[Marxism] Stephen Kinzer on Nicaragua

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Since this article is only available to NYR subscribers, I am 
forwarding the whole thing, something I have mixed feelings about. 
Kinzer covered Nicaragua for the NY Times during the contra war and was 
not as bad as Shirley Christian. On the other hand, he was not as good 
as Raymond Bonner who covered El Salvador.)

NY Review
Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Life Under the Ortegas
By Stephen Kinzer

During the 1970s, Dionisio Marenco was one of many young Nicaraguans who 
decided to risk their lives by joining the rebel Sandinista National 
Liberation Front. He helped rob a payroll office to finance the group, 
joined in planning spectacular commando raids, and narrowly escaped 
death in a firefight when he and a band of comrades stormed a police 
station in Managua. After the Sandinistas seized power in 1979, Marenco 
held several ministerial posts under President Daniel Ortega, and then 
became chief of the Sandinista propaganda department. He remained by 
Ortega's side during the convulsions that shook the Sandinista Front 
after it was voted out of power in 1990. While in opposition, Ortega 
helped engineer Marenco's election as mayor of Managua in 2004. Like 
many other veteran Sandinistas, though, Marenco finally became fed up 
with Ortega, who was reelected president in 2006. The two are now on bad 
terms.

I recently visited Marenco at his modest City Hall office. On the walls 
hang portraits of Nicaragua's two most famous historical figures, the 
brilliant modernist poet Rubén Darìo, who died in 1916, and the 
guerrilla hero Augusto César Sandino, who held off repeated US Marine 
assaults in the 1920s and 1930s. After an aide brought us coffee, we sat 
silently for a moment. I was thinking back to the turbulent 1980s, when 
the Sandinistas were fiery radicals and President Reagan was sponsoring 
a brutal war to overthrow them. When Marenco finally spoke, I realized 
that he too had been remembering those days. "It's amazing," he said 
wistfully, "to see how this country has gone from such superinflated 
importance to less than nothing."
New York Review Books Children

By many standards Nicaragua is worse off than ever. It is one of the 
poorest countries in the Americas. There is money to be made, but most 
goes to the elite; 10 percent of Nicaraguans earn nearly half the 
country's total income, while 80 percent subsist on less than two 
dollars a day. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 
27 percent of the population is undernourished. Hundreds of thousands of 
people have left to find work in Costa Rica or elsewhere. A 
twenty-six-year-old American who lives in a northern town lamented that 
he has no friends his own age, because every young man who lived there 
has left.

Grinding poverty has been endemic in Nicaragua for decades. Governments 
of the left, center, and right have failed to ease it. In the 
countryside it is even more palpable than in the capital. Many people 
are so frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities that they have 
given up looking for full-time jobs and simply do what they can to 
scrape by. Chronic energy shortages make it difficult for factories to 
operate, and this keeps away foreign investors. Rates of domestic 
violence are among the highest in Latin America. If there is one bright 
spot, it is that levels of violent crime outside the home are remarkably 
low, nearer to the rates in placid Costa Rica than to those in 
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, the region's comparably poor 
countries. Some attribute this to a gentle streak in the national 
character. Others suggest that it is due to the professionalism and 
social consciousness of the National Police, which is among the positive 
legacies of the first Sandinista government that ruled during the 1980s.

The gentleness of Nicaraguans is one of their country's most endearing 
qualities. Despite their troubles, many remain cheerful and feel a 
strong sense of solidarity with their fellow citizens. I met more than a 
few poor people who struggle to live on pennies yet told me their lives 
are not bad. Nicaraguans are accustomed to difficulty. The land around 
them is majestic and, as tourists are discovering in steadily increasing 
numbers, they seem eager to share it with visitors.

By most standards, though, Nicaragua remains caught in an acute version 
of the underdevelopment that has gripped much of Latin America for 
generations. Aid agencies ameliorate some of the worst problems, the 
Ortega government has embarked on a food project with the aim of "zero 
hunger," and local leaders like Mayor Marenco have done what little they 
can to bring low-priced rice and beans to the poor. None of these 
efforts, however, is backed by enough resources to make a real difference.

"There are no jobs and no prospects," Mayor Marenco told me. "People 
don't have enough to eat, to dress themselves, or to go to the hospital 
when they need to. The sense of hopelessness is tremendous. Where's the 
way out? I don't see it." Then, as if grasping for some bright spot, he 
added, "Only Chávez can help us."

While the Sandinistas were insurgents, and while they governed Nicaragua 
during the 1980s, Fidel Castro was their hero and inspiration. Cuba is 
still sending what aid it can to Nicaragua, notably a corps of doctors 
who practice in remote regions and have won much admiration for their 
hard work and willingness to live in difficult conditions. The central 
object of Daniel Ortega's admiration today, though, is President Hugo 
Chávez of Venezuela, who has replaced Castro as the chief demon in 
Washington's Latin American cosmology. Chávez has visited Nicaragua four 
times since Ortega took office as president in early 2007, and Ortega 
rarely makes a foreign trip without stopping in Caracas. Perhaps, as the 
Nicaraguan psychiatrist Gioconda Cajina suggests, Ortega has a need for 
a father figure. Most Nicaraguans of all political perspectives, 
including Mayor Marenco, nonetheless agree that his relationship with 
Chávez has been crucial for the Nicaraguan economy.

Nicaragua's most urgent priority these days is energy. Without energy 
there is no hope of securing the investment or achieving the economic 
growth the country must have if it is to begin pulling itself out of its 
misery. Yet it produces no oil and cannot afford to buy what it needs. 
By providing all of Nicaragua's supply, a total of about 10 million 
barrels per year, on generous credit terms, Chávez has become 
Nicaragua's greatest benefactor. "Without Venezuela's oil cooperation, 
the Nicaraguan economy would already have collapsed," Ortega said during 
a visit to Caracas in January. "We simply would not have had energy in 
our country, so productive activity would have stopped. That is to say, 
there would have been chaos."

Even aid from Venezuela, however, has not been enough to resolve 
Nicaragua's intensifying energy crisis. Prices for oil and electricity 
have been rising steadily. This has led to power rationing, rolling 
blackouts, and spreading demands for subsidies that the government says 
it cannot provide. Popular anger erupted into a paralyzing transport 
workers' strike in May, the first strike Ortega has faced since taking 
office last year. Protests over energy costs weakened previous 
governments, and if Ortega cannot calm this one, even his supporters may 
come to question the wisdom of his alliance with Chávez.

Ortega shares with Chávez an old-fashioned developing-world leftism 
based on scorn for traditional democracy and denunciations of Western 
power. Chávez described President Bush as "the devil" during a speech at 
the United Nations in 2006; a year later, Ortega took to the same podium 
to assert that the United States is history's "biggest and most 
impressive dictatorship." At a summit of Spanish-speaking leaders in 
Chile last November, King Juan Carlos of Spain told Chávez to "shut up" 
and then, when Ortega tried to defend him, stood up and left the room. 
When regional leaders met in Managua recently to discuss world food 
shortages, Ortega ascribed the shortages to the "tyranny of global 
capitalism."

In his dealings with Western nations, however, Ortega's actions are more 
conciliatory than his rhetoric. He signed an agreement with the 
International Monetary Fund that imposed on Nicaragua the same 
conditions previous Nicaraguan presidents had accepted. In January he 
welcomed the director of the US Peace Corps with a speech saying that 
its programs are of "great value." Then he accompanied the director of 
the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which offers American aid to 
developing countries, on a tour of the countryside. While I was in 
Managua, I was surprised to see a group of uniformed American military 
officers at the restaurant where I was having lunch; they turned out to 
be part of a visiting delegation led by General Norman Seip, who directs 
US Air Force operations in Central and South America.

In March, soldiers from Colombia, which is the Bush administration's 
closest ally in South America, crossed into neighboring Ecuador to chase 
leftist guerrillas who had sought refuge there. The soldiers found 
evidence suggesting that Chávez had been aiding those guerrillas, which 
led to a full-fledged diplomatic crisis in which President Álvaro Uribe 
of Colombia demanded that Chávez be brought to trial before the 
International Criminal Court. Ortega, eager as always to show solidarity 
with Chávez, immediately announced that his government was breaking 
relations with Colombia. Just a day later, before the Colombian 
ambassador had had time to leave Managua, he changed his mind and 
reestablished relations. The incident suggested both Ortega's reflexive 
anti-imperialism and his ability to make tactical retreats when he deems 
it wise.

In January the United States opened the largest embassy ever built in 
Nicaragua. Located on top of a commanding hill, it will reportedly have 
working space for six hundred people. Around the same time, the State 
Department informed Nicaragua that President Bush's choice to become the 
new US ambassador was Robert Callahan, a protégé of Deputy Secretary of 
State John Negroponte. Callahan was Negroponte's spokesman not only 
while he was ambassador to Iraq and director of national intelligence, 
but also while Negroponte, as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, was 
helping to direct the contra war that aimed to defeat Ortega and his 
Sandinista comrades.

This nomination seemed an obvious provocation, and Ortega would have had 
good reason to reject it. Instead he accepted it almost immediately. He 
has even named Arturo Cruz Sequeira, who supported the contras in the 
1980s and whose father was selected by the CIA to run against Ortega for 
president of Nicaragua in 1984, as ambassador to the United States. So 
although he leaves no doubt about his anti-imperialist convictions, he 
also seems careful not to burn his bridges to Washington. Nicaragua, 
however, is not getting from the United States anything like the help it 
receives from Venezuela.

President Ortega was elected with just 38 percent of the vote, with most 
of it coming from poor people who see him as more sympathetic to their 
plight than other Nicaraguan politicians. He remains unpopular. Recent 
opinion surveys conducted by a Mexico-based firm in twenty Western 
Hemisphere countries found him to have lower approval ratings than any 
other president except Nicanor Duarte of Paraguay. He campaigned on a 
platform of reconciliation, but since taking office in January 2007 he 
has been coldly dismissive in his relations with Nicaragua's business 
leaders and investors. He governs in isolation and refuses requests for 
interviews. Yet those who voted for him in the hope that he would 
attract lavish aid from Venezuela have not been disappointed. That aid 
sustains not only Nicaragua, but Ortega's hold on power.

Traveling through the Nicaraguan countryside, I found some poor people 
still hoping for better times. Several told me that the three 
pro-Western presidents Nicaragua had after 1990—Violeta Chamorro, 
Arnoldo Alemán, and Enrique Bolaños—seemed to govern only for the rich 
or for themselves, and that Ortega cares about the poor even though he 
has not been able to do much for them. "Life is still hard, but that 
isn't his fault," said a peasant farmer in the northern province of 
Matagalpa. The director of the public library in the south-central town 
of Nindirì, José Luis Sánchez, agreed. "Over the last fifteen years, we 
had three governments that weren't able to improve people's lives or 
resolve any of our great national problems, so people looked somewhere 
else," he told me.

     I see some improvements in health and education, but the economy is 
our big problem. We are not our own masters. We're at the mercy of 
foreign corporations and governments. People are eager for something 
better. We've waited a year for this government to give us hope. We're 
still waiting.

For the last hundred years Nicaragua, perhaps more than any other 
country, has been subject to the cycle of foreign intervention, 
repression, and rebellion. In 1909 US Secretary of State Philander Knox 
engineered the overthrow of President José Santos Zelaya, the most 
formidable leader Nicaragua ever had, mainly because Zelaya was trying 
to exert control over American corporations like the Philadelphia-based 
La Luz and Los Angeles Mining Company, which Knox had represented during 
his years as a corporate lawyer. Three years later, the weak new 
regime—headed by the mining company's former chief accountant—had to 
call on US Marines to put down a nationalist revolt. The Marines stayed 
in Nicaragua for more than twenty years, notably failing to suppress the 
guerrilla movement mounted by Augusto César Sandino in the 1920s and 
1930s. Sandino was assassinated in 1934, and for the next four decades 
the United States supported the Somoza family dynasty, founded by 
General Anastasio Somoza Garcìa, who had ordered the assassination. The 
dynasty's repressive rule provoked another uprising that began in the 
1960s and finally swept today's Sandinista National Liberation Movement 
to power.

Wherever I traveled in Nicaragua, I found references to the country's 
violent history. On a plain thirty miles from Managua, I found a small 
museum commemorating a battle fought there in 1856 between Nicaraguans 
and invaders loyal to the mad American adventurer William Walker. At a 
hotel where I stayed in the north, I found a brochure urging tourists to 
travel the "Sandino Route": it includes a stop in Ocotal, where on July 
16, 1927, American planes attacked Sandino's guerrillas in the first use 
of close air support in a military engagement; and San Rafael del Norte, 
where Sandino gave his only interview to an American journalist. He told 
Carleton Beals of The Nation that "there may be bandits in Nicaragua, 
but they are not necessarily Nicaraguans." In Masaya, where more than 
350 Sandinista guerrillas were killed while fighting the National Guard 
in 1978 and 1979, a ground-floor room at City Hall houses a poignant 
display of photos, weapons, and other memorabilia from that uprising. It 
includes a farewell letter from one guerrilla to his parents, saying he 
had decided to fight against "the brutal force that is imposed upon us 
every day."

History suggests that when Nicaraguans assert themselves, "the brutal 
force," whether represented by Philander Knox or Ronald Reagan, falls 
upon them. When they languish quietly in misery, as they are doing now, 
few foreigners seem to care. A prosperous and stable Nicaragua would be 
a powerful asset to the United States, especially as corruption, 
violence, and drug trafficking increasingly undermine other Central 
American countries; but with the US so intently focused on Iraq and the 
Middle East, it devotes little attention or resources to confronting 
nonviolent challenges closer to home. Nor do Nicaraguans themselves seem 
able to unite in ways that would allow them to change their destiny.

One morning I drove to the outskirts of Managua to visit Emilio Álvarez 
Montalván, a retired ophthalmologist, former foreign minister, and 
political patriarch who is sometimes described as the wisest man in 
Nicaragua. He is now, by his own account, "eighty-eight and a half" 
years old, and his mind is as sharp as ever. I asked him what he sees 
when he surveys his country today. "We have not been able to take 
advantage of sixteen years of peace," he replied.

     The Sandinistas lost the election in 1990, but they made life 
impossible for Violeta [Chamorro], so her six years were very 
precarious. Alemán was very political and charismatic, but totally 
irresponsible with money. He and his friends turned the treasury into 
their own private fund. Bolaños was a good administrator, very capable, 
but he had no political party and no bloc in Congress, so he couldn't do 
anything on a large scale. And during all those years, the Sandinista 
Front remained a strong political force here because it's so well 
organized....

     There is no civil war in Nicaragua, and elections are held every 
five years. Other than that, we haven't accomplished anything important. 
Nicaragua's problem is structural. We are a country full of cliques, 
clans, and social groups. There is no sense of nationhood or long-term 
purpose. People look for what's good for them, not what's good for the 
country. The Spanish were able to take over this country because the 
Indians were divided, and that pattern still exists today. We have still 
not discovered that there is a country called Nicaragua, or that unity 
is the only thing that can save us.

Everyone I met in Nicaragua agreed that only investment and job creation 
can improve people's standard of living. Many investors, however, are 
put off by the lack of political stability and legal protection for 
private enterprise, and frightened by President Ortega's anticapitalist 
rhetoric. Others worry that they would not have reliable access to the 
energy needed to maintain businesses.

Some Nicaraguans see reason to hope for better times ahead. Engineers 
and other experts believe that Nicaragua could produce energy from wind 
and geothermal sources. Tourism also has large potential: Nicaragua is 
among the safest and cheapest places in Central America, and a booming 
tourist enclave has already emerged around the beach town of San Juan 
del Sur. Some entrepreneurs also dream of creating retirement 
communities to attract middle-class retirees from the United States. 
With global food prices steadily rising, moreover, Nicaragua could make 
money from beef and dairy exports. If, as now discussed, an oil refinery 
were to be built on the Pacific coast, with aid from Venezuela, it could 
produce considerable income. Even more ambitious is the "mega-project" 
of which Nicaraguans have dreamed for more than a century, a new 
transoceanic canal, which a handful of visionaries including Mayor 
Marenco see as the country's only chance to make a decisive leap toward 
prosperity.

In 1992, the Nicaraguan government created a free-trade zone near 
Managua's airport. More than 50,000 Nicaraguans now work there sewing 
clothing for export. Mayor Marenco told me he is grateful to the 
Taiwanese businessmen who run the workshops there, because "without 
those jobs we would have an explosion here." But he also said that 
although the Taiwanese provide desperately needed employment, "they 
don't leave anything behind, no education or chain of production—we are 
kept at the most primi-tive level."

A dramatically different kind of foreign investment is taking place just 
across the border in Costa Rica, where in 1997 the American computer 
manufacturer Intel built a $300 million assembly and test plant. 
Although Intel employs less than one tenth as many people as the 
Taiwanese employ in Nicaragua, analysts from the World Bank believe the 
plant has had a "profound impact" on the whole country. In a recent 
report, the bank attributed this transformation in part to the 
willingness of the government to carry out economic reforms:

     Costa Rica worked resourcefully and with a novel sense of urgency 
to enhance the country's techni-cal education, incentives law, 
regulation, and infrastructure. Over time the effects could be seen in 
an improved investment climate.... The Intel investment also reached far 
into the local community, affecting education and the country's 
knowledge base, workplace standards and business culture.

Costa Rica places great importance on education, and as a result, Intel 
can count on a large pool of engineers, programmers, and other trained 
professionals, many of them English-speaking. Nicaragua, by contrast, 
invests very little in education. School-teachers are grossly underpaid, 
and many have barely more skills than the children they are supposed to 
teach. "Our educational system needs to be radically transformed," the 
Nicara-guan economist Israel Benavides Cerros recently wrote,

     or else we will be condemning our children and young people to 
mediocrity, with all the consequences that implies in a market system 
that functions according to the law of the jungle.

Few would disagree, but the Ortega government has proven unable to 
respond to the challenge of providing decent education in a country 
where some 44 percent of the population is under the age of eighteen.

President Ortega's government has decreed that parents may no longer be 
asked to contribute to their local public schools. That benefits some 
poor people, but since the government has not added any funds to 
compensate for what parents used to pay, the total amount available for 
education is now less than before. Since taking office, Ortega has been 
preoccupied with political questions rather than public policy. He has 
sought to eliminate the ban on presidential reelection and, failing 
that, has suggested the adoption of a parliamentary system that might 
allow him to remain in power after his term ends in 2011. His government 
has ignored the deeper social and economic problems that afflict 
Nicaragua. Unless they are addressed, they will prevent the country from 
climbing out of its current predicament.

One striking aspect of Ortega's new administration is the emergence of 
his wife, Rosario Murillo, as the country's second most powerful person. 
She accompanies her husband everywhere, often speaks on his behalf, and 
is evidently one of his closest advisers. Among her various titles are 
minis-ter of the presidency, coordinator of the Communication and 
Citizenship Council, and executive secretary of the Economic and Social 
Planning Council. She is a moving force behind the network of 
pro-Sandinista neighborhood groups that the government is creating as a 
partisan power base; it is supposed to provide low-cost food, fuel, and 
other benefits to poor people in the name of the Sandinista Front, as 
distinguished from the government bureaucracy. But it has not become as 
potent as Ortega would like because there is little surplus available to 
distribute. Nothing like this conjugal co-government has ever been seen 
in Nicaragua. Only in Argentina has power been so fully and publicly 
shared by husband and wife, first by Juan and Eva Perón and recently by 
Cristina Fernández and Néstor Kirchner.

Ms. Murillo is not popular, and critics of the government claim she is 
responsible for Ortega's refusal to address fundamental issues. "Daniel 
Ortega was born under a dictatorship and fought against it, but today 
his ambition is to become the dictator he helped overthrow, by 
establishing a dynasty for the benefit of his family and friends," Henry 
Ruiz, one of the nine comandantes who ran the country after the 
Sandinistas seized power in 1979, asserted in a recent speech. "He 
mouths phrases in favor of the poor in order to confuse them, when in 
reality he is bowing before the International Monetary Fund."

During the 1980s, the nine comandantes, led by Ortega, ruled Nicaragua 
as a revolutionary "directorate." Now Ortega rules with the active 
support of only one of his eight former comrades, Bayardo Arce. Even 
Ortega's own brother, Humberto, who was Nicaragua's defense minister 
during the 1980s, has broken with him. Since neither the President nor 
his wife grants interviews, I was eager to talk to Arce, now a 
prosperous businessman who holds the title of adviser to the president 
on economic and financial matters. Some political analysts told me he is 
one of the few people not related to Ortega who still has his ear.

I met Arce in an office dominated by a huge trophy that had just been 
presented to the country's most popular baseball team, Boer, which had 
won the national championship the night before; he heads its governing 
board. When I asked him about Rosario Murillo's position in the 
government, he compared it to that of Vice President Sergio Ramìrez in 
the 1980s. "Anyone who has watched this country since 1979 knows that 
Daniel Ortega was never an administrator," Arce told me.

     He is a man of policy and strategy. That's why when we were in 
power, Sergio Ramìrez ran the country. Now this role is being filled at 
least in part by Rosario.

Since he left the Sandinista movement in the mid-1990s, Sergio Ramìrez 
has been officially retired from politics and devotes his time to 
writing novels. Because he is so widely admired by the Latin American 
left, his break with Ortega helped convince many in the hemisphere that 
the revolutionary idealism that once supported the Sandinista Front is 
dead. At dinner one night, I asked him why Ortega has not sought to 
reach out to the Nicaraguan businessmen and foreign investors who 
everyone agrees offer the only hope for the country's revival. "He feels 
part of the club with Chávez, Evo Morales [of Bolivia], and the other 
Latin American leftists," Ramìrez replied. "He can't be negotiating with 
the center while his leftist allies are denouncing imperialism."

With us at dinner was Carlos Fernando Chamorro, Nicaragua's leading 
journalist and son of the newspaper publisher whose assassination in 
1978 helped turn the political tide against the Somoza dictatorship. 
"From the day Daniel was elected on November 10 [2006] until the 
inauguration on January 10 [2007], he had this country in his hand," he 
said.

     There was a lot of talk about national unity, and even hints that 
some of the ministers from the last government would be held over. But 
for whatever reason, Daniel didn't go that way. He's off on another 
project that doesn't seem to have any long-term goal other than keeping 
himself and his family in power.

When I asked Bayardo Arce about Ortega's economic policy, he conceded 
that the current government lacks expertise:

     When Sergio Ramìrez and his group left the Sandinista Front, most 
of the party's intellectuals went with them. That meant not just priests 
and writers, but also economists. We were left without economists.... So 
I began teaching myself about economics. We have new people, especially 
new people who don't know much history. And as for me, I have to laugh 
when people call me an economist. I'm a journalist who learned something 
about economics.

But he insisted that pursuing Ortega's pragmatic alliance with Chávez is 
more important than the pursuit of far-reaching economic reforms:

     Blackouts are a much bigger problem than rhetoric. Even if Daniel 
were to speak tenderly to investors, they're not going to come here if 
there are blackouts every day. And that's one reason why the cooperation 
we're getting from Venezuela is so important.

The timing of Ortega's return to power is unfortunate. He governs an 
impoverished country with few resources or prospects. In one sense, 
though, he is reemerging at a propitious moment. With the United States 
consumed by troubles in the Middle East, it is unable or unwilling to 
intervene in Latin America as it has for much of the last century. This 
has allowed independent-minded leftists to come to power in half a dozen 
countries. Ortega has taken advantage of this new environment to score 
an extraordinary diplomatic coup. He has arranged for his close friend 
and ally Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, a Maryknoll priest who was his 
foreign minister during the 1980s, to be elected president of the United 
Nations General Assembly for a one-year term that is to begin in September.

No foreign minister in the modern history of Central America has been as 
outspokenly critical of the United States as D'Escoto was. He bitterly 
condemned what he called "the systematic policy of murder and terror 
that Mr. Reagan's government has carried out against Nicaragua." Under 
other circumstances, former contra supporters in the Bush 
administration, who range from Vice President Cheney to Elliott Abrams 
of the National Security Council, might have sought to block his ascent. 
But with Latin America now setting an increasingly independent course, 
and with officials like Cheney and Abrams preoccupied with challenges 
elsewhere, Ortega saw his chance and organized a deft diplomatic 
campaign that brought him a high-profile victory. So while the domestic 
situation he faces is bleak, he is taking advantage of Latin America's 
leftward drift to reclaim his place on the world stage.

The second-place finisher in the 2006 presidential election, a 
pro-American banker named Eduardo Montealegre, is planning to run for 
mayor of Managua in the election scheduled for November. Since Mayor 
Marenco is unable by law to seek reelection, Montealegre would be a 
strong favorite, and would presumably use the mayor's post as a 
springboard to run again for the presidency in 2011. While I was in 
Nicaragua, though, I heard several people predict that Ortega will find 
some ruse to keep him off the ballot. Ortega grew up at a time when law 
was used as a tool to defend the powerful; now that he is in power, he 
has no interest in the impartial rule of law. Some Nicaraguans believe 
he will do whatever necessary to prevent an opposition figure from 
replacing him in 2011.

During the decade between 1996 and 2006, real wages in Nicaragua grew by 
40 percent. That is a small increase over a ten-year period, especially 
considering the low base from which Nicaragua started, but it was at 
least progress. During the first year of Ortega's presidency, according 
to figures from the Central Bank, real wages fell by 10 percent.

"By almost any economic standard, we're worse off now than we were 
thirty years ago," I was told by Edmundo Jarquìn, an economist who was 
part of the original Sandinista government but turned against it and was 
the fourth-place finisher in the 2006 presidential election. "The big 
question is when or whether the social and economic disenchantment with 
Ortega will become political disenchantment."

No one I met in Nicaragua dared to suggest that the country has any 
prospect of becoming appreciably happier or more prosperous in the short 
or medium term. Its challenges are enormous, and only partly 
attributable to poor political leadership. With a population of less 
than six million and plenty of land available for everyone, Nicaragua 
should be able to offer its people some prospect of a better life. What 
outside force, if any, might help fix it? President Chávez would 
evidently like to, but he is juggling a host of projects and has 
dwindling supplies of free cash. The United States could make assistance 
to Nicaragua a priority, and quite possibly turn it into a success 
story, but is too bogged down in the Middle East to pay much attention. 
Once an urgent focus of world interest, this poor country is now a 
forgotten backwater. Few outsiders have much sense of its unhappy past. 
Even fewer consider it important enough to help.

—May 14, 2008

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