7. A Nicaraguan Workers’ and Peasants’ Government?¶
Core Argument¶
In the wake of the July 1979 insurrection that shattered the bourgeois state apparatus, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) assumed power in Nicaragua. As a petty-bourgeois organisation, the FSLN was the sole effective force in government, and its early expropriations and measures against capitalist property lent credence to characterising the regime as a transitional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. Yet its trajectory remained fundamentally unresolved. The FSLN explicitly called for an alliance with the national bourgeoisie and a mixed economy, leaving over sixty per cent of the economy in private hands. The 1980 economic plan subjected all sectors to market laws, while capitalists responded with decapitalisation and blackmail. Land seizures by peasants were suppressed, and the regime provided welfare gains—subsidised food, rent controls, healthcare, and a literacy crusade—without taking ownership of production.
The political contradictions deepened. Alfonso Robelo resigned from the Junta in April 1980, protesting that FSLN control had reduced the Council of State to a false front; he was replaced by a rancher from the Democratic Conservative Party, presented as a promotion of the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’. Special Tribunals tried captured ex-National Guards, acquitting or freeing 47 per cent of 6,310 cases—a rate far higher than average US courts. The FSLN appointed priests to senior government posts, including four ministers, prompting the Catholic hierarchy to demand their resignation in May 1980; they refused. Worker dissatisfaction forced a minimum wage increase in June 1980, though many employers did not pay it. The Rural Workers’ Association pressed landowners to rent unused land to poor peasants. In October 1980, the Junta decreed it would no longer tolerate factory occupations or strikes disrupting production. The bourgeoisie walked out of the Council of State in November; the FSLN responded with a mass rally of 100,000 supporters. By year’s end, state sectors contributed 41 per cent to GDP, but 70 per cent of export production remained in private hands. Nicaragua’s foreign debt meant US$55 of every US$100 earned from exports went to repayments, and US economic assistance was suspended indefinitely. The regime was a transitional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, not a workers’ state, and its direction hung in the balance.