At turns wistful, sober, and hopeful, this volume offers five sympathetic though critical depictions and analyses of the original intentions of Nicaragua’s revolutionaries, the shortcomings and successes of their proceso, and their post-1990 legacy.
The editors seek to diagnose the ailing revolutionary project and to explain the causes and consequences of its defeat. Gary Prevost sketches a “balance sheet” of revolutionary advances and setbacks in the areas of agrarian reform, economic and social policy, women’s rights, Atlantic Coast autonomy, the military and police, national sovereignty, Sandinista political integrity and fragmentation, and the vitality and viability of the popular sectors. This balance sheet is clearly in the red, requiring “a new political force that does not now exist” (p. 42) to move it into the black. Harry Vanden laments the victory of elite representative democracy over the direct democracy as structured by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) through the Council of State in the early 1980s. Although blaming United States pressure for much of this antipopular trend, he also faults corrupt authoritarian FSLN caudillos as well as Chamoro’s technocrats for abandoning Nicaragua’s growing poor majority.
Richard Stahler-Sholk traces the relationship between what for him are misguided policies of structural adjustment and popular resistance to these policies, contrasting Sandinista attempts at economic expansion and redistribution (1979-90) with austerity and privatization under Chamorro (1990–96). Fits detailed examination of this relationship reveals a tendency toward elite pact-making and a concomitant weakening of the capacity for popular mobilization. Stahler-Sholk attributes these tendencies in part to economic and social strains inherent in the reigning model and in part to the absence of “a coherent strategy and an organization that can formulate alternatives” (p. 107).
Cynthia Chávez Metoyer engages the reader in a discussion of the contributions of feminist theory to an understanding of the gendered outcomes that result from transitions of state power (pp. 116-19). Specifically, she argues that the local experiences of rural women have been underutilized in analyzing transitions in Nicaragua. Although they do not seem to support all of her conclusions equally well, her interviews with women in rural Masaya are refreshing and reveal truths that all too often are obscured by conventional data.
Pierre LaRamee and Erica Polakoff render a theoretically sensitive and empirically nuanced portrait of Nicaragua’s popular organizations. They identify the growing contradiction of the revolution between the requirements of grassroots mobilization from below and those of efficiency and control from above (p. 146). The FSLN’s attempt to resolve this tension in favor of vertical control from the top deprived local participants at the bottom of a “real sense of ownership or input” (p. 154), thereby helping to undermine participatory democracy in Nicaragua. Nevertheless, the ethos of participation created by the revolution has survived and found new life beyond party controls. For the 1990s, and amidst conditions of an increasing concentration of resources and burgeoning poverty, LaRamee and Polakoff document the resurgence of popular participation in a proliferation of women’s organizations and in the Community Movement. In closing, they point to ways in which participation in a newly reconditioned civil society could move in the direction of “a true democracy transcending the ersatz populist variety” (p. 191), thus honoring the best aspirations and commitments of an otherwise much discredited Sandinismo.
Given the apparent inability of the FSLN to resolve its internal contradictions and the polarizing effects of the current economic, social, and political models in Nicaragua, the authors look to the near future as an important time for the democratic development of responsive and responsible alternatives.
