CONTINUED JUST THE FACTS: NICARAGUA

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Nicaraguans, who have been known to have always fought relentlessly in battle, and been generous and firm in victory, on the other hand experienced that war’s transcendence. Travelers, development specialists, aid workers and investors who have interacted with my favorite attraction there, the Nicas, have witnessed this, and in plentiful and often poignant proportions.

It was that war, and its aftermath, that drew me to Nicaragua in the first place. As a military intelligence analyst in the 1980s, I followed the Contra-Sandinista War at first tactically, and then with socio-political interest. Part of the strategic effort to halt the incursion of communism in the Western Hemisphere, I intercepted “enemy” communications, and managed to get a sense of what the fight was all about. I learned that it was largely about economics and self-determination, and this lesson was a significant step on the path of what the renowned Brazilian educator Paolo Freire would have termed my “conscientización.”

Later, I followed the post-war national reconciliation with great interest and so I traveled “mochilera,” or as a backpacker, in an effort to witness some version of events firsthand. My sense throughout the years was that something remarkable, yet ambiguous, was unfolding; whether it turned out excellently or tragically remained to be seen.

Nicaraguans relish the double entendre. Life’s realities, unpredicted circumstances, humorous innuendo and even raw, bad luck are so much more robust when there is more than one way of looking at a given situation. As such, it may be fitting that a dichotomy exists in terms of whether anything at all was resolved with the war.

On the one hand, in the early years after the late 1970s Insurgencia, also known as “la Runga” or the “Fray,” that overthrew the often brutal 40-year Somoza dynasty, an education campaign by the burgeoning Sandinista movement achieved a dramatic drop in illiteracy. Exploration of alternative energy, potable water and organic farming were underway. Land that had been accumulated by the Somoza family was confiscated and re-distributed in what was at first a revolutionary land re-allocation effort.

Humble men who had been owners of large tracts of land tell me nowadays that they were so impressed with the sea change in the structures which for decades had maintained a wide gap between the haves and have nots, that they voluntarily gave up land in anticipation of increased social equity. The multi–member governing junta managed to govern fairly well despite formidable external pressures and a crippling US economic blockade.

Maintaining the new independence was paramount. However, by making agreements with other socialist regimes, the new Sandinista Directorate’s effort to ensure support for its sovereignty invited the intervention it hoped to avoid. On the premise of rolling back communism, the Reagan Administration authorized secret CIA attacks on Nicaraguan oil reserves and the mining of its harbors. Anti-interventionist passions flared. Revolutionaries who had fought for change in the socio-economic order hardened in their socialist rhetoric, and leaders took more radical measures to mark the new day that had come.

Reactionary, unsustainable policies engendered distrust, radicalism and more external pressure and the once immensely popular revolution deteriorated to the kind of low that invited yet new upheaval.

Throughout the 1980s, aid money—including profits from secret arms sales to Iran—funded the guerrilla war waged by the Contras angry over excessive property confiscations by the increasingly tyrannical Sandinistas, among other grievances. Ironically, these two "sides" had fought side-by-side during the 1978 Insurgency.

The civil war persisted until the end of the 1980s, when peace talks commenced between the Sandinistas and Contras, who saw an opening for dialogue with the imminent end of Reagan’s second term in office. Then, in the elections of 1990, Violeta Chamorro––wife of La Prensa Editor-in-Chief Pedro Joaquín Chamorro who was assassinated by Somoza’s National Guard in 1978–––won the presidential election and promptly admonished everyone to lay down their arms and remember their sense of family, of brotherhood.

Scores of men and women, Sandinistas and Contras, swiftly and joyously did just that, I am told by numerous and often teary-eyed former combatants. Then, a truly unique process of National Reconciliation ensued.

A critical component to a successful post-war recovery effort, the National Reconciliation initiative in Nicaragua created political power-sharing arrangements and brought former combatants together for private dialogue in forgiveness. It was unprecedented in scope, and the chapters on its real, long-term impact remain to be written. However, its effects are evident in what did not happen in Nicaragua.

Unlike most civil wars, there was a conspicuous scarcity of traditional post-ceasefire ambushes and personal vendettas. Family and brotherhood were easy to recoup because they had always remained. Folks with little more than a few pesos will find food or coin for an indigent, and a majority of Nicaraguans seem to prefer to engage, rather than judge. And like Japan after World War II, in Nicaragua the American traveler might imagine forgiveness in spite of singular US policy decisions that left so many dead, so many suffering in their wake, an economy in tatters, and––perhaps unlike Japan––so little resolved.

Yet, reconciliation was no panacea, and in the aftermath of war, economic needs were pressing. For the next five-year presidency in 1996, Nicaraguans chose the Liberal Party (PLC) candidate, Arnoldo Aleman, whose promised productivity largely resulted in his artfully raiding state coffers to the tune of some $90 million USD by the end of his presidency.

For a while, Nicas seemed willing to look the other way, perhaps inured to such theft as inevitable office perks, as long as the economy got a boost. This was something generally seen to be unachievable by the opposing Sandinista Front, or FSLN, led-for-life by a now ideology-poor Daniel Ortega, whose more politically-astute compatriots perished from torture and assassination during the Insurgency, and whose regular excesses made it clear that his leadership credentials were sorely lacking.

Tired of Ortega’s pseudo-leftist militancy, a population that had not forgotten the ravages of war elected to office in 2001 Enrique Bolaños, vice president of the republic, member of the PLC, and a man of some integrity who promised to fight corruption and poverty.

Regrettably, President Bolaños has spent more time struggling with the excesses of his party and bipartisan infighting than focusing on reducing unemployment, poverty and the mega-salaries that offer a clear definition of how the poor have once again come to stand in relationship to the government, and those who profit from it. Nicas still wonder, “is this what we fought a civil war for?”

I can recount numerous conversations with citizens who had moved the Revolution, with Sandinista combatants who fought against the US supported counter-revolution, and with the sons and daughters of that elusive dream, and their nostalgic candor is unfailing.

I have found them in the mountain pubs of Jinotega and truck stops of Estelí, in the attractive eateries and colonial corners of Grenada, in the markets and universities of León, in a café on a bustling rotunda in Managua, at a scenic overlook to one of the many volcanoes and lagunas in Nicaragua, once on a river launch on the Rio Escondido, even on a beach in Costa Rica, and in Marx Café and the Gala Hispanic Theatre in Mount Pleasant in Washington, DC.

A Sandinista who’d held his Contra blood brother in his final moments and received his last wishes; a Contra who’d been forced at gunpoint to commit POW atrocities––I’ve wept with them, and often for them, when alone. Their passion, once engaged, is unrelenting, yet their forgiveness appears to be without limit.

While in the capital, the FSLN and the PLC are parties that have virtually come to be defined not by ideology or any practicable skills base but by their exhausting opposition to one another and their shameless thievery of Nicaragua’s few financial resources, the hinterland representatives appear to be a decent lot.

There is some general agreement that the results of the November 2004 municipal elections suggest some democratic progress, though tainted with bipartisan constraints, to wit: with little chance of winning under a fledgling third party banner—APRE, or Alianza para la República—and not opting under the PLC on principal, many would-be mayors held their noses in distance from Ortega-styled Sandinismo, and lined up under the Frente Sandinista, roundly winning 23 of the 24 municipal seats available. That they were nearly all progressive professionals associated with the FSLN is not testimony to the resurgence of communism as some seem to fear but rather evidence of the compromises folks make when constrained within a two-party system in paralysis, and when need for application of the fundamental tenets of democracy is paramount.

Whether progressive Sandinista, centrist Alianza, or uniquely competent Liberal, movement afoot in Nicaragua suggests that future leaders there could well capture folks’ energy and imagination by anteing up with the genuinely practical and collective governing agenda they appear poised to offer.

This could prove to be good news for travelers like my father, whose sense of adventure wanes when the potholes on the road less traveled jostle the bones and the brain, or when compelled to plug his nose while forced one too many times to carry his own toilet paper to a malfunctioning latrine. The peeling “Works, Not Words!” (Obras, no Palabras!) public works logo that dots the highway billboards and township welcoming placards is at once tragic and comic. What Nicaraguans have done is to determine what their bottom-line basket of goods contains, use whatever tools are available, jerry-rig what can be jerry-rigged, and invent what doesn’t exist. They’ve also come to value their friends more than money, because the former can always mitigate an absence of the latter.

On the road out of the cool, northern mountains of Jinotega on a mission-laden run into the hot, Pacific lowlands of León not long ago, mechanical problems forced a stop. Seemingly miles from any sort of assistance, children on bicycles appeared. Asked if they happened to know a mechanic, one went to fetch his father. Nino arrived, sent his children off for this tool or that, as well as silicon at a neighbor’s house, and chatted amicably as he worked. When I offered compensation, he joked that I need only take with me one of his six children, to lighten the load. When I insisted on paying, at least for the silicon he’d purchased, he said, “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you just pay us a visit upon your return?”

It may be that such kindness, grace and generosity are manifestations of the full cycle of oppression, poverty, social unrest, insurgency, revolution, foreign intervention, civil war, ceasefire, national reconciliation, and then political corruption of satirical proportions, and more intervention-stress and poverty––all of which have combined to somehow both curse and bless Nicaraguans.

History has a tendency to repeat itself, and there are few avenues available to a people mired in certain degrees of economic crisis. Yet, while it is reasonably certain that war will not repeat itself in Nicaragua, it would seem that the conditions are right for a new socio-economic evolution, forged by the same, bright, industrious minds I regularly meet in my travels here, who not only acknowledge the sacrifices the country has made to secure a more peaceful future, but who will work to achieve it––kindly, collectively, with ingenuity and without violence, and with whatever tools exist.

Suzanne Wopperer is CEO of Naturalí Spring Water in Jinotega, Nicaragua, having formerly worked in USMC naval intelligence and USIP communications.

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