had a seat on the Council of State. El Pueblo, the paper of the FO denounced the FSLN mixed-economy strategy as giving “great opportunities to the bourgeoisie and businessmen and few to the exploited masses”.65 From October 1979 through to January 1980, the FO led a series of strikes for higher wages and better working conditions, most importantly at the Amalia and San Antonio Sugar Mills (the largest in the country).

In response, the EPS occupied the FO offices and arrested the editor and leading members, who were given two-year prison sentences. El Pueblo’s printing works were handed over to the ‘literacy crusade’. This action was combined with the suppression of the MILPAS. The response of the workers at the San Antonio Sugar Mills was to strike again, this time one of their demands being for the release of the FO members. Daniel Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, and Tomás Borge intervened to condemn the workers’ actions, and on 1 February, 1980, Barricada carried a report that Borge had threatened to send in troops. This was a very worrying development, but fortunately, the FSLN drew back and the FO leaders were released early in May 1980.

The campaign was not a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, because the real targets were not two tiny left groups, but rather, the rising militancy in the factories for increased pay and greater workers’ control. The measures against the FO and LMR were deemed necessary to consolidate the dominant position in the CST in the workers’ movement as part of the project of integrating the unions into the state apparatus. At the same time, the CST and FSLN were anxious to identify those owners who were deliberately running down their enterprises in order to take corrective measures, which could include nationalisation. Thus, the CST could present itself as militant and left wing by leading strikes and occupations, such as at the El Caracol food processing factory, against owners who were de-capitalising the enterprise demanding nationalisation of the factory.

6.6 National Union of Agriculturalists and Cattlemen

The last of the mass organisations launched by the FSLN was the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG). In the battles to oust Somoza, agricultural workers, poor peasants, and middle peasants, fought side-by-side, and jointly carried out land seizures.

Immediately after the revolution, all these different groups joined the ATC, but it soon became clear that the peasants (both small and middle) needed a different kind of organisation from the agricultural workers. The one was concerned with, for example, obtaining cheap loans while the other called for better working conditions and pay. The FSLN was keen to retain the support of all peasants because they were seen as forming a solid base of support in the countryside. At its commencement, the UNAG was intended for co-operative farms and small and medium-sized peasant holdings, and the best way of organising that was for these peasants to have their own co-ordinating organisation.

UNAG was launched by the FSLN in 1981 in tandem with the First Agrarian Reform Law. The name had been carefully chosen to make it clear the organisation was open to all landholders. However, in the prevailing circumstances it was, de-facto, an organisation for small and medium peasants, many hundreds of whom attended its first national gathering and actively participated in the proceedings. In 1981/82, the main thrust of UNAG was to obtain land for landless peasants and adequate supplies of credit on reasonable terms for the small and middle farmers. At first the membership (and a section of the full-time officials, those who considered themselves socialist) blocked capitalist landowners from joining, preferring to see them in COSEP.

Over the next two years UNAG continued to press for land for landless peasants, cancellation of debts for small and middle farmers, increased production by all farmers, and organising militias to counter the Contra threat. However, there was a growing outcry from the larger landowners that the FSLN was ‘dividing the producers’. The public face of Jaime Wheelock, the Minister for Agrarian Reform was that the interests of the small producers were different from those who had all kinds of facilities to hand:

How can there be equality between the barefoot son of a peasant and the son of a big producer who is studying in the United States? It is the barefoot ones we have to think about.

The strategy of the FSLN to develop the agricultural sector was clear and repeated many times in speeches and documents. It aimed for a mixed economy which would be more just and equal than under Somoza in its redistribution of land and resources, while maintaining an alliance with the major agrarian capitalists who dominated the country’s export sector and were the leading force within COSEP.

This was the heart of the popular front strategy of the Junta in 1979. The FSLN quickly discovered that the dominance of the state sector in agriculture was much less than it thought, believing that the nationalisation of Somoza’s holdings would give it control of up to sixty per cent of the country’s agricultural production. In fact, that control extended just over twenty per cent.66 The discrepancy was serious: the difference between being able to satisfy the demands of the peasants for land, or not. And lest we forget, the distribution of land is key to the success of all national democratic revolutions. With their perspective of a mixed economy, the FSLN tops were soon backing the landlords not the tenants and, in so doing, gave the first concrete indication that this revolution would not follow Cuba’s example. The FSLN now recommended that all but the largest landowners in COSEP should join UNAG to obtain the benefits on offer.

6.7 The Bourgeoisie Make Their First Demands

The first rifts in the broad array of social forces that toppled Somoza appeared soon after his overthrow. Faced with a steep growth in union membership and a deepening radicalisation, many of the capitalists who had opposed Somoza, doubtless looking over their shoulders at Cuba, were refusing to resume production and holding back on investment. Some were selling whatever possessions they could and leaving the country, others were trying to take their machinery with them. The premier bourgeois paper, La Prensa, began a campaign, declaring that the willing participation of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ was essential for the successful reconstruction of Nicaragua.

There was a regrouping of bourgeois politicians, and the simultaneous launch in late September 1979 of four bourgeois parties, all of which made public statements claiming to support the revolution while emphasising the need for ‘authentic democracy’. Vestiges of the old Conservative Party, the most openly anti-FLSN re-appeared as the Sandinista Social Democratic Party (PSDS). This cheeky adoption of ‘Sandinista’ for the name of the party sparked a storm of protest. The result was a governmental decree reserving the title ‘Sandinista’ for the FSLN and its organisations, resulting in the change of the name to the Social Democratic Party (PSD).

The PSD was launched on 23 September, with calls for the revolution to be limited to a bourgeois democracy, for the consolidation of capitalism, and bitter complaints against attacks being made on private property. These were not complaints about the FSLN leadership, whose declared and actual policy was that of no restrictions on capitalists running their businesses. What the PSD speakers were complaining about were the actions of workers in occupying factories and enterprises in support of demands for increased pay and better working conditions, and against decapitalisation.

The bourgeoisie was also regrouping in its employers’ associations (such as, for example, Chambers of Commerce, Association of Cotton Producers, etc.) delaying re-opening their businesses or investing in the economy as a way of applying pressure on the government to meet their demands. La Prensa, which had a circulation more than twice that of Barricada, and the radio stations in capitalist hands campaigned for a Council of State as set out in the Puntarenas Pact without any ‘unfair’ change of rules by the FSLN. Ignoring the revolution, they demanded that all bourgeois parties be given guaranteed representation. In parallel were demands for curtailing the power and authority of the militia and CDCs/CSDs, and their replacement with normal bourgeois institutions.

These demands had the support of the Minister of Finance (Joaquin Cuadra Chamorro), Minister of Planning (Roberto Yorga Cortes) and the Governor of the Central Bank (Arturo Cruz), all appointed by the Junta. The Junta had appointed individuals from the private sector to head the government’s economic team. These people were responsible for renegotiating the foreign debt and channelling foreign economic aid through the state-owned International Reconstruction Fund (Fondo Internacional de Reconstrucción - FIR) – which might be a partial answer to why the new government assumed responsibility for Somoza’s debts instead of repudiating them.

On the one side stood the movement of workers, campesinos and urban poor, eager to throw off years of exploitation and oppression. On the other stood the bourgeoisie, backed by imperialism but deprived of its crucial weapon, its direct control of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state, the army and police. The old bourgeoisie was in no sense powerless, they had control of the great majority of the economy, the radio stations, the major daily paper (La Prensa), had great political influence over the middle classes and professionals, and at their disposal (even if indirectly) the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

The masses were demanding thoroughgoing land reform, greater control over production, working conditions and wages, and the settling of outstanding scores with their employers. The anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, represented by Chamorro and Robelo, were pressing the FSLN to re-build the structures of the bourgeois state and to halt any radical anti-capitalist measures. Leaders of the European Social-Democratic parties hurried to Managua to urge the FSLN to maintain the block with the anti-Somoza bourgeoisie and, of course, made it clear that international aid would be dependent on this. The PSN added its small voice: that the FSLN “be sensitive to the interests and demands of its capitalist class allies”.

7. A Nicaraguan Workers’ and Peasants’ Government?

In Nicaragua, in July 1979, the FSLN had come to power as the result of a revolutionary mass insurrection that had destroyed the political power of the bourgeoisie and smashed the state apparatus. As the only organised anti-Somoza force prepared to carry the revolution through to the end, the FSLN were the main beneficiaries of the insurrection. A petty-bourgeois group, the FSLN was the sole effective force in the government, and the power of the state was in its hands. During 1979 and 1980, the opening years of the revolution, the FSLN government responded to mass mobilisations of the toilers, carried out a series of expropriations (even if limited), and other measures against capitalist property and social prerogatives. It was anti-imperialist and responded with practical measures to the needs of the workers and peasants.

In total, its actions justified its characterisation as a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, but its direction of travel was unclear. The hope world-wide was that Nicaragua would follow the Cuban example, that a revolutionary petty-bourgeois leadership would show itself to be dedicated to improving the conditions of all Nicaraguans and would take the necessary anti-capitalist measures: shed the bourgeois elements in the government and establish a workers state (even if deformed). It was hoped that the FSLN would continue to respond positively to the mass mobilisations, which both carried and pushed it to take the initiatives challenging capitalist prerogatives, and expropriated capitalist property.

With no democratic revolutionary party to give a voice to the masses, the new government called instead for an ongoing alliance with the national bourgeoisie, giving it a social and economic weight it did not deserve. Despite the leadership of the FSLN having the perspective, not of a workers’ state, but of a capitalist mixed economy, despite the dangers of possible US intervention, despite the presence of large blocks of private property and independent bourgeois political parties, at that stage, matters still hung in the balance. The situation was not very different from Cuba in 1959, so the possibility that the FSLN regime would follow a parallel trajectory, towards a Nicaraguan workers’ state could not be ruled out. The key step would be the expropriation of the landed estates. It was this that marked the qualitative stage of the Cuban revolution because it took back the lands snatched by the American corporations.

Instead, and with no dissenting voice, the FSLN Directorate declared that the maintenance of a mixed economy with more than sixty per cent remaining in private hands was an essential feature of the Nicaraguan revolution.67 In Nicaragua, where the number of employees in enterprises with five or fewer workers was nearly 15,000, and only 120 plants employed more than fifty workers each,68 small-scale commodity production by peasants, farmers, artisans and light industry was acceptable as part of a planned economy if the key sectors were nationalised with a state monopoly of foreign trade.

In 1979 it remained to be seen whether the FSLN, or even a section of it, would evolve to a socialist consciousness. As a petty-bourgeois formation it was unstable and, while its evolutionary direction (at least of the Terceristas) had not been encouraging, insofar as it took practical measures against the bourgeoisie and stood against imperialism, it had to be supported unconditionally.

Any theoretical analysis would do well to start with the 1922 World Congress of the Communist International. The Thesis on Tactics agreed at the Congress accepted the possibility that, as the result of class struggles, the power of the state could pass into the hands of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, but declared that such a government did not represent a workers’ state – the dictatorship of the proletariat – but could become an important launch pad for the fight for that dictatorship.

That is where matters rested until the Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International, was published. That document is key to understanding the processes that occurred in China and Cuba, and is relevant to the FSLN in Nicaragua:

[O]ne cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case one thing is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere at some time becomes a reality and the ‘workers’ and farmers’ government’ in the above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.69

By 1979, history had demonstrated that such regimes could progress to a workers’ state (such as in China and Cuba), though some could regress (like Algeria). As all real processes take time, there is an interval between the overthrow of bourgeois military and political power, and the decisive expropriation of bourgeois economic power. This period in China had lasted for many months, during which the regime was not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather a transitional regime: A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

Lenin and Trotsky had both emphasised the necessity of the mobilisation of the masses to break the power of the bourgeoisie.70 The mass mobilisations can, in exceptional circumstances such as occurred at the end of World War II, force even petty-bourgeois leaderships to accomplish the transition to a workers’ state. The creation of a deformed workers’ state in Cuba, where a leadership was determined to better the conditions of the working masses, showed that real life rarely conforms to the ideal; rather, distortions and variants are the norm.71

The first consideration, that a revolutionary mass mobilisation had destroyed the power of the bourgeoisie and established a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, was a clear and striking confirmation of the theory of the permanent revolution, that in colonial and semi-colonial countries there is a natural tendency to transcend the bourgeois democratic phase and progress more or less directly to a workers’ state, even if deformed.

However, the FSLN government did not accept such an analysis, stood in the way of this development, and called instead for an ongoing alliance with the national bourgeoisie in a mixed economy. The FSLN, riding on the mass upsurge that overthrew Somoza, believed it could use the carrot of economic concessions and stick of the mass movement to force the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie, against its wishes, to carry through the bourgeois democratic revolution.

From the Marxist perspective, it is not possible to have a two-class state – though it is possible to have a two-class government, and in Nicaragua the Junta and Council of State was just such. The FSLN Directorate had clearly stated its aim of preserving a mixed economy, in a similar way to both the Chinese Communist Party and the J-26 Movement. But in the highly turbulent and contradictory conditions of post-revolutionary Nicaragua, what was in question was the outcome of the conflict between the stated programme of the FSLN and the natural progression of events which everywhere demanded actions that exceeded the limits of a mixed economy. Would these pressures push the FSLN to take measures which were socialist in principle, in the direction of developing a state with one foot firmly in socialism?

7.1 The Regime Consolidates

After the revolution and into 1980, the problem of mass hunger having been temporarily solved, the problem of unemployment was by far the most serious facing the FSLN. It had two basic causes. The first and the more important was the disruption of the planting of coffee and cotton due to the revolution. An emergency plan was needed in which public works would play the major role; for example, rebuilding the centre of Managua. But that would not be enough; the revival of production by the capitalist sector was needed, but the capitalists were using just that to blackmail the government. Their demands were carried in the columns of La Prensa: for the government to formally make them full partners in economic planning, to restrict the growing power of the unions, CDSs, AMNLAE and other mass organisations. They had to be guaranteed their investments would be sufficiently profitable, and that the FSLN would implement the original version of the Puntarenas Pact and give them control of the Council of State and the Supreme Court.

The agrarian reforms had been enough to raise the expectations of the campesinos but not enough to satisfy their land hunger nor, in the short term, significantly improve the working and living conditions of agricultural labourers and poor peasants. Thus, there was a swathe of occupations and seizures of land not approved by the FSLN and in some cases troops were brought in to restore the land to its ‘rightful’ owners.

The economic perspective of the FSLN government as articulated in its 1980 economic plan was for a mixed economy, one in which all sectors would be subject to the laws of the market, that is, the laws of capitalism. Nor was any debate allowed amongst peasants and workers on the economic direction of the revolution. Imperialism breathed a sigh of relief as an immediate danger appeared to have been removed. Many well-respected Social-Democratic leaders from Europe flew to Managua Airport to offer their services and assist in raising loans to help Nicaragua service its foreign debt. This was a prime example of reformist internationalism, because the beneficiaries were the big banks who had loaned Somoza the money to maintain his regime. Soon the Organisation of American States officially recognised the regime and after this came money from Costa Rica, Panama, and Venezuela. And on 25 October, 1979, the UN pitched in with a resolution appealing for economic assistance to be given to Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan Revolution was being feted because, unlike in Cuba, a large part of the economy was left in the hands of multinational companies and the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie. The Sandinistas did not, and at the time, due to the pressure of the masses, could not hand political power to the anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, but they left in their hands decisive economic weapons that would allow them to take it in due course.

The narrowness of the productive base of a country as small as Nicaragua with only about 3,000,000 inhabitants meant that, to stimulate genuine economic development a truly revolutionary initiative was required such as establishing a Federation with Cuba, which in the long run would have strengthened both countries. However, FSLN leaders considered there was no need to take control of production, but only to direct investment and take a share of the surplus value generated. The reality, however, was the bulk of production remained in the private sector which demanded guaranteed rates of profit, in effect, determining what surplus would be left for the state.

The FSLN was the subsidiary partner, subject to all kinds of blackmail, one being the demand to provide the private sector with loans at very low interest rates. When the balance sheet was drawn up it was found that the private industrial sector had taken the loans but failed to mobilise even the production capacity available. By the end of 1980, foreign debt had risen to US$2 billion with nearly two-thirds of foreign earnings spent on debt repayment and oil imports.

Because the tasks of rebuilding Nicaragua were so great, the economy required a considerable inflow of resources, estimated by the World Bank at about US$300 million annually. Nevertheless, at first, the economy experienced positive growth, largely because of foreign aid and re-reconstruction after the revolution. Carter and the US Administration favoured financial pressure, and aid was forthcoming only after the revolution had proved it posed no threat to US interests in the region. Loans totalling over US$110 million from US sources for making good the infrastructure and re-vitalising the private sector were vetoed. A scenario repeated in all financial organisations in which the Americans were represented.

FSLN propaganda talked about class struggle and socialism sometime in the future, but to convince capitalists to invest, the FSLN had to control and discipline the workers. Consequently, it carried through a developmental programme for the immediate benefit of the poorest: provision of educational and health services, water supply and drainage schemes, subsidised food and transport, all of which greatly improved the lives of working people, ensuring CDS loyalty to the FSLN, all which frightened the US imperialists. The costs incurred were largely met by foreign aid and loans, which was not available after 1981 with Reagan in the White House.

Borge listed other major gains of the Nicaraguan revolution that benefited the workers, poor peasants and unemployed. The consumption of wheat rose by thirty-three per cent, rice thirty per cent and beans forty per cent; over 300,000 houses and building plots were handed to the masses. House rents were fixed at no more than five per cent of the declared value of the property, which meant rents were generally cut in half. Later, by the end of the decade, with rampant inflation, the rent paid by many tenants had reduced to negligible amounts. The infant mortality rate was already falling and a further substantial drop was expected. It is clear that the majority of poor families hugely benefited by the government’s redistribution policies and provision of food subsidies.72

To counteract the attacks in the bourgeois media that it had reneged on the Puntarenas accords, the FSLN confirmed its intention of working within a multi-class bloc, and in February 1980 launched the Popular Patriotic Bloc (Bloque Popular Patriótico, BPP) which in addition to the FSLN, contained the MDN, PLI, PSN and PCN, and the PPSC. In July, the FSLN relaunched the BPP as the Revolutionary Patriotic Front (FPR) without the PCN, which was dropped because of its opposition to FSLN industrial policy, and without the MDN which had walked away, to the plaudits of La Prensa.

At home, the national bourgeoisie responded to the appeals of the FSLN, not by repatriating the capital it had sent out of the country, but by further ‘de-capitalising’, usually in preparation for the owners themselves running off. This was a serious problem, and the FSLN mobilised the workers to curb such behaviour, a strategy which gave the bourgeoisie another reason to fear the trade unions.

At the El Caracol food processing factory, the workers, the majority of whom were women, took over the plant on 19 February, 1980, locking out the owners. The workers were convinced that the owners were deliberately bankrupting the company by reducing production. Supported by union officials, the workers claimed that the necessary raw materials had not been purchased, no repairs or maintenance had been carried out on the fleet of delivery trucks, and that factory machinery was kept running only because the workers themselves were undertaking makeshift repairs. The workers were particularly outraged that vitamin supplements normally added to foods for children had been cut as they reduced profits. Matters had come to a head when twenty-eight women workers were fired. After opening the books, the workers found that the owners had received a US$400,000 government loan to help the company get back on its feet, but none of the money had reached the factory. Naturally, trade union action extended to landed estates and factories where the owners refused to pay the new government minimum wage or introduce the new standards of working conditions.

This initial period after the revolution was a time when the interests of workers, peasants and the FSLN government were most closely aligned. But even at this time, when the FSLN was most radical, there was no suggestion that the FSLN would progress the revolution to a workers’ state. Barricada,73 carried the statement ‘The Workers Will Put an End to Inequality and Exploitation’, which sounded revolutionary when it spoke about the creativity of workers and peasants and ‘workers’ control’, but any suggestion of taking ownership of the means of production was absent.

The 24 February, 1980, issue of Barricada declared a new period was beginning for the popular militia. Having disarmed the militia in the weeks after the revolution, the government re-launched the militias as “the highest expression of the people in arms”. The article called for all Nicaraguans to join and play their part in defending the nation. But now the militia was under the control of the Ministry of Defence and, as reported in IP74 that this militia would only carry those arms supplied by the EPS at times determined by the EPS. Co-incidentally, the same issue of IP in which this news was reported carried an item on how seven leaders of the Maoist FO and its trade union wing were facing up to ten years imprisonment for “having a large cache of arms”.

An outstanding success of the revolution, and one that resonated around the world, was the National Literacy Crusade for which Nicaragua, in the person of Fr. Fernando Cardenal, the organiser of the campaign, was awarded the UNESCO Nadezhda K. Krupskaya Literary Award for 1980, and the UNESCO Hassin Habif Literary Award. The literacy campaign was modelled on what was done in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, which re-assured those on the left who wanted to see the Nicaraguan Revolution as a second Cuban Revolution.

Before the revolution three-quarters of the population had never opened a book and only forty per cent were literate. On 24 March, 1980, a mass literacy campaign was launched. Over 52,000 high-school and university students and teachers (well over half female) organised the People’s Literacy Army. They travelled from towns and cities into the mountain areas and countryside where they spent five months living with the families whom they taught to read and write. In the towns, nearly 26,000 workers and housewives taught in their workplaces and community centres. There was a revolutionary transformation in education not least because these young people could do no less than explain the political motivation that made them give up five months to help end the conditions that had kept the campesinos in a state of poverty, illiteracy and degradation. These teachers were roundly condemned for ‘indoctrination’ in the pages of La Prensa, by people who all their lives had refused to lift a finger or spend a cent to aid the peasants!

It was quite true, of course, that the very existence of the crusade was, in and of itself, a massive boost for the FSLN, had a major impact in winning the support of broad layers of peasants, but further frightened the US Administration.

This highly successful campaign was planned like a military operation. After a 150-day campaign against centuries of ignorance, it was claimed that 406,000 Nicaraguans had learned to read. By 1987, the Sandinista regime had built 1,200 new schools and the literacy rate had jumped to eighty-six per cent. The mobilisation of women’s, peasants’ and workers’ mass organisations was the reason for the success of the literacy campaign. However, it was not without cost, as sixty-three teachers and students were killed by Contra commandos.

Stories were common of women, who travelled for hours every day in order to learn to read:

Everything that we did was for our children so that they could learn to read, so they could have a better life and participate in the Revolution. With the idea that they were going to learn to read, that they were going to learn many things that they didn’t know, with this we integrated in the process of the Revolution.75

The membership of the Junta changed when Violeta Chamorro resigned on 18 April, 1980, ostensibly for health reasons, though she later claimed that she had become dissatisfied with increased FSLN dominance in the government. Overnight, La Prensa became much more critical of the FSLN. Two days later, the managing editor (Xavier Chamorro Cardenal) resigned in protest; the papers’ workers declared their support for Xavier and went on strike. The strike was portrayed by the bourgeoisie as a blow against freedom of the press. Faced with the intransigence of the owners, on 26 April, the workers and progressive journalists resigned on mass and followed the old editor to launch a new paper El Nuevo Diario. From then on, La Prensa was the voice of the most determined opposition to the revolution. These views were often expressed in the letters’ column, where false reports and exaggerations could be passed off as personal opinions which needed no denial by the paper. Violeta’s place on the Junta was taken by Arturo Cruz, Governor of the Central Bank.

Alfonso Robelo resigned from the Junta on 22 April, 1980 to protest the expansion of the Council of State, pointing out that the FSLN now had such a degree of control that the Council had been reduced to a false front. He was replaced by Rafael Córdova Rivas a rancher and leader of the Democratic Conservative Party representing business interests. The new appointment was promotion of the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ and Cruz in La Prensa of 28 May, 1980 presented his appointment as: “part of the government’s firm decision (to) put a system of mixed economy into effect…”

The FSLN had re-scheduled the convocation of the re-structured Council of State to May 1980. In the meantime, the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction was limited to routine matters of little or no political significance. However, the problem of what to do with captured ex-National Guards charged with murder, rape, arson and other crimes had led to the creation of tribunals independent of the regular court system: often dubbed ‘Peoples’ Tribunals’, these operated from November 1979 to February 1981. Nine three-judge panels and three appeals panels were all appointed by the Junta and included lay members. Of the 6,310 cases presented to these Tribunals 1,760 prisoners were freed for lack of evidence and 1,229 were acquitted, giving an acquittal rate of forty-seven per cent, far higher than the average US court. The 3,331 who were convicted – many for murder – received sentences ranging from zero to thirty years, the maximum allowed under post-Somoza Nicaraguan law. La Prensa campaigned for these National Guards to receive a fair trial! Pyle, having investigated what happened wrote:

(O)ne does not hear calls from the former Guards that they would have preferred a jury trial… they fared far better under the Special Tribunals than if their fate had been left to juries composed of their former victims.76

The FSLN in its Historic Programme had promised to “support the work of priests and other religious figures who defend the working people”, and is one of the few revolutionary movements to have taken power and appointed priests to senior government posts: Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, Foreign Minister; Ernesto Cardenal Martínez, Minister of Culture; Edgardo Parrales Castillo, Minister of Social Welfare and, most prominent, Fernando Cardenal (Ernesto’s brother), who had headed the literacy campaign before becoming Minister of Education. At the time, over 200 priests and nuns held lesser-governmental positions.77 In May 1980, the Catholic Church hierarchy made its first move against the FSLN-dominated government. An Episcopal Conference in that month called for the resignation from the government of the four priests with ministerial positions. They refused.

Growing worker dissatisfaction led to a series of strikes, the most serious of which was in the country’s only cement plant, situated on the outskirts of Managua. The strike was organised by CAUS (Confederation of Trades Union Action and Unification) which was gaining ground against the CST because of the latter’s lack of militancy. Such strikes forced the government to introduce, on 11 June, 1980, an across-the-board wage increase in the minimum wage of C$125 per month, but many employers did not pay it. This meant that, for example, one third of workers in Managua received less than the recommended minimum wage. Inflation made matters worse.

With government approval, the ATC continued to press landowners to pay the new national minimum rate, and to improve health and safety for agricultural labourers on both private and state-owned farms. In line with the FSLN priority of increasing food production, the ATC launched a campaign for landowners to rent underused or unused land to poor peasants with a rent ceiling established by law. On 7 July, 1980, Barricada denounced landowners who refused to rent as counter-revolutionaries who intended to starve the country. However, the Minister responsible for food production, Wilberto Lara, kept the demands of the government and the ATC well within bourgeois limits. He explained the FSLN position as one of ensuring maximum crop production, and made it clear that “once utilised we will hand it back to its owners”.

The 3 October, 1980, issue of Barricada carried a decree that the Junta would no longer tolerate factory occupations or other illegal activities such as strikes that disrupted production. The CAUS, CGT-I and FO all increased their membership by taking up work-related issues discounted by the CST.

The 7 October, 1980, issue of Barricada carried a statement by the Directorate: ‘The Role of Religion in the New Nicaragua’, giving its official position on religion. Welcoming all those who were prepared to actively struggle against Somoza-ism, the document stated: “Some authors have asserted that religion is a mechanism for spreading false consciousness among people, which serves to justify the exploitation of one class by another”. Some authors? Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Guevara all fall into that category, and their theoretical and practical arguments become mere – ‘assertions’. The mixed economy applied to religion!

The bourgeoisie were beginning to find their feet. MDN, probably the most influential bourgeois party called a public rally for Sunday 9 November, 1980, under the slogan ‘March Against Totalitarianism’. Borge and others attempted to dissuade Robelo, citing the need for calm after an armed attack on Santa Maria by ex-National Guards, but Robelo was adamant. The government stepped in and invoked Decree 513, which banned all party-political campaigning until the election promised for 1984. However, the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie felt now was the time to pressure the FSLN and at its 12 November, 1980, meeting walked out of the Council of State. In response, the FSLN brought out 100,000 supporters to a mass rally.

By the end of 1980, the state sectors in Nicaragua (also known as Areas of Peoples’ Property – APP) contributed forty-one per cent to the GDP, a figure which would remain roughly static. At the same time, seventy per cent of the production of export items, the crucial area in the Nicaraguan economy, remained in private hands, mainly the big cotton and coffee farmers. The 1980 plan had been partially successful in making up the losses in agricultural production that occurred during the revolution but, being a primary producer, Nicaragua was at the mercy of world prices and these had fallen in the key areas of coffee and cotton. The matter was exacerbated because the foreign debt inherited from Somoza meant that, for every US$100 earned from exports, US$55 would go in repayments. Nicaragua imports all its oil and, while oil prices fell between 1980 and 1981, they fell much less than the price of coffee and cotton, leaving Nicaragua worse off. With the withdrawal of the bourgeoisie from the Council of State, the US giant Standard Fruit quit its operations in Nicaragua, its land was nationalised, the US Administration believed its worst fears were being realised, and US economic assistance was suspended indefinitely.

The call by the FSLN to develop the agricultural sector was clear and repeated many times. The aim was a mixed economy that relied on maintaining an alliance with the major agrarian capitalists who dominated the country’s export sector and were the leading force within COSEP. The FSLN was attempting what the national-bourgeoisie had failed to do – to achieve independent national development. For the near future the FSLN model envisaged the country continuing to be an exporter of agricultural produce, giving the private farmers and ranchers who produced the majority of crops for export the whip hand. The problem was accumulating sufficient surplus for planned investments, which implied minimising those costs which subtracted from that surplus – such as the standard of living of the working class and peasants.

With the active assistance of the US media, the US Administration set in motion a programme of increasing the level and number of (untrue) ‘horror’ stories about the Sandinista government; it was totalitarian, the centre for arms smuggling in the Caribbean, it was receiving masses of Soviet weapons, all with the aim of justifying planned actions against Nicaragua.

8. Austerity, the Contra War and the National Question

With his speech of 13 January, 1981 to the CST, the FSLN Planning Minister (Henry Ruiz) launched a national discussion on the 1981 Economic Plan, which was called ‘Austerity and Economic Efficiency’. The aims were the creation of 60,000 jobs (giving Nicaragua its lowest ever unemployment rate), and increasing investment in industrial production by 43.5 per cent with an expected boost in exports of twenty-two per cent. Consumption of food by the workers was planned to rise by twelve per cent. Ruiz explained that the ‘privileged sector’ would have to make sacrifices for the common good and might find it difficult to continue eating caviar. The key to success was increasing productivity by nine per cent through a higher degree of organisation and mobilisation of the workers themselves.

The two problems at the core of this mixed economy approach were that those who eat caviar invariably see what they want as essential for the good of the country, while the surplus needed for investment comes from increased exploitation of labour. The government policy would thus have to obtain investment as surplus value from domestic sources with the emphasis on the private sector, since that owned the lion’s share of the economy.

The priorities were much the same as in the 1980 plan but now Reagan, the new hard-line US President (in office from 20 January, 1981 to 20 January, 1989), would terminate foreign aid and loans and initiate a programme of economic destabilisation in the hope that hunger would weaken the loyalty of the population to the FSLN. Reagan and his Secretary of State, Haig, claimed the revolution in Nicaragua was a serious threat to the stability of the US-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. The US administration was determined to organise the overthrow of the FSLN government by force on the pretext that the Nicaraguans were aiding the guerrillas in El Salvador and elsewhere. The political colour of the Nicaraguan regime was not important, rather, simply by attempting to take control of its own destiny it shattered the classic model by which the US dominated Latin America, and it threatened the profits of the US capitalists.

Reagan and Haig saw the situation in Nicaragua as particularly dangerous because it was in the heart of what US imperialism considered its own backyard. The Vietnam War remained fresh in their memories and this seriously constrained US options, so it was decided to fund the re-organisation and expansion of the National Guard remnants, the Contras, as a counter-revolutionary army ‘advised’ by US Army and CIA personnel. This mercenary force would be based in Honduras on the Nicaraguan border and, for more than six years, would wage a war of terror against the Nicaraguan people.

The government plan had considerable impact on the workers who expressed their response through their trade unions, which in Nicaragua are generally organised on a workplace not a trade basis. Thus, when figures were published on the increase in trade unions after July 1979,78 what was referred to was the unionisation of individual enterprises where the number of workers might be as few as ten or as many as 300. What is not in doubt is that urban workers were flocking to join trade unions and individual plants were raising demands that were outside the FSLN programme.

The PCN-dominated CAUS led a series of strikes in Managua in January/February 1981, some for 100 per cent wage increases, some against ‘de-capitalising’ employers and for nationalisation. A major strike was at Fabritex, a high technology textile factory. In response, the CST organised demonstrations, which seized the CAUS offices in León and Managua, and handed them over to the literacy crusade. Throughout the strikes the PCN, CAUS and FO were denounced as ‘somozista agents’, ‘agents of the counter-revolution’ and ‘CIA agents’.

In February 1981, Jaime Wheelock laid out the expectations of the government.79 The bourgeoisie and the middle classes would join the workers in the task of building a new homeland. The mutual benefits from such an approach would more than offset any class differences. In a rational plan for the economy there would be no need to expropriate the means of production; all the government had to do was determine how to allocate the surpluses. The difference between ‘expropriation of the surpluses’ and ‘expropriation of the means of production’ was the Achilles heel of the FSLN economic plan, it was the difference between production for profit and production for use, the difference between dream and reality.

The CST and ATC were not immune from the pressures driving workers to strike and were forced to make demands that were, objectively, against government policy. On 17 February, the ACT led a demonstration of some 50,000 peasants demanding that all land occupations be legalised. Poor peasants and farm labourers were not waiting, they were pressing their demands for land through land occupations and other direct actions. The ATC officers attempted to defend their reputations by pointing out how they had won the support of the government for individual cases where the land had stood idle for some time, even years.

To remove the heat from the situation, families were encouraged to join co-operatives where each family had title to its own land. These ‘agrarian reform’ titles could be inherited, but neither the title nor any part of the land could be sold. The co-operatives came in two types, the first where the land was owned individually but everyone worked on centrally-allocated tasks and then received a share proportional to their land area and effort put in; and the second where the peasants worked their own lands individually but combined in making applications for loans, grants, feed and seed grain, etc.

A new Junta was announced on 4 March, 1981, with Daniel Ortega clearly playing the lead role as ‘Co-ordinator’. Arturo Cruz went to Washington as Nicaragua’s ambassador, but resigned in November 1981. By April the following year, Cruz had been joined by Pastora and Robelo with the aim of launching an armed struggle against the FSLN from Costa Rica. Years later the New York Times80 leaked that Cruz had been on the payroll of the CIA at US$6,000 a month. Moisés Hassan now acted as liaison between the Council of Ministers and the Junta, and would serve as Minister of Construction and Deputy Interior Minister before being named Mayor of Managua in 1985. He opposed the rightward direction taken by the FSLN and was removed from his remaining posts of responsibility in 1988. The February demonstration was followed on 11 March by a demonstration of more than 10,000 factory workers demanding that the government confiscate those factories where it had been forced to intervene.

In May 1981, Tomás Borge, gave an interview to Latinamerica Press, reported in IP81 in which he described the FSLN goal as the achievement of a mixed economy and political pluralism. He claimed that the FSLN leaders had accepted that the bourgeoisie were necessary to maintain production levels. He made it clear: “we are not going to become another Cuba”, and repeated his vision to a visiting delegation of Canadian trade unionists stating: “There is a mixed economy within the revolution, a mixed economy at the service of the workers, (not) a mixed economy at the service of the bourgeoisie”. The problem with such a perspective is that in an imperialist world, notwithstanding personal intentions, a mixed economy, especially as in Nicaragua, with such a high proportion of private companies with imperialist connections, will always end by serving the capitalist element.

The CST was starting to make real progress in recruiting workers. It was seen as the government’s preferred union and able to improve health and safety in the workplace, which often spilled over into protecting the environment of those living close to factories. One spectacularly awful case was the Electroquimica Pennwalt chemical processing plant which produced and supplied corrosive and dangerous chemicals for more than fifty local factories. An important component of the production process was mercury, yet health and safety in the plant was practically non-existent, with workers standing in pools of highly toxic liquid mercury which had leaked onto the floor.

In May 1981, health tests of the 150 workers revealed that fifty-six had serious nervous damage. But, even worse, the plant had dumped forty tons of mercury into lake Xolotlán from which many of the inhabitants of Managua drew their drinking water. It turned out that the plant’s owners were ‘de-capitalising’ the plant using a scam whereby the company ran up debts importing raw materials from abroad while payments for finished products ended up in US$ in their Miami bank account, a process which would soon have bankrupted the business.

The government was forced to step in and nationalise the plant, pay for the clean-up, maintain production and install protective measures for the workers. It was later revealed that the plant manager was Jaime Montealegre, a Vice-President of the Council of State. One result was an article in the New York Times,82 which placed the blame for the pollution and resulting health problems on the Nicaraguan government because it had nationalised the plant.

In June 1981, the Conference of Bishops, which had never objected to the presence of priests in the Somoza government, even as officers in the National Guard, found it impossible to accept Catholic priests should engage in activities that promoted the physical well-being of Nicaraguans. Cardenal and his colleagues were again instructed to surrender their posts. One particularly petty and spiteful act by anti-Sandinistas within the church was against Sister Maria del Pilar Castellano, a nun from the Ciudad Sandino area, which had been a revolutionary stronghold. She had given first aid to those who fought on the streets against Somoza and had been instrumental in establishing the Roberto Clemente school and pioneering the literacy campaign. In 1981, she visited her parents in Spain and, while there, was informed that she would not be returning to Nicaragua. Borge used this incident to explain how religious persecution in Nicaragua was not by the state against the church but by the conservative elements of the church against those within the church supporting liberation theology.

Daniel Ortega and Jaime Wheelock were at a complete loss to understand why the bourgeoisie could not appreciate the logic of a mixed economy, how everyone would benefit. Why couldn’t the capitalists see it was in their own interests to increase production, why were they deliberately continuing to polarise the situation and stimulate the class struggle? What reformist hasn’t had the same thoughts? It was this failure to appreciate the class nature of the struggle that doomed the FSLN to lead the revolution to defeat.

The actions of the capitalists were placing union officials in a very difficult position. Notwithstanding official policy, the local and national officials of the CST were faced with the grubby reality of bourgeois deception. The trade union leaders were becoming frustrated with having to face one de-capitalising capitalist after another under conditions where the law as it stood invited the capitalists to run their enterprises into the ground.

Both CST and ATC officers had responsibility for identifying owners who were de-capitalising, and taking preventative action to stop them. However, their personal experiences demonstrated that the mass occupations essential to stop decapitalisation led inevitably to other demands by the workforce which they then had to curtail. At a workers’ assembly held in July 1981, entitled ‘Against De-capitalisation We Demand Confiscation’, the General Secretary of the CST, Lucio Jiménez said:

The workers could not remain on the defensive (…) we had to go over immediately onto the offensive in a clear struggle, not against an individual or one or two bourgeois administrators, or one or two bosses, but to go on to the struggle immediately and strike sharp blows against the bourgeoisie as a class.83

However, no measures were included for the workers’ and peasants’ democratic control of production – the only sure way to defeat decapitalisation.

Under pressure from the rank and file, and failing to get the expected increases in production, Daniel Ortega announced the Agrarian Reform Law on 19 July, 1981, on behalf of the new Junta. Despite strong resistance from landowning capitalists, it was again promised that land that was underdeveloped, left fallow or abandoned for at least six months would be compulsorily purchased from its owners at a price set by the government. Additionally, the land of those who had taken up arms against the revolution could be seized. IP reported84 that these lands (approximately 600,000 hectares) were to be made available to agricultural labourers, and the poorest campesinos, the 64,000 who owned less than 1 hectare of land. The government now owned the banks and, in a popular move, declared a moratorium on debt interest repayments for loans made to small and medium peasants.

Homesteaders were given free title to land they had occupied. Bank foreclosure in the event of default on a bank loan was prohibited. These moves had three goals: to increase government popularity and mobilise the campesinos behind the FSLN; to make Nicaragua self-sufficient in food production by 1983; and to increase the production of food and agricultural crops for export. These remained the dominant themes of FSLN agricultural policy until well after the 1984 elections.

Importantly, the new Agrarian Reform Law established the legal right of women to hold the title deeds for land; neither kinship nor gender barred a person from benefiting from land redistribution. Previously, the vast majority of women members of the co-operatives had been landless labourers, now they could be land-holders and full members.

According to Jaime Wheelock, these actions were at the heart of the FSLN’s programme of a mixed economy with private, co-operative, and public ownership of production. They would improve Nicaragua’s economy and thereby lay the groundwork for democracy by providing Nicaragua’s population with the means to develop itself economically, politically and culturally. Wheelock later generously estimated that by mid-1986, almost one hundred thousand campesino families had benefited from the reform’s land redistribution programme, with two million hectares having been affected.

La Prensa voiced the concerns of the bourgeoisie, stepping up its campaign of false allegations, COSEP denounced the government, Contra raids escalated. In response, the FSLN decreed a state of economic and social emergency (9 September, 1981), banned land seizures, strikes, threats to continued production and any actions which could lead to demands for workers’ control of production. The penalties included jail terms of up to three years. As a gesture, twenty-four members of the PCN were arrested. From September 1981 through to 1987, the right to strike was denied except for a short period around the elections, from 1984 to 1985.

The CAUS survived the attacks of the CST, but clashed again with the FSLN in October 1981 when its leaders were sentenced to several years in jail (later commuted) for violating the emergency decree. Once again, the PCN-led union CAUS and FO were denounced by the CST and Barricada as agents of Somoza, or the CIA or the counter-revolution.

By October 1981, AMNLAE’s membership was 25,000. It was successfully mobilising women for the coffee and cotton harvests and when those were complete, recruited women students as teachers for the Literacy Crusade after which it organised preventative medicine brigades to undertake vaccinations, and gave advice on nutrition and personal hygiene. As if that weren’t enough, it then undertook to mobilise women for the Popular Militia against the Contras.

Glenda Monterrey, “a central leader of AMNLAE”85 explained that AMNLAE was not intended to organise around issues pertaining only to women. Its purpose was to organise around the practical tasks of the moment; e.g. its biggest campaign in 1981 was to recruit women to the militia reserve battalions – to spend two or three weeks a year on military exercises in the mountains, away from the family. However, the image of an organisation which simply enacted government decisions rather than its own initiatives grew and, by 1982, its effectiveness was noticeably declining.86

Under Somoza’s dictatorship, easily curable diseases led to the death of over thirty per cent of the children in the countryside. A health awareness campaign similar to the literacy campaign was launched. Of the 78,000 health brigadistas, three quarters were women. Mothers and children were the priority, with over a million people vaccinated, and hygiene and nutrition education provided with the immediate result that infant mortality dropped to nine per cent. An essential element was the provision of clean water. Under the FSLN government, 500 doctors graduated annually and the healthcare system guaranteed doctors’ visits for some 3,000,000 people. The government also launched housing construction programmes, especially in the countryside.

8.1 The Revolutionary Patriotic War Hots Up (1982-83)

The decision to launch the Contra War was made in the White House no later than 1981, and, by 1983, had grown into a full-scale mercenary war that dominated all life and politics in Nicaragua. Because of its perspective of a mixed economy, the FSLN leadership decided ‘national unity’ was essential in the face of the Contras and declared a social pact (concertación) with the national bourgeoisie, in an effort to get them to back the war. The capitalists, certainly those that looked to La Prensa for leadership, had no intention of supporting an FSLN victory. But the FSLN saw concertación as possible, and to achieve it was quite prepared to slow down and, in some cases, curtail the more radical measures being taken to improve the living standards of working people.

Nicaragua, meanwhile was peacefully engaged in attempting to increase its exports in the face of the opposition of its own capitalists. These people had been robbed (as they saw it) of governmental and state power by a gang of terrorists in whom they had no confidence either politically or economically. They were terrified of revolutionary activities within the factories: sit-ins, strikes, and even the imprisonment of managers. As they saw it, the FSLN, despite all its statements and pleas, was gradually robbing them of their authority on their farms and in their factories by encouraging the workers to act against decapitalisation. They were only too anxious to be rid of the FSLN. For many, it meant covert support for a Contra victory by economic sabotage.

In February 1982, new financial incentives were announced for capitalists who increased their exports. The government would ensure profitability by paying a significant proportion of the cost of imports and guaranteeing a preferential exchange rate for exports. This scheme directed almost two-thirds of government financial assistance to the big farms. The thanks the government got? Private investment fell to an all-time low! But even worse, the loopholes in the scheme meant even greater decapitalisation, weakening the export sector further, the opposite of what was intended. The FSLN practically encouraged decapitalisation when, as an incentive to the capitalists to produce more, it gave them access to hard currency “for useful purposes, including recreation”.87

As the Contra war was getting underway in May-June 1982, Nicaragua suffered devastation due to torrential rain. 800 mm of rain (thirty-four inches) in six days threatened to reverse the gains made since Somoza’s overthrow, a third of basic food crops (beans, corn and rice) and ninety per cent of the cotton crop was destroyed, sixty factories partially or totally paralysed, hundreds dead, 40,000 homeless and US$200 million in damage. The national network of roads, bridges and drainage systems, inadequate even for normal conditions collapsed. Naturally, the Contras made every effort to exacerbate the situation. This was a major material disaster, but it was minimised by the spirit of self-confidence and creative self-help that prevailed in the country.

The war took a terrible toll on the Nicaraguan people, some 500 had been killed by early 1983. Given the level of medical support, severe wounds, particularly those due to land mines, meant amputees became a common sight in most towns. The economic impact was severe with shortages of everyday basic necessities such as cooking oil. The Contras made a special effort to target those engaged in education (fifteen schools destroyed) and health initiatives (seventeen healthcare centres destroyed), killing doctors, nurses, technicians, teachers, and children. Food production was another target, with regular attacks on campesinos in their fields, and warehouses storing coffee, cotton and tobacco.

Nicaragua was being forced to spend a quarter of its GDP to protect its citizens which meant increased inflation. As a result of the war, in 1983 inflation was nearly thirty per cent (rising to forty per cent in 1984) and, consequently, the real take-home pay of workers fell substantially. The government attempted to cushion these effects by introducing food subsidies. The effect on the factory workers was a surge of volunteers to fight the Contras, coupled with a tightening of belts in order to contribute even more to the war effort. Taking care of and resettling 114,000 refugees slowed the expansion of healthcare provision, schools and social housing. The destruction of resources meant the state had to impose greater control over the distribution of food and necessities.

Conflict within the Roman Catholic Church surfaced again when Pope John Paul II, a noted reactionary, visited Nicaragua in March 1983. The government provided free transport for some half a million Nicaraguans to attend the highlight of the visit, an outdoor mass in Managua at which the Pope refused to offer a prayer for the government or for the souls of deceased soldiers. Anti-government demonstrators began chanting, “We love the Pope”. Pro-government supporters responded with chants of “We want peace”, which soon drowned out the anti-government claque. The mass was interrupted, and the Pope angrily asked the crowd for silence several times. Edited highlights were broadcast worldwide as a deliberate attempt by the Sandinistas to disrupt the mass.

Outside of Nicaragua it was difficult to appreciate the scale of this war. Washington, using verbal camouflage, described the Contra war as ‘low-intensity’, but there was nothing ‘low intensity’ as far as Nicaragua was concerned. As an indication of the disruption caused by the war, the 43,000 Nicaraguans killed plus the 25,000 killed fighting against the National Guard during the revolution constituted some two per cent of the total population, equivalent in the USA to more than seven million people, not to mention the wounded, the war refugees, the orphaned and the massive destruction of the country’s productive resources.

The destruction wreaked by the Contra armies came on top of the US trade embargo; the devastation caused by large-scale natural disasters, and failure to obtain sufficient aid from overseas. The Contra War was a war on two fronts, the battles against the Contras and the economic war being waged by the bourgeoisie within Nicaragua against the Sandinista regime. The refusal of the large producers to co-operate with the government did not stem from a lack of incentives or a reaction to the regime’s more revolutionary rhetoric. Rather, it was a determined and conscious attempt to assist in the overthrow of the government. They were doing all they could to prevent a revolutionary regime from surviving, including not only economic sabotage but also running a campaign of lies and deceit aimed at undermining support for the regime both at home and abroad.

The FSLN should have followed the example set by the ex-colonists in the US after the American War of Independence when many states passed ‘confiscation laws’ which allowed the state to seize the property of those loyal to the British crown, selling it off on behalf of the state treasury.88 The response of the FSLN was to cut back or abandon many of its social programmes and development projects: land reform, the fight for women’s rights (legalisation of abortion, equal rights in hiring and on the job, and ending violence against women), and how to plan the economy so that production met social need not private profit.

Facing continuing attacks by US-sponsored Contras along both its northern and southern borders, on 10 August, 1983, Humberto Ortega, with overall command of the EPS, announced compulsory military service for the first time in Nicaragua’s history. Conscription would begin in January 1984 with each conscript serving for a minimum of two years. Initially, women were not mentioned, but the AMNLAE argued that since women had proved themselves as effective fighters in the war against Somoza there was no reason to exclude them from the draft. Many women active in AMNLAE argued that this omission reflected a machismo view of women held by senior members of the FSLN (especially President Daniel Ortega and his brother Humberto). A compromise was reached whereby women were not required to register, but could do so on a voluntary basis.89

AMNLAE re-focused its attention on the collection of materials for recycling, campaigning to save energy, convincing women to back the war effort when they were subject to frozen wages, inflation, shortages, black-market speculation, and lack of either child or maternity care. An important aspect of AMNLAE’s work was the campaign to increase food production that relied heavily on women activists in the ACT. The AMNLAE leadership was doubly taken aback when women agricultural workers responded by challenging the thrust of the war effort, demanding a more anti-capitalist emphasis.

Catholics make up about half Nicaragua’s population. The Catholic Church in Nicaragua was led by Obando, Archbishop of Managua, a vocal opponent of Liberation Theology, which condemned capitalism, in Latin America especially, as an unjust and iniquitous system and thus a form of structural sin. The Catholic hierarchy in Nicaragua threw itself behind the Contra leadership, leading to a de facto split with the so-called ‘church of the poor’ which supported the Sandinistas. Naturally, the bourgeois news media around the world emphasised the views of the hierarchy.

Obando would become the leading ‘legal’ Contra mouthpiece in Nicaragua. So eager was the Church hierarchy to undermine the FSLN government that it altered Canonical Law – the fundamental law of the Roman Catholic Church. On 27 November, 1983, Article 285 was introduced prohibiting priests from accepting “those public positions entailing participation in the exercise of civil authority”.  Obando personally saw to it that Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest who refused to resign from his position in the Sandinista government, was expelled from his order. With the approval of Pope John II, all four priests with ministerial positions were suspended from their orders by 1985.

Obando was made a cardinal on 25 May, 1985. Fresh from the Vatican, he travelled to Miami to brief, and be briefed by, Contra leaders. The first Mass Obando celebrated after being made a cardinal was in Miami before the Contra leadership; after which he was claimed by the Contras in Honduras as their ‘spiritual guide’. In January 1986, Obando travelled to the United States where he declared his support for the Contras and encouraged the US administration to provide them with military aid. Tomás Borge, in an interview published in the Mexican paper El Día (January 1986), argued that Obando was made a cardinal for political reasons that fully coincided with those of the US administration.

8.2 The National Question in Nicaragua

The national question became an explosive issue in Nicaragua when it led to substantial numbers of Miskito Indians joining the Contras and fighting against the revolution.

The Spanish colonised the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and the British the Atlantic coast. This meant there were significant differences in the composition of the two populations with the ‘Coast’ a separate entity historically, religiously, culturally, linguistically, and ethnically. The term ‘Atlantic Coast’ is somewhat of a misnomer since it comprises just over half the land area of Nicaragua. The approximate make-up of the population of the Atlantic Coast was, at the time of the revolution, 120,000 Mestizos (of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent, as are the great majority of Nicaraguans), 80,000 Miskito Indians and 30,000 Creoles, with three other racial groups totalling about 10,000.

Under the Somoza regime the Atlantic Coast was isolated financially and socially. When the revolution triumphed in 1979 the peoples of the Atlantic coast, even though they suffered severe discrimination under the Somoza regime were, except for the mining areas which saw intense fighting between National Guards and FSLN guerrillas, by and large, not involved.

Later, Tomás Borge in an interview with El Nuevo Diario, on 15 January, 1986, explained that the Sandinistas accepted their treatment of the peoples of the Atlantic Coast had been high-handed. He described how young enthusiastic revolutionaries from Managua, speaking only Spanish, arrived on the Atlantic Coast and, although they introduced some reforms, they disappointed by promising far more than could be delivered by the new regime.

The local population had been used to the presence of only relatively few National Guards, but after the revolution, and in the fight against the Contras, large numbers of Sandinista militia speaking neither Miskito nor English arrived, in a virtual invasion. That, and the failure in the first stage of the revolution to give security of land tenure to the local peasants generated considerable mistrust and opposition.

Initially, the FSLN was insensitive to the demands of black people and indians for racial equality, greater autonomy and an end to economic subordination. The FSLN failed to appreciate the existence of ethnic dimensions and sought to integrate the Atlantic Coast within Nicaragua by purely economic means, ignoring demands for participation in decisions on matters affecting their lives, such as the use of their own languages in official documents and schools. These errors did not flow from the FSLN’s Historic Programme as written by Fonseca. That programme had called for land to the peasants and for self-determination for the Atlantic Coast, both key democratic demands omitted from the Humberto Ortega version.

The result was the Atlantic Coast became an area where the local population provided substantial support for the Contras. Local chiefs, who had worked with the Somoza security services now made deals with the CIA, which supplied them with money and munitions. The FSLN appointed Steadman Fagoth Mueller, a Miskito, to the Council of State, only to arrest him in February 1981 on charges of fostering counter-revolution. He was also identified as an informer for the National Guard. The FSLN militants were astounded when the Miskitos remained loyal to their former leader and protested his arrest. Finally, the government freed him on the condition that he went abroad. Fagoth crossed into Honduras where he openly collaborated with the Contras.

The FSLN then made the disastrous decision to move the Miskitos from their traditional lands near the Rio Coco river, to Puerto Cabezas, away from the fighting. This caused some ten thousand Miskitos to flee to Honduras where, funded by the US and under the influence of Fagoth, they joined the Contra forces. It was not until the FSLN, having realised its mistakes, agreed the Miskitos should return home with security of land tenure, that the Miskitos drifted back and relinquished support for their former leaders and the Contras. Tomás Borge was given responsibility for developing government policy on National Autonomy which would incorporate the principles contained in the Historic Programme.

9. The 4 November, 1984, Election – a Reformist Orientation

An alleged lack of political pluralism was one of the Reagan administration’s frequently-used arguments to attack the Sandinistas. In early 1982, the USA began to demand the FSLN government hold free elections, despite knowing that elections were already scheduled for 1985. Bringing the elections forward became an ongoing demand of the bourgeois opposition within Nicaragua. Faced with the Contra War, and to enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of the world, the FSLN opened a discussion on the holding of a governmental election. In May 1983, Jaime Wheelock was interviewed extensively on the question of an election and explained why one could not be held immediately. A delay was necessary to give the election credibility by having a census of those over the age of sixteen and register them to vote.90

By mid-July 1983, it had been decided that certain constraints were necessary and some parties would be excluded, these were: Somoza-ist parties which did not respect the political and social gains conquered by the Nicaraguan people, parties which did not defend national sovereignty and self-determination of the Nicaraguan people, and parties that sought to impose a regime of oppression and exploitation on the Nicaraguan people. Within these constraints, to which all the bourgeois parties paid lip-service, any party could run in the elections, criticise the government, publicise their views through public meetings, newspapers, radio, TV and other mass media, raise funds, and establish and maintain a national network of offices.

The FSLN leadership openly declared in its election platform that the elimination of private enterprise and the socialisation of the means of production were not objectives of the Sandinista Revolution. Commandant Jaime Wheelock, formerly leader of the Proletarian Tendency and a major architect of economic strategy, openly embraced the Stalinist theory of stages:

It is important to understand that the socialist model is a solution for contradictions that exist only in developed capitalist countries… socialising all the means of production… would not lead to socialism, rather, on the contrary, it could lead to the destruction and dis-articulation of our society.91

This was nothing less than a political disaster.

Although the FSLN leaders had formally broken organisationally with the PSN, they brought with them its reformist policy of socialism by stages. During the re-unification in 1978-79, all three tendencies publicly accepted there would, first, be a democratic revolution to bring the country to an acceptable level of capitalist development then, later, at some unknown time in the future, a second, socialist revolution. This false theory does not flow from a scientific analysis of reality and the actual history of revolutions, instead it is based on the bogus belief that the interests of the national bourgeoisie are qualitatively different from the interests of their imperialist masters.

This is the kind of reformism that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Guevara fought against. Today, no country in the world can develop its own capitalism in the same way that the advanced capitalist countries did in the past, because the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries will fight to preserve their dominance. They have over two hundred years’ experience of doing so in the bloodiest manner, including two world wars. Of course, the bourgeois in the advanced countries favour peaceful means of dominating the weak and cowardly national-colonial bourgeoisie in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The IMF, the World Bank, the Central European Bank, and so on are preferred because such methods allow the multinational companies to maximise their profits through looting raw materials, exploiting cheap labour and charging interest on loans to crooked despots which the people of the country then repay in taxes.

The ‘national’ bourgeoisie in Latin and Central America had already shown themselves unable and unwilling to carry through their own bourgeois-national revolutions, to effect land reform by abolishing the big landed estates, to seize full sovereignty, to provide social and economic development independent of imperialism. The so-called ‘national’ bourgeoisie in Nicaragua, in which the FSLN leaders had so much faith were, and remain, proxies of the imperialists, rich thanks to their positions as agents for the imperialists with whom they jointly exploited the poor, working, indigenous masses.

Pandering to the national bourgeoisie in an attempt to win their support, the FSLN leaders further demoralised and demobilised the Nicaraguan workers and peasants, who were increasingly less convinced that making ever-greater sacrifices was a strategy which would advance the revolution. The FSLN used numerous arguments to convince the vanguard: the only realistic road forward for Nicaragua was to strengthen the mixed economy (i.e. capitalist production and capitalist profits), that only by maintaining a social pact with ‘patriotic’ capitalists (freezing the class struggle) would give an improvement in living standards and lead toward socialism at some unspecified time in the future.

It would be insufficient to say the FSLN bent under the pressure of the national and international bourgeoisie because, right from the start, its own ideology led it in this direction. Believing in the myth of a ‘progressive national bourgeoisie’, the Sandinistas were left little room for manoeuvre, particularly in the economic field. The hey-day of the mixed economy was in the period following World War II when it was the official policy of European Social Democracy. In the UK, it meant the nationalisation of basic industries and their modernisation at public expense to enable British capitalists to better compete in international markets. As a final irony these industries, made profitable by public investment, were returned to the very same class that had run them into the ground.

FSLN leaders insisted that state property and a planned economy were incompatible with political liberties, that only a mixed economy could guarantee political pluralism. We can all agree that extending and deepening bourgeois-democratic rights in Nicaragua was a progressive development that increased the opportunities for the exploited to organise and become involved in politics. Such a struggle has a revolutionary dynamic if linked to a deepening of workers’ democracy, which will inevitably conflict with capitalist exploitation. Limiting the struggle to one for bourgeois parliamentary democracy and electoralism inevitably means the restriction, if not destruction, of any democratic freedoms gained.

The Transitional Programme explained:

[T]he slogan of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ government’ in the bourgeois democratic version… when the party of the proletariat refuses to step beyond bourgeois democratic limits, its alliance with the peasantry is simply turned into support for capital, as was the case with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in 1917, with the Chinese Communist Party in 1925-27, and as is now the case with the peoples’ front in Spain, France and other countries.92

On 21 February, 1984, the Council of State set the election date for 4 November, two days before the US presidential elections. Internationally, the announcement was well received – except by the United States. The Kissinger Commission had released its report on Central America on 10 January, calling on the FSLN to allow the Contras to run candidates in the election. Without the FSLN meeting this condition, Kissinger (fresh from the Vietnam conflict) advised that the US should consider the direct use of force.

From the second half of 1981 to the end of 1983, some land redistribution occurred, but much less and much more slowly than the peasants wanted. With the Contra war and the suffering of the population the government was anxious to maximise campesino support, particularly in the border regions and some parts of the Atlantic Coast, where the Contras had been able to recruit poor peasants who had received nothing from the land reform programme. The government accelerated the pace of confiscations of underused capitalist holdings and its distribution. It also ended the policy limiting land distribution to those who agreed to establish co-operatives. Naturally, this new tranche of land distribution was met by howls of protest from the bourgeoisie who saw it as a bribe to influence the outcome of the forthcoming election.

On 22 October, 1984, El Nuevo Diario, reported Commandante Víctor Tirado’s announcement to an assembly of peasants; “In the framework of the mixed economy … expropriation of large farms came to an end with the expropriation of Somoza’s land”. But the FSLN could still be swept off-course; the peasants of Masaya (an impoverished area), fed up with their poor standard of living, took the law into their own hands and, en masse, in May 1985 took over large local landed estates refusing to leave despite the entreaties and threats of the local FSLN tops. In the end, the government agreed a deal with the landowners who accepted equivalent farms in areas of less militancy. The exception was Enrique Bolaños, President of COSEP, who engineered a political campaign out of the incident.

Despite Tirado’s statement, the government distributed over half a million hectares in 1984, compared to 350,000 in 1983 and less than 100,000 in total in the two years 1981-82. The growth was because of the Contra threat, some two-thirds of the peasants in the border areas were allocated land and were photographed, filmed and televised being presented by Daniel Ortega or Jaime Wheelock with the title deed of their land and a gun to defend it. And it did make a big difference – support for the Contras fell away. Giving the people something concrete to defend was the most effective way to fight the war, and for the campesino, the best thing was land.

The primary source of the new land was from those landowners with more than 350 hectares (850 acres) neither used productively, nor rented to tenants. This, it was hoped, would strengthen government support in the countryside and produce more food.

The FSLN believed its policy for food production would be more effective if all producers were members of the organisation which the government controlled, and not in the opposition COSEP. In August 1984, UNAG took its first positive step towards actively recruiting ‘patriotic producers’ by calling on the government to guarantee the land of capitalist farmers would not be confiscated if they continued to produce efficiently. This change was symbolised by the election of Daniel Nuñez as President of UNAG. Nuñez, previously Head of the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Reform (MIDINRA), was a long-time FSLN stalwart. Beginning his political activities with a Catholic Church group, he joined the FSLN in 1972 and had his ranch of over 1,200 hectares confiscated when he was arrested by the Somoza regime in 1974.

Increasingly, the ‘patriotic producers’ and their class interests dominated UNAG and effectively ended its role as an organisation based on the peasantry. Increasingly, the voice of the ‘agricultural producers’ became that of capitalist farmers, the exploiters of agricultural workers. This turn had the effect of undermining the self-confidence and politicisation of the poor peasants, leaving them vulnerable to the demagogy of the capitalists.

According to objective observers, Nicaragua was one of the most democratic states in Central America. On 4 November, 1984, more than eighty per cent of the eligible population voted. Barricada announced the results, seats were allocated in proportion to the votes cast: FSLN sixty-seven per cent of votes cast (sixty-one seats); PCD fourteen per cent (thirteen seats), PLI ten per cent (eight seats), PPSC six per cent (five seats), the PSN, PCN and the People’s Action Movement each got one seat but only about three per cent of the votes cast. Daniel Ortega was elected president and Sergio Ramirez vice-president. The election results showed the huge support of the masses for the FSLN. The US imperialists damned the election as repressive because the Contras were not allowed to run candidates, and because Ortega received a higher percentage of the popular vote than Reagan!

The 1984 election was, in a democratic sense, a real political advance for Nicaragua. Quite rightly, it was applauded, because it was held in the middle of a full-scale civil war, instigated and funded by the US. The election demonstrated that the conquest of power by workers and peasants is in no way a restriction on democratic freedoms. Compared to previous Nicaraguan elections, this was a huge increase in the right to assembly, free expression of ideas and association, freedom of the press, and casting one’s vote without a guard looking over one’s shoulder.

The FSLN’s election programme was reprinted in Intercontinental Press of 1 October, 1984, and can be read with the benefit of hindsight. It contains much that is admirable and would have been supported by revolutionaries: right to a job, to organise and mobilise, to housing, equal pay for equal work, the provision of healthcare and educational services for all Nicaraguans, the provision of water, electricity, communication and transportation to even the most remote areas, particularly the Atlantic Coast. One of the first tasks of the new Assembly would be to draft a new constitution.

These undoubted positive aspects dazzled many on the left who exaggerated such statements as “Weapons will remain in the hands of the people” as proof that the FSLN still represented a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government on the way to a workers’ state. That the weapons were under the control of the army, that the FSLN remained committed to the development of a mixed economy, that the promised land reform did not fundamentally challenge private ownership were ignored.

The FSLN promised to “deepen the popular anti-imperialist character of the Nicaraguan state”. This was done by setting up a government department: ‘the Comptroller-General of the Republic’ to monitor the conduct of civil servants and improve their ‘levels of efficiency’. What was not mentioned, because it cut across the priority of the mixed economy, was any kind of popular or Soviet control of government.

Most revealing was the policy proposed for ‘Women’. This commenced with the statement: “The family laws adopted by the revolutionary government are aimed at protecting women as mothers and providing them the dignity due them within the family” and continues “The Sandinista Front will go on defending the nuclear family and the integrity of the home…” Such statements were a clear warning that this was a government of retrenchment, not one that would take the revolution forward. The bureaucratisation of both the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties was accompanied by just such statements.93

Hidden in the small print was the transformation of the Council of State into the Nicaraguan National Assembly. The FSLN leadership changed the governmental structure to that of the traditional bourgeois parliament. With hindsight, this was a clear indication that the FSLN regime could no longer be classified as a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. However, this was not the response of the majority on the left. Three factors acted to obscure the change. Firstly, the new government had a sizeable FSLN majority and so, it was argued, could continue as before. Secondly, because Nicaragua was subject to imperialist attack, it was necessary to continue to defend the Sandinista government unconditionally (and to some that meant uncritically). Thirdly, there was a subjective element: having defended the revolutionary government for five years, it was very hard to acknowledge it had taken a qualitative step backwards.

Leading leftists now argued that it is not the form of a parliament that makes it bourgeois; because as the FSLN had come to power on a revolutionary wave and had control of the state apparatus, the parliament resulting from the election could not be bourgeois. However, to cover themselves against possible future criticisms, these commentators simultaneously and correctly called for the creation of Soviets on the grounds that such organs were more effective in consolidating workers’ power, suggesting the possibility of some kind of job share between parliament and Soviets.94 This having your cake and eating it approach, was strikingly similar to the counter-revolutionary argument proposed in 1917 by Kamenev and Zinoviev – and damned by Lenin – for the establishment of a dual-power in Russia, a Constituent Assembly and Soviets.

As the economic and social crisis deepened, the FSLN resisted the demands of working people in city and countryside to extend workers’ control over capitalist production and distribution. Such moves were necessary to protect the living standards of workers and peasants, let alone enhance them, but would have challenged the rights of private ownership. As supplies of essential foodstuffs and other basic items decreased, prices spiralled upwards. The only way to guarantee fair access to necessities was to ration them and place their distribution in the hands of democratically-controlled local committees. During 1984, it was self-help initiatives by working women, creating communal soup kitchens, arranging for water distribution, establishing child healthcare centres and organising transport that kept many urban areas from social collapse.95 The shortages in the early years of Soviet Russia had been even more severe: between 1919 and 1920, ninety per cent of Petrograd was fed communally, and in May 1920 nearly 315,000 working class families in Russia were eating in state canteens.

10. Revolution Under Siege (1985)

When the newly elected Nicaraguan government took office in early 1985, it was clear that those leaders least attracted to a socialist course were dominant. Nevertheless, the government responded to pressure from the masses and advanced important anti-imperialist initiatives. First and foremost, the FSLN led the mobilisation of the toilers of Nicaragua to defeat the imperialist-organised and financed Contra War.

The FSLN government could no more guide a capitalist economy toward recovery and expansion than could any government of a poverty-stricken capitalist country in the semi-colonial world. To ease the crisis in production it was necessary to take steps towards a planned economy. Without that, no amount of government effort to reverse the economic decline could be successful. The top Sandinistas, however, still dreamed of collaborating with a ‘national progressive bourgeoisie’.

On 3 August, 1985, Daniel Ortega called for the re-organisation of the FSLN, pointing out that the existing structure was suited to guerrilla groups and underground cells, not an open mass organisation governing a country. Defence of Nicaragua from merciless attack by the greatest military power on earth required improving the quality of the FSLN cadres, increasing the number of cadres, and strengthening the organisation.

The FSLN had a leadership, the National Directorate, the nine Commandants, who made decisions and policy, but no formal membership, even as late as 1978. Its only democratic element was a consultative ‘Sandinista Assembly’, whose members were appointed by the Directorate. Astounding though it may seem, the FSLN did not have its first party congress until 1991, one year after the disastrous election of 1990 and eleven years after the triumph over Somoza. The largest mass organisation supporting the FSLN was the CDSs, but the head of the CDSs was appointed by the Directorate and the CDSs themselves ‘elected’ their leaders from a pre-selected list compiled by the Directorate with no opportunity for democratic discussion on the policies and programmes of different candidates.

Obviously, changes were necessary, but those recommended by Daniel Ortega would not give the membership greater involvement in decision-making. Rather, they gave him greater personal control of the government and party. Ortega’s rise within the FSLN had been steady and continuous. He was a guerrilla leader, a member of the first revolutionary Junta in 1979, then as Junta Co-ordinator in 1984, he was the FSLN Presidential candidate and won a decisive victory. His ambitions were revealed when he successfully proposed within the Directorate that the President be allowed to run for re-election. Despite an official news black-out, it was soon leaked that Interior Minister Tomás Borge had opposed the proposal.

Ortega moved quickly and his opponents were soon demoted. Borge was too senior and popular to be openly sacked, so Borge’s allies became the targets. Henry Ruiz Hernandez was downgraded from Planning Minister to Minister of Foreign Co-operation; the Directorate’s Political Commission, with Bayardo Arce Castano as head, was abolished and replaced with an Executive Committee which Ortega, himself, headed. Agriculture Minister Jaime Wheelock, notionally the country’s top economic planner and another possible rival, was systematically undermined by Ortega’s public apologies for failings in, for example, the government’s agricultural planning, that brought shortages of beef and dairy products.

By November 1986, FSLN recruitment meetings for the new ‘aspiring members’ were being held throughout Nicaragua. One such meeting was at the University of Managua:

A thousand people came to celebrate the admission to the FSLN of some 50 new members, the majority of them women… It was my impression that the FSLN is a young and dedicated party with the great bulk of its members in their twenties.96

Despite these jamborees, the FSLN had fewer than 10,000 militants at the end of 1986.

Membership turnover was high; by 1988 there were as many ex-members as there were current members, the reason being that although the great majority of leavers remained loyal to the revolution they found the undemocratic practices within the FSLN unacceptable. The internal structure and organisation made it impossible to have a political discussion in which honest differences were expressed.97 Moisés Hassan, in an interview carried in the Los Angeles Times of 3 July, 1988, criticising the Tercerista Tendency for damaging the revolutionary quality of the Front, gave his reason for quitting the FSLN as its lack of internal democracy: that it still bore the stamp of its guerrilla origins with a military emphasis on discipline and duty, requiring instructions from the top be obeyed immediately and without question – expressed in the slogan ‘National Directorate – we await your command’.

Without internal democracy, a party has no in-built mechanisms to discuss, identify and correct mistakes. Political policy is inevitably settled more and more at the top, increasingly by an ever-smaller cabal and, in the end, by the Napoleon of the party – Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Lacking a party modelled on Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, where there was maximum freedom of discussion within the party, but a firm discipline when enacting the decisions of the majority, the party inevitably becomes dictatorial. With chronic shortages the order of the day, it was no wonder that, by the time of the 1990 election, top party and state officials were supplied with free housing, free household goods, coupons for the ‘dollar stores’ and for the very tops, Toyota cars.98

Subsequent events confirm that the changes recommended by Ortega in 1985, and subsequently, were made to consolidate his personal base. The Directorate still met regularly and, formally, had the final word on policy matters. But increasingly Ortega became its principal figure with the firm backing of his brother Humberto, Minister of Defence, and Leticia Herrera, who was then in charge of the CDSs and a Vice-President of the National Assembly, described in La Prensa99 as a former close personal companion of Mr Ortega and mother of his son Camilo. The more insightful of American commentators as in the New York Times,100 looked positively on what was happening, and praised Ortega as “among the least dogmatic members of the National Directorate”.

It appears there were no dissenting members of the Directorate regarding the need to preserve the mixed economy, and for the regime to defend capitalist property relations. The FSLN leaders repeated ad nauseum their commitment to preserving the mixed economy. As Tomás Borge said in an interview with New Left Review: “In Nicaragua… the bourgeoisie is… not eliminated, nor do we plan to eliminate it; quite the contrary, we have made substantial efforts to keep it in existence”.101

In the same interview Borge explained that, to win the bourgeoisie to the revolution, it had to be given many economic incentives, “more even than the workers”. “We have sacrificed the working class in favour of the economy as part of a strategic plan”. By the time of this interview, the FSLN had eight years’ experience of the machinations of the bourgeoisie, and one would have thought the Directorate would have realised this was a relationship going nowhere. It was crystal clear that the national bourgeoisie was waging an economic war against the revolution and the FSLN government and refusing to accept its designated role of partner in ending the country’s dependency and under-development.

But the FSLN held firm in its commitment to an obviously failed partnership because its Stalinist, stagist perspective blinded it to what was really happening. It saw only what it wanted to see. Humberto Ortego confirmed: “We cannot resolve at the same time, the problems of national liberation and those of social liberation. We must first complete the stage of national independence and national liberation”.102 However, it was becoming painfully obvious to unbiased observers that, after the jolt of the revolution, the mixed economy experiment had not qualitatively changed the capitalist economic structures in Nicaragua.

By the late summer, the Contras had stepped up their attacks on bus stations and other acts of sabotage, and made their single largest incursion when about 2,500 contras advanced across the Honduran border into the Estelí region. The Directorate responded by re-instating the state of emergency, suspended one year previously. Quite correctly, the state of emergency banned any publicity for those advocating dialogue with the Contras, but it also included a ban on the right to strike, a measure deemed necessary by the Directorate because the government’s austerity package had resulted in strikes and demonstrations demanding higher wages. The Directorate’s thinking was made clear by Daniel Ortega’s address to the United Nations on 21 October, 1985, when he equated those who sabotaged the economy by de-capitalising with those who encouraged strikes and labour ‘indiscipline’.

The Directorate could not totally ignore the mass protests. In 1985, nearly 100,000 hectares of land was distributed to the peasantry, with a fourfold purpose: to strengthen its base amongst the peasants, to increase food supplies for the cities, to enable the government to end food subsidies, and to boost Ortega’s personal prestige. About 7,500 families had received land under the First Agrarian Reform Programme in 1982; in both 1984 and 1983 about 12,000; and in 1985 nearly 15,500: totalling 47,000 families. Official figures claim a more optimistic 86,000. The land allocated per family, however, had halved, from over thirteen hectares per family in 1982 to about six hectares per family in 1985.

In 1985, poor and middle peasants still comprised the bulk of the UNAG members and its banners and flags were seen on demonstrations demanding land. However, Nuñez was remarkably successful in recruiting capitalist farmers to the UNAG, some of whom became FSLN candidates in the 1984 and 1990 elections. These ‘patriotic producers’, of whom Samuel Amador, Nicaragua’s largest rice producer and FSLN member in the Constituent Assembly was one, could have up to 200 permanent employees, increasing to 500 during the harvest. In line with government policy, there was a change in UNAG policy during 1985/86 – the call for redistributed land to be given exclusively to co-operatives was dropped and replaced by the demand for land titles to be given to individual campesinos, subject to their farming it productively. This had the additional benefit of reducing the costs to the government because it could no longer afford the machinery, seed, and technical help that was given to co-operatives.

The urban population had received a minimum of basic foodstuffs at subsidised prices. Within a mixed economy these subsidies fuelled budget deficits and increased inflation. The expectation was that increased food production from the new farms would compensate for the ending of food subsidies. However, many of the new, small farms were engaged in subsistence farming so that what actually occurred was a sharp increase in the price of the now unsubsidised food. The underlying cause of high food price remained: the shortage of supply exacerbated by Contra attacks on food producers. Marketplace food prices became the harsh reality. Managua housewives were outraged as hunger and malnutrition grew rapidly among the poorest city-dwellers.

Food shortages bore down most heavily on women, and at the same time, the revolutionary upsurge had given women a greater sense of self-worth. Thus, for some time members of the AMNLAE had been raising the question of a woman’s right to choose. They had remained silent during the election campaign, but now increasingly raised the charge that, without the right to control one’s own body, which is not possible if abortion is neither legal nor accessible, the road to full equality for women, whether peasants, workers, unemployed or middle class, was blocked. The FSLN government, however, made no change to the law as it existed under Somoza.

A case for abortion on medical grounds (the only grounds permitted) could be brought only by the woman’s nearest male relative and would be heard by an all-male panel of three doctors. Given that many peasant women were lucky to live in a region with even one doctor, securing the approval of three was impossible. Back street or self-induced abortions, unlawful and often bungled, were killing and injuring thousands of women a year. Jon Hillson, a respected socialist and Nicaraguan solidarity activist, had – during a visit to Managua – investigated the major causes of injury and premature death for Nicaraguan women.103 Hillson came to the shocking conclusion that between 1985 and 1988 the single greatest cause of death and injuries to women in Nicaragua was complications due to botched abortions, a greater number than the female casualties in the Contra War. How could a revolutionary and self-proclaimed socialist government tolerate such a situation?

In September 1985, AMNLAE convened a national conference on the actual progress made by women compared to the stated goals of the revolution. The Contra War was blamed for the slow progress, but six years after the revolution, women were serving in the armed forces, working as equals on the production line and were running the CDSs, all of which highlighted the gap between promise and reality. The AMNLAE conference emphasised that the failure to give a woman the right to determine for herself whether and when to have children limited her ability to determine all other aspects of her life. The question of abortion went right to the heart of women’s rights.

The debate brought into the open a central obstacle holding women back from full participation in a self-proclaimed revolutionary society, but the FSLN leaders declared abortion too explosive an issue on which to adopt a public position given the strength of the opposition of the Catholic Church and conservative opposition parties. No member of the Council of Ministers or any of the nine members of the FSLN Directorate declared themselves for legal abortion. Consequently, thousands of women continued to die or suffer serious injuries each year. Botched, illegal abortions were, and would remain, the leading cause of maternal death.

The Sandinista paper Barricada reported on 19 November, 1985, the findings of a study by doctors at one Managua Women’s Hospital: forty-five per cent of all admissions were due to complications from illegal abortions, of which about ten per cent died and a quarter required hysterectomies. Over eight-and-a-half thousand women presented themselves at the hospital in the fifteen months of the study. The pain, suffering and anguish of these women led the doctors and social workers concerned to make two recommendations: The Ministry of Health should implement family planning education programmes and remove restrictions on birth control devices; and the anti-abortion law should be revised.

One FSLN veteran, however, did make her position clear. In the 9 November, 1985 issue of Barricada, Commander Doris Tijerino, Chief of Nicaragua’s police stated she was in favour of sex education in schools and that contraceptives should be cheaper and more easily available. She criticised the law whereby a woman seeking sterilisation needed the written approval of her husband, and explained, with obvious approval, that there was de-facto non-enforcement of the anti-abortion law. AMNLAE made no official statement, but María Lourdes Balaños, AMNLAE’s legal officer stated:

[T]he laws of the past were class-biased in favour of the bourgeoisie… (the current law) says that a woman who has an abortion can be sentenced to one to four years in prison. But if a man beats his wife so badly she has a miscarriage he faces only six months (in prison).

The Atlantic Coast autonomy process had been set in motion in late 1984. In October, 1985, Tomás Borge, Minister of the Interior, produced a report entitled ‘Principles and Policies for the Exercise of the Rights to Autonomy by the Indigenous People and Communities of the Atlantic Coast’, generally referred to as ‘The Autonomy Plan’. This was the basis for the Autonomy Law that would be passed in 1987.

Borge’s report, while emphasising Nicaraguan national unity, recognised:

[T]hat the indigenous peoples and communities of the Atlantic Coast have the full right to preserve their own cultures and historical and religious heritages: the right to free use and development of their languages; the right to receive education in their own language and in Spanish; the right to organise their social and economic activity in accordance with their values and traditions… The rights of autonomy of the indigenous peoples and communities of the Atlantic Coast will be exercised in the geographic area they have traditionally occupied.

This reversed the earlier policy of the FSLN against autonomy on the Atlantic Coast, the FSLN was now pledged to protect local customs and languages while wiping out ‘odious discrimination’.

On the first anniversary of the Autonomy Law, 2 September, 1988, Borge welcomed units of the Miskito militia to the celebration, many of whose members had, prior to the agreement on autonomy, fought alongside the Contras.

The fight against the Contras had forced the government to introduce conscription in August 1983. This was seen as a chink in the FSLN armour and Radio Catolica, broadcast from Managua, kept up a constant barrage of propaganda against the draft, appealing to young men to be draft dodgers. This illegal and highly provocative campaign forced the FSLN to start 1986 by closing the radio station to howls of protest by the international bourgeois media. Soon after, in an attempt to assuage the criticism, Daniel Ortega gave an interview to TIME Magazine. The 31 March, 1986 edition has him declaring firmly:

Now is not the time to establish socialism… We are convinced that our model should not be the countries of Eastern Europe or Cuba… The proper example for Nicaragua (is) the Scandinavian countries.

11. The Contra War, the Economy and the Arias Plan (1986-87)

The Terceristas in the leadership were consolidating their positions, developing a party ‘apparatus’, turning the CDSs into carefully controlled organs of ‘popular power’, establishing a regular army with direct control over the militias. At this juncture, the FSLN leaders still had to mobilise the masses and arm them against the counter-revolution in the form of the Contras backed by US imperialism. During 1986, working conditions in the factories deteriorated significantly. The Contra war brought a severe lack of replacement machine parts and shortages of raw materials. Skilled personnel were often transferred to the front to be replaced by enthusiastic, but inexperienced staff sent to administer and manage the factories. Some attempted to cut costs by not adhering to government pay scales, accelerating the development of currents in the unions that favoured strike action. Unfortunately, all too often, the new managers resorted to needless sackings, which only exacerbated the situation as the workers responded with strikes and picket lines. The managers then called in the police because the workers were violating the state of emergency.

In response, the FSLN launched an educational campaign explaining how industrial action played into the hands of the Contras. It moved to integrate selected union representatives into management structures. On 19 June, 1986, the government made great play of its taking temporary control of the country’s largest car importers and repairers, the Julio Martínez group, in response to calls from the company’s 400 workers alleging the company was union-busting, black marketeering and sabotaging the economy. The FSLN stressed that the company would be returned to the owners “when conditions improved”.104

In June 1986 the FSLN opened public discussion on the proposed constitution to be enacted the following year. As Daniel Ortega had previously indicated, the constitution was based on the Swedish (bourgeois) parliamentary system and, as a bourgeois democratic constitution, it had no structures that gave the mass organisations representing workers any direct role. Marxists have long been aware that the working class cannot rule using a bourgeois state structure since its ideological, legal, parliamentary and military institutions are fine-tuned for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; it is not possible to exercise ‘popular power’ by these means because they are designed precisely to stop any genuine popular participation. The draft constitution with its bourgeois parliament demonstrated unequivocally that the FSLN government was now a radical, reformist government with a popular front strategy based on a mixed economy. It was clear that the FSLN leadership was consciously determined not to step outside capitalist limits economically, socially or politically.

Certain of the proposals, the more progressive democratic clauses such as those requiring equal pay for men and women doing the same work, the right of women to own land and join co-operative farms, the right of female agricultural workers (rather than their husbands) to receive their wages were, of course, to be welcomed. Across the country there were eighty-four public meetings to discuss the proposals, one in Managua on 10 June, 1986, as reported by IP105 was attended by more than 800 women and chaired by Carlos Nuñez, National Assembly Member. According to the IP report only one person, an FO militant, Sara Marina Rodriguez, raised the question of direct representation through decision-making mass meetings.

On 25 June, 1986, the US Congress approved US$100 million in ‘aid’ for the Contras which marked a decisive turn from 1984 and 1985 when funds were restricted to so-called humanitarian assistance. The first Contra attacks were targeted on those Miskitos along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border who had gained land and a title, and who wanted an end to the war; some 4,500 had already returned from Honduras substantially weakening the Contra forces on the Atlantic Coast.

The Congressional vote sparked the most serious rift between Catholic Church and state in Nicaragua because a section of the clergy clearly endorsed the US action. In response, the FSLN suspended publication of La Prensa and denied a Catholic priest, Bismark Carballo confidant of Cardinal Obando the right to return to Nicaragua on the grounds that both La Prensa and Carballo were promoting the mercenary war and breaking Nicaraguan law. The government warned that similar actions would be taken against anyone else who aided and abetted Contra aggression.

On 2 July, 1986, Catholic Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, Vice-President of the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference, held a news conference in Managua. In his trips to the United States he had stated that armed struggle against the Nicaraguan government was justified because the FSLN was violating human rights, discriminating against the Catholic Church and had murdered three priests. But each time he returned to Nicaragua, he claimed he had been misquoted. However, at his Managua news conference he challenged the World Court ruling that Washington systematically violated the human rights of Nicaragua, claiming that the real aggression Nicaragua faced was from Soviet ‘imperialism’. Two days later, the Nicaraguan President’s Office announced the decision to suspend indefinitely the right of Bishop Vega to reside in Nicaragua on the grounds that he had met with top Contra commanders, had justified US military intervention in Nicaragua, and had supported Congressional allocation of ‘aid’ for the Contras.

In the run up to the harvest season (December 1986-January 1987), the ATC launched a campaign with two goals: to increase coffee production and to recruit new members and improve working conditions. At this time, coffee provided about forty per cent of Nicaragua’s exports, but in the countryside, many of the big landowners were de-capitalising by taking government subsidies for the harvest but then neglecting their farms. Working conditions declined, the neglected coffee trees deteriorated, and production fell. The ATC announced an important goal of the campaign was to win for the union some control in order to increase production on behalf of the owner! Despite gains in working conditions on the state farms and co-operatives, in the private sector they were often the same as before 1979. The ATC’s list of demands, aimed at increasing both membership and production, included the employer providing first aid stations, childcare and, importantly, improved health and safety procedures in the use of pesticides and agrochemicals.

The philosophy of the FSLN was that a producer was a producer, whether s/he produced five kilograms of rice or 500 tons of rice. The only class division was whether the landlords were absentee or not, whether they remained on the farm or had moved to the city. By the time of its National Congress of January 1986, UNAG had recruited as many as one third of all large landowners.106

The Contra war was devastating, not only in terms of lives lost but also in terms of productive capacity destroyed, loss of trade, sabotage of ports and transport, and disruption of agricultural production. But the international situation was becoming even darker. By the mid-1980’s, the guerrilla forces in El Salvador and Guatemala had been defeated, and US marines had invaded Grenada and overthrown the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government there. By 1987, the CST was the dominant urban trade union and, like the ACT, was actively implementing state policies. At its June 1987 Congress, the appointed leaders passed resolutions to the effect that ATC members would contribute to the war effort by forgoing wage increases and campaign for the suspension of the Labour Code as it limited the maximum number of hours in the working day.

The failure of the mixed economy meant the FSLN was heavily dependent on outside assistance. From July 1979 to December 1987, it received almost $6 billion in credits and donations. Soviet aid (usually in the form of tractors and oil) increased steadily from 1979 to 1985 when it was US$ 1 billion, it dropped to about US$ 400 million in 1986 and less in 1987. In total, Soviet aid amounted to $3.3 billion. However, the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia were collapsing. The combined economic and military assault from US imperialism left Nicaragua battered and exhausted at precisely the time the USSR was undergoing a counter-revolution and quite willing to wash its hands of Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, and anything that stood in the way of a rapprochement with imperialism. The FSLN leaders, pointedly did not ask for closer economic collaboration with Cuba.

The US administration was also pressurising European and Latin American governments to stop the little remaining aid they were supplying to Nicaragua and demanding the Nicaraguan government agree to negotiate peace terms directly with the Contras, as though the latter really represented a body of opinion within the country. In this they were supported by the PSN and PCN, no doubt reflecting the views of Gorbachev, but going one step further and demanding the release of captured Contras.

Mass protests in the US over military aid for the Contras continued. Then, in November 1986, the policy of the Reagan administration toward Nicaragua was shaken by the Iran-Contra scandal (Irangate). Senior members of Reagan’s staff secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran and used the money obtained to, again secretly, fund the Contras, thumbing their noses at the authority of Congress. Israel acted as intermediary. The Iranians purchased arms from Israel. The Israelis then ordered replacement weapons from the US and paid for them with the money received from Iran. A portion of this money was siphoned off into Contra pockets.107

The result was that the US Congress stopped all overt military support to the Contras in 1987, but agreed to continue to indefinitely supply US$4.5 million a month in ‘non-lethal’ and ‘humanitarian aid’ to the estimated 10,000 Contra rebels and their dependents living in Honduras, with additional top-ups as required. Lacking any popular support in Nicaragua, the Contras were forced to cut back on their activities.

11.1 The Arias Plan

Many on the left claimed the Arias Plan reflected the weakened position of the Reagan administration due to the Iran-Contra affair. But the Arias Plan was not a defence against the Contra War, it complemented and extended it. The Arias Plan was designed to shore up the US-backed regimes in Central America by undermining the Nicaraguan revolution. The Plan was a tool to force concession after concession, giving nothing in return, until at last the FSLN government was replaced by the direct representatives of the national bourgeoisie.

An essential requirement for the Plan to succeed was for Nicaragua to be in an absolutely desperate economic situation. This had been achieved by the Contra War, and the US economic and financial blockade. The first step was for a US stooge, the President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias Sánchez, to offer a deal to Daniel Ortega that gave all the appearances of ending the Contra War: five Central American states (Panama was not included) would cease aid and support to all ‘irregular’ military forces. Nicaragua would have to make concessions but would retain its principled positions, for example, that the Contras were a catspaw of the US, and thus no direct negotiations would take place between the FSLN and the Contras.

Gorbachev was desperately trying to rescue an economy strangled by bureaucracy, but the USSR and Eastern Europe was inexorably sliding back into capitalism. Anxious to ensure that no little local difficulties would compromise the general strategy of peaceful co-existence, Gorbachev had no intention of letting Nicaragua sour relations between Russia and the USA, and put considerable pressure on the FSLN government to sign up to the Arias Plan. In early 1987, Russian oil supplies to Nicaragua were temporarily suspended to pressure the FSLN to accept the Arias Plan, which was duly signed by the Presidents of the five Central American republics (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) on 7 August, 1987.

The signing up of the Arias Plan was the logical conclusion of the refusal of the FSLN to pursue a policy of breaking with capitalism at home and appealing for international revolution abroad. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had signed a much worse peace deal with Germany to save the fledgling workers’ state. The big difference between the peace deal signed by Lenin in 1917 and that signed by the Sandinistas in 1987 was that the first gave the Bolshevik regime in Russia a breathing space in which to consolidate, whereas the Arias Plan was only a first step in overthrowing the Sandinista government. Instead of making an appeal for international support from the working masses, Ortega looked for capitalist sponsorship of Nicaragua’s mixed economy. False friends of Nicaragua, such as Reverend Jesse Jackson, had howled for the FSLN to agree. Once the deal was agreed, the US and the Nicaraguan capitalists denounced it as being too soft on the Sandinistas, demanding a range of additional concessions before the Contras laid down their weapons.

Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1987 and, using the prestige he gained, immediately demanded the FSLN conduct direct negotiations with the Contras, and release those National Guards still in prison. The Nicaraguan bourgeoisie now launched a series of demands, including the requirement that the elected government step aside in favour of a non-elected ‘Government of National Salvation’, and that the Contra forces be integrated into the EPS.

On 15 January, 1988, at a summit of Central American presidents, President Ortega agreed to hold direct talks with the Contras. The New York Times,108 ascribed this about-face as due to pressure from Gorbachev, who threatened to stop all aid to the FSLN. Some informed sources claim that refusal of the former Soviet Union to supply aid in sufficient quantities damaged the Sandinistas more than the presence of the Contras.109 In March, the FSLN government met with representatives of the Contras and signed a cease-fire agreement. The Sandinistas granted a general amnesty to all Contra members who surrendered their weapons and, as goodwill gestures, freed former members of the National Guard who were still imprisoned, allowed the Catholic radio station to return to the air, and permitted the re-opening of La Prensa.

The economy was in free-fall. On 14 February, 1988, the government announced as series of economic measures intended to reduce inflation: the introduction of a new currency which represented a devaluation of 500 per cent; over 50,000 government employees to be laid off; the end of government subsidies on thirty basic foods. What could the FSLN have done if it had the workers’ and peasants’ interests at heart? The Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, in 1951-52, had been faced with hyper-inflation. It protected real wages by insisting workers and peasants were paid not with paper money but in kind, imposed a monopoly of foreign trade and nationalised the banks to control credit and foreign currency exchange.110 Instead, the FSLN government had imposed a dramatic devaluation of the Córdoba, cutting real wages in half overnight.

The private producers, ‘the most inefficient producers in all Central America’ were treated very differently. The big cattle ranchers demanded the government pay a price for their beef five times that of the international market. The government agreed to pay them one and a half times. The rice growers were paid a price which gave them a ‘mere’ seventy per cent profit, when the government could have imported the same rice much cheaper. Given its chosen political and economic direction, the FSLN made concession after concession, including ending the state of emergency. Finally, La Prensa was sufficiently confident to demand seventeen constitutional reforms that would have reversed the revolution: including the return of the National Guard and its integration into the army, the return of all property seized by the government, dissolution of CDSs, and a ‘private’ TV channel.

The FSLN appeared to have learned nothing. Continuing with its mixed economy policy, it began to return nationalised properties to their owners. One of the first was the Julio Martinez auto group. In the teeth of the workers’ opposition, five plants were returned to the Martinez family.

The government continued to meet its expenditures by printing money and so exacerbated inflation, which hit wage earners hardest. The degrading of wage rates and living standards led to an increasing number of strikes against government policies, the two most bitter originating with government reductions in pay. The first was by auto mechanics, who were protesting being transferred from piece work rates to a weekly wage that halved their take-home pay. The total number on strike was about 400. Most were members of the CST but sixty were members of CAUS. Because the CST opposed the strike, CAUS took the leadership by default.

The second was the result of the government announcement made on 29 February, 1988, of a new wage scale for construction workers. So poor were the proposed wages that a trainee would receive C$29 a day but be charged C$30 for lunch. As one trainee put it, “starve on strike, or starve on the job”. For skilled workers the weekly pay fell by two-thirds, from about C$1,100 to about C$310. Over 4,500 workers on fifty-six building sites came out on strike, answering the call of their union, the SCAAS, demanding the new decree be lifted and workers be awarded a 200 per cent wage increase.

CAUS was a PCN union and SCAAS was a PSN union, both of which were pursuing even more obsequious deals with the bourgeoisie than the FSLN, and so were political dead ends.

The CST again attacked the strikes as the work of counter-revolutionaries, ignoring the fact that the economic demands of the workers were entirely legitimate, that they had sacrificed much for the revolution but were drawing the line at hand-outs for the capitalists and starvation wages for themselves. On 2 June, 1988, Barricada International carried an interview with Commandante Víctor Tirado, a leading Tercerista. Tirado did not beat about the bush. When asked if it wasn’t time to spread the economic burdens more evenly he replied:

What is the thinking behind that proposal? That it is necessary to attack the bourgeoisie, those who are benefiting from some dollar incentives? … The workers have to be clear about alliances, about the project of national unity, the strategic policy of the mixed economy. This is a revolution of the workers and campesinos and obviously the burden – primarily the problems and hardships – will fall on them.

On 4 June, 1988, wage and price controls were lifted and the currency again devalued. Daniel Ortega appeared on television and announced that wages and prices would be determined by market conditions. This was an open acknowledgement that the February measures and the whole mixed economy project had failed utterly. Prices soared but wages remained desperately low. COSEP jumped for joy and La Prensa’s headline was ‘Returning to Capitalism’. Nearly all of the economic gains of the revolution were gone. Between 1980 and 1988 real wages fell by ninety per cent.

On 9 June, in discussions with the Sandinistas, differences between Contra factions burst into the open and sank the talks. With the Contras split, even with US$ millions in their pockets, the military war was effectively over, but this was a Pyrrhic victory for the Sandinistas, because the Contras had achieved the major goal of their US paymasters. They had crippled the Nicaraguan economy. The battle was now one of economics and politics.

In one more step away from any kind of central planning, Ortega announced that state and private companies would be free to apply a more flexible wage policy, meaning that despite there being a notional legal minimum wage, employers had no obligation to pay it. On 14 June, 1988, another devaluation was announced. Prices immediately rose by over 1,000 per cent. On 31 August, President Ortega appeared on state-run radio to announce yet another currency devaluation to shore up the economy. The New York Times111 gleefully reported that state agricultural workers were twenty per cent worse off while urban government workers would, in real terms, lose a third of their wages.

Ortega’s proposals also included the concession that designated ‘patriotic producers’ no longer had to sell their produce to the state and were entitled to export their products directly. This marked the end of any pretence of state monopoly on the export of agricultural produce. The owners of the San Antonio sugar mills and those major cattle barons associated with UNAG were amongst the first to benefit from these moves.

In the same speech, Ortega placed yet more austerity measures on the shoulders of the workers and peasants. These entailed across-the-board government spending cuts, including healthcare and education; 23,000 members of the armed forced to be demobilised; 12,000 civil service jobs to be lost; an end to enforcement of the minimum wage.

In October 1988, Hurricane Joan, the final storm of the 1988 hurricane season, struck Nicaragua, killing hundreds, severely damaging or destroying 30,000 homes, leaving a quarter of a million people homeless, washing away 1,000 kilometres of power lines and 650 kilometres of road. There was extensive destruction of farms, with tens of thousands of livestock killed. A severe drought followed in 1989, ruining agricultural production for 1990. Total damage was estimated at nearly US$1 billion, with the resulting inflationary pressure cancelling out any financial benefits of the previous devaluations. The US sent no aid and pressured its allies to send none. Hurricane Joan could be said to be the event that caused the final collapse of the Nicaraguan economy.

The Christian Science Monitor of 25 January, 1989, described the situation:

Even as the poor get squeezed, the government is bestowing privileges and incentives on large agricultural exporters and trained professionals in the sprawling state bureaucracy. Some bureaucrats now receive free housing, household goods, coupons for the ‘dollar’ store, even Toyota Cressidas – Nicaragua’s new symbol of success. Such favoritism, with 50% cuts in most social programmes, has embittered pro-government unions and long-time Sandinista supporters.

The attempts by CST officials to support government policy meant that workers were increasingly turning to more militant alternatives. The FSLN and the CST responded in very much the same way as the Stalinists in the Soviet Union during the faction fights with the United Opposition. Elected union officers were refused entry to their workplaces, union meetings were broken up by strong-arm gangs of CST loyalists, secret ballots denied, FO and CAUS speakers were barracked, jeered, and shouted down. Strike leaders were slandered and sacked.

Ortega agreed to lift the state of emergency and call national elections. In January 1989, as the economy slid into an ever-deeper crisis, with hyperinflation destroying the living standards of the masses, the government launched an austerity plan which was a series of attacks on the living conditions of the masses including laying off one-third of public-sector workers and freezing wages.

12. Women, Workers, and Land Reform (1987-89)

12.1 Women

On 8 March, 1987, International Women’s Day, the FSLN published its long-awaited ‘Proclamation on Women’, the first programmatic statement on the relation of women’s struggles to the Nicaraguan revolution. The statement highlighted women’s historically unprecedented level of political participation in the new government and political organisations – comprising nearly one-third of positions in government, two-thirds of DCSs, and a quarter of FSLN membership. These reflections of participation in the revolutionary process, while unprecedented, were declared insufficient. The stated goal was to create conditions that would make women equal partners in decision-making in the revolution. However, the Proclamation did not mention the right to abortion or birth control and, in effect, marked a decision by the FSLN leadership to end the discussion on these questions. Despite its strong words against machismo, the Proclamation sounded a retreat on the fight for women’s rights.

On 26 September, 1987, at a meeting to celebrate the founding of the AMNLAE, Daniel Ortega, in his role as President, made his first major public statement on abortion:

The ones fighting in the front lines against this aggression (Contra terrorists) are young men. One way of depleting our youth is to promote the sterilisation of women in Nicaragua – just imagine what would happen then – or to promote a policy of abortion. The problem is that the woman is the one who reproduces. The man can’t play that role … some women, aspiring to be liberated, decide not to bear children. A woman who does so negates her own continuity and the continuity of the human species.112

Using such reactionary rationalisations to oppose a woman’s right to choose was a clear demonstration of the political consequences of Ortega moving towards the Catholic Church, and may have had a lot to do with his statement that “the family is the basic unit of society and guarantees social reproduction not only from the biological point of view, but also the principles and values of society”. In the same speech, Ortega declared that indians and black people had never suffered racial discrimination in Nicaragua, either under the Somoza regime or afterwards.

By retaining the current status on abortion, birth control and sex education, the statement offered an olive branch to those advocating a more traditional role for women. The lack of any subsequent public statements by, for example, AMNLAE, offering a pro-woman, pro-choice position reflected the bureaucratic discipline of the FSLN rather than a measure of the opinions of its members. Earlier gains, such as childcare centres and the entry of women into jobs that were previously men-only, were being eroded under the impact of budget cuts and large-scale layoffs. This political retreat continued in 1988, symbolised by the newly-elected national leadership of the Sandinista Youth, which did not include a single woman, a clear statement on how seriously the FSLN viewed its ‘Proclamation’.

In July 1988, a columnist in El Nuevo Diario wrote approvingly of the Miss Moscow contest and argued that Nicaragua should follow suit. Some hotels, restaurants, airlines and the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism launched ‘Miss Elegance’, which was held on 12 August. This was followed by a competition for Miss Juventud sponsored by the Sandinista Youth, the EPS and the Sandinista Television System, to be held on 26 November. There was, naturally, considerable discussion and much public criticism. Barricada balanced its obvious editorial enthusiasm for the events with articles about the contestants, stressing their service to the revolution. Ventana, the cultural supplement to Barricada, was less discrete, boasting the display had challenged the prejudice of leftist dogmatists.

In early 1989, AMNLAE leaders announced plans calling for legislation by the summer to legalise abortion, outlaw wife beating, and stiffen legal penalties against rape. By the middle of the year, however, AMNLAE had bowed to pressure from the FSLN leadership, which argued that raising such issues would “only create confusion” and hurt the FSLN’s candidates in the 1990 pre-election period. Those AMNLAE figures who now sat silent were cadres who, earlier, were outspoken about violence against women and strong defenders of abortion rights.

Women’s share of the labour force had risen from fourteen per cent in 1950, to twenty-nine per cent in 1977 and to forty-five per cent in 1989. In the clothing, textiles, leather, shoes, food, and pharmaceutical industries, women constituted up to eighty per cent, of the workforce (though in the lowest paid jobs), in cotton, coffee and tobacco over half the workers were women, and forty per cent of the members of the ACT. However, defending the jobs of women in the face of cut-backs was becoming more and more difficult. AMNLAE convened a conference to receive reports from across Nicaragua and found that women were twice as likely to be laid off as men. Two members of the FSLN National Directorate, Victor Tirado and Bayardo Arce, spoke at the conference, their message: everything would get better if the FSLN were elected, and that women workers should put their efforts into winning the election on 25 February.

The reduction in the revolutionary content of the FSLN programme reflected its adherence to the theory of stages with the FSLN pushed inescapably to the right. To protect and extend its reformist perspective, the FSLN leadership, represented by Daniel Ortega, were abandoning progressive policies in virtually every sphere, and for women, this included reviving and fortifying the family system. Daniel Ortega would be elected President of Nicaragua in 2007, by which time he would be so strongly opposed to abortion that so-called therapeutic abortions (where the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life) would be made illegal. Amnesty International documented how Ortega’s anti-abortion laws decreed that a pregnancy – anencephalic or ectopic – that could not possibly result in a viable baby had to be carried to its limits; that women who became pregnant through acts of rape or incest had to have the babies; that a pregnant woman with cancer had to have the baby first, then treatment for the cancer, no matter what the risk to her chances of survival.

The situation of women in society, of course, reflects the progress of that society. As Charles Fourier said: “Social progress… takes place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women”. This was demonstrated in a negative way in the former Soviet Union in the official attitude towards women and the family. Trotsky explained:

The forty million Soviet families remain in their overwhelming majority nests of medievalism, female slavery and hysteria, daily humiliation of children, feminine and childish superstition… best of all characterise… the evolution of its ruling stratum.113

Much the same process was occurring in Nicaragua. 

12.2 Workers

As the FSLN became increasingly enmeshed in concertación, efforts by unionised workers to gain a measure of control over decisions concerning investment, production, and conditions of work were, at best, hindered but more likely rejected. The FSLN’s policy was to convince workers that it was in their interests to revive the economy (the theme of all Social Democratic Parties), and to this end they should accept increased exploitation and worse working conditions.

During 1988, the Nicaraguan government implemented a series of measures in response to the economic crisis it was facing. It devalued the C$ four times – 14 February, 4 June, 14 June and 31 August – each one of which hit wage earners hard. It reduced subsidies to peasants, it stepped back from regulation of prices and wages in favour of a ‘free market’ approach to improving productivity. The burdens of a declining economy were placed overwhelmingly on wage earners, both urban and rural, the small producers and artisans, precisely those people who gave the government its popular character. Simultaneously, the top-down style of leadership exercised by the FSLN meant the lack of any serious public debate on the measures to be taken, with a consequent decline in popular support.

President Daniel Ortega denounced striking construction workers protesting against worsening work conditions and lower wages as in the pay of the CIA. Elaborating on his theme, Ortega, in a speech broadcast over Radio Sandino, referred to the strikers as “small groups of disoriented and confused workers who are being directed by people who are conscious elements of US and counter-revolutionary policy”, and “ignorant workers – some of whom claim they are revolutionaries – [who] do not know who the enemy is”. Despite Ortega’s outrage, the FSLN’s economic and political course strengthened those Nicaraguan unions which sought to defend their members from the effects of government policies.

Feeling ever more confident, individual capitalists were flagrantly breaking the law on de-capitalising, so enraging their workforces, that the workers occupied the factory or warehouse, which was then expropriated. These punitive actions were taken from time to time but did not constitute any change in the government’s general course. Such nationalisations were ad-hoc measures implemented without political preparation, aimed at pressuring the capitalists to support the government’s social pact policy. Some workers did welcome these measures, hoping their conditions would improve and they would have increased control over production, but these nationalisations did little or nothing to increase the class-consciousness and self-confidence of the working class generally or give workers increased decision-making powers in the workplace.

In July 1988, the government found itself in the position where it had to confiscate Nicaragua’s largest private business and symbol of capitalism, the sprawling San Antonio sugar plantation and sugar mills. Since 1982, the mill workers had been accusing the mill owners of accepting government grants in US$ to buy replacement parts, but pocketing the money and blaming faulty machinery and poor-quality work for the shortfall in production. In 1987 alone, about US$30 million was put into American bank accounts.

Minister of Agriculture, Jaime Wheelock, who announced the confiscation, emphasised it was not a political measure, explaining that production was falling because the owners were deliberately not investing sufficiently to maintain the refinery. Production had fallen from 150,000 tons to just 55,000 tons in 1987-88. Previously, the FSLN government had refused to nationalise this particular mill on the grounds that Nicaragua needed a mixed economy and that ‘patriotic producers’ should have no problems with the government.

The owners of the San Antonio sugar mill had encouraged its workers to join the Federation of Trade Union Unity (CUS), an affiliate of the American AFL-CIO and as such, anti-FSLN. Preferential treatment, such as prioritised access to company housing, promotion, free sugar to sell on the black market, etc., had encouraged strong support amongst this section of the mill workers, some 200 out of a total of 800, who opposed the nationalisation.

The economic policies were meant to make companies more profitable but, as an article spread across two issues of Barricada114 made clear, all too often this was achieved at the expense of the conditions of the workers. The article ended with a call for greater rank and file participation in determining policies, including workers’ control and community control.

In the two years following the peace accords and victory over the Contras, the influence of the FSLN-led unions and mass organisations on government policy declined, membership participation diminished, and their political level consequently reduced. Leaders of the pro-FSLN trade unions tried to convince doubting workers that it was in their interests and of the revolution, to sacrifice more so the capitalists could gain a bigger share of Nicaragua’s wealth. As the government placed an ever-increasing burden on the shoulders of working people, the leaders of the pro-FSLN unions were increasingly required to curtail efforts to advance workers’ interests, meaning favoured candidates for union posts were the bootlickers. The promotion of the best union members, those experienced in organising and mobilising workers and peasants – for pay and conditions, for land reform, against machismo and for women’s rights, and to advance Nicaragua toward socialism – was blocked.

12.3 Land Reform

The land question is central for any oppressed nation seeking independence, especially where the peasantry forms the majority of the population. In such a situation ‘Land to the Tiller’ is a vital slogan for winning the support of the majority of the population. This was proved beyond doubt in the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions where the resulting peasant-worker alliance enabled essential bourgeois-democratic tasks (national independence, formal equality for women, overcoming hunger and famine, control of inflation, planning to overcome natural and man-made disasters, etc.) to be carried through successfully.

Even during the revolution itself, the FSLN had protected the estates and latifundios of those claiming to be part of the anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, but the FSLN criteria for differentiating between pro- and anti-Somoza landowners are still not clear. The strategy of the FSLN towards the agricultural sector, and repeated many times in speeches and documents was a mixed economy which would be more just and equal than under Somoza in its distribution of land and resources. But two factors seriously complicated the situation: the US-backed Contras displaced some 50,000 families, increasing peasant demands for land, and there was an exodus of peasants from countryside generally to the towns, especially Managua.

On 11 January, 1986, a revised Agrarian Reform Law was adopted. Formally, the new law extended the possibility of compulsory purchase of the larger farms where ‘public necessity’ required it, in particular where lands had lain idle. On 29 June, 1986, the law was further amended to allow the government to confiscate the land of any person who spent more than six months continuously outside the country. It was claimed that these and other measures resulted in over 80,000 hectares being distributed amongst 16,000 peasant families. In fact, the government continued to protect the large private farms, giving them (and medium and small private producers) priority over state farms and co-operatives and, increasingly, the land distributed came not from the private sector but from state farms and co-operatives.

How was the government repaid for its support of the private farmers? Taking the average over the years 1974-78 as 100 per cent, then between 1979 and 1988 the big landowners decreased agro-export production: coffee to seventy-five per cent, beef livestock to seventy per cent, and cotton to twenty-seven per cent, with similar figures for bananas, sesame, tobacco, sugar cane, and milk. The peasant smallholdings, except for beans, increased production for the domestic market: sorghum by seventy-six per cent, corn by thirty-five per cent, rice by twenty-four per cent, and both poultry and pork production more than doubled.115

As the threat from the Contras faded, land distribution slowed sharply and, in 1987, the number of peasant families benefiting from land distribution was at its lowest level since 1982. Under pressure from the biggest landlords, the government confirmed that there was no limit on the area of land that could be held by the largest farmers, provided they maintained production. The new 1987 constitution forbade the seizure of land by peasants and promised “cash payment of fair compensation” for those whose uncultivated land was expropriated; there was a sharp fall in land distributed – Barricada116 informed its readers that only about 9,000 families had been provided with land. The land bordering Honduras is particularly fertile and eminently suitable for beans, corn and rice and peasants moving back into these areas were demanding land. However, a necessary pre-condition was the clearing of land mines with priority given to displaced and demobilised soldiers. By December 1988, the process had begun and in the Jalapa area, for example, about 100 hectares was cleared of mines and allocated to about seventy landless families.

The government retreated by further weakening the degree of state control over foreign trade, and relaxing currency controls. It lifted many restrictions on imported goods and widened the range of products that could be exported directly by capitalists. This further reduced the resources available to the government for social programmes and undermined efforts to control inflation and establish a stable currency, without which effective economic planning was impossible. At this time, the sum total of the imbalance for the country was a deficit of between US$400 and US$500 million annually.

Capitalist domination of manufacturing industries inevitably meant that the prices paid by the peasants for manufactured goods rose faster than the prices they received for their crops. It was estimated that, between February and December 1988, the costs of producing corn, rice and beans rose twice as fast as the price for which these crops were sold. Hence, the peasants suffered a substantial drop in real net income.

A major problem now facing the peasants was that the government was restricting bank loans with the peasants expected to meet the shortfall from the sale of the previous year’s crop. Thus, the Arlen Siú collective farm had agreed a bank loan of C$800 to prepare the soil for planting, but in mid-June, the government ended fixed rate loans and introduced interest rates linked to an inflation rate of more than 1,000 per cent, rendering the interest unpayable.

On 30 January, 1989, the government announced a halt to any further confiscations and re-distributions of land from capitalist farmers, President Daniel Ortega declared to the National Assembly “Sufficient land has already been distributed… there is no reason to take an inch of land from anyone”. Later, the Minister for Agrarian Reform made things crystal clear when he confirmed that this was not a short-term measure. The Militant,117 reported him as saying: “We want to make a long-term strategic arrangement with the private owners, which is to say that the expropriations have finished”. Violeta Chamorra would, after her election as President, go further. By granting amnesty and immunity to National Guards and Contras who surrendered, she opened the door for them to reclaim the lands and homes seized during the revolution.

The ATC was now playing a more openly class-collaborationist role. One ‘patriotic producer’ in Matagalpa Province stubbornly refused to allow a union to be organised. Firing the organiser of each attempt and hiring new workers. Exasperated, the workers occupied the farm and demanded support from the ATC. The union officer dealing with the matter is reported to have said, “Look, I know the workers are right… If I were in their shoes I would be doing exactly what they are doing. But we can’t look at things just from the standpoint of this one struggle… We need to buy some time under peaceful conditions to allow us to get the economy back on its feet”. Trapped within concertación, his response was that of any class-collaborationist union official. Alienation with the FSLN and concertación was spreading beyond militant workers and peasants, into the masses who saw increased workloads lining the pockets of the bosses while their own families went hungry.

Larry Seigle, in the Militant,118 reported on the situation on a coffee farm owned by one of the richest families in Nicaragua. Workers were in dispute over the family’s practice of firing older workers because, after a certain length of service, workers were supposed to receive a higher wage, be provided with housing, and be paid a pension when they retired. But the ATC would not organise a strike against the FSLN-sponsored concertación, instead it recommended workers refuse their pay when it was offered!

After the 1990 election, during 1991, the FSLN began revising its opinion of the agrarian policy of 1979-1986, questioning whether it had been correct to distribute land to landless peasants and agrarian workers. Luis Carrión, a member of the FSLN Directorate, made the astounding suggestion in the 20 June, 1991, issue of Barricada, that distribution of land had resulted in net loss of support amongst the peasantry. Carrión named three groups that had opposed land re-distribution: The first group were peasants who preferred to operate on the black market and not sell produce to the government for re-sale at fixed prices; the second group were peasants who had the goal of becoming big property owners and felt land distribution thwarted their ambitions; the third and last group consisted of the Contras who, it now turned out, were not a military force created and funded by the US, but an indigenous peasant movement.

13. Demobilisation, Economic Collapse and the 1990 Election

The end of the Contra war should have been a huge step forward for the Nicaraguan people, and could have offered the opportunity to extend and deepen the revolution. Would the FSLN repeal the emergency measures constraining the actions of the workers, revoke the ban on public protests such as strikes, return to land re-distribution, end concertación, introduce a planned economy, and so on?

Over the period 1988-1989, thousands of returning workers and campesinos, youth and women, who had fought in the war, had gained leadership experience and self-confidence, came increasingly into conflict with the owners of the latifundios, large commercial enterprises and factories.

With the end of the war many thousands of young, experienced and disciplined cadres were available to assume leadership responsibilities. The military victory over the Contras had instilled the majority of Nicaraguans with a new confidence and a preparedness to deepen and advance the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist characteristics of the revolution. It must be admitted that many of these returnees lacked both the training and the experience to immediately administer public affairs. Being a good soldier does not mean that you can be a good administrator, but post-civil war Russia had shown that, while it might be a rough ride, it was possible.

With the correct leadership, these cadres were capable of rapidly, effectively and consciously moving Nicaragua in an anti-capitalist direction. But just the opposite happened. Having won the war, these cadres were politically demobbed, dispersed, sent home or, if retained in the army, kept largely idle and not used in any significant way to progress social projects.

One example that exemplifies the attitude of the FSLN leaders was the battle the veterans fought with the Ministry of Transportation. On demob, veterans were given a bus pass that should have enabled them to free travel, but the owner-operators of the buses refused to honour these passes on the grounds they were not profitable. Neither the FSLN nor any of its mass organisations made any moves to support the veterans. With each clash such as this, the FSLN leadership made it ever clearer they had rejected an anti-capitalist direction. At the end of the Contra war, seventy-eight per cent of industry, seventy-six per cent of commercial agriculture, and sixty per cent of commerce was privately owned, but to pay for the economic crisis resulting from the war, wage controls and severe austerity measures were imposed on the workers.119

Despite all the evidence of growing inequality, Ortega was still claiming to be convinced that his mixed economy approach with the dominance of market mechanisms would lead to a system in which wealth was fairly distributed. ‘Now is not the time to establish socialism’ became his catchphrase and the FSLN’s stagist view for revolutions in less developed countries was spelled out in detail in El Nuevo Diario (29 and 30 January, 1989). Despite, or because of, FSLN class-collaborationist policies, production in 1988 fell by a third. The great surprise to socialists outside Nicaragua was the lack of any response from either the FSLN or trade union leaders. Quite the reverse. In factories, the local union officials collaborated with management in deciding who to lay off, a process made even more punitive because, in contrast to previous years, those made redundant received no severance pay. The leaders of the CST and ATC responded by calling for the newly laid-off workers to take up Ortega’s offer, move to the countryside and take farm jobs to help raise food production.

On 4 January, 1989, the government devalued the Córdobas to C$2,000 to the United States dollar, up from eighty a year earlier. Simultaneously, it cut subsidies on food, spending on education, health, transport, and sacked 35,000 government workers. More than one-third of the work force was unemployed, there was widespread hunger, factories were closing for lack of power, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, those with skills or a profession, were leaving the country – many to the US. The government’s response: yet more sweeping austerity measures.

In March 1989, Tomás Borge gave a major interview in Barricada in which he attempted a theoretical justification for FSLN policy. His essential argument was that market mechanisms stand above capitalism and socialism, and could be used to serve the interests of the working class.120 In an attempt to give weight to his argument, Borge cited the example of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted in the Soviet Republic in the early 1920’s. The NEP was a necessary, but temporary, retreat in the face of starvation and hunger caused by imperialist military intervention and a civil war. Lenin insisted that the indispensable preconditions for the NEP were the state ownership of industry, nationalisation of the land and the state monopoly of foreign trade. The course being followed by the FSLN was very different from the NEP, which was implemented after, not before these tasks were accomplished; that is, after the establishment of a workers state.121

In mid-March 1989, Daniel Ortega, accompanied by the Minister of Agriculture (Jaime Wheelock), attended a fair supported by COSEP, the organisation representing the openly capitalist landlords and ranchers. Wheelock chose this venue to announce the availability of large, low interest loans in support of the government’s policy of making the beef industry the spearhead for the country’s economic recovery. Ortega again emphasised there was no upper limit to the amount of land a rancher could own, subject to the sole condition that it was used profitably.

One month later, on 20 April, 1989, Daniel Ortega used a UNAG conference to formally announce a series of concessions to private farmers. The first was a fifty per cent reduction in the debts to the state bank for farmers who chose to grow basic food crops. In addition, the remaining debt was spread over five years at much lower interest rates than paid by the banks’ other customers. Cotton farmers received an even better deal if they could increase production, effectively their debts would be written off. Cotton, of course, is farmed mostly on the big, capitalist farms. At the conference, the ATC representatives pressed Ortega on what he would do to help those campesinos still justly demanding some land for themselves and their families. Ortega responded that peasants who had seized land outside the new law would be dispossessed, but the government would allocate them scrub land in the interior, away from the arable coastal regions.

In May 1989, Matilde Zimmermann, an on-the-spot observer, writing in the Militant,122 reported how every three months a Cuban ship arrived with food and other basic supplies sufficient to feed and clothe a quarter of the population of the North Atlantic coastal region. The supplies represented a great sacrifice by the Cuban people, who expected they would be distributed under a form of rationing, but such a strategy was at odds with the policies the FSLN was now promoting. Under its new policy, the FSLN sold these supplies on the free market. Wealthy residents bought what they wanted and merchants grabbed the rest, resold it at inflated prices, and little, if any, of the Cuban shipments reached the masses.

Zimmermann went on to explain that one expression of the political retreat since the end of the Contra war was the growing emphasis on the uniqueness and originality of the Nicaraguan revolution; that this was simply a ploy to conceal the real issue: whether the Nicaraguan revolution should move towards socialism. The ‘defenders of the Nicaraguan revolution’ in stressing how different they were from the Cubans, argued against following the path of the Cuban revolution on the grounds that the Nicaraguan revolution was unique and original. Naturally, every revolution has its unique and original features, but all too often the intention of those who highlight these, is to drown the essential, common socialist content in endless debate, always putting off action until the discussion has been resolved – which they ensure never happens.

On 12 June 1989, the government announced yet another devaluation and, once again, the arithmetic meant workers were up to about thirty-three per cent worse off. The government promised to supply small, privately owned shops with basic necessities for sale at government set prices, but that did not stop a stampede that left all shops with empty shelves. Inflation was destroying any remaining economic stability. This was followed by a series of economic measures: finally abandoning any pretence of a minimum wage and other benefits for the lowest-paid sector of the workforce, cutting government subsidies to farmers to maintain staple food at prices affordable for the masses, cutting government subsidies of basic foods sold in local stores, but expanding concessions to capitalist growers of export commodities.

In June 1989, the EPS issued a new regulation, stipulating that all firearms (except those peasants in areas under attack from Contra remnants) were to be surrendered. Two reasons were given: Sandinistas with rifles slung over their shoulders would alarm the international observers monitoring the election promised for 1990 and, it was claimed, a large number of hand guns had fallen into the possession of criminals, though whether the latter would obey the new regulation was not mentioned. What was certain was that those peasants who had seized land and were squatting on it, or were defending their right to join a union, would now be at the mercy of the landowners.

These and other concessions by the FSLN leaders gave the national bourgeoisie the confidence to increase their opposition to the regime. In early July 1989, at a COSEP meeting, three leading coffee growers called on their fellows to reduce production, and to blackmail the government into making even more concessions. Few responded, but the government was forced to act in the face of this declaration of economic war, and expropriated the lands of all three. Jaime Wheelock, in the columns of Barricada (11 July, 1989), rushed to re-assure other large landowners that they remained ‘absolutely necessary’ for the new mixed economy society.

The promises of Ortega and Wheelock to the large landowners had in the small print some most unwelcome news for those working on state-owned farms. In July 1989, the workers on La Gloria, a state farm growing coffee, were visited by one Sergio Torres, who declared that their picking of bunches of bananas from trees growing on the farm would stop when he became the farm’s owner. The astonished workers were told, by an army officer sent from Managua, that Torres was getting their farm in compensation for a farm he had had expropriated in 1979.

Luis Carrión, FSLN Minister for the Economy attempted to explain government policy:

We’re making an effort to bring together all the sectors of the nation, including the private sector, in order to deal with the economic crisis. This could lead to a qualitatively new style of government in the economic aspect, a style that would assure that the points of view and interests of all sectors are taken into account when it comes to formulating economic policy… we no longer talk of a planned economy… A planned economy becomes less and less possible to the extent that the policy we have been following grants more and more weight to market forces in the functioning of the economy.123

In July 1989, the ground rules for the February 1990 elections were agreed, one of which was that private property would not be subject to confiscation or expropriation for political reasons. Twenty opposition parties had been declared eligible to run against the FSLN. Published surveys showed that if the opposition parties could agree on a presidential candidate and form a bloc, then they could defeat the FSLN.

The FSLN’s new and openly pro-capitalist course was too sudden to allay Washington’s fears. George Bush (US President, 20 January, 1989 – 20 January, 1993) agreed to fund an electoral alliance and, after much horse-trading, a coalition of fourteen opposition parties agreed to form the National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositora, UNO) and run Violeta Barrios de Chamorro for President with Virgilio Reyes Godoy (a former FSLN Minister of Labour who had moved steadily rightwards to eventually lead the PLI) for Vice-President. The UNO contained Contra leaders, conservatives and liberals, the Social Christian Party, and the Stalinist PSN.

A most significant event occurred over the summer of 1989 – private wards were re-introduced into state hospitals. The first hospital to do this was the Bertha Calderón Women’s Hospital in Managua. As a pilot project, the hospital converted four rooms into two singles and two doubles with all the facilities a private patient could expect. The initiative was soon being copied by other hospitals, though prior to the election there was neither any public announcement nor news coverage. Doctor Maritza Quant, Director of the Women’s Hospital, commented that the project would be extended to a separate annex for private patients and “as for the new private system, I don’t see how it can be stopped”. Of course, the privatisation of healthcare in Nicaragua has not solved the problem of lack of access to medication. Today, there is one physician for every 1,400 Nicaraguans, and in Cuba one for every 300 Cubans. At its best, the health service provided by the FSLN government reduced infant mortality from 120 per 1,000 live births to sixty-two. Cuba has a much lower figure, four. But as Ortega had made clear, Nicaragua’s model was not going to be Cuba.

13.1 The 25 February, 1990 Election and its Aftermath

These elections took place under conditions of unbearable blackmail by imperialism and were extremely polarised. Ninety percent of those over sixteen years of age and resident in Nicaragua registered to vote, and eighty-six per cent of those actually voted (Nicaragua, Parliamentary Report on 1990 elections). Hundreds of bourgeois observers, including ex-President Carter, searched in vain for reasons to declare the elections biased and unfair if it did not produce the result they wanted.

Significant numbers of National Guards, who had been allowed to return home after the Arias Accord, found their property occupied. In Managua, where there was a serious shortage of accommodation, they took legal steps to regain their property and, to everyone’s surprise, were able to obtain court orders for eviction. One such case that received considerable publicity concerned a property that was in use as a health centre in a working-class neighbourhood. The local community rallied to protect it, confronting the authorities. Ultimately, Managua Council declared the building to be a public necessity. Across Managua there were hundreds of such instances, and in the majority, the tenants were evicted. This was no good for the FSLN in the run-up to the election so, at the end of August 1989, the National Assembly passed a bill to suspend all legal proceedings for repossession of urban dwellings for 180 days, just long enough to quieten things for the election, but not so long that the landlords were seriously inconvenienced.

The FSLN candidates in the 1990 election were Daniel Ortega for President and Sergio Ramirez for Vice-president. Their election programme was, officially, determined at a one-day convention of 1,200 selected FSLN delegates on 24 September, 1989. The programme was to be “realistic”, “responsible”, guaranteed “to maintain… private property” and to protect “ownership of the land”, while promising land for 25,000 peasant families. Specific proposals were limited to mildly reformist demands: to build 500 kilometres of new road, to build 6,000 new homes annually and to double the number of telephone lines in Managua. The section on women promised to struggle for the stability and unity of the family and, within that framework, to provide sex education and family planning. AMNLAE had been expected to raise the question of the right to abortion, but behind-the-scenes manoeuvres meant it was not brought to the floor of the convention.

On 12 December, 1989, Daniel Ortega, jointly with the presidents of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, issued a statement in support of the El Salvador regime, calling for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) to immediately and effectively cease hostilities and take steps towards immediate demobilisation. The FMLN was the parallel organisation to the FSLN when it was a guerrilla force. The regime in El Salvador, backed by the US, and to preserve its position, had killed more than 70,000 Salvadorans and driven a million more into refugee camps. The FMLN indignantly rejected the declaration on the grounds it was in flagrant contradiction to the wishes of all democratic forces in El Salvador and in support of those guilty of crimes against humanity. Ortega defended his actions in the columns of Barricada (21 December, 1989), on the grounds that the FSLN’s support for people fighting for their freedom and independence had to be “within the norms of co-existence with other governments”.

The FSLN leadership used the 1990 election to steer the revolution of 1979 into a capitalist straight-jacket. The more the FSLN leadership presented the election as bolstering the gains of the revolution, the more it miseducated an entire generation. For the 1990 election the leadership transformed the FSLN into an electoral machine with a party organisation modelled on that of a radical bourgeois electoral party, with a mass following, but with no political accountability of the leadership.

Up for election were the President, Vice President, ninety members of the National Assembly, hundreds of local councillors and, on the Atlantic Coast, local autonomous regional councils. The FSLN shared its election platforms with capitalist ranchers and farmers, called for the continuation of concertación, and instructed the CST and ACT to avoid confrontations with management during the election campaign. The FSLN election slogan was: “Daniel for President – With me everything will be better”. Large glossy posters showed Daniel Ortega holding a suitably photogenic child, but in village meeting halls there were also posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Sandino.

The Sandinistas lost the elections in a vote against hunger and misery, a protest vote against the FSLN because it offered no perspective. A substantial factor in undermining the FSLN support was that the masses could see that the suffering brought by the Contra War was not equally shared. Walking in the streets of Managua it was obvious that there were those that were doing well out of the situation. These privateers, the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’, the owners of factories and large farms, made enormous sums out of state-subsidised credit. Borrowing at a fixed rate meant that, with inflation rates of 1,000 per cent or more, they paid back only a tiny fraction of the value of the sum lent. Wanting to be on good terms with these ‘patriotic producers’, the state bought their produce at fixed prices, higher than they would have paid on the international market.124 This meant a layer of society was able to visit the ‘dollar shops’ selling jeans costing a month’s wage of a teacher.

The 25 February, 1990, election saw the Sandinistas beaten by Violeta Chamorro – the candidate of the old oligarchy. The US Congress had intervened directly in the election through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a body established and funded by the US Congress, and the CIA. The NED spent some US$48 million on the election in favour of the UNO candidate, who gained fifty-five per cent of the votes cast. Chamorro and her supporters pushed the line that a vote for her was a vote that would ensure peace and prosperity. This was the natural outcome of a mixed economy policy, and the exclusion of the masses from government. With the UNO victory, Ortega declared the election “the consolidation of democracy”.

But the most important factor, by far, was the lack of leadership from the FSLN Directorate. As living conditions fell, the FSLN turned increasingly to a market system, demanding ever higher production levels from workers in factories with no raw materials, where machines went unrepaired, and where the real value of wages fell by the week. When some workers fought back, the FSLN declared a state of emergency, banned the right to strike and cut social spending to rock bottom, climaxing in 1990, the crucial election year. Social differentiation increased as bourgeois values were promoted, children and families were again seen scavenging through rubbish piles to find the means to stay alive. By 1989, the average person’s real income was less than half of what it had been in 1977. Morale among the Nicaraguan people was falling rapidly and scepticism towards the FSLN was widespread.

The 1989/90 electoral programme of the FSLN, the bourgeois form of the elected assembly and the constitution, which turned its back on any form of Soviet democracy, brought to a head simmering differences on the revolutionary left internationally concerning the class nature of the FSLN regime. The essential difference was whether the FSLN would “quickly reactivate itself, affirming its decision not to give up control of the army and to defend the social gains, relying on popular mobilisations”,125 or whether Humberto Ortega was retained in his post as Head of the ESP in order to ensure no such mass mobilisations occurred.

On 26 February, 1990, top government officials met with UNO leaders in the presence of high-ranking US diplomats, to discuss the hand-over. The next day, La Prensa carried a large front-page photo of Chamorro and Humberto Ortega in an embrace under the headline: ‘First step towards reconciliation’. On 27 February, Daniel Ortega addressed a crowd of thousands of FSLN party members and supporters urging them to accept the election results, leading them in the chant ‘We will govern from below!’ Perhaps he half-remembered the similar slogan used by third period Stalinism: an approach that resulted in the Nazis taking power in Germany.

The labour law existing in Nicaragua in 1990 had been adopted in 1945, drawn up by the PSN when it was in partnership with Somoza, and designed to ensure workers toiled flat-out for the war effort without any disruptions such as strikes. Between 1979 and 1990, there had been calls for change, but the FSLN had never felt it necessary to take remedial action. Now, however, the workers were faced with a legislature that would be dominated by the pro-US bloc led by Chamorro. After the election and before the new government took office, workers across Managua were taking advantage of the hand-over period to engage in industrial action in expectation of a much harsher regime. But the workers were not only demanding wage increases, they were demanding the ATC and CST get the FSLN to change the labour law before the UNO took over government. At the time, the total labour force consisted of approximately 1,300,000 persons. About one-third of these were female, and about one-third of all working-age women held jobs, but half of Nicaragua’s work force was under- or unemployed.

Militants argued that workers would be faced with an openly capitalist regime and should have stronger legal protection. However, the FSLN leadership argued that such a course of action would be a declaration of war on the new government, ‘the road of violence’. The FSLN had to take ‘the road of peace’, which both bosses and workers would be urged to follow. The union members were having other thoughts.

During the pre-inauguration discussions, the fifty-one UNO assembly delegates, an unstable and opportunist grouping, split into a majority faction supporting Violeta Chamorro and a smaller group supporting the Vice President, Virgilio Godoy. The differences centred on the speed at which the reforms and services (e.g. health and education) introduced by the FSLN would be dismantled. On its own, neither UNO grouping had a majority, and on 24 April, Chamorro and Daniel Ortega did a deal for the FSLN to support Chamorro’s group and become part of the governing block. In her inaugural speech, Chamorro announced Humberto Ortega would be retained as army chief. Humberto, for his part, pronounced Violeta to be a Sandinista!

This deal was the natural extension of the concertación policy of the FSLN, a de-facto coalition government, a popular front government. That is not to say the Ortega brothers did not use the militancy of the workers to bolster their position in the negotiations with Chamorro. Leading militants had stopped listening to the FSLN and, beginning on 11 May, and for two weeks, over a hundred strikes, predominantly in the public sector, swept across the country in the final week of the hand-over. The National Federation of Workers (FNT, a coalition of pro-FSLN unions), in fear of losing members to PSN unions, demanded a 200 per cent pay increase, an end to lay-offs, for greater state support of nationalised industries, and an end to the return of state farms to private owners. About 60,000 Government workers staged sit-in strikes.

Cynically, Daniel Ortega came out publicly in support of the strikers, a manoeuvre that had the additional benefit of heading off opposition within the FSLN to the deal with Chamorro. Ortega’s support was, however, heavily qualified: emphasising the need for the re-establishment of calm, rejection of provocations, rejection of physical violence. The overall outcome was a sizeable victory for the FNT, with wage rises of over sixty per cent, but while many of the strikes were victorious, others were not.

In the same way, the FSLN leaders called a mass May Day demonstration with the demand ‘Disarm the Contras’ – a real issue that needed to be raised and acted upon; vigilante groups, Contras who had not been disarmed, had attacked strikers and at least one picket had been killed. But here the demonstration was primarily to show Chamorro that the FSLN still had mass support and would make a better partner in government than either Godoy or the Contras.

Factors such as prices continued to shoot up, public splits in the FNT and the threat that state-owned enterprises would be returned to their private owners were wearing down the resistance of the workers. Many of the less class-conscious saw it as a choice between having a job, any job, rather than being out of work. However, it was not economic hardships that disoriented and demobilised Nicaraguan toilers, it was the leadership default of the FSLN in failing to project any course for working people to act collectively against the exploiters and by their own efforts to change the course of their lives.

Almost everyone sought some means to augment their inflation-ruined wages and salaries. A fixed pay-rate had become increasingly meaningless in the late 1980s due to inflation and high annual turnover, as much as 100 per cent for urban industrial workers, was also typical of the Nicaraguan labour force as workers continually sought a better deal. Many Nicaraguan workers took to black marketeering, street vending, driving taxicabs, with some earning their livings on the streets – all non-productive labour. By inauguration day, 1990, it was not unusual for members of the salariat to earn as little as the equivalent of US$10 per month (not enough to pay for the food necessary to feed a family) while black marketeers made over ten times as much. A direct result of the mixed economy.

The continuing class-collaborationist perspective of the FSLN was explained by Humberto Ortega in an interview for state-run television four months after the election, on 27 June, 1990. The army (of which Humberto was head) paid for the interview to be published as a supplement in both La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario. Humberto described the recent elections as decisive in achieving peace in Nicaragua, saying: “Elections equal peace, peace equals economic recovery equals a firm foundation to begin to overcome underdevelopment”.

After the election, the FSLN, with an occasional squeal, supported the austerity measures of the Chamorro government accepting falling real wages and a return to unemployment and underemployment levels of fifty per cent, on the grounds that “we cannot return to the 80s”.126

The extreme nature of the neo-liberal measures taken by Chamorro and her successor (Arnoldo Alemán) meant the privatisation of everything that could be privatised, with those lucky enough to find work labouring twelve hours a day, six days a week for less than US$1 an hour. This was accompanied by the return of the wealthy families which had supported Somoza, flaunting their riches and regained social positions.

The economic course of the Chamorro government after 1990, supported by the FSLN leadership, was to place an increasing burden of indebtedness and material want on the mass of toiling peasants such that many of them went bankrupt. Under the Chamorro government, large farms would, once again, swallow up the land-holdings of smaller peasants.

As these events were developing, the majority of the FSLN National Assembly delegates, led by the leader of the parliamentary group (Sergio Ramirez) and the editor of Barricada, formed a faction in the run-up to the FSLN’s 1994 First Congress’ Extraordinary Session. This group would split from the FSLN and would ensure the neo-liberals had the full backing of the National Assembly. In the run-up to the Congress, Daniel Ortega, again putting on a left face, toured the country vigorously, calling for mass actions against the Chamorro government, voicing undying opposition to imperialism and supporting strike actions. At the Congress he was elected by acclamation, after which it was business as usual. Once back in charge Daniel Ortega imposed an even more rigid top-down structure than before, turning the FSLN into his personal election machine.

In 1996, the FSLN (with Daniel Ortega once again their candidate) would lose to Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Alliance. However, in 2006, Daniel Ortega would be elected President of the poorest country in Central America and the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere, with widespread unemployment, under-employment, poverty and hunger, and an income distribution that was one of the most unequal in the world. That was the price the Nicaraguan masses paid for the lack of political perspective of the leaders of the FSLN.

Ortega now sought to neutralise the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy. The neo-liberal economic policies had hit women hardest: they were the first to lose their jobs; they and their families suffered most from the cutbacks in health and education; patriarchal attitudes reasserted themselves, reducing women to second-class status. Ortega now chose to align himself with Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, and the 2006 Presidential election was noticeable for the FSLN candidate’s attacks on the women’s movement, in particular his all-out attack on women’s reproductive rights. Before Ortega’s election, the FSLN voted to abolish the right to even therapeutic abortion. For women, Nicaragua is one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

After Ortega and the FSLN lost the 1990 election, the FSLN women’s organisation AMNLAE broke asunder. A Women’s Movement had grown outside AMNLAE, largely independent of the FSLN, and outside the control of the Ortegas. It is the major voice protecting women’s rights, both factory workers and campesinos. The focus has become ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’, and the Movement is under constant attack for, allegedly, serving the interests of the country’s oligarchy, being upper-class intellectuals, out of touch with ordinary women and criminals. The severity of the onslaught demonstrates that this is a real issue in Nicaragua with the potential for becoming a mass movement.

The case of Nicaragua shows how important revolutionary leadership is. A petty-bourgeois guerrilla organisation was swept to power on a mass, urban uprising. With no perspective of overthrowing capitalism, they moved ever further to the right, protecting capitalism from the righteous demands of workers and peasants. There was no revolutionary party to correct this stagist perspective, no means by which the masses could impose their will on the FSLN tops. The self-sacrifice and heroism of the masses in their battles with the National Guard showed there was excellent human material from which to recruit a Marxist Party. But without workers’ democracy, the anti-Marxist policies of the FSLN leadership, systematically miseducated sections of the youth, women, campesinos, and workers. There is, however, no way to bypass the challenge of building such a party, there are no short cuts around it.

14. Conclusions: What Could Have Been Done?

Before Nicaragua, Workers’ and Peasants’ Governments had, within a couple of years, either progressed to a workers’ state (e.g. China, Cuba, Russia and Yugoslavia) or been overthrown by a counter-revolutionary coup (e.g. Algeria and Grenada). What was unique about Nicaragua was that, after a successful revolution, the entire leadership united to take the revolution in an openly capitalist direction. The Nicaraguan revolution decayed from the head down. Nicaragua was a demonstration that in the real world, a world dominated by imperialism, a revolution, even with heroic and massively popular support, will, without revolutionary theory, revert to capitalist oppression.

With the 1990 elections, the FSLN could be seen for what it had become: a radical bourgeois electoral party representing an obstacle to the development and political education of Nicaragua’s working classes. Its political roots were a mix of Social Democracy, Liberation Theology, remnants of Stalinism, and some liberal bourgeois ideas, that combined to promote the myths that revolutions all end with the capitalists back in control, that lasting victories are not possible, and that minor reforms are all that can be hoped for.

During the initial stages of the revolution, class-struggle alternatives to the FSLN did make a brief appearance, but in conditions of retreat and even defeat, it would not be expected that a class-struggle alternative to the FSLN would emerge. What would be expected and what happened is that workers and peasants engaged in local defensive actions. For example, in the spring of 1999, striking transport workers forced President Arnoldo Alemán’s government to give in to nearly all their demands. Alemán promised to reverse the price of diesel fuel from $1.41 to $1.28 and abandon plans to deregulate the country’s bus lines. Nor have all the revolutionary-democratic gains been lost. Students are no longer being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night by cops, taken to the outskirts of town, badly beaten and then shot. These gains will remain for some time, although they will inevitably weaken.

Where peasants benefited from land reform by taking over capitalist holdings, so long as capitalism exists, class differentiation will sharpen and the campesinos will gradually be driven off the land. The 1990 election accelerated that process, pardoned Contras were legally entitled to the return of their lands and properties. Banks now regularly foreclose on impoverished peasants, and the big landlords can find a thousand reasons for taking a peasant’s land. Small farmers increasingly sink into the landless semi-proletarian and proletarian layers.

The character of the Sandinista regime, radical, petty-bourgeois and hierarchical, contained the basis for its own defeat. Its contradictory character and utopian perspectives played into the hands of the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. Mass mobilisation ousted Somoza, but that did not stop the remaining national bourgeoisie, with enormous help from US imperialism, European Social Democracy, the Catholic Church, and FSLN leaders, from making a comeback.

For the revolution, the two most serious problem were the lack of a Leninist party and no independent organs of workers’ power, no Soviets, in either the cities or the countryside. These omissions were quickly and consciously filled by the FSLN, with a radical but reformist programme.

14.1 What Could Have Been Done? Pre-Revolution

Despite the setbacks experienced by the Nicaraguan workers, we expect a new generation of working-class fighters will eventually emerge and follow Carlos Fonseca in his determination to ‘go all the way’ but, with the experience of the class-collaboration of the FSLN, they will adopt the practice of permanent revolution conceptualised by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mella.

There were many on the revolutionary left who, after the victory of the Cuban revolution, concluded that a Marxist, democratic centralist party was no longer necessary for a workers’ victory over capitalism. The failure of the FSLN in Nicaragua to successfully carry through even the bourgeois-democratic tasks such as Land to the Tiller, gaining national independence, and equal rights for women, let alone taking the revolution forward to social equality, should have buried that particular fallacy. A petty-bourgeois, guerrilla organisation has been shown to be an insufficient instrument for the overthrow of capitalism.

The first task of revolutionary socialists in Nicaragua was, and is, to contribute to the building of a democratic, disciplined, and centralised Leninist party of committed cadres dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Such a party is suited both to lead a successful mass uprising and continue the revolution through to the creation of a workers’ state. As part of building such a party, it is necessary to achieve ideological and strategic clarity: to provide an explanation of events that corresponds to the actual situation in order to enter into a meaningful dialogue with workers, students, women, campesinos, and honest FSLN members. It was a fatal error for the FSLN to try to deal with a complex and contradictory situation on the basis of an out-of-date schema.

Discipline in the FSLN was military-bureaucratic, orders from the top were to be obeyed, and policy was made with little or no input from the members. Lenin’s democratic centralism was very different. Policy was determined by the membership by majority vote after free and thorough discussion. Once policy was determined, the minority was required to accept and implement the decisions of the majority and then allow the test of events to determine who was right. After the FSLN came to power in Nicaragua, such a process would not have been tolerated, because the leadership was determined to implement a class-collaborationist policy that protected the bourgeoisie. Indeed, a programme best matching reality would have meant the immediate end of concertación and the Directorate.

A Marxist cadre party was essential because the toilers in Nicaragua needed to take more than just defensive actions, more even than overthrow the Somoza regime. History has demonstrated that a democratic revolution, especially one beginning with demands such as land to the peasant, cannot be carried through to a successful conclusion without taking the first steps towards socialism. Living positive proof is the Cuban Revolution, living negative proof is the recent history of Nicaragua.

Building the Leninist combat party as the number one goal may be the objective, but how to do it with limited resources under the watchful eyes of the National Guard? What would have been its programme? In particular, what strategy/tactics would a revolutionary socialist organisation have adopted in the pre-revolution period, during the 1979-80 revolution, during the restructuring of the FSLN and constitutional change in 1987, and the 1990 election?

During the period after the Chinese Communist Party had adopted the strategy of rural guerrilla warfare it withdrew its cadres from the factories to fight in the rural areas. Trotsky advised that the situation in China was not then revolutionary, that the correct strategy should be to draw the masses into action with democratic demands, including the eight-hour-day. Such slogans were intended to bring broad masses into activity and prepare the ground for raising revolutionary slogans and establishing Soviets.127 Later, Liu Shaoqi, when making an overall assessment of the work of the CCP during that period, admitted that democratic slogans were what had been required. He explained that the CCP had condemned the use of democratic slogans as ‘rightist’ … “the losses we have suffered on this account are countless”.128 The possibility of organising and unionising workers in China in 1937 under Japanese occupation was less propitious than in Nicaragua in the 1970s as evidenced in the successful PSN-led strikes during the Somoza dictatorship.

Would revolutionary socialists have carried out their political work as part of the FSLN? This is not easy to answer. At first sight it appears obvious that the masses rallied to the guerrillas and swept them to victory. But the charisma and attraction of the guerrillas came almost entirely because they had demonstrated they were the only ones prepared to take the fight against Somoza to the end. They were also glamourised because they were seen as the Nicaraguan equivalent of the ‘bearded ones’ of the Cuban revolution. Yet it was urban, not rural uprisings, that swept Somoza from power. Guerrillas who had made their main focus the rural and border areas, often arrived after the urban uprisings had routed the National Guard. An experienced and tested urban insurrectionary leadership may well, in those early days of the uprisings, have taken power based on a Soviet-style network of local Civil Defence Committees.

14.2 What Could Have Been Done? The Revolutionary Upsurge

In Nicaragua there was no better time to form Soviets than from the summer of 1979 to the spring of 1980. Lenin emphasised that the concept of the Soviet was simple and applicable to peasants and factory workers alike,129 and Soviets would have meant the democratisation of the revolution. In the urban centres CDCs existed and the workers were demanding political rights such as freedom of assembly, association, speech, and to strike. In the countryside Soviets could have been based around actions taken on the basis of destruction of the system of latifundios, in particular, ‘Land to the Tiller’, and ‘End Debt Repayment’. The Russian experience had shown that, given a firm lead, middle peasants would support the revolution if the revolutionary regime approved the seizure of the landed estates and their distribution to the peasants by the peasants. Though, of course, there had to be a minimum level of organisation in existence to pose such a programme.

In times of revolutionary upheavals, Soviets emerge organically from the mass movement: from strike committees, action committees, peasant leagues, and other representative bodies. In Nicaragua the CDCs were the basis for the self-activities of the masses, bringing into action broad sections and directly expressing their will. Soviet power could have been fought for through the convening of Soviets both locally and nationally. For CDCs and peasants’ committees to take the lead and control the revolution through a national congress of delegates which would determine policy for the revolutionary government. Revolutionaries would have fought within those organisations for a programme of transitional demands leading to a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

The CDCs gave a structure to the mass opposition to the Somoza regime and would have done the same for the expropriation of the big bourgeoisie. These committees formed the embryo of a genuinely revolutionary force based on the actual movement unfolding in the cities. Free, democratic workers’ Soviets are the mechanism by which the masses assess and impose their will on the parties that claim to represent them, and it was to avoid such a process that the FSLN took control of the CDCs so quickly. In this the FSLN followed the example of one of their mentors, the Chinese Communist Party, which was also terrified of genuine Soviets, to the extent that it developed the novel argument that the Bolsheviks had come to power against the Soviets and that any other interpretation was ‘Trotskyist’.130 The CDCs could have carried the revolution to the capture of governmental and state power, but such a concept was alien to the FSLN.

In the second half of 1979 Nicaragua was in the process of a revolution and the transitional demands made by revolutionary socialists would have led from the actual situation to the goal of a workers’ state, and very likely have included:

• The CDCs to be transformed into workers’ and peasants’ councils (Soviets), into organs of power. The CDCs throughout Nicaragua to send delegates to a central congress in Managua.
• Complete destruction of Somoza’s National Guard, police force, and judicial system.
• All major enterprises, factories, TV and radio stations, etc., to be nationalised and put under the control of the workers employed in them.
• All land to be nationalised and the large estates to be shared as decided by the peasants themselves.
• Control of the militia to be retained by the CDCs. Militia to retain their weapons.
• State monopoly of foreign trade.
• A national economic plan drawn up on the basis of production for need not for profit.
• Renunciation of all foreign debt pilfered by the Somoza family and its entourage.
• A woman’s right to choose must be incorporated in the constitution, as must the rights of the indigenous, the Black Nicaraguans of the Atlantic coast, and all other groups.
• A socialist federation of Central America, beginning with Nicaragua and Cuba.

The Nicaraguan masses had armed and organised themselves to take and defend revolutionary power. Popular militias had been formed in localities, in factories and workplaces, and had demonstrated their effectiveness by smashing the Somoza regime and destroying the National Guard. One of the first actions of the FSLN was to regularise these militias. Neighbourhood and village CDCs were adopted by the FSLN in such a way that they retained the dual role of political mobilisation and active involvement of working people in the revolution, and yet keeping those activities within the bounds set by the FSLN. The FSLN showed great skill in rapidly transforming the CDCs into CDSs and quickly mobilising them for hugely popular campaigns such as the literacy drive, the child immunisation programme, and ensuring that food rationing was fair and effective. Instead of the CDCs becoming the organisations of revolutionary power, they were co-opted into the mixed economy as CDSs under FSLN control.

Revolutionary popular militias always terrify the bourgeoisie, for whom the disarming of the people is a priority. Such a goal was quite in accord with the Programa Sandinista, the only surprising aspect being the speed with which the FSLN moved to disarm the CDCs. Within two months of the revolutionary upsurge, on 28 September, 1979, the order was given: all weapons and military equipment to be turned in. Revolutionary Marxists would have called for the retention and strengthening of the armed militias based on the CDCs, not their demobilisation.

Nevertheless, during and following the revolution it was necessary to be cautious in proposing any course of action that challenged the FSLN leadership. It was hugely popular and had a dedicated following in the barrios and amongst the poor peasants because the first, most immediate and very important gain of the revolution was the end of the reign of terror and this was popularly ascribed to the FSLN. Tomás Borge in the May and June, 1981, issues of Latinamerica Press confirmed that the Directorate understood this and had used this popularity to control the direction of the revolution.

In such a situation, from 1979 to at least 1985, regardless of the leadership and/or programme and/or alliances of the FSLN, revolutionists had to place themselves within the current represented by the FSLN. The struggles for an independent working-class party, for independence from the bourgeoisie, for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government and progression to socialism all had to take place as part of the FSLN’s mass organisations. Revolutionaries would have been loyal militants but fought for the political and organisational independence of the working class, attempting to lead those struggles that posed the question of power and democracy, both urban and rural, as a focal point of democratic and transitional demands.

Party building after the revolution would have included working within the mass organisations: in AMPRONAC on a woman’s right to choose; as militants within trade unions demanding free speech, the right to assembly, the right to strike, and nationalisation under workers’ control; within the ATC, raising the demand for nationalisation of the land and its sharing out by the peasants themselves; within the student and youth movements calling for free speech and the right to assemble, for free education and/or training up to and including university level. Whether these activities would have been via an independent organisation such as the LMR, or from within the FSLN was a matter of practicalities, not principle.

14.3 What Could Have Been Done? The Mixed Economy

The right of workers to representation and collective bargaining was generating confrontations with employers. Demands for wage rises or improvements in working conditions were supported by strikes and occupations, most importantly by health and construction workers. In towns and cities, workers were spontaneously confronting employers who used authoritarian methods and/or laid off workers who took industrial action.

These actions were opposed by the FSLN, ACT and (at the time, the embryonic) CST. Barricada131 reported that workers’ strikes and occupations were being met not only by sackings by the bosses, but also arrests by the new Sandinista police, and even threats to send in troops. It is claimed that often heard on the demonstrations at this time were the slogans ‘Workers and Peasants to Power!’ and ‘Down with the Bourgeoisie!’ These demands may well have originated with the FO, but needed to be made concrete to avoid the workers’ anger being dissipated. Revolutionary socialists would have included specific and appropriate ways for the workers and peasants to actually take the power.

Simultaneously, workers were also mobilising to occupy enterprises where they believed the employers were attempting to liquidate their companies and take their monies abroad (to Miami, usually), or were sabotaging production in one way or another. The FSLN faced both ways on this question, supporting workers’ action in one factory and opposing it in an adjacent one. The more advanced layers of workers understood the need to open the capitalists’ account books and to place the factories and enterprises under workers’ control to end decapitalisation. At the same time, the peasants were for the immediate seizure of the landed estates and their division by the peasants to the peasants. But for the FSLN, carrying through the agrarian revolution to completion was unthinkable because that would have violated the existing property relations; a complete land reform would have affected the properties of allies like Violeta Chamorro and Alfonso Robelo.

Democratic control by the masses would have meant stepping beyond concertación, taking measures that could not be contained within the bourgeois democratic revolution, taking the first steps towards socialism. In Nicaragua, any scenario in which the workers and peasants determined policy would have meant a break with the mixed economy and the concept of a revolution by stages. Workers’ democracy is the mechanism to counteract bureaucratisation, to ensure that party policy and all major economic decisions are in the interests of those who work for a living. It was thus studiously avoided by the Directorate.

Workers and peasants were brought into the FSLN after the revolution, but they had no control over its political course, or the selection of its leaders. As Trotsky wrote about the Popular Front government in France:

In order to lead the revolutionary struggles for power, it is necessary to clearly see the class from which the power must be wrested. The workers did not recognise the enemy because he was disguised as a friend. In order to struggle for power, it is necessary, moreover, to have the instruments of struggle: the party, trade unions, and Soviets. The workers were deprived of these instruments because the leaders of the workers’ organisations formed a wall around the bourgeois power in order to disguise it, to render it unrecognisable and invulnerable. Thus, the revolution that began found itself braked, arrested, demoralised.132

A governmental slogan is required to bind workers’ demands into a coherent programme. The demand for a revolutionary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government based on Soviets (by any name) was vital to counterpose the popular front direction of the FSLN. Revolutionaries would have been demanding that the FSLN break with the bourgeoisie, by not only ejecting the capitalist ministers, although this was a crucial demand, but politically by renouncing the project of a capitalist Nicaragua.

The tactics used by revolutionaries would have had to start by accepting the immense respect and status the FSLN held amongst the masses as the leader of the popular insurrection. But neither the FSLN nor the bourgeoisie wanted to place their policies before the masses for discussion and approval. The bourgeoisie initially pinned its hopes on the Junta and Council of State appointed by the FSLN, and attempted to use those bodies to protect its interests. But at that stage the pressure of the masses for radical change could not be fully contained and the bourgeois representatives quit.

The attempt to reconcile the revolution with capitalism is what led to its defeat. Successful revolutions cannot be achieved with half-measures. It is necessary to either break the power of the oligarchy and establish workers’ power, or the ruling class will regain the initiative, sabotage the economy, create chaos and re-take power in a counter-revolution.

The state of the internal democracy within the FSLN can be better appreciated when we remember that in 1987 the organisation underwent a complete transformation and changed Nicaragua’s constitution without any real involvement of its members; that the membership at large had no effective say in the election programme, strategy or even tactics of 1990. The very first FSLN Congress was held 19-21 July 1991.133 In the run-up to the Congress there were calls for democratisation of the FSLN, to give workers and campesinos the right to have their voices heard. Revolutionary socialists would have whole-heartedly supported such calls and helped organise the rank and file meetings to formulate their own analyses of what had happened, to question the role played by the FSLN and, particularly, its leaders. Revolutionary socialists would have taken into all the Sandinista mass organisations the demands – suitably posed – to break the rank and file from the dangerous and non-revolutionary policies of the FSLN leadership. These would have included defence of every strike, every factory occupation and every land seizure, raising the need for democratic control of the militias. To oppose every attempt to use the police or EPS against such mobilisations, to call for rank and file committees within the EPS that would defend not attack the peasants.

Of course, the specific and concrete demands would have to be determined by those on the spot but would have been based on the workers’ rights to act in their own interests and would almost certainly included, in addition to those above:

• Freedom of assembly, the right to make one’s voice heard through public demonstrations, leaflets, newspapers.
• Freedom of association, whether trade union or political party, with the exception of those who supported the Contras, those who were intent on undermining the revolution.
• Freedom to bargain collectively and to take industrial action on such issues as unemployment, low pay, health and safety.
• Freedom to elect local officers of the FSLN, ACT, CST, CDS, AMNLAE and the youth organisation, subject to recall at any time.
• Freedom to strike, to form picket lines and self-defence squads to protect them.
• Freedom for the peasants to seize the estates and plantations of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie without compensation and to divide them between themselves.
• No official to get wages higher than the average skilled worker.

In the months before the Congress there was a structured discussion, and some 47,000 Sandinistas participated in these ‘assemblies’. Over 3,000 locally-elected delegates met to elect 501 of their number to represent their department in the National Congress. This indirect method of election is the tradition in top-down parties to weed out oppositionists. The Congress, with nearly 600 delegates (only eighteen per cent were women) divided into two currents, the one led by the Directorate, convinced that the FSLN should move more openly in a Social-Democratic direction and put ‘national interest’ before class interests. This group proposed purely parliamentary means of struggle even, if necessary, dissociating from grassroots and trade union actions. The outcome of the Congress was symbolised by this group succeeding in having the FSLN establish formal links with the Social-Democratic International.

The counter-current was rooted in the trade unions’ rejection of the “petty-bourgeois utopia of class-conciliation and non-antagonism between the interests of the exploited and exploiters, which only serves to undermine the struggle of the exploited”. They described concertación as an “error”, and called for deepening internal democracy, rejecting a top-down style of organisation; for defence of the living standards of the poor, and rejected the neo-liberal policies of the government.

The Congress was rigged from the start with the seating of eighty ‘historic cadres’ as voting delegates, and by manipulation of the agenda and careful selection of what was to be voted on, the main documents being released only hours before Congress began, and so on. The only unexpected aspect was the pre-Congress role of Daniel Ortega, who toured the country tub-thumping in favour of supporting strike actions, for undying opposition to imperialism, for no more deals behind the backs of the trade unions, and calling for mass actions against the Chamorro government. He defended ‘the right to rebellion’. At the Congress he was elected by acclamation after which it was business as usual, with the same Directorate save for the replacement of Humberto who resigned in order to remain Minister of Defence. The Directorate was elected as a slate to ensure that those most identified with unpopular policies retained their places.

15. Postscript

On 18 April, 2018, Ortega announced new pension regulations that would have increased the contributions of both employers and workers while, at the same time, reducing resulting benefits by introducing a new tax on pensions. Immediately after the announcement of the reform package, students took to the streets in impromptu demonstrations, which sparked spontaneous solidarity actions in the barrios when hundreds, then thousands, came out onto the streets to join the students and protect them from government repression. Barricades were erected, in particular in areas with strong Sandinista traditions, such as Masaya, León, Jinoteque, etc. This popular rebellion was met with violent repression.134

After four months of clashes, protests, mass demonstrations and repression the Ortega-Murillo government seems to have recovered control of the situation at the cost of over 300 people being killed.

Though the protests started over the issue of the reform of the pensions system, the scale and virulence of the movement reflected widespread opposition to the model of government introduced by the ruling couple (Ortega and Murillo are man and wife), when the FSLN returned to power in 2006, after sixteen years of openly right-wing governments. The Ortega-led FSLN, which won the election had little or nothing in common with the traditions of the Sandinista Revolution.

Ortega had made a deal with the reactionary hierarchy of the Catholic Church, through which FLSN deputies (in opposition) voted with the right wing for, especially, the banning of all abortion rights. This was part of a series of agreements between Ortega and the main representative of the right wing, Alemán, one of which was the lowering the threshold for election victory in the first round, in exchange for a legal reform which would benefit Alemán who was in jail on corruption charges.

Ortega’s campaign in 2006 no longer used the red and black colours of the FSLN but yellow and pink, claiming to stand for ‘Christian socialism’ with emphasis on Christian (which here meant traditional, reactionary, Catholic values) and ditched the Sandinista anthem for a version of John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Reconciliation was the main FSLN slogan.

Once back in power, the presidential couple’s only concern was to remain in power, with the ensuing perks, privileges and wealth. This meant establishing a pact with the capitalist class and clamping down on democratic rights. Ortega would guarantee social stability so that the employers would be able to make profits and they, in exchange, would stay out of politics. That agreement was hugely beneficial for the ruling class and particularly for those capitalists involved in the Free Trade Zones, which benefited from low taxes, cheap labour, and absence of trade unions.

Ortega enjoyed good relations with the US to the extent that Nicaragua was singled out for preferential status. There was close collaboration with Washington on migration, the war on drugs, security, etc. US agencies were allowed to operate freely in the country. Ortega’s government enforced all the necessary conditions for the extraction and looting of wealth by US multinational corporations. In return, Nicaragua received substantial sums from USAID.

As a result of the Ortegas’ policies the living standards of Nicaraguans is the lowest in Latin America. This was the background to why wide layers of the Nicaraguan people rose up in April.

Cunningly, Ortega combined these policies with an alliance with Venezuela. This was very convenient as it gave him access to cheap oil and, for a time, subsidies for social programmes. It also allowed him to indulge in a certain degree of left-wing rhetoric, which was used as a smokescreen to cover his pursuit of openly pro-business policies. Simultaneously, he tried to balance his trade and security links with the US with similar links with China and Russia. But here Ortega blotted his book, he established trade relations with China, including the idea of constructing an alternative to the Panama Canal, which is anathema to any US administration.

The US is always on the look-out for more compliant and openly pro-US regimes, and at the same time is anxious that if there is to be regime-change, it should be peaceful and not harm US interests. The US Ambassador, Carlos Trujillo, called for elections. Several senior US officials have visited Nicaragua in recent weeks to hold closed-door meetings with Ortega. What they want is some kind of early election that will deactivate the movement, and maintain ‘peace and order’ to continuing with the smooth running of their businesses.

The bourgeoisie prefer a quiet life, but they also prefer a government of their own kind no matter how servile and useful the Ortega-Murillo government may have been. In Nicaragua, a section of the capitalist class saw the protests as a means of getting rid of Ortega and replacing him with a ‘safer pair of hands’. Quickly, the bosses’ federation, COSEP, which had collaborated closely with Ortega for sixteen years, moved to take over the leadership of the protests in order to steer them towards the safe channels of negotiations and talks. The American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) also jumped in.

The students, who took the lead in street protests, used social media in an attempt to form a national student council to provide organisation and leadership. Lacking experience and with no clear left-wing alternative being presented, the students’ movement was also co-opted by right-wing organisations.

The only alternative to the ruling party, other than openly right-wing parties, is the Movement for Sandinista Renewal (MRS). However, the MRS is not a socialist organisation. Its criticism of the Ortega government is purely liberal, and it offers no real alternative to collaboration with the capitalists. In fact, on several occasions, the MRS has stood jointly in elections with bourgeois Liberals.

Self-appointed ‘student leaders’ travelled to the US to meet with the Republican right and then to El Salvador to meet with the leaders of the right wing and reactionary ARENA. Instead of advancing an independent strategy based on the unity of students and working people creating their own organisations of struggle, the student movement appealed to the bosses’ organisations to call a ‘civic strike’. In their communiques they fully accepted the idea of a ‘necessary’ alliance with the capitalists.

This, in turn, gave ammunition to the government to present the movement as a “US imperialist plot against the Sandinista Revolution”, and this played a role in enabling it to crush the protests.

The protest movement, which started in April and acquired, at times, insurrectionary proportions was a genuine movement of opposition to a government carrying out capitalist policies. Due to the lack of any left-wing leadership, it was captured by right-wing bourgeois elements and crushed through repression.

In this situation, the great absentee has been the organised workers. Although there were some who came out to demonstrate individually, the bulk of the working class did not participate fully – a situation that is largely due to the domination of the unions by the Ortega government. In Nicaragua, the unions have long been a tool for putting a brake on class struggles. The most urgent task is to develop an independent class programme that confronts the repressive bourgeois government of Ortega, the capitalists, the right-wing parties and imperialism. The immediate challenge facing Nicaraguan revolutionaries is the elaboration of transitional demands, which will include calls for political democracy and social justice in very concrete terms.

The recent history of Nicaragua confirms the inability of the so-called progressive bourgeoisie to solve the problems of the masses. In the Revolution of 1979, it was the general strike and the popular urban insurrection that swept away the old regime and opened the door for social transformation. The bourgeoisie did not play any role; on the contrary it betrayed the revolution. The 1979 Revolution could have destroyed capitalism; however, the FSLN leaders, all of them, accepted the poisonous class-collaborationist schema of stages, instead of maintaining class independence as Carlos Fonseca Amador always advocated. Instead of taking the necessary steps to ensure the gains of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which necessitated taking the first steps towards socialism, they combined the public sector with the private in a ‘mixed economy’, to the benefit of the latter.

It is necessary to rescue the true history of Nicaragua that shows the heroism of the workers, peasants and students, demonstrates the despicable role of the politics of class collaboration, and the treacherous role of the bourgeoisie. The real revolutionary traditions of Nicaragua must be saved in order to build an independent class leadership and genuine socialist programme based on the traditions of workers’ democracy.

For the moment, the fight in Nicaragua has the form of a struggle for democracy and for social justice, but these are important and can be the basis for rallying the masses. Such a programme could inspire, unite, and advance the movement and would have strong similarities to the transitional demands applicable after the 1990 election (see Section 14.2). The demands would include legitimising the right to fight for decent wages, union rights and safe working conditions, especially in the Free Trade Zones; for decent pensions with costs borne by the capitalists out of their multi-billion-dollar profits; against repression; and identification and punishment of those responsible for the killings of demonstrators.

There must also be protection of the campesinos’ and indigenous peoples’ land, and new agricultural programs to raise the standard of living in the countryside. Women’s rights, children’s rights, and the rights of the indigenous, the Black Nicaraguans of the Atlantic coast, and all other groups must be protected and enhanced.

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[1] Vanden, H., and Prevost, G., Democracy and Socialism in Nicaragua, Rienner 1993.

[2] In Roberts, J., Lenin, Trotsky and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, Wellred Books, 2007.

[3] Sandino: Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, 1921–1934, Princeton Legacy.

[4] Fonseca, C., ‘Nicaragua: Zero Hour’, in Sandinistas Speak, Pathfinder, 1982.

[5] Faber, D., Imperialism, Revolution and the Ecological Crisis in Central America, Latin American Perspectives 19(1)17-44, 1992.

[6] International Fund for Agricultural Development FIDA, 1980.

[7] Villa, C., The Sandinista Revolution, 1986, see Chapter 2 for the rural class structure.

[8] Borge, T., “A Nose for Power”, Second National Seminar of Political Education in Nicaragua, 20 May, 1983.

[9] World Bank, World Development Report, 1980.

[10] Viterna, J., Pushed, Pulled and Persuaded, Women’s Mobilisation, American Journal of Sociology, 112(1)1-45, 2006.

[11] Fonseca, C., A Nicaraguan in Moscow, 1981, available on the internet.

[12] In Sandinistas Speak, Pathfinder, 1982.

[13] Cabezas, O., Fire in the Mountain, Cape, 1985.

[14] Gonzalez, M., Nicaragua: Revolution under Siege, Bookmarks, 1985.

[15] Zimmerman, M., Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution, Duke University Press, 2000.

[16] Las condiciones de salud en las Américas: 1971-1973, Organisación Panamericana de la Salud.

[17] Lenin, V., The Dual Power, CW24:40, 1917.

[18] Holloway, T., A Companion to Latin American History. Blackwell, Ltd., 2011.

[19] All police vehicles were Mercedes, as were the cars of the top brass of the National Guard, the top politicians, even the country’s refuse trucks.

[20] Chinchilla, N., Women in Revolutionary Movements: the Case of Nicaragua, Stanford University, 1983.

[21] Zimmerman, op cit.

[22] Fonseca, C., Nicaragua: Zero Hour, in Sandinistas Speak, Pathfinder Press, 1982.

[23] Roberts, J., China: From Permanent Revolution to Counter Revolution, Wellred Books, 2016.

[24] Black, G., Triumph of the People, Lawrence Hill & Co., 1981.

[25] Foroohar, M., The Catholic Church and Social Change in Nicaragua. N.Y. Press, 1989.

[26] Zimmerman. op. cit.

[27] Lenin, V., A Militant Agreement for the Uprising, 1905, CW8:158-166.

[28] Ortega, H., Journal Latin American Perspectives 6(1)108-113, 1978.

[29] Zimmerman. op. cit.

[30] Molyneux, M., Mobilisation without emancipation? Feminist Studies, 11(2)227-254, 1985.

[31] Ortega, H., Nicaragua - Strategy for Victory, Granma 27 January, 1980.

[32] Benjamin, A., Nicaragua: Dynamics of an unfinished Revolution, Walnut, 1989.

[33] ‘Comandante Cero’, of the Tercerista Tendency, an ex-member of the Nicaraguan Conservative Party who would later desert to the counter-revolution.

[34] Borge, op. cit., 1983.

[35] Blanco, F., and Dolores, M., La Nicaragua de los Somoza: 1936-1979, 2012.

[36] La Botz, D., The Nicaraguan Revolution, 2018, Haymarket.

[37] Revista Dialogo Social, interview with Jaime Wheelock Roman, 1 November, 1978.

[38] A small formation claiming to represent patriotic professionals.

[39] Break-away from the Social Christian Party.

[40] A splinter group with its own militia, MILPAS.

[41] Amador, F., and Santiago, S., Where is Nicaragua Going?, IP 11 June, 1979.

[42] Chinchilla, Women ... op cit.

[43] Dora Maria Tellez, quoted in Chinchilla, op. cit.

[44] Lenin, V., The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, CW 24 61-62, 1917.

[45] 10 July, 1979

[46] Pastor, R., Condemned to Repetition. The US and Nicaragua, Princeton UP, 1987.

[47] Roberts, op cit. 2016.

[48] Pilger, J., July 19, 1979: Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution Remembered. Video.

[49] Flynn, P, Women Challenge the Myth, Stanford, 1983.

[50] Ortega, H., Nicaragua - Strategy for Victory, Granma, 27 January, 1980.

[51] New Advance in the Nicaraguan Revolution, USec Fourth International, Sept. 28, 1980.

[52] Harris, R., Evaluating Nicaragua’s Agrarian Reform, Latin American Perspectives, 14(1)101-114, 1987.

[53] Benjamin, op. cit.

[54] See Gorman, S., ‘Power and Consolidation in the Nicaraguan Revolution’, Journal of Latin American Studies Vol 13, No 1 for details of government changes in this period.

[55] Borge, T., Women and the Nicaraguan Revolution, Pathfinder, 1982.

[56] Marx, K., The Civil War in France, Part III, 1871.

[57] Maitan, L., IP, 30 June, 1980.

[58] Rodríguez, C., Lenin and the Colonial Question, New International, 1(1)93-144, 1983.

[59] In Stone, E., Women and the Cuban Revolution, Pathfinder, 1980.

[60] 11 November, 1985

[61] Harris, H., Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, Third World Quarterly, 5(4)899-908, 1983.

[62] Barricada International, Dec. 5, 1985

[63] 19 October, 1980

[64] 9 October, 1979

[65] Black, op cit,

[66] Collins, J., Nicaragua: what difference could a revolution make, 1986.

[67] Molyneux, op cit., 1985.

[68] IP 12 December, 1983.

[69] Trotsky, L., The Transitional Programme, www.marxist.org, 1938.

[70] Trotsky, L., History of the Russian Revolution, Preface, www.marxists.org.

[71] Woods, A., The Chinese Revolution of 1949, 1 October, 2009. www.marxist.com.

[72] Borge, T., Latinamerica Press, May and June 1981.

[73] 14 March, 1980

[74] 10 March, 1980

[75] Being a Mother in Nicaragua AMNLAE, Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1984.

[76] Pyle, J., Seeing Justice Done, Envio, No 17, 1988.

[77] Close, D., Nicaragua, Politics, Economics and Society, Continuum International Publishing, 1988.

[78] “Between August 1979 and December 1980, there was an average monthly increase of 26 new unions. From January to June 1981, the average was 63 and from July to December 1981, the monthly average was 31 new unions” (www.envio.org.ni/ articulo/3291, 1983.)

[79] IP, 2 March, 1981

[80] 8 January, 1988

[81] 19 September, 1981

[82] 1 August, 1981

[83] In Vilas, C., Perfiles de la Revolución Sandinista, Casa de las Américas, 1984.

[84] 12 December, 1983

[85] In an interview with IP 26 October, 1981.

[86] Chichilla, Women ... op. cit.

[87] IP, 14 November, 1983.

[88] Boonshoft, M., Dispossessing Loyalists ... in Revolutionary New York, www.nypl.org.

[89] Molyneux, M., Women’s role in the Nicaraguan revolutionary process, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9(2)379-384, 1993.

[90] Harnecker, M., Interview with Jaime Wheelock, jaimewheelock.com.

[91] Wheelock, J., The Great Challenge. Managua: Nueva Nicaragua No 101: 1983.

[92] Trotsky, L., The Transitional Programme www.marxist.org, 1938.

[93] Trotsky, L., ‘Thermidor in the Family’, in The Revolution Betrayed, 1936, www.marxists.org and Roberts, op cit. 2007.

[94] Mandel, E., Road to Socialist Democracy, La Gauche, 16 November, 1984.

[95] Stevens, K., Women’s Role in the Sandinista Revolution, Stanford University, 2013.

[96] Benjamin, op. cit.

[97] Ibid.

[98] Larmer, B., Christian Science Monitor, 25 January, 1989.

[99] 11 May, 2014

[100] 2 March, 1987

[101] Interview with Borge, T., New Left Review 164, July/August 1987.

[102] Benjamin, op. cit.

[103] Hillson, J., Central American Reporter, February 1989.

[104] Barricada, 20 June, 1986.

[105] 28 July, 1986

[106] Nuñez, D., The Farmers’ View, Envio, No 96, 1989; Núñez, D., Making the Economy Our Own, Envio, No 116, 1991.

[107] The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations, National Security Archive, nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB2/index.html.

[108] 18 December, 1987

[109] Harsch. J., Christian Science Monitor, 6 February, 1988.

[110] Roberts, op cit. 2016.

[111] 1 September, 1988

[112] Chinchilla, N., Gender and Society, 4(3)370-397, 1990.

[113] Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, www.marxists.org, 1936.

[114] 24 and 25 November, 1998

[115] Zalkin, M., Sandinista Agrarian Reform, Int. J. of Political Economy, 20(3)46-69, 1990.

[116] 18 December, 1987

[117] 17 March, 1989

[118] 22 December, 1989

[119] Molyneux, op cit., 1985.

[120] Barricada International, March 25, 1989.

[121] Lenin, V., Political Report, CW33:267, 1922.

[122] 12 May, 1989

[123] Seigle, L., A Historic Opportunity is Being Lost, New International, No 9, pp248-249, 1994.

[124] Sagali, S., Report from Managua, Bookmarks, 1989.

[125] 1991 World Congress the USec Fourth International, International viewpoint.

[126] FSLN Commander Bayardo Arce, El Semanario, September 1993.

[127] Chen Duxiu, Appeal to all the Comrades in the CCP, 1929, www.marxist.org.

[128] Liu Shaoqi, Letter to the Party Centre… 1937, in Saich, T., The Rise to Power of the CCP, Sharp, 1994.

[129] Lenin, V., CW31:243, July 1920.

[130] Wales, N., Why the Chinese Communists Support the United Front: An Interview with Lo Fu, Pacific Affairs, 1938, 11(3)311-322.

[131] 1 February, 1980

[132] Trotsky, L., Whither France? www.marxists.org, 1936.

[133] Envio No 122, The Sandinista Congress ... Inconclusive, September 1991.

[134] The Postscript is based on De La Cruz. J., The crisis of the regime in Nicaragua and the necessity of revolutionary leadership, July 4, 2018, www.marxist.com