NOT A CHOCOLATE REVOLUTION
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the
Sandinistas' efforts to make Nicaragua Marxist
Managua IN THEY came: Comandante Daniel Ortega, President of the Republic, striding forth in his army uniform, and Father Ernesto Cardenal, Trappist monk and minister of culture, hurrying along beside him, a great mass of white hair bursting out of his now famous dark beret. The children went wild. Hundreds of baby Sandinistas in their little Sandinista uniforms yelled and waved and stood on their chairs. and when they had at last stopped chanting Sandinis- ta slogans a young boy stepped onto the rostrum and, in an exquisitely drafted speech, called on his peers to resist the Yanqui imperialists until the bitter end.
This was Childrens' Day in Free Nicar- agua and was put on by ANS, the Associa- tion of Sandinista Children, to show that even five-year-olds are not short on revolu- tionary militancy. When they are older they will be able to join the Sandinista Youth and go around beating up bourgeois reactionaries with crowbars, but first they must undergo their ideological prepara- tion. This goes on each day at school when they raise the Sandinista flag — and beside it the national flag of Nicaragua — and sing the Sandinista hymn: 'We fight against the Yanqui, enemy of humanity', and so forth. It carries on in class where they learn how the FSLN liberated the nation and is now the vanguard and embodiment of the Nicaraguan people. And to make sure they don't grow up cissies even their maths lessons foster the martial virtues. Three hand grenades plus three more hand gre- nades makes six hand grenades; and if a rifle's cartridge case holds eight bullets how many do two cases hold?
We are not dealing with a chocolate
revolution in Nicaragua. The Sandinista high command says it is Marxist and behaves as if it is Maxist. This has been somewhat confused by the presence of priests in the government and the corps of foreign Jesuits, Franciscans, and Domini- cans that continue to bless the revolution- ary proyecto. It has also been obscured by the Sandinistas' apparent commitment to a mixed economy. It is true that the Nicara- guan private sector still produces a fair proportion of the country's total output but alas that doesn't mean very much since Nicaragua is now living off foreign aid and not its own production. In the last five years Nicaragua has been given or lent over three billion dollars from countries and organisations all over the world. And that does not include all those AK-47 rifles and T-55 tanks that have been coming in from the Soviet Union and for which, presumably, the Russians do not expect payment on the nail.
The Sandinista idea of free enterprise is one where the state decides on a 'just' price for goods produced. So while a quintal of coffee fetches around $130 on the interna- tional market, growers had to sell their last harvest to the government at 3,100 cordo- bas, which buys a bottle of shampoo or nearly a minute on the telephone to Miami. Not much 'surplus value' going to the workers here. But that is not the worst of it. A medium-scale farmer recently told me how in 1983 he arrived at his 120-acre property to find his workers kicked out and a sign pinned up saying this was now the co-operative 'such and such'. When he protested, the Ministry of Agrarian Re- form admitted his farm was not covered by any of the categories liable for confiscation but said that the people needed the land and if he resisted the will of the people life could get unpleasant. Instead they prom- ised to pay him compensation and last month, after two years of waiting, he got the first instalment. For prime land that was worth $2,000 an acre in 1979 he was given 9,000 cordobas an acre in devalued currency; and that just about buys a pair of trousers.
There is no rule of law for property owners in Nicaragua, nor, for that matter, for anybody else. Finding that the regular judiciary does not always have the right
revolutionary spirit the Sandinistas have empowered the police to give two-year prison sentences for crimes that include insults to authority. They have also intro- duced Special Tribunals, now called Popu- lar Anti-Somocista Tribunals, which serve as a sort of parallel judiciary for political offences. These are made up of two Sandi- nista political activists and one lawyer — or law student. There is no right of appeal to an ordinary court and in order to speed things up the tribunals have invoked the principle of Sana Critica which allows them to infer guilt from circumstantial evidence and ignore the formal rules of evidence.
After the first orgy of revenge in which 4,331 people were sentenced by these kangaroo courts, things hare cooled down, and, given there is a civil war going on, it is remarkable how few human rights abuses there have been lately in Nicaragua. In- deed the Sandinistas do not tolerate brutal conduct by their own forces. The officer responsible for murdering seven Miskito Indians at Walpa Siksa in 1982 was sum- marily executed. and last year a sub- lieutenant was sentenced to 18 years for raping a Miskito woman when his own troops reported him to the regional com- mand. It is simply not true that the Sandinistas have turned Nicaragua into a 'totalitarian dungeon', as President Reagan likes to say, but unless they put an end to this judicial anarchy and create the institutions that can safeguard liberty it could well become one.
The signs are that it will. Evoking memories of traditional fascism, the Sandi- nistas say that 'if you are against the party you are against the patria' . This is logical enough since in Nicaragua the two have become indistinguishable, the institutions of the state being annexed to the apparatus of the party. There is no such thing as the Nicaraguan police or the Nicaraguan army, there is only the Sandinista police and the Sandinista People's Army, both at the direct service of the FSLN. And last year's referendum — for only so can you describe an election in which one party had sublimi-
nally fused itself with the state — has not cleared up the mess since there is still no constitution and all it did was endorse the government of nine guerrilla fighters who hold military rank and rule by decree.
And not only do they wield unchecked power at the centre, they have assiduously built up mass organisations to control the grass roots. Among them are the ill-famed CDS (Sandinista Defence Committees) which serve both as social action groups, doing excellent work in the slums building schools and putting in water pipes, and at the same time as a spy network for the security forces. Every neighbourhood is expected to form vigilante groups to hound out pimps and footpads and to keep an eye open for political heterodoxy, The CDS have been known to set mobs on conservative priests and school teachers and are a very nasty creation. Fortunately, however, they don't work. 'Nobody takes the slightest notice of them here,' said an old lady contemptuously in the little town of San Dionisio, and that has been their fate in most of the country. Nicaraguans are practical; when they can see some advantage they will go along with the CDS, but when all they can see is a device to turn their relaxed and informal society into a regimental barracks they will have nothing to do with it.
Nicaragua is not fertile ground for com- munist 'popular democracy' and there is massive cultural resistance to the claptrap of the FSLN. For the Sandinistas, survival is now a race to indoctrinate a new generation and to institutionalise their own rule, before the sinking economy turns the whole nation against them. The American boycott has given them a respite, perhaps, since they now have a scapegoat for their own appalling failures, but the mood here in Nicaragua is changing so quickly I don't think they will manage it in time.
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