[Marxism] THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FSLN

[Fred Fuentes <fuentf01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

THE RISE AND  FALL OF THE FSLN

In the 25 years of its existence the FSLN has constantly  struggled
with contradictions, the weight of state power and the hardships  of
being an opposition party. But its misappropriation of the
revolutionary project threatens its very survival.

By Alejandro  Bendaña
 
Twenty-five years ago, amid the urban insurrection  against the brutal
regime of Anastasio Somoza, teenagers armed with no more  than
pistols, hunting rifles and homemade explosives repeatedly stood
their ground behind ramshackle barricades against the onslaught of
the  dictatorship's U.S.-trained National Guard. In the heat of the
siege, the  boys and girls, or muchachos, as they were called,
demanded to know when the  Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
would arrive to relieve them.  These youths in cities like Managua,
Masaya, León and Estelí all received  the same frightening
answer: "You are the Sandinista Front."

A  decade earlier, university students fleeing the dictatorships'
secret police  took to the mountains to join the Front's guerrillas
and were equally  surprised. They expected to find hundreds of
militants undergoing rigorous  training in a well-organized camp.
Instead, they were shocked to see that  the "base" was little more
than a few dozen comrades on the run. At the  time, the Front was
experiencing a series of military setbacks, incapable of  securing a
permanent territorial foothold in the countryside, let alone  urban
areas.

Yet it was the Sandinista myth-along with the hundreds  of muchachos
who offered their lives on its behalf-that finally forced the
unexpected collapse of the National Guard and the downfall of Somoza.
With its leaders clad in green fatigues, the FSLN seized power and
proceeded to implement one of the last social revolutions of the 20th
century. The world watched the new Central American experiment with
an  enthusiasm matched only by the venomous fervor of Washington's
subsequent  military and economic destabilization campaign.

The July 19, 1979,  victory was less the product of strategic or
military genius than of two  more important factors: widespread hatred
for Somoza and the identification  of the FSLN as the embodiment of
the nationalist hero Augusto Sandino. The  allusion to Sandino was
important, because he had fought the Marines of the  U.S. occupation
from 1927 to 1933, only to be assassinated a year later by  the first
Somoza-Anastasio's father. The FSLN's principal founder, Carlos
Fonseca Amador, had wisely and purposefully injected the legacy of
Sandino to broaden the Front's appeal and to underscore the
importance  of nationalism and anti-imperialism.

Just months before achieving  victory, the three distinct "tendencies"
within the FSLN-the Prolonged  People's War group, the urban
proponents of the Proletariat Tendency and the  Insurrectionist
Tendency-had been at each other's throats over deep  ideological
differences. The three factions, each with their own leaders,  united
with the helpful prodding of Fidel Castro who convinced them to share
leadership in a single political-military strategy. Demands for unity
also came from the ranks of fighters and sympathizers who cared more
about getting Somoza out than bringing Lenin or Mao into the fray. As
the armed resistance grew, particularly after the 1978 murder of
popular  newspaper editor Pedro J. Chamorro, the insurrectionist
strategy won out.

The day the FSLN assumed power, it remained shrouded in mystery. In
fact, July 19 was the first time many Nicaraguans, including long-
time  Sandinista fighters, caught a glimpse of most of the Front's
leaders. The  nine-member leadership collective known as the "National
Directorate,"  quickly seized upon the myth and acclaim of the
revolution to veil the  bitter differences existing among them.
Leading members of each tendency  made up the National Directorate,
with Daniel Ortega and his brother  Humberto assuming the top civilian
and military posts in the new government.

Doctrinaire ideology took a backseat as the leadership and cadres
kept to themselves the ideological schisms among the alliance. This
decidedly "tactical" necessity for upholding a united front, bought
them  time to deepen Sandinista control over key institutions while
pushing  forward structural changes under a rubric of pluralism, a
mixed economy and  non-alignment. Necessity became a virtue as
Christians, middle-class sectors  and even the progeny of the
oligarchy became part of the Sandinista movement  and government. The
broad support base and the divergent tendencies required  collective
leadership within the FSLN. Likewise, the Revolution, for the  time
being, opted out of choosing a single leader and was flexible in the
definition and implementation of a program.

Unwittingly,  Washington's decision to wage war on the Nicaraguan
Revolution forced the  FSLN and its government to turn tactics into
strategy. That is, use their  diverse base and collective leadership
to consolidate and legitimize their  power in the face of mounting
U.S. aggression. Despite then-hardliner  Humberto Ortega's claims
that "we will not raffle off power," Washington's  hostility caused
the FSLN to make several political concessions. The  government
organized elections in 1984, drafted a bourgeois democratic
constitution, gave space to dissident parties in a more powerful
National Assembly and tolerated some media reforms.

Throughout the  1980s, preserving unity at all costs meant heeding
collectivism. All nine  Directorate members made key government
decisions, not only President Daniel  Ortega, or even its five most
prominant members. The nine shared a Marxist  perspective, introducing
themselves to the Kremlin as leaders of a  "socialist-oriented"
nation, but party members lacked the serious political  education
required to make democratic centralism more democratic and less
authoritarian. Indeed, much of the post-1979 organizational trappings
reflected a Leninist model. Ministers and other top-level officials
were  drawn almost exclusively from the Sandinista Assembly, a group
of some 70  persons that became a consultative body wielding even less
power than the  central committees of communist parties elsewhere.
Behind the vanguard of  select cadres, stood hundreds
of "sympathizers" who carried out  party-assigned duties. The war
against the Contras and the United States  reinforced this top-down
political culture, establishing personality cults  rather than
ideology or democratic discussion. The National Directorate met
regularly on Friday mornings and by the afternoon the state and party
apparatus would have their marching orders.

Formal party structures  became increasingly dependent on the state
for their operation and  orientation, fusing political and
administrative responsibilities. And the  party itself became
bureaucratized, overlapping heavily with state  structures. Jokes
abounded calling the party the "Ministry of Political  Mobilization."
A reference to the delegation of governmental initiatives to  the
party when tasks required mass participation and overtime for
government workers. But extraordinary achievements that never would
have  been realized on governmental effort alone were made in this
way: the 1980  literacy crusade, the popular health campaigns and the
creation of a mass  military force to fight the U.S.-backed Contras.
The National Directorate  made full avail of the myth and the sense of
historic mission to transform  Nicaragua. They sought to recruit a new
generation that hadn't fought in the  war against Somoza, instead, the
new generation waged war against  illiteracy, plunging illiteracy
rates from 52% to less than 13% in just a  year. Later, that same
generation took up arms to fight the Contras,  although more
reluctantly, as evidenced by the eventual instatement of the  military
draft.

U.S. martial, economic and ideological aggression  inevitably
determined the course of the nation and the evolution of the  party in
eight of the 11 years the FSLN held power. Iron discipline and
unquestioned verticalism within the party was by and large pivotal in
the survival of the Revolution during the U.S. barrage, but that same
discipline and authoritarianism also magnified the FSLN's many
mistakes.  Political miscalculations were the product of both external
pressures and  increasing detachment between citizens and government,
base-level party  members and leaders. Grossly overestimated, for
example, was the people's  capacity to endure suffering and shortages,
while the FSLN leadership and  the cadres in the bureaucracy remained
noticeably unaffected. And like many  social revolutions before it,
the Sandinistas confronted small landowners  who refused to comprise a
rural proletariat as part of an agrarian  revolution. Reluctance by
the small landowners, the government's  bureaucratic incompetence and
U.S. meddling turned the confrontation brutal.  What began as a class-
based confrontation over agricultural policy became a  bloody battle
of counterinsurgency against small and large landowners who  cast
their lot with the Contras. Militarily, it was a success, but it came
at insurmountable social and moral costs, given the heavy-handed
Sandinista security forces.

Prodded by the war, Directorate members  pushed aside non-FSLN sectors
within the government, creating bureaucratic  fiefdoms loyal to their
respective chiefs. The party factions responded  administratively to a
Directorate member. The most skilled cadres assumed  responsibilities
concerning the military and diplomatic defense of the  Revolution.
Deprived of capable administrators, government organs seeking to
address people's needs became weak and designers of ineffective
policy.  Hardest hit by these inadequacies was the countryside, where
the Contras and  the opposition could then count on fertile
recruitment grounds. The FSLN  also stumbled in its handling of the
legal opposition political parties and  media, small-scale farmers,
the Church hierarchy and the Miskito indigenous  population. Finally,
attempting to prevent a total economic collapse in  1988, the
Sandinista government imposed a brutal International Monetary  Fund-
style package of austerity measures and currency devaluations with
little consultation and explanation, causing further impoverishment
and  resentment.

Signs of decomposition were rife in the FSLN. With the  unabashedly
vertical command structure came arrogance, luxurious lifestyles,  and
personal and institutional vices. According to Chilean journalist
Marta Harnecker, "The conduct of many Sandinista leaders provided
fodder  for negative press campaigns by the opposition, and leading
[sic] to an  increased separation between Sandinista leaders and their
support base."[1]  Jesuit priest and one-time economic advisor to the
Sandinista government  Xabier Gorostiaga recalls
how "the `bourgeoisification' of the Sandinista  leadership increased
their isolation from people's real needs." What caused  its division
and disintegration, writes Gorostiaga, "was the personal  ambition of
the leadership who sought the success of their own projects  rather
than the consolidation of an alternative model." The tremendous moral
and human effort by a small republic in the Empire's backyard was
eventually undermined and corrupted by a "demoralizing ethical  hara-
kiri," he adds.[2] Eduardo Galeano laments that the Sandinistas lost
the 1990 presidential elections "on account of a devastating and
draining war. And afterwards, as usually happens, some of the leaders
sinned against hope, incredibly turning against their own sayings and
their own work."[3]

The relentless U.S. destabilization campaign and  the crippling
economic embargo embittered much of the population against the
Sandinista government, which had seriously underestimated the
viciousness of Washington's reprisals for the logistical support
provided to El Salvador's leftist guerillas throughout the 1980s.
Fending off the U.S.-backed Contras was consuming 60% of the budget,
forcing the FSLN to choose between implanting a brand of wartime
communism and negotiating a way out. It chose the latter. The Church,
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias and Democrats in the U.S. Congress
mediated a political transition and the organizing of free elections.
Unfazed, the FSLN mistakenly believed it could stall and
simultaneously  defeat the Contras, stabilize the economy and win an
election.

Just  as the Sandinista Front awoke one July day to find itself at the
seat of  Nicaragua's government, so too on February 25, 1990, it awoke
in a state of  disbelief, having lost the presidential election to a
U.S.-assembled  coalition of parties headed by Violeta Chamorro.
Washington had successfully  transformed the election into a virtual
referendum on the war. The choice,  as framed by the U.S. government,
was between continued war and resistance  with the Sandinistas on the
one hand, and an end to war and aggression on  the other. People's
diminished capacity to resist was the result of the  misappropriation
of a project worth defending, and the failure of party  democracy and
political education or lacks thereof.[4]

The  Sandinista Front became a legal left opposition party, having no
inkling of  what either "opposition" or "left" truly meant, especially
in the dawning of  a neoliberal, post-Soviet era. The unity in the
party exacted by war and the  preferred muzzling of internal debate
disintegrated. Party members spoke out  brazenly about members of the
National Directorate. After more than a  decade, the nine leaders lost
their demigod status; some even left for  Harvard to study public
administration.

Tensions that had simmered  for over a decade boiled over. The period
of accepting orders without  question was gone, and for once, the
Directorate was forced to listen. With  internal consensus gone,
Sandinista rank and file rebuked leaders for the  mistakes and abuses
of the previous decade. For many in the FSLN, allegiance  to the party
had been more a question of wartime discipline than ideological  or
programmatic conviction. Once the need for discipline was gone and
privileged access to the state severed, many left the party. What
many  considered sources of Sandinista strength-collective leadership,
broad class  composition and the downplaying of dogma-were now
envisaged as sources of  weakness and "ideological confusion."

As economic and social conditions  rapidly deteriorated after 1990,
pressure grew within the FSLN for a  clarification of strategy. Base-
level militants cited the FSLN's power and  popularity and its
continued presence in the army, police, bureaucracy,  legislature and
prominent social organizations. They demanded the party make  use of
its street muscle and force policy changes on the Chamorro
government, if not topple the government itself. A leftist current
materialized and in 1994 demanded "greater combativeness in defense
of  the poor, in its revolutionary vocation and its vanguardist
nature." An  opposing wing, led by Ortega's former Vice President
Sergio Ramírez and a  number of FSLN legislative deputies, argued
against confrontation with the  government, emphasizing negotiation
over street credibility, believing  polarization would only benefit
the right. They reasoned that by promoting  greater transparency,
broad social consensus with a multi-class base and  stability in
international relations, the FSLN would win elections.

By this point Daniel Ortega had emerged as first among equals. His
influence over party structures showed among the regional
representatives gathering for the FSLN congress in 1994 that was to
decide the composition of the party leadership. Ortega roundly
defeated  Ramírez. But this was less a victory for the "left" than for
Ortega, who  surfaced as the new caudillo. From then on, Ortega
enacted the Ramírez  strategy in practice, while exuding the combative
strategy in rhetoric.  Convinced he had the left in his pocket and
having pushed out his more  conservative opponents, Ortega began
fortifying alliances with Nicaragua's  dominant capitalist groups and
focused on winning over undecided voters.  Despite his machinations,
the party lost the 1996 election to Liberal Party  (PLC) candidate
Arnoldo Alemán, who ran on a clear-cut anti-Sandinista  platform.

Traumatized by the electoral defeat and fearing retaliation  >from the
new government, party members and sympathizers across the country
closed ranks around Ortega. Again, the absence of political education
and internal democracy haunted the FSLN. Ortega tightened his hold
over  the party faithful and the lingering party machinery, preventing
a real  break with the vertical leadership style ingrained on the
FSLN.

Having to battle both neoliberalism and Orteguismo, social forces
have found it difficult to articulate independent movements and
alliances against neoliberalism. Sandinista dissidents may be
prominent  in the media and nongovernmental organizations, but they
have failed to  articulate an organized alternative, never mind an
electoral one. Several  have either failed to come to terms with their
past in the party, or have  given up on parties entirely. Others
insist that the battle must take place  within the party, because
breaking with historical symbols infused in the  popular sectors would
be counterproductive. For so many poor, support for  Ortega's FSLN is
a matter of faith and blind confidence. Ironically,  strategists of
the ruling PLC hope Ortega will run again precisely because  of the
polarization and U.S. opposition his candidacy would inspire.

Patronage politics rules the country and both major parties: the PLC
and the FSLN. Only those loyal to Ortega made the ballot for
municipal  and legislative elections in 2000. Not until 2002 did the
FSLN introduce  primaries as a means of selecting party candidates,
albeit only for city  council. Critics of Ortega within the party
remain on the sidelines awaiting  change. Others have left the
official party all together, still calling  themselves Sandinistas,
but preferring to do their political work  independently. Many believe
they had little choice, given the lack of  long-term vision and
serious proposals. In their view, the FSLN  unsuccessfully abandoned
its strategic calculus for immediate  macro-political considerations.

For many, the high point of Sandinista  prestige was the morning of
February 26 when Ortega recognized the electoral  victory of Violeta
Chamorro-the first peaceful transition to an opposition  government.
Within a month, however, the prestige collapsed in the wake of  the
infamous piñata. Before turning over the government to Chamorro, the
FSLN gutted state-owned resources, ostensibly to finance its
conversion  to an opposition party. Some Sandinista leaders assigned
themselves  state-owned properties and awarded their associates with
house and land  titles.

In May 1998, Ortega's stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, filed
charges against him, saying she had been the subject of rape and
abuse  since the age of 11. In what was probably the most convincing
evidence of  Ortega's lock on the party, including its women's
movement, party officials  ignored Narváez's accusation, herself a
party militant. Then in 1999, to the  dismay of even the party
faithful, Ortega and then-President Alemán, one of  the most despised
and corrupt figures in contemporary Nicaragua, negotiated  a pact. It
provided for the distribution of state posts and changes in the
constitution, which shutout independent electoral challengers.[5]

The political compromises made since the revolution must be judged in
terms of what they have accomplished for Nicaragua's poor.
Unfortunately, the record is dismal. Per capita income is lower than
pre-1979 levels and imports exceed exports by 30%. In the early
1990s,  Nicaragua set the world record for the highest debt per
capita. By the end  of the decade, neoliberalism left the country with
one of the largest income  inequality gaps in the world. New shopping
malls sprout up while 40% of  school age children, mostly in rural
areas, can't afford to enroll in school  because of World Bank-
recommended user fees. According to Unicef, 57% of  children fail to
complete the sixth grade.[6] One quarter of the population  is
functionally illiterate, suffers from malnutrition, and has no access
to basic health and services. Nicaragua dropped from 85 in 1990 to
118  in 2002 out of a possible 175 on the UN's Human Development Index
ranking.  Despite all this, the FSLN urged teachers and health workers
to rein in  their demands and keep off the streets, so they would not
upset the  government's 2003 negotiations with the IMF and the World
Bank.

Given the disastrous social impacts of more than a decade of
structural adjustment and staggering corruption, there is little
doubt  that the FSLN could lead a movement to transform, or at the
very least  question, the nation's destructive path. The obstruction,
however, is not  capacity, but will. Ortega continues to believe in
the possibility of  re-election and in the meantime pursues a strategy
of securing spaces and  positions in the state apparatus for his loyal
followers.

The very  parameters of the FSLN's political discussions along with
the unquestioned  authority of Secretary General Ortega simply
highlight how far the  Sandinista party has come from the principles
of its first Secretary General  and founder, Carlos Fonseca Amador. He
correctly explained the purpose of  revolution: "It is not a matter of
replacing men in power, it is a matter of  changing the social and
economic structures of oppression." Is today's FSLN  not part of the
entrenched national power bloc, risking its own  dismantlement? Will
the FSLN be content to simply administer the liberal  democratic
institutions that it helped create, wheeling and dealing the
distribution of the spoils?

That Sandinistas entertain such a course  speaks volumes to the
current conjuncture. Credit is due for the  Revolution's considerable
accomplishments, but it fell far short of people's  aspirations for
genuine economic and social democracy, let alone  sovereignty. In its
heyday, the FSLN failed to reconstitute Nicaraguan  society in any
revolutionary fashion. Today, its failure lies in its  reluctance to
contain or reverse neoliberalism's sordid ideological and  economic
transformation of that same state and society. In fact, the
Sandinista Revolution might in the end prove to be the stimulus that
gave the right their present hegemony. As William Robinson argues
elsewhere in this NACLA Report, "What took place in Nicaragua, more
than  in any other Central American country, was a circulation of
elites, made  possible (or unblocked), ironically, by the revolution"
[See "The New  Right." p. 15].

It may well be that Fonseca's dream appears unrealistic  and
unattainable in this imperial age when the United States is more
determined than ever to micromanage the politics and economies of
Central America. Yet, it is that dream that keeps alive the original
Sandinista myth rooted in the hope for an alternative future for the
dispossessed. The dream is also what drives the FSLN's core
constituency  to give its vote of confidence in elections. But that
confidence has a  limit. Any hope for the future of the left in
Nicaragua lies precisely in  the possibility that the myth of Sandino
and Sandinismo may once again  transform the sad contemporary reality
of the FSLN, Orteguismo and  Nicaragua.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandro Bendaña is founder and  president of the Center for
International Studies based in Managua. He  served as the Nicaraguan
Ambassador to the UN (1981-1982) and as Secretary  General of the
Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry (1984-1990). He is author of  several
books, including La mística de Sandino (Centro de Estudios
Internacionales, 1994) and Power Lines: U.S. Dominance in the New
Global  Order (Interlink Press, 1996), and is a member of NACLA's
editorial board.

NOTES
1. Marta Harnecker, Events that Have Marked the Left,  unpublished
manuscript, 1999.
2. Xabier Gorostiaga, "The Legacy of a  Life Intensely Lived," Envio,
Vol. 22, No. 267, October 2003, pp. 40-41.
3. Eduardo Galeano, Patas arriba: la escuela del nuevo mundo al revés
(Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2003), p. 322.
4. For example, see the  interview with former Directorate member
Mónica Baltodano in Adital, ,  November 24, 2003.
5. See Mónica Baltodano, "Nicaragua: hacia un nuevo pacto  Alemán-
Ortega," Rebelión Internacional, December 4, 2003. Baltodano
says, "The decisions [surrounding the new pact] demonstrate once
again  that the weight of the official decisions of the FSLN continue
to be  subordinated to the logic of the personal interests of Daniel,
and to the  closed logic of elitist transactions and distribution of
power quotas, in  isolation from the real problems of the country and
of the people."
6.  "Creciendo sin educación," La Prensa (Nicaragua), January 28,
2004.




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