This process began the day after the triumph of the revolution. By Fidel Castro’s advice, the Sandinista Front formed a National Reconstruction Government (GRN) with the participation of important bourgeois figures, like Violeta Chamorro.
By Bernardo Cerdeira.
Back then, Fidel advised, “Nicaragua must not be a new Cuba.” Like this, the Sandinista government avoided to expropriate the capitalist companies and kept the production means, factories and great farms in hands of the bourgeoisie.
The GRN goal, from the beginning, was to disarm the militias that had organized in the struggle to defeat Somoza, to reconstruct the bourgeois Armed Forces and the bourgeois State with its three powers (Legislative, Executive and Judiciary) and subject the working class to the Sandinista Workers’ Federation and to the FSLN, already assumed as a party.
From guerrilla-soldiers to Sandinista bourgeois
For years, the Sandinista government had to lead a war against the guerrilla of the Contras, financed by the US. Even so, the Sandinista Front agreed to a peace truce and carried out elections in 1990. In this process, they lost to the candidate by the Opposition National Union, Violeta Chamorro, who had broken the government.
The FSLN left the government but continued controlling the most important institution of the bourgeois State, the Armed Forces, which never lost their domain. In this process, an important element of capitalist accumulation by the FSLN leaders took place. Such enrichment of the Sandinistas was known as the “Piñata”[1] as a reference to the children’s game. The FSLN commandants appropriated mansions and other properties expropriated by the revolution, as well as money from the generalized sell of armament and military equipment acquired by the Armed Forces during the war.
Like this, a Sandinista bourgeoisie emerged, just like the Bolivarian Bourgeoisie (Boli-bourgeoisie) in Venezuela. This bourgeois wing always controlled part of the bourgeois state. It had deputies, prefects, and mainly, the Armed Forces in their hands.
When it came back to power, in 2006, the FSLN was already a bourgeois party consolidated over the years. Today, the Ortega family owns more than 30 companies of multiple fields, controlling, among other things, hundreds of millions of dollars from fuel commerce and transportation, subsidized by Venezuela.
The FSLN lost many years ago any trace of anti-imperialism, as it shamelessly showed by voting in favor of the FTA between Central America and the US.
In these 12 years in power, the Ortega family and the FSLN ended up controlling, apart from the Armed Forces and the Executive Power, the Judiciary, the Legislative, the Universities, and a good part of the media. They use this control to pressure and repress the opposition demonstrations and organizations.
Out with Ortega and Rosario now!
Ortega is trying not only to stay in power as to save its properties and political future because he knows that, if the popular revolt triumphs, the people will want to settle scores with the FSLN and its government.
Ortega proved that using only the repression at this moment causes an even more exasperated popular reaction. And so, without stopping the repression, it tried to propose a dialogue. However, this is nothing but a trap to stop the mobilization and avoid it from growing up to a general strike that might defeat him.
The dialogue is impossible because the central demand of the popular revolt is “Out with Ortega” and the government refuses to quit. The farce of the dialogue is supported by the COSEP, that gathers the main businessmen in the country.
These organizations want Ortega to stay in power, as they are afraid that his fall might destabilize the country. They got to attract, so far, the Students Coordination to the roundtable.
We need to denounce the farce that can lead the movement to a defeat and Ortega and the FSLN to a survival, what will bring more repression and the aggravation of the dictatorship.
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Notes:
[1] Decorated vessel filled with candies, small toys, etc., hung up at children’s birthdays to be broken with a stick by a blindfolded child, releasing all of its content.
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Originally Published @ https://www.pstu.org.br/depois-da-vitoria-da-revolucao-um-governo-burgues/
