When negotiations between the Nicaraguan government and striking sugar workers stalled last March, strikers camped out in a park opposite the President’s office in central Managua. They parked a gasoline truck and a trailer filled with 3,500 sacks of sugar across a main thoroughfare, blocking traffic. Former Interior Minister Tomás Borge launched a blistering attack on strike leader Lucio Jiménez, head of the Sandinista Workers Central (CST). Borge complained that, coming on the eve of a meeting with donor countries in Washington, the CST’s actions were irresponsibly jeopardizing the image of stability that the Chamorro government and Sandinista party chief Daniel Ortega were trying to promote. Jiménez responded with a similar broadside.
Three days after this heated exchange, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) National Directorate reined in Jiménez, who then resumed negotiations with the government. Managua party chief Víctor Tinoco explained: “When strikes affect the whole country, we have to coordinate, even intervene. We couldn’t ignore the sugar strike because it was disruptive, a threat to stability. There are limits to autonomy!”
Just where those limits lie is a central question for the Left in Nicaragua today. Popular movements, once instruments of the party line, have grown increasingly independent and militant, while the Sandinista Front has been forced to redefine its role in the struggle for social change.
The Front’s 1990 electoral defeat unleashed long-dormant discontent with the vanguandist politics of the 1980s. Conditions which had bred a hierarchical mode of organizing—the capture of state power, and the Contra war—were replaced by ones which favored the growth of autonomous movements. Without the apparatus of the state, the FSLN could no longer control or coopt the movements, and the government’s draconian austerity policies provided a clear target for popular mobilization.
Many grassroots activists believe that traditional leftist thinking about political power—based on the requisite alliance of party and state—needs to be reworked. Nicaragua’s social movements, like those elsewhere in Latin America, want to shift the political center of gravity away from the state toward civil society.
But old ways don’t die easily. “Since the elections,” says William Grigsby, who runs a pro-Sandinista radio station called La Primerísima, “the popular organizations have won formal antonomy, but none is really independent of the FSLN. It’s a matter of work style. We all went to the same Stalinist school, the same verticalist school, and that legacy is still with us.” There are party leaders who have yet to accept their loss of control, and many in the popular organizations still look to the Front for guidance.
As was evident in the sugar workers’ strike, such tendencies are reinforced by Daniel Ortega’s partial alliance with the government, particularly with Chief Minister Antonio Lacayo. In what jourrialist David Dye calls “a marriage of convenience for both sides,” the FSLN gets protection from the far Right and from Washington in return for keeping popular protest somewhat in check. “Since the ultra-Right wants to exterminate us, and has the backing of Bush,” explained Sandinista National Directorate member Luis Carrión, “the agreement enables the FSLN to defend its popular program. It also prevents police repression and gives us political space.”
The entente, however, places the FSLN in the unenviable position of attempting to defuse the impetus for change emanating from its own traditional base of support. And since September, it seems the Sandinista leadership has found the marriage to be less than convenient. When President Chamorro fired the Sandinista police chief and the government refused to honor its commitment to sell 25% of privatized state enterprises to workers, the party began to look more favorably on worker take-overs of state property. In October, CST unionists occupied 25 factories the government had planned to sell to Miami-based Nicaraguans rather than to workers. Víctor Tinoco, who in June had spoken of the need to rein in an obstreperous CST, referred to burning tires and blockading streets as “legitimate actions to defend the right to [worker] privatization.”
A Corporate Mindset
For the leadership of the Agricultural Workers Union (ATC) as well, the privatization of state enterprises raises difficult issues. Last June the army began evicting 6,OO0 families of agriculrural workers who had occupied state farms. These lands had been returned to their pre-revolutionary owners as part of a negotiated agreement whereby the workers could keep their jobs, houses, and a plot of land. The take-overs occurred when the owners reneged on their part of the bargain.
Though the ATC never initiates such take-overs, it is generally thought that union head Eduardo García fully supports them, and the organization does stand by them once they occur. The leadership, however, likely fears that such land seizures could torpedo the agreement to sell 25% of the state’s enterprises to workers. Economist Oscar Neira believes what is threatened are the entrepreneurial ambitious of the union bureaucracy. “As future landowners,” he told me, “it’s not in the ATC’s interest to encourage take-overs. After all, its property may someday be in jeopardy.”
The privatization process bears directly on the question of union autonomy. For economist Trevor Evans, the ATC is reasonably independent of the FSLN. “García may be influenced by Ortega, but he thinks like a worker. Anyway, the union isn’t a footsoldier of the party any more.” Dissident ATC Rice-Growers Federation leader Domingo Gómez disagrees: “García’s been trained to think in terms of what the National Directorate wants. When he negotiates the return of land to the original [pre-revolutionary] owners without consulting or even notifying the workers, he acts in the interests of the party, not his own people. In this sense the ATC has been castrated by the party.”
Maria Teresa Blandón, who works with Gómez’ rice-growers and other dissident federations, believes the
ATC’s dependence on the FSLN is primarily ideological. For example, once a farm is privatized, ATC leaders generally favor the use of professional managers rather than worker self-management. According to Neira and Blandon, the heavy hand of the party, in the person of Jaime Wheelock, is at work here. As minister of agriculture in the 1980s, Wheelock was responsible for the bureaucratic, top-down structure of state farms. This administrative style and Wheelock himself, they argue, still exert a powerful influence on the ATC. (Wheelock told me later that he no longer favors the corporate model and has persuaded García not to impose it on workers. The bureaucratic model is also evident in the Farmers and Ranchers Association, UNAG, where a large corporation now absorbs most resources, and in the CST, where plans for a holding company are reportedly still afloat. For reasons of space, UNAG is not discussed here.)
The ATC dissidents’ call for a vision based on participatory democracy and worker control has found echo in other popular organizations. “The old school of leadership must compete with alternative forces,” maintains Gómez. “In the 1980s the leadership was everything, but not anymore. There’s been a growth of civil society at the grassroots.”
In no arena of smuggle has grassroots empowerment become more evident than in the neighborbood-based Communal Movement. Barrio La Primavera in Managua is a case in point. In this neighborhood of working-class homes and shantytowns at the edge of the city, machete–wielding residents were recently clearing land for a baseball field near a large draining pit of raw sewage that empties into Lake Managua. Down the road, a group of women were meeting to plan the construction of a preschool dining hall. Such work is typical of the activities undertaken by the Communal Movement.
The movement has thrown off the top-down model that dogged its precursor, the Sandinista Defense Committees, and is no longer the party instrument it once was. Though led by Sandinistas, it is deliberately non-partisan. Organizers work with the poor regardless of political affiliation to improve their communities and empower them as citizens. Moreover, the movement’s non-onfrontational tactics, which not threaten stability, make it less subject to party intervention than the unions.
After the Sandinistas lost power 1990, Daniel Ortega tapped former foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto to head the movement. According to Ernesto Torres, communal coordinator for the department of Granada, the movement then served as “the shock troops of the party” in its struggle with Managua Mayor Arnoldo Alemán. D’Escoto disagrees. “I don’t like political parties, he insists. “They create elites who distance themselves from the people.” (He is reportedly close to Ortega but not to the rest of the National Directorate.)
Faced with strong opposition from those who felt his plan to reorganize the movement bypassed grassroots leaders, D’Escoto left in 1991, and at the movement’s congress last August, leaders were, for the first time, elected by members rather than appointed by the FSLN. So strong was the anti-partisan sentiment that the congress formally declared its independence from the Front. “Our values are revolutionary, says National Coordinator Enrique Picado, “and the majority of the leadership is Sandinista, but in an institional sense the movement and the party are just friends.”
If the FSLN returns to power in 1996, the Communal Movement will remain an independent pressure group committed to grassroots activism. Like other popular organizations, it takes a more distanced view of state power and a more hospitable view of civil society than it did in the 1980s.
No Political Daddy Needed
The women’s movement is also divided by the struggle over autonomy. The organization most associated with the FSLN is the Nicaraguan Women’s association “Luisa Amada Espinosa” (AMNLAE), which is formally autonomous, but whose leadership consists of long-time party members. Like the party and the traditional Left, it holds that women are primarily oppressed not by the patriarchy, but by the class system. AMNLAE focused its efforts during the 1980s on production and war-related work. Now it is stressing matters like female unemployment and violence against women (where it did some work in the 1980s), mounting campaigns and offering services such as health care to the poor majority. But such activities too often fail to challenge sexism.
The women’s caucuses within the unions have historically been more independent of the party than AMNLAE, but their inclusion in male-dominated organizations places limits; on their feminism. They acknowledge the influence of machismo on women’s subordination but often put the blame on capitalist society. “Men as such aren’t the problem,” says the CST’s Sandra Ramos. “It’s more the class system and the government.” The women’s caucus in UNAG organizes work collectives but does little on gender issues. As the UNAG’s Benigna Mendiola sees it, “Why should I talk to a woman about sexuality if she’s starving?”
Both the ATC and the CST do some consciousness-raising work through their family-planning and domestic-violence programs, even while they tread lightly on the issue of male domination. They are also lobbying in favor of a provision on sexual harassment in the new labor code. However, many ATC and CST programs, which offer services for women rather than address the causes of their oppression, end up taking a band-aid approach.
In the last two years, independent feminists have emerged as a strong force within the women’s movement. “Unlike AMNLAE and the union women, our collective is not a service center,” says Maria Teresa Blandon, whose group, La Malinche, has been at the forefront of autonomous organizing. “We won’t set up clinics and nurseries. We target patriarchy more than the government. Above all we don’t ask anyone’s permission to be feminists.” Mandan and others organized a national conference in January of last year, and last August 18, groups joined to form the National Feminist Committee (CNF).
Most of these women are critical of the FSLN’s ideas about women’s oppression, and fault it for its authoritarianism. “After the [1990] elections,” says Ana Criquillón, “much of the women’s movement said, ‘We don’t need a political daddy looking after us. We want to be on our own.”‘ Like other leftist feminists in Latin America, Nicaragua’s independent feminists take women’s class oppression seriously. This was evident at the January conference, where workshop themes included unemployment and health as well as sexuality. Independent feminists, however, disagree with AMNLAE and the unions, who “think only women of the popular classes are sufficiently disadvantaged to merit attention,” according to journalist Sofia Montenegro. “They don’t understand patriarchal oppression and its effect on women of all classes.”
But in the eyes of more orthodox Marxist women in AMNLAE and the unions, independent feminists are too obsessed with sexism to attend to the troubles that plague the majority of women. “Independent feminists work up in the sky, on theory,” AMNLAE Vice-Coordinator Rita Fletes told me. “There was this article on how to have an orgasm without penetration. That doesn’t interest the market women I work with. They have more pressing things on their minds.” (Though in the age of AIDS, independent feminists consider this a survival issue; they also confront the legendary indifference to women’s sexual pleasure that machismo perpetuates.)
In Nicaragua, as elsewhere in the world, social movements put a high premium on self-determination and empowerment, Many Latin American movements harbor a deep distrust of the traditional cadre parties of the Left with their top-down leadership style. They also critique the parties’ overly centralized notions of managing state power. But because of the achievements of the Sandinista Revolution and the prominence of pluralism within an admittedly vanguardist FSLN, as a general rate Nicaragua’s popular organizations do not share this animus toward leftist parties (though many independent feminists do). And though often critical of the FSLN’s accommodations to the Chamorro government, they regard the Front’s future success as integral to the construction of a more equitable social order.
If verticalism is the legacy of the 1980s, fragmentism may be the danger of the 1990s. Many Sandinistas agree that the Front should accept the movement’s autonomy, while linking them to the FSLN and to each other in a more cohesive way. Bu there is no consensus on this. Comandante Dora María Téllez, for example, believes even facilitating a “horizontal dialogue” among grassroots groups would be “too bureaucratic and vanguardist.” Luis Carrión, on the other hand, contends that the party should encourage discussion among the different movements so that they can create popular alliances. The FSLN, he said, “could be a broker, helping the groups find common ground.” And according to journalist William Grigsby. “Vanguardism isn’t bad if it promotes dialogue and the search for common solutions.”
Meanwhile, the FSLN has yet to create a felxible leadership style, one more sensitive to the needs of the popular organizations and more responsive to the increasingly desperate situation of Nicaragua’s poor. Recognizing the magnitude of this problem, Daniel Ortega is trying to reach down to the grassroots. “The FSLN needs to develop new structures of communication and mobilization, “Ortega told me. “We need to invert the pyramid, so that the ideas of leadership reflect the proposals from the base.”
One important factor inhibiting the development of a post-vanguardist vision has been the Sandinista Front’s alliance with the Chamorro government. Now that this marriage of convenience seems on the verge of divorce, perhaps a breakthrough is in the offing. In November, Ortega worried aloud about the problem. He talked of “recent pressure from the base and the popular organizations to be more militant” and he forecast “a new phase of struggle.”
The election of Bill Clinton, he added, “has reduced the threat of the far Right, which sees the Clinton victory as a victory for the Sandinistas, and has given us more space for struggle.” But if Ortega is to succeed in positioning himself and the FSLN as the leaders of an increasingly militant popular struggles, he will have to find a way to reinvent the relationship between the party and his movements.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Midge Quandt is a solidarity activist and historian. She is the editor of Nicaragua, The New Face of U.S Intervention: An Activists’ Guide (Nicaragua Network Education Fund, 1992)
