12. Women, Workers, and Land Reform (1987-89)¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter traces the FSLN’s retreat on women’s rights, workers’ power, and land reform between 1987 and 1989, arguing that this was not a tactical concession forced by war but a systematic abandonment of revolutionary principle rooted in the party’s underlying theory of stages. The 1987 ‘Proclamation on Women’ is presented as the first programmatic statement on women’s relation to the revolution, noting women’s unprecedented political participation — nearly one-third of government posts, two-thirds of neighbourhood defence committees, a quarter of FSLN membership — while declaring these gains insufficient. Yet the Proclamation omitted abortion and birth control, effectively closing debate. Daniel Ortega’s September 1987 speech opposing abortion on the grounds that women who refuse childbearing “negate their own continuity” is quoted at length, alongside his denial that racial discrimination had ever existed in Nicaragua. The chapter treats these statements as evidence of Ortega’s political accommodation with the Catholic Church and the broader rightward drift. AMNLAE’s silence on abortion, the absence of women from the Sandinista Youth leadership in 1988, the revival of beauty pageants sponsored by state institutions, and AMNLAE’s eventual capitulation to FSLN pressure not to raise abortion or domestic violence legislation before the 1990 elections are all cited as markers of the same trajectory. The chapter draws on Charles Fourier and Trotsky to frame women’s liberation as a measure of social progress, invoking Trotsky’s description of Soviet families as “nests of medievalism” to argue that a similar process of bureaucratic degeneration was occurring in Nicaragua.
On the economic front, the chapter details the 1988 devaluations, the shift toward free-market pricing, and the government’s denunciation of striking construction workers as CIA-backed. It argues that the FSLN’s policy of concertación — a social pact with capital — required union leaders to discipline workers rather than advance their interests. The confiscation of the San Antonio sugar mill in July 1988 is presented not as a radical measure but as an ad-hoc response to capital flight, with Minister Wheelock insisting it was not political. The chapter contrasts the FSLN’s protection of large private farms with the decline in agro-export production — coffee to 75 per cent of pre-revolution levels, cotton to 27 per cent — while peasant smallholdings increased domestic food production. The 1987 constitution forbade peasant land seizures and promised cash compensation for expropriated uncultivated land. By January 1989, Ortega declared that “sufficient land has already been distributed”, and the Agrarian Reform Minister confirmed expropriations had ended permanently. The chapter concludes with Luis Carrión’s 1991 revisionism, in which he suggested land distribution had cost the FSLN peasant support and redefined the Contras as an indigenous peasant movement rather than a US-created force. The polemic is directed against the FSLN leadership itself, and against the theory of stages that justified sacrificing women’s rights, workers’ control, and land reform to the logic of a mixed economy and electoral calculation.