Bitterness and Apathy in Nicaragua
Published: December 29, 1987
(Page 2 of 3)
The main causes of the Sandinistas' difficulties are much debated. But they include an American-backed guerrilla war and economic pressure, the Sandinistas' own one-party conception of power and also their mismanagement of the state-run economy.
The blame ascribed to either American-encouraged hostility or the Sandinistas' own failings appears often to depend on an analyst's ideological prejudices as much as on evidence drawn from recent events. History in Nicaragua can be marshaled to march in support of very different conclusions.
What is much less in doubt is that the contra war and the Sandinistas' shortcomings have joined to produce a Nicaragua mired in party bureaucracy, narrow political sloganeering, overt militarism and widespread poverty for a people once known in this region for their emotional openness, natural talent for poetry, and long history of ungovernability.
Nicaragua is now a society divided into three main groups.
First there is a well-organized ruling minority of Sandinista militants and their ample supporters, backed by a large party-directed army and police force. They remain gripped by the conviction that radical change is still necessary.
Next there is a smaller minority of contras and the growing number of their supporters in rural political circles, who angrily resist the Sandinistas' one-party rule and are showing a new willingness to fight for their conviction.
Finally, there is the great mass of the Nicaraguan people for whom strong belief, except in God, seems to have largely fled.
It has been leached away by two decades that have visited them with an earthquake that destroyed their capital city and then a successful but bloody insurrection in which 40,000 people were killed.
Now there is the pain of seeing the broad-based opposition to the former dictatorship polarize into a sectarian revolution struggling against the United States and stuck in an internal civil war that has killed and wounded another 40,000 Nicaraguans and helped drive an estimated 500,000 more into internal and external exile.
Revolutionary rallies and the nine ruling Sandinista commanders regularly proclaim that the revolution is a success and is advancing.
But the crowds of pot-bellied urchins in the streets, the city dwellers trudging in search of scarce public buses, the mass conscription of the young into the army instead of into schools, the cardboard hovels of the spreading slums and the people standing in ration lines, offer contrary evidence to the official claims of success.
Jobs, except with the state and fighting in the army, are non-existent. Salaries, set by the state, are made almost worthless because of inflation of more than 1,000 percent and constant devaluation. The most basic foodstuffs are hard to find. Much of what is needed to survive in the slums and countryside is acquired by bartering scarce goods.
Neglect has made city streets an obstacle course of potholes and left neighborhoods in disheveled decline. The water is cut off two days a week in the capital to conserve energy. Failed Peace Talks And an Aborted Truce
The Christmas holidays have brought news of failed peace talks with the contra rebels and a brief holiday truce is heralded by the rebels' biggest attack of the war in the north. The attack kills and wounds more than 100 Sandinista soldiers and another 100 Nicaraguan civilians.
Newspapers are filled with pictures of wounded children and angry calls to fight to the end.
Despite their greater military effectiveness, the contra rebels are still a peasant army hitting isolated targets in the countryside. The war could go on for years so long as the guerrillas continue to lack the urban political base that would be needed to topple the Government.
Having waged a successful guerrilla war to seize power themselves, the Sandinistas have concentrated, with considerable success, on keeping the contra rebels from extending their influence into the cities. They have also sternly warned opposition parties not to be tempted to form even a tacit alliance with the rebels.
The Nicaraguan Army is everywhere. It is the armed wing of the ruling party and the backbone of state power.
One of the most commonly carried items in Nicaragua is the Russian AK-47 assault rifle, like the one brandished by the defiant statue in the city center. The most common color in Managua seems to be olive green: the military hue of the army trucks, army jeeps, army uniforms, army barracks that paints the tone of a state far more militarized than neighboring El Salvador, a country also at war.
President Ortega confirmed two weeks ago the revelation by Roger Miranda Bengoechea, a senior Defense Ministry aide who defected, that the Sandinistas intend to have a 500,000-man reserve army supported by the Soviet Union - even if the contra rebel war ends and the United States gives security guarantees to Nicaragua. A Young Country Raised on Revolution
The young are being educated in Nicaragua. But a visit to schools in the city and the countryside indicates that they are being educated by Sandinista party teachers who explain history as class struggle and who lead the children in singing the Sandinista anthem glorifying revolutionary war and condemning ''the Yankee'' Americans as the ''enemy of humanity.''