Many revolutions or socialist governments existed in the 1970s besides Nicaragua that later lost power or abandoned their socialist ideology by the 1990s. These include Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Tanzania, Congo (Stanleyville), Afghanistan, Grenada, and almost El Salvador, Portugal, Spain, and Ethiopia. In addition, the Communist Soviet Union collapsed (now 15 countries), along with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania.
When the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election, these other socialist leaderships were already disintegrating or had already been overturned. Only the Sandinistas continued the struggle and once again arose to retake power and implement their original program. What revolutionary lessons does this experience provide, and what abilities did they possess that make them unique among the socialist movements of these 23 countries?
This will be discussed by the Nicaraguan Foreign Minister in an August 23 webinar introducing a four-part series in September, “Governing From Below, Lessons from Nicaragua’s Neoliberal Years, 1990-2007.” After losing the 1990 election, Nicaragua’s Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) vowed to “govern from below.” The series will delve into how the FSLN during these years worked closely with its grassroots base in unions, student groups, women’s, peasants, and communal movements to pressure the neoliberal governments and eventually returned to power.
The strategy Daniel Ortega advanced combined popular struggle in defense of the revolution’s gains, political struggle within the nation’s institutions, and electoral struggle as the path toward the reconquest of political power.
The return of the Sandinistas through their electoral victory in 2006 was the direct result of the strategy defined at the FSLN Extraordinary Congress of 1994. This outcome was made possible thanks to the political foresight of Daniel Ortega.
When the Sandinistas initially triumphed in 1979, members of a sector of the Nicaraguan oligarchy played an influential role, which was indispensable to victory. After the 1990 defeat and the collapse of the Soviet Union, this sector, like many of the revolutionary movements of the 1970s, advocated renouncing anti-imperialism and socialist goals. They were to become the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a group that, until the FSLN Congress in May 1994, wielded immense influence within the FSLN. The opposing faction, which more directly represented the impoverished majority, championed the FSLN’s historical principles and was led by Daniel Ortega.
In the 1990s, the now-ruling bourgeois parties began to reimpose Somoza-era living conditions, turning their backs on efforts to improve the lives of working people. This ushered in a new period of neocolonialism that went hand in hand with the flourishing of corruption in state institutions. The dismissals of revolutionary leaders were massive, and Nicaragua became a springboard for drug trafficking, ensuring that cocaine and other narcotics reached the US.
Daniel Ortega publicly denounced neoliberal government measures, such as the seizure of land from peasants and from cooperatives, and the depriving of the people of their human right to education and healthcare through privatization. The second neoliberal President was convicted of embezzling $250 million. Labor and social rights were drastically reduced. Seventy-six percent of the country’s public schools lacked basic necessities; teachers’ salaries did not cover the cost of living. The oligarchy was soon provoking the people to reignite a fratricidal war.
Daniel Ortega avoided that trap, explaining, “faced with the plans to destroy the gains of the Revolution that began to unfold, we would have had every authority and legitimacy to engage in peaceful street protests to overthrow the government. And we said: No! We are going to fight the battle defending the social gains of the Nicaraguan people.” The FSLN waged the battle peacefully, while the US spent the next 16 years establishing control.
Daniel Ortega explained in a speech recounting this period:
“April 25, 1990 [when neoliberal Violeta Chamorro became President], we declared: ‘We will continue this battle by governing from below.’ At that juncture, the Sandinista Front found its primary instrument of struggle, its principal instrument of battle, in the National Workers’ Front; for the need arose to organize this united front of workers who were being cast out onto the streets… A campaign of persecution against the workers began. Thousands of workers were dismissed from the healthcare system, the education system, and various state-owned enterprises. It was a scorched-earth campaign; lists of labor leaders were circulated to ensure they would be denied employment in any state institution.
“Workers continued to resist within the enterprises designated as the Area of People’s Property, enterprises [the neoliberal government] were attempting to seize. We fought a great battle there when the government elected in 1990 attempted to return all those properties—all those enterprises—to those who had previously been subject to confiscation and expropriation, including the Somoza family.
“Their objective, therefore, was to wrest the factories away from the workers who had defended them with such bloodshed between 1979 and 1990. To seize enterprises that had not even existed prior to 1979, enterprises that had emerged with the Revolution; state-owned enterprises—meaning, owned by the Nicaraguan people—that had been built through international solidarity, through the blood and sweat of the workers, and through the skills and dedication of the technicians and professionals committed to the Revolution.
“That is where the battle lines were drawn, and that was the banner we raised in the face of such a difficult situation…It was a battle that would not be easy, for we faced an entrenched power, one that held a majority in the National Assembly and controlled an Executive Branch with the authority to make decisions and order repression. And they did not hesitate to do so, time and again, actions that resulted in the deaths of many workers, as well as the deaths of several of our brother police officers. In essence, the diabolical plan of the Right was to engineer a confrontation between fellow Nicaraguan brothers and sisters.
“We challenged the measures they sought to impose upon our country, measures that, first and foremost, involved stripping workers of their property, seizing land from peasants and cooperatives, and, by means of privatization, robbing the people of their fundamental rights to education and healthcare.
“In short, we stood our ground…. This allowed us to retain certain spaces: ensuring that some properties were allocated to rural workers, and certain enterprises to urban workers. Some of those enterprises remain in the hands of the workers to this day. Those rights had to be recognized for the workers because we declared: ‘If privatization is going to take place here, then privatize in favor of the workers, who are the ones who have spent their blood and sweat building them and maintaining them in times of war.’”
Building on this close work with the people in defending their gains made in the first Sandinista period, standing with them in their difficult struggles, the FSLN was able to counter the continual US electoral manipulations and win the votes to be elected to power in 2007.
Nicaraguan Sandinistas have been waging a twenty-year war against poverty and for national development in concert with the nation’s economic forces. A prerequisite for defeating poverty has been the maintenance of social peace, avoiding a new contra war that could kill another 50,000 people and another economically ruinous US-backed 2018 coup attempt. Nicaragua has built a Government of Reconciliation and National Unity, an alliance between business leaders, small businesspeople, cooperatives, urban and rural workers, women, Afro and Indigenous organizations, and the youth. The Sandinistas are successfully waging the Revolution to end the scourge of poverty by maintaining social peace and building solid multi-class alliances.
During the 1990-2006 neoliberal years, over 50% of the population lived below the poverty line, and over 23% of the adult population had become illiterate.
Since those times, Nicaragua has built 48 new or renovated hospitals, provides free universal healthcare and medicine, and offers free education from pre-school through university. Infant mortality has fallen from 26 per 1000 births to 9.4 per 1000 births; GDP per capita has doubled; and the poverty rate has fallen to 12% (World Bank). Nicaragua is now a world leader in gender equality. Over 80% of energy comes from renewable sources, and 99% of the population has electricity. Almost 90% of food is grown domestically. Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples now have autonomy and communal title to a third of Nicaragua’s land. And the latest poll shows 88.7% of the people feel the government is leading the country in the right direction.
These achievements are largely the result of the work the FSLN undertook during the 16 dark years of neoliberal rule. This four-part webinar series offers us an opportunity to learn how the FSLN continued its revolutionary work during those times. Don’t miss it.