Thu Mar 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Solidarity of the peoples of the world with the struggle of the Nicaraguan people is needed.

The history of the Nicaraguan people for their liberation has made the world vibrate for almost a century.
By IWL-FI
In 1928, promoted by the Anti-imperialist League of the Americas[1], the “Committee hands off Nicaragua” (“Comité Manos Fuera de Nicaragua”) was built. Located in Mexico, this was a unitary effort with the objective to provide political, financial and military solidarity to the fight of the “small crazy army”, the Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua, which fought against North American military intervention in Nicaragua. In the campaign, there were political leaders like the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella, the Peruvian Victor Raul Haya de la Torre and the Mexican painters David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.
Dead and betrayed, Sandino established the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty in iron and fire. New solidarity campaigns were necessary to support the struggle of the freedom fighters. In 1969-1970, an extended solidarity campaign was necessary to avoid the deportation and certain murder of Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN), who was imprisoned in Costa Rica at the time. In the campaign, intellectuals and French Nobel Prize winners like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre participated.
The solidarity movement in favor of the struggle of the Nicaraguan people only grew as the Somoza family dictatorship deepened its crisis. Since 1978, it was obvious that a popular upsurge against the dictatorship was building up. Besides, the political and logistic support increased every day. The Nicaraguan revolution recovered a notable internationalist tradition, the International Brigades of voluntary fighters. The Costa Rican Carlos Luis Fallas and the Panama Victoriano Lorenzo, besides countless voluntaries participated in the brigade.
Our current, the International Workers League also organized a brigade of voluntary fighters, the Simon Bolivar Brigade, which fought the liberation of Bluefields.
The 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution began a new wave of international hope. Just after the North American military defeat in Vietnam, once again a small country overcame militarily a bloody dictatorship armed to its teeth with imperialist financing. The revolution seemed to spread like powder throughout Central American, just as oppressed and tarnished as Nicaragua.
International solidarity was concentrated now in the great alphabetization days, the field reconstruction, and from 1983, in the fight against the counterrevolution, aided and financed by the North American government.
The Nicaraguan and Central American people did everything they could to defeat imperialism. Tens of thousands died and sacrificed their lives. Few wars were as bloody as the Central American revolution 1979-1990.
However, the Central American revolution was not defeated essentially due to imperialist aggression, which is one element. However, the main problem was the conception of revolutionary process imposed by the FSLN and all the Castrist organizations.
Since the downfall of Somoza, the FSLN understood the tasks of the revolution as the building of a “national unity” government. In other words, a bourgeois government with the essential task of rebuilding the State, the police and the bourgeois army, now dominated by the Sandinistas. The Cuban government used its authority to say that Nicaragua should not follow the path of the 1959 Cuban revolution with the expropriation of capitalism. This was the origin of the current army authorities and paramilitaries.
Just the same, the economic task was to develop a “mixed economy”, a capitalist economy with state intervention. They must not advance towards socialism nor in the agrarian reform. The revolution should not be “exported”. One had to respect the artificial frontiers of the national states.
In other words, the revolution was asphyxiated early, and finally strangled by its own political leadership. To achieve these objectives, the FSLN had since the beginning to transfer its military form, as party-army, to society. They did not allow opposition, even among revolutionary forces rank and file. First, they expelled the Simon Bolivar Brigade and handed them over to the Panama police. Then they “sterilized” the rest of the Communist, Trotskyist and Maoist left.
Sandinism only accepted political subordination or controlled opposition. Any political organization, which seriously wished to fight and dispute with Sandinism, was fought to death.
As part of the military culture transferred to the social movement, it would be their habit to annex and “nationalize” the union and social organizations. The Sandinista Workers Federation, the Field Workers Association, and the student bodies, were transformed into semi-state organizations, ruled by totalitarian and corrupted bureaucracies.
These dictatorial characteristics were completely justified during the war due to the severe confrontation with the United States and the “contra”, but truthfully, the asphyxia of the mass movement was helpful for the defeat of the revolution.
Sandinism abandoned the government in 1990, after losing elections. The revolution was buried in the midst of electoral agreements and new corruption (the “piñata”), which begun the building of a new Sandinista bourgeoisie.
Sandinism “ruled from below” between 1990 and 2006. Its control of mass movement allowed it to negotiate safe posts for a new process of capitalist accumulation. It occupied the State, police, army and judicial structures.
The raise and support of Chavism allowed Orteguism to develop as a new family dictatorship, repeating the history of the Somoza.
Without historical Sandinism and having eliminated the left and right wing opposition, the Ortega family and its privileged domination of the State allowed them to build a new family dynasty, linked to the communication enterprises and oil management.
The IMF, the Catholic and Pentecostal Churches, the North American army, the mining groups and the Central American entrepreneurs all applauded the Daniel Ortega administration. Until the political crisis of April 2018 began.
Since April 2018, a new process of popular upsurge began, which followed the pattern of a century of rebellions. An upsurge of the youth and poor against a family dynasty that guaranteed the business of great capitalists. Based on the police and the army to rule, it manipulated and lied.
Since, the social demonstrations and the blockages against the Daniel Ortega administration have not stopped. As any dictatorship, it answered with a blood bath that has already overcome the 450 deaths, thousands of wounded, hundreds of missing. A new wave of political refugees have fled to Costa Rica. The dictatorship has been particularly cruel in the use of police and paramilitary violence to face the demonstrations and street blockages.
The entrepreneurs and the Catholic Church supported the tyrant for many years, and now they had no choice but to oppose. The same goes for the North American government and its international bodies.
Unlike what Castrism and the Sao Paulo Forum say, there is no conspiracy in Nicaragua, just an authentic social upsurge.
As in other revolutions lived by Nicaragua, there are forces that act against its success. In the first place, one finds the Cuban government, the Communist parties and the Brazilian PT, which support the massacre of the Nicaraguan people, in defense of the “progressive” Ortega administration.
Then, the entrepreneurs, the North American government and the international bodies, which protected Daniel Ortega for a long time, and now that he has lost control, they criticize him to be able to recompose the situation. The words spoken against the regime do not hide the policy of the Department of State and the OAS:  dialogue with the dictatorship and early elections.
In order to defeat the dictatorship, the Nicaraguan people need international solidarity as they did in the past. They also need to organize their self-defense to face the dictatorship and fight independently from imperialist bodies and entrepreneurs, which only seek to lead the fight towards an agreement with tyranny. To triumph, the broadest solidarity is needed from all social organizations, but particularly from the working class. It is necessary for the unions and other organizations to provide political and material support for the fight of the Nicaraguan people for their liberation from the dictatorship and for the building of a new State under the rule and control of the workers and their organizations. With nationalization of the main enterprises, planned economy and state control over foreign trade, so that the wealth produced is destined towards the people’s needs, and so that this time the fight leads to the definitive victory of the Nicaraguan people.
[1] Some sort of “anti-imperialist united front” pushed due to the first zigzags of the Communist International.

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