Fabrizio Casari, Altrenotizie, 18 de julio 2021
https://www.altrenotizie.org/spalla/9349-nicaragua-il-sandinismo-fa-42…
Sandino has been back in Nicaragua for 42 years. Since 1979 a history has been written without little fear of boredom and no hope of rest. 42 years of the FSLN overlapping with and integrated into the history of Nicaragua. Sandinismo without Nicaragua and Nicaragua without Sandinismo are unimaginable.
Sandinismo is an architecture constantly updated but with unchanging cardinal points: the fight against poverty, inclusive development, independence and building an equitable society. A society based on shared values, on collective responsibility, on the supremacy of the common good over ego. In fact, Sandinismo is not simply, though at a fundamental level it might be, the enumeration of its successes: it was and is ideology and practice, ethics and revolutionary mystique, identification of each individual destiny with the destiny of all and with that of the nation. In a way Sandinismo was and is the civil religion of the country.
The stages of the Revolution
The first stage began with the entry of the guerrillas into Managua. The years followed brazen and exciting: the illiterate learned to write and the silent to speak, the peasants learned to walk with their gaze held up and joy took over everything that ran through the veins of the country. An extraordinary adventure, a collective dream that saw men and women as equals, poor and rich with equal citizenship. But the idea that Nicaraguans were in charge in Nicaragua was not digestible in Washington, and in the following years revolution contrasted with terrorism. Within the country, the difference was between those who defended the nation from attack and those who, for profit or out of hatred, were with the aggressor.
Resistance to the aggression was in itself a project. It brought popular democracy as a dowry and demonstrated that when the time came to hand over the country to those who had won the elections. In January 1990 the FSLN complied with the rules even when it was hard to do so. For the first time in history, a Revolution ceded power without a fight. Governing without majority legitimacy was not an option. As it did during the ten years of war that ended with Sandinismo undefeated, the FSLN gave a master class on democracy. Far from those who scheme with coup plotters to take power away from those who win elections and hand it to those who the electoral losers.
The second stage of the Sandinista Revolution took the form of opposition. We had to learn that nothing is forever, that not even a Constitution has real value if it is not defended every day. In order not to lose ten years of revolution, the FSLN had to start again from below and dictate the political agenda of the country in defense of the revolutionary conquests. The struggle was intense and a handful of Sandinistas with oligarch surnames decided it was time to transform the FSLN into a social democrat alternative compatible with liberalism. They considered turning Sandinismo into a relic for the history books, fixing their rebellious spirit merely to the defeat of Somoza, declaring socialism over and revolutionary Nicaragua a chapter closed.
They allied with liberalism offering their parliamentary votes to allow it to privatize wealth and socialize hunger. They voted for opportunist electoral inhibitions and signed the electoral law which today they now oppose: they had not imagined that someday it could become an obstacle for them. They inaugurated the season of paid entitlements: those already literate accepted that education should be an option only for those who could pay and they applauded Minister Belli who deprived school children of their daily glass of milk. In that case, Gioconda Belli, the publishers' Mona Lisa, orator of her loves through her books, did not feel she had to despair since the crime was committed by her brother Umberto, of Opus Dei, one of the most cynical characters in Nicaraguan politics.These "ex-guerrillas", whom the Western press defines as "ex-Sandinistas" forgetting that they were so for 10 years but have been liberals and allies of the extreme right for 30 years, immediately installed themselves in the new world. From the struggle against imperialism they quickly turned to serve it, while Daniel Ortega criss-crossed the country rebuilding the FSLN.
So that electoral defeat would not turn into a political collapse, to avoid establishing the conditions for a permanent opposition with no way out and taking advantage of the divisions of the right wing, Daniel Ortega negotiated the best agreement possible on electoral law reform in order to plan for returning to government through the ballot box. And so it happened. The end of 2006 brought with it the end of rapacious Chamorroism and devastating liberalism.
The third stage was first the reconstruction of a destroyed nation, then the implementation of the largest modernization project ever conceived in all of Central America; a project designed down to the smallest detail by its Comandante. The results? A 50% reduction in absolute and relative poverty; free, quality health care, with 19 hospitals built and six more under construction; 1133 medical centers and 143 clinics, 178 day care centers, 59 rehabilitation centers and 80 mobile clinics; pharmacological laboratories and two cancer treamtent centers equipped with linear accelerators.
The darkness of the 1990s has turned to light. Electricity covers 99.5% of the national territory and with subsidized rates, 70% of the energy comes from renewable sources. Hunger is a thing of the past: food self-sufficiency and a controlled price basket, drinking water for 98.2% of the country.
People and things move: more than 3700 kilometers of highways, with new land connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific, transport is subsidized at the lowest cost in Central America. Housing? Nearly 122,000 families have received new homes and there are no more homes without adequate roofing. Education is free up to the highest university level: some thirty-two thousand classrooms have been built or rehabilitated, one million two hundred thousand school meals per year and six million backpacks with student materials have been delivered, just so as to make the right to study of the less favored a reality.
Guaranteed pensions from the age of 60. Programmed periodic wage increases. Affordable credit for peasant families and support for cooperatives. Financing for tens of thousands of families, as well as stadiums and sports centers built everywhere and parks rebuilt with free wi-fi. Gender equality policies have placed Nicaragua fifth in the world in reducing the gender gap. International funding spent in the best possible way, certified by the UN itself, FAO, World Bank and IDB. A good life certified by two data: migration at the lowest level of the entire region and security at the top of the continent.
These were the last 14 years of Sandinismo and that explains the adhesion of the people and the opposition of the elites. In fact, where universal rights are certain, private services and charity have no place: if schools, pensions and health care are public and efficient, there is no role for speculative pension funds, private insurance companies managed by financial groups or private clinics owned by local oligarchies. Where rights abound, privileges make little sense.
The Sandinista Revolution is not only a dream of liberation and independence: it is also a visionary project of a country that is not content with being the largest in the region but wants to become the most modern, livable, equitable and sustainable. The mixed economy is the instrument chosen for the consolidation of economic growth: wealth is accumulated within a capitalist economy and distributed with a socialist logic.
Nicaragua is a bad example for the empire, which has decided to oppose it since 2007, first through the attempt to unify the right and moderates to defeat it electorally; then, in 2018, when it saw the impossibility of succeeding in both projects, it gave the order to unleash the war.
Those three months of 2018 severely damaged Nicaragua's growth. In addition to the casualties, they cost $1.8 billion in damages and nearly 300,000 jobs lost in the case of the large companies whose owners laid people off to raise the level of the social crisis due to the fall of the government. They failed and are now licking their wounds, ratifying their irrelevance. Nicaragua, in fact, despite the damages of the coup attempt, two hurricanes and the pandemic, will close this year with a growth between 2.5 and 3.5. The highest in the region.
Coupism, infection by malinchismo
The hatred of Sandinismo by the oligarchy gets shored up in the US empire, where it is a product of the long series of defeats and humiliations suffered both in Nicaragua and internationally. But whether before or after, the United States does not tolerate rebellion by others. They consider the region their territory, as the Monroe Doctrine stipulates, but they have to endure a theater of independence, of open international relations, diplomatically, commercially and politically. In Managua, the continental and regional importance of the US is not ignored, but it is not considered necessary to ask for US authorization to decide what is best, what can be done and what cannot be done. It is a question of sovereignty and the issue does not lend itself to much discussion: defend or renounce, there are no third options.
Threats, sanctions, mafia-style warnings have been the American and European tools in recent months. The pretext has been the judicial investigation for money laundering and the active collaboration with the coup of the Chamorro family and their followers. Nicaragua is accused of applying its laws, as if the country's institutions were a legitimate matter of discussion. One of the issues Washington insists on is the electoral law. Although largely written by liberal governments and only updated by the Sandinista one with clauses regarding women's participation and ineligibility (already largely issued by the liberal government of Violeta Chamorro), it disturbs the empire because it certifies the sovereignty of Nicaraguans. Nicaragua.
In fact, the law does not contain the article that the United States would like: the one that decrees that their chosen candidate must win, regardless of who has the votes. From Washington's point of view it is understandable: what need is there for votes if the president is only going to be their proconsul?
The vogue of the moment characterizing the coup promoters is that everyone declares themselves candidates: it does not matter that they are not, that they have no one to nominate, that they have no political party and no consensus. According to them, self-nomination serves enode impunity. Wrong, it only serves to deceive the media and gullible readers who believe their claims to be candidates without being so.
It is ridiculous to talk about an investigation staged for electoral motives, when the polls give the victory to the FSLN over the opposition 62% to 23%, with 15% abstentions. The investigation for treason, subversion and money laundering has abundant evidence and will continue even without the consent of the United States or the European Union, which themselves punish those same crimes more harshly than the Nicaraguan penal code.
It will also continue to confirm, to friends and foes alike, that Nicaraguan democracy is a democracy of the people and not of the elites : that it is based on institutions and respect for the will of the people and considers the attempt to subvert the constitutional order through violence as a crime to be prosecuted. The same is true of money laundering (against which the US itself calls for rigor) which cannot be condoned or omitted.We will go all the way, also to demonstrate that the Constitution, the legislative system, the rules and regulations that determine and delimit the scope of legality, are not susceptible to external pressures, however powerful they may be. As for the fifth columns, they will learn the principle of reciprocity at their own expense: whoever invokes sanctions will be sanctioned.
On the eve of the November elections, Nicaragua and Sandinismo go hand in hand. They know they cannot be separated, they have to walk together implacably to continue to assert the right to be free and to have a dignified future. This is Nicaragua and Sandinismo after 42 years: immortal body and soul of that project inspired by a tiny general who became a giant.