Jorge Capelán, Managua con Amor, January 9, 2020
https://managuaconamor.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-13-anos-nicaragua-es-mas-…
Comandante Daniel Ortega with Comandante Hugo Chavez and
Evo Morales during the inauguration ceremony on January 10, 2007
Finally, after two centuries of difficult existence, between the surrender by its elites, the voracity of empires and the suffering of its people, Nicaragua can begin to say that nation-building is no longer a dream but an everyday reality.
From January 10, 2007 to date, Nicaragua has made unprecedented progress in the construction of its national project. The country has previously had two other periods in which progress was made in this regard, which were the presidency of General José Santos Zelaya, between 1893 and 1909, and the first period of Sandinista government, between 1979 and 1990, following the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.
The Liberal Revolution of the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century and the two stages of the Sandinista Revolution (that of the 1980s and the current one), have been the three great periods of nation-building in Nicaragua. The rest of the country's history, from 1821 to date, had been divided between power struggles among the liberoconservative elites, imperial interventions, heroic popular resistance and brutal, often genocidal, repression.
During those periods of sad memory, hardly any progress was made in the construction of a National State worth the name in Nicaragua, and that was always subordinated to the insertion of the country into a model of economic relations totally dependent on imperial interests. If any infrastructure was built or any rights were recognized, these were always subordinated to three factors: a) that Nicaragua would continue to be a faithful supplier of raw materials to the empire; b) that ultimately the Nicaraguan people would offer their labor force at the cheapest possible price; and c) that the monopoly of power would remain in the hands of the usual conservative and liberal elites.
Zelaya is to be thanked for, among other things, the (military) recovery of the Atlantic Coast from the hands of the British Empire; the promotion of the project for an inter-oceanic canal outside the tutelage of the United States; the promotion of Central American unity; the modernization of the State; the separation of the State from the Catholic Church; the introduction of habeas corpus; free and compulsory education together with the construction of schools and the introduction of the post and telegraph, railways, steamships, road construction, etc.
It is necessary to point out that Zelaya was overthrown sooner rather than later by the United States, which, in addition to occupying Nicaragua's Caribbean ports and financing mercenaries, supported the conservative opposition and the Government of Guatemala, Zelaya's enemies, in a pattern of behaviour that is all too familiar even now both in Nicaragua and throughout Abya Yala and the so-called Third World.
After Zelaya's overthrow in 1909, Nicaragua was strangled by 70 years of a rigid imperial status quo , contrived by the US empire despite the fact that its Marines were militarily defeated by General Augusto C. Sandino's Army of National Sovereignty. In the end, the United States still managed to imposed one of the most opprobrious regimes in Latin America.
During this period of time, the Somoza dictatorship was born, grew up and also died a violent death. It was overthrown in 1979 by people who saw themselves as the heirs of General Sandino, namely the vanguard of the Sandinista National Liberation Front founded by Carlos Fonseca Amador. Thus, from July 19, 1979, the path of national construction, interrupted by the overthrow of Zelaya, was taken up once again, this time with the popular classes firmly established in charge of the project.
The Sandinista Popular Revolution, even stronger than Zelaya's liberal revolution, was violently resisted by the US empire, this time with blockades, "low intensity" warfare, terrorism, defamation campaigns and unfailing financing of the quisling oligarchic groups within the country.
In spite of so many brutal aggressions, between 1979 and 1990, the Sandinista Popular Revolution made historic achievements: a truly popular, democratic and revolutionary army and police force; popular literacy; rights for women; health and education that were truly free and within everyone's reach; autonomy for the Atlantic Coast; agrarian reform and expropriation of the Somocistas; the first truly democratic political constitution in Nicaragua's history; a politically and socially organized population - countless achievements in that decade brought the country closer to the goal of independence with social justice.
In the end, the brutal war financed and directed by the United States, together with the serious damage it caused to the economy, forced the Revolution to retreat, losing the 1990 elections that gave political power to the same liberal-conservative elites that had kept the country in dependence and backwardness for two centuries.
During the subsequent period, which lasted 16 long years, from 1990 to 2007, those elites did everything possible to dismantle what had been achieved in the 80s. But they failed to dismantle what was fundamental: an army and a police force with revolutionary roots; an organized people in the streets and a plurinational state under a constitution with democratic and national roots. This "long neo-liberal night" meant for Nicaragua a terrible setback in all areas, and especially in the living standards of the people.
With the crisis of domination of the liberal-conservative elites and the general crisis of imperialist domination at the beginning of the 21st century, the conditions were right for the return to power of the Sandinista Front in the November 2006 elections and President Daniel Ortega's second inauguration on January 10, 2007. This initiated the period of the last thirteen years, which can be fairly described as the period of greatest stability and institutional continuity in Nicaragua's history, despite the constant attempts by the liberal-conservative elites to return Nicaragua to colonial status, efforts which included the defeated coup attempt of April-July 2018.
Here's why Nicaragua today is more of a nation than ever before in its history:
- Nicaragua is a nation because it has no foreign troops or constabulary on its territory and it is more of a nation because it has been proven that its armed forces will never strike a blow against the people.
- It is more of a nation because these last 13 years have changed the country. There is no sector of activity in which the country has not been strengthened. Nicaragua is already practically interconnected by a network of roads that are among the best in the region. Almost the entire territory is electrified. It has made dramatic advances in telecommunications and dramatic progress in access to drinking water and sewerage.
- For the first time, it has the beginnings of a national network of modern hospitals for the population. It is beginning to produce its own medicines.
- It produces almost all the food it consumes.
- It has changed the energy generation matrix to free itself from dependence on oil. It has the most diversified international and economic relations in its history.
- It has a social and institutional civil defence system that is becoming a regional reference point to face all threats of natural or man-made disasters with the participation of the people.
- It is more of a nation because its people are no longer just a political and social protagonists, via large social movements and a strong mass party, but also an economic protagonist which, thanks to the redistribution and assured legal title of land, controls many key sectors of the economy.
- It is more of a nation because the most reactionary classes, those who have always seen the country as "a farm with Indians" for their own use, have lost all moral power, all prestige and all strategic control over the economy, now in the hands of small and medium producers, and all those interested in developing the country.
- It is more of a nation because it comes from a long process in which, although, as the song says, it has not yet been possible to turn the traitors and cowards into "characters in an old story," it has indeed been possible to demonstrate that the immense majority of this people is not willing to sell out their homeland or let themselves be defeated by extortionand menaces of the powerful.
- It is more of a nation than ever because it is not walking alone in this process of national construction, but is doing so together with the other Latin American peoples within the project of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.
- Nicaragua is more of a nation because it has now spent 13 years building a broad soical consensus around a project of national development, including the construction of an inter-oceanic canal, just as Zelaya and Sandino dreamed.
Nicaragua is more of a nation now after 13 years in which it has learned to stand on its own two feet, and to stay that way for good. This second stage of Sandinista government under the leadership of Comandante Daniel Ortega, begun on January 10th 2007, will hopefully continue well beyond the year 2021. Certainly, it is the the most successful period in the entire independent history of the land of Sandino.