Daniel Ortega, presidential candidate for the El Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional [FSLN], or who are commonly referred to as the Sandanistas has won the presidency of Nicaragua after about 16 years “out of power,” as mainstream news sources like to characterize his absence. When he left the presidency of Nicaragua in 1990, the US and its Hondurian-based surrogates, “the Contras,” were engaged in a terrorist war against the Nicaraguan people, pressing death and misery as a threat from Washington against this already all too miserable population who had the audacity to rid themselves from the yoke of the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, threatening in effect absolute US supremacy over Central and South America.
Now Ortega faces a more matured threat, as the imperialist’s former violent thrust for obedience from this tiny Central American nation has blossomed into overt exploitation and has solidified into distorted trade agreements that stand to pillage the country and its people. What’s more, the US has, illegally, made explicit threats against Nicaraguans, claiming US-aid to the nation will be reconsidered in the event of an Ortega presidential victory-a form of blackmail that is, in essence, meddling in the domestic electoral affairs of another nation in a manner illegal under existing international law.
Much discontent in the country has accrued over the past decade as Nicaragua’s current centrist-right government has pursued an economic policy of “free trade,” culminating in its recent passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or what is know as CAFTA last summer. This agreement guarantees, for example, that Nicaraguans must respect lucrative patent rights for drugs owned by US pharmaceutical firms, doubling or tripling for the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere (only the much US-abused half-island nation of Haiti ranks more destitute) the costs of medicines, specifically anti-virals, designed to combat new threats to the population like HIV/AIDS. Additionally importation of cheaper, but illegally US-subsidized crops such as maize and rice, inherent in these agreements, will threaten the livelihoods of local producers who otherwise depend on cultivation of these products for a livelihood.
(These provisions were ruled again illegal by the WTO after Brazil brought suit against the US last year specifically for cotton-related subsidies USDA annually gives to large, industrious cotton producers in the western and southeastern parts of the US that cover about 40 percent the cost of production for this crop, thereby artificially cheapening the price of US cotton against what is otherwise more efficiently produced cotton in places like Burkina Faso, a land-locked West African nation that has seen its economy wrecked in recent years as a consequence.)
In addition, coffee producers in Nicaragua have seen their yearly earnings drop and their nation’s primary source of livelihood and largest exported commodity cheapened as the international price for coffee, a capricious market anyway, suddenly and dramatically dropped in 2001, unleashing what has been termed “the Coffee Crisis” by non-governmental organizations like Oxfam and others.
I traveled there in the summer of 2004 with the United Students for Fair Trade, or USFT, to Nicaragua where I saw hung high above crumbling homes flags of black and red bars, the colors of the Sandinistas. The party’s acronym, FSLN, was painted on the sides of shops, bars, and homesteads similarly in black-and-red colorations. There I learned from Nicaraguans the oppression they faced at the hands of a well-financed US-trained and equipped terrorist militia. Visible still on the landscape were remnants of war, and after over a decade of an end to fighting, people still there carried emotional scars from that truculent time.
I learned that in 1979, after years of repression from the US-backed Samoza dictatorship, revolutionary forces exploded in Nicaragua. After Samoza’s corruption reached new heights in the wake of a1972 earthquake that leveled Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, business elite joined in sympathy with guerrilla FSLN fighters in opposition of Somoza.
Landless workers in the countryside and students in the cities supported the movement. And by mid-1979, the Sandinistas were able to dispose of Somaza, who abdicated his power and fled to Miami (where many of the US’s Latin American reactionary clients call home.)
But a Sandinista victory didn’t resonate well with a rightist US, and soon the newly elected Reagan administration began sponsoring counter-revolutionary Contra forces. Violence began in 1982 when “Contras,” as they were popularly called, who had trained in Argentina and neighboring Honduras, destroyed bridges built through Sandinista work programs-in essence attacked the infrastructure of the nation to intimidate the population.
The US’s current threat to deprive aid to the country is, at face, outrageous and contemptible given the level of liability the US has for the shoddy condition in which the country now exists. For example, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 1986 against the US’s terrorist campaign, via “freedom fight[ing]” Contras, as the even then senile Regan characterized them, as outright illegal under international law and subject to retributive payments for costs in lives and property incurred;(though the US reactively claimed to be exempt from the ICJ’s jurisdiction and used its UN Security Council (SC) veto to void subsequent UN SC resolutions with wording designed to enforce the ICJ’s ruling.)
The entire Contra war, as it is now called, costs the lives of about 80,000 Nicaraguans, a country with a population of roughly 3 million at the time of the violence, not to mention the entire destruction to the economy and rural infrastructure.
I also heard from Nicaraguans how Contras used methods of terror, kidnapping and killing teachers who worked in Sandinista-established schools, attacking Sandinista-organized farming cooperatives with guns and ammunition and ultimately destabilizing the country to prevent any Sandinista reforms. Yet the Sandinista government was able to grant huge tracts of land to landless farmers who had been squatting and farming in rural mountainsides since Samoza’s disposal.
After the Sandanista’s lost power, the government again encouraged the production of cash crops, putting these farmers directly at risk to price fluctuations on the international coffee market. What’s more, sensing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US no longer needed to appease Southern nations from turning to the USSR for support, and so unilaterally withdrew from the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, thereby destabilizing the international price of coffee.
Consequently, all this has resulted in the reemergence of the Sandanistas and, specifically, Daniel Ortega into the position of the presidency. It appears that Nicaraguans are discontent with neo-liberalist subterfuge designed to reap from them profits at the destruction of their livelihoods, and which has taken ever-greater tolls against their population in recent years with sequential “free trade” concessions. What’s more, Nicaragua’s recent presidential election is yet another indication of Latin America’s shift to the left in general, after enduring failed IMF and World Bank policies (e.g., Argentina, Chile, Haiti), rightist US-backed dictators (e.g., Guatemala in 1954, Cuba pre-1959, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Haiti pre-1989, etc.,) and US-terrorist campaigns that have left rural populations destitute and elites more empowered and enriched (e.g., Colombia and El Salvador-not to mention the outrageous invasion of the tiny Caribbean island-nation of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 causing thousands of deaths to both of these populations). With the recent elections of Eva Moralles in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Latin America is succeeding from its neo-colonizers, those only standing to benefit being the majority of the population.
