The new shantytowns in Managua are near traffic lights. In the early morning, children and adults pour forth from the dirt-floored houses of cardboard and scrap metal to peddle their wares to drivers waiting for the lights to change. They sell radios, silverware, television antennas, cigarettes, chewing gum, lottery tickets, tropical birds, tummy stretchers, newspapers, and homemade candy; some wash car windows. The drivers courteously ignore the unkempt lot, but buy enough to give the vendors hope.
At the end of the day, the poor return to their homes. As darkness comes, the barrio's night shift emerges. Young girls in party dresses head off for night spots and urban arterials where they'll spend the evening selling their bodies.
Nicaragua. What Salman Rushdie once called a "fulcrum point of history" has come to resemble any old banana republic.
Almost four years ago, in a country exhausted by war and strife, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro won an election promising peace and prosperity. Yet today the majority of Nicaraguans is worse off than in the mid-'80s at the height of the U.S.-sponsored war and economic blockade. Nicaragua challenges Haiti for last place on the list of the hemisphere's socioeconomic indicators.
War continues to plague the mountainous north of the country. Indigenous groups on the Caribbean coast, where unemployment runs to 90 percent, seem sentenced to permanent neglect. The capital's feuding political class provides high drama but few solutions. The poor are left to sell shoelaces in the city and pray for rain in the countryside.
Despite her government's failings, Chamorro enjoys wide respect. She did, after all, end the eight-year contra war during her first year in office. Yet the promises she made to convince combatants to lay down their arms have gone largely unkept. Of the 100,000 hectares of land the government distributed to former combatants, for example, only 5,000 hectares are in production because the government reneged on its promises of tools, credit, and training necessary to turn the fighters into farmers.
Frustrated by government inaction and bored by peace, many former combatants - from both sides of the conflict - have taken up arms again. Dozens of rogue militias roam the countryside, attacking government offices, robbing and terrorizing civilians. A bloody attack on Estelí in July and twin kidnappings in Quilaí and Managua in August underscored how close the country has been to the brink of civil war.
WHAT'S BEHIND Chamorro's failure to keep her promises? Although some suggest that the president, surely an aristocrat if such a thing exists in Nicaragua, really doesn't care about peasants nor understand their problems, all agree that she has been severely hampered by the rules of the game imposed upon her administration by the multilateral moneymen.
Following prescriptions from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Chamorro's technocrats have slashed state spending for education and health, sold off more than 300 companies and closed scores more, and severely restricted credit to all but the most wealthy.
Yet even that hasn't been enough. Ignoring Nicaragua's pleas for consideration as an "exceptional case," in 1993 the IMF decreed even more sacrifice, including deeper budget cuts, the privatization of state-owned utilities, the sale of remaining government-run mines and fisheries, and further devaluation of the córdoba.
To her credit, President Chamorro successfully halted the rampant hyperinflation she inherited from the Sandinistas, who printed money as fast as they could to pay for both war and social services. When Chamorro took office, inflation ran about 13,000 percent annually. By 1992, according to government figures, it dropped to only 4 percent. Inflation for 1993 is expected to be around 20 percent.
Yet Chamorro's success in fighting inflation has had its cost. Julio Guido, a León-based development worker with the Nicaraguan Council of Evangelical Churches (CEPAD), says his region has suffered four disasters in the last two years: an April 1992 volcanic eruption, a September 1992 killer tidal wave, a two-year drought in Chinandega province, and a drastic restriction of credit available to small farmers in the area. Of the four disasters, Guido says the fourth has caused the greatest amount of suffering.
In the cities, store shelves are full of imported goods, in contrast to the trademark empty shelves of a decade ago. But few people have money to buy Weight Watchers frozen entrees or Washington state apples. Many small-business people, most of whom resisted Sandinista market controls in the '80s, now remember with fondness the difficult years of inflation.
With somewhere around 60 percent of the economically active population either without any work or seriously underemployed, levels of malnutrition are soaring in the shadows of the supermarkets. While many in Nicaragua and abroad clamor for more foreign assistance for the war-ravaged country, such aid doesn't seem to have helped much. Of the $3 billion Chamorro has received in foreign assistance since 1990, $1.2 billion was immediately sent north to service Nicaragua's $10.8 billion foreign debt. Most of the rest was dedicated to "opening the market" to imported goods.
Funds pumped into the economy through Nicaragua's flourishing private banks are more often used to finance trendy boutiques and restaurants in Managua - part of the capital's "Miami Boy" culture - rather than help farmers produce more food in the countryside. Managua Mayor Arnoldo Alemán, a rising star on the political Right, has used U.S. money to pave city streets and build parks that showcase his bid to replace Chamorro in 1996 elections.
"Aid is not the answer," argues Xabier Gorostiaga, rector of Managua's Jesuit-run Central American University. He claims foreign assistance has become "an opium which has left Nicaragua waiting for outside solutions to all its problems." Gorostiaga says what's needed is an end to the political chaos at home that has left Chamorro careening from one crisis to another and scared away foreign investment.
THE PRESIDENT has certainly tried hard to promote reconciliation by reshaping a political culture in which electoral winners rule like czars and losers go into exile. But Nicaraguan politicians have little experience with compromise. That's been the problem with most of the National Opposition Union (UNO) coalition that Chamorro led to victory in the 1990 elections. They want their agenda at all costs, and consider Chamorro a traitor for compromising with the Sandinistas, who, after all, lost the elections.
For most of the last year this feud has paralyzed the National Assembly. Chamorro has passed legislation only with the help of a group of moderate UNO deputies (the "Center Group") voting with the Sandinista minority.
Chamorro's controversial decision to leave the army under the control of Gen. Humberto Ortega has drawn the most criticism. Even her son Carlos Fernando, editor of the Sandinista daily Barricada, has called for Gen. Ortega's removal, charging the army chief with "aggravating a climate of political polarization."
The U.S. government, which for eight years sent contra troops into battle against Gen. Ortega's soldiers, has repeatedly conditioned further economic assistance on the establishment of civilian control over the police and army. The U.S. government wants Nicaragua to have a security force that can be used repressively when necessary; such a force is indispensable for full implementation of the neoliberal model. You can't drive peasants off occupied land, for example, without police and soldiers willing to bust heads.
After intense U.S. pressure, Chamorro sacked the head of the police in 1992, and the force's subsequent behavior has satisfied all but the most hardline in the State Department. In September, Chamorro promised that Gen. Ortega would go before the end of 1994.
Ironically, while Chamorro rapidly reduced the size and influence of the armed forces in the months after her election, the transition to civilian control might have occurred even more quickly had it not been for U.S. pressure. Even many conservative Nicaraguans don't like being told by the U.S. government how to run their country, and Doña Violeta has occasionally exhibited a streak of nationalist pride. "I want to be friends with the U.S.," she said in 1992, "but without interference. I'm the one in charge in Nicaragua."
In 1993, during debates in the U.S. Congress, the issue of Gen. Ortega, along with the resolution of property disputes, improvements in human rights, and the investigation of secret arms caches were all discussed, and further aid to Nicaragua conditioned on advancement in those areas.
But Gorostiaga argues that the United States should let Nicaraguans decide these issues. "This is the same as Nicaragua's own agenda," he says. "The United States doesn't have to impose it." As long as the United States meddles in Nicaraguan politics, however, some Nicaraguan politicians will grandstand for CNN rather than earnestly work to resolve concrete problems at home.
RECENT SURVEYS indicate that if Nicaraguans went to the polls today, "none of the above" would win. The poor majority seems to have lost faith in political solutions. The poor hear no one articulating a viable national alternative to Chamorro's deadly neoliberal policies. There is no vision of an alternative to more grinding poverty and desperation.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) has been so torn by internal strife since its 1990 defeat at the polls that it has failed to articulate convincingly an alternative economic policy. The front's leaders, whose legitimacy suffered greatly from a property grab during the transition period, frequently end up supporting the president's policies because they are unable to come up with anything better.
The property giveaway "irreversibly damaged the moral capital of the Sandinistas. Many leaders still do not understand the magnitude of the moral disintegration," according to Carlos Tunnermann, a Sandinista and former ambassador to the United States. Sergio Ramírez, who served as Nicaragua's vice president in the '80s, says that many in the FSLN still haven't faced the fact that times have changed. "It was the peasants, not the oligarchy, that voted us out of office," he says. "We are not the eternal vanguard. We have to get those cobwebs out of our heads. A lot of us have not finished taking off our olive green uniforms."
In July, reform-minded elements within the FSLN finally convinced leaders to call a party-wide congress; it's scheduled for April. Reformers want to change some of the party's top leaders, who are all men - something blocked during a 1991 congress, the only such gathering to date. Also at issue is the character of the party. Dissidents don't want the FSLN to be just one more political organization maneuvering for power. They want the Sandinista movement to recapture some of its lost mystique, taking the side of workers and peasants who have been hit hard by Chamorro's economic policies.
That concept has been incarnated by some Sandinista activists, including many Christians, who work in their local neighborhoods on survival-oriented projects, from opening soy kitchens to slowing the spread of cholera. Even some FSLN leaders have responded well to changed times. Daniel Núñez, president of the National Union of Farmers and Cattleraisers, has long argued for rural residents to forget who was a contra and who a Sandinista during the decade past. Núñez believes that the rural poor can only change things for the better if they can break down ideological barriers in favor of a new vision of class identity and peasant solidarity.
That new consensus can be glimpsed in a project near Estelí that's funded by the country's Catholic base communities. The Mokuana Center brings former combatants from both sides of the last decade's conflict together in a common program of vocational training. The program then helps graduates start small businesses; each enterprise must include at least one contra and one Sandinista.
Director William Morales, a former Franciscan priest, says his center embodies "a spirituality of reconciliation" that's badly needed in Nicaragua. He says he's doing what the government should be doing rather than "just making speeches about reconciliation." If government officials were really interested in reconciliation, Morales argues, "they'd put resources and land and credit into equipping poor people to produce, rather than just trying to make the rich richer while the poor kill each other."
PAUL JEFFREY is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He lived in Nicaragua from 1984 to 1993.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!