Nicaraguan Councils Stir Fear of Dictatorship

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The government billboards and graffiti in this sultry city tell a visitor a lot about the ideological battle racking Nicaragua.

President Daniel Ortega Saavedra beams from the billboards, promising “Citizens Power” as a solution to Nicaragua’s endemic poverty. “The world’s poor arise!” the signs say. But beneath the billboards, on walls and benches all over town, others have scrawled “No to CPC. No to dictatorship.”

The graffiti alludes to Citizens Power Councils — or C.P.C.’s. In December, Mr. Ortega established the neighborhood committees, which are controlled by his left-wing Sandinista party and administer antipoverty programs, despite a vote against the plan by the National Assembly.

Mr. Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader, maintains that the councils are meant only to let community leaders have a say in where and how government money is spent.

But opposition leaders say the councils are another step in what they call the Ortega administration’s drift toward an authoritarian and secretive government that does not have to answer to the legislature — mostly because the president controls tens of millions of dollars a year in aid from Venezuela.

Some of the president’s opponents charge that the Citizens Power Councils are nothing more than patronage mills, channeling government largess to supporters of the party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Mr. Ortega has made no attempt to hide his desire to make an end run around the National Assembly. He declared last fall that the legislature’s vote against the councils was intended “to deny the right of the people to exercise power” and “to keep ministers from governing directly with the people.”

“It is the people who have the final say on the system they want,” Mr. Ortega declared at a rally on Dec. 1.

Opposition leaders complain the councils smack of similar party-controlled organs in totalitarian governments like Cuba’s, where local committees of party loyalists not only influence who gets government benefits but also spy on political opponents.

“It’s part of a vision that President Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have to destroy the model of representative democracy and replace it with a direct democracy,” said José Pallais, a Liberal Party leader. “The C.P.C. serve as a fundamental element, a strategy, to control the society, to spy on the people.”

Another Liberal opposition leader, Wilfredo Navarro, defended the Sandinista party’s right to organize political committees but said the president had crossed a line when he gave those committees power over government programs. “Ortega can form his Citizens Power Councils, but he cannot give them the role of the state,” he said. “To pave a street, you have to talk to the C.P.C.”

He added, “It is very clear the state’s money should not be used as an instrument of political blackmail.”

Elías Chévez, a prominent Sandinista party leader who oversees the citizen councils in Managua, denied that the councils showed favoritism in handing out subsidies, though he acknowledged that they were controlled by the party.

In defending the councils, he said past governments had failed to lift people out of poverty in part because neighborhoods and towns lacked local organizations to send aid where it was most needed. He portrayed the critics of the councils as members of a corrupt oligarchy interested only in protecting business interests.

“These people don’t want the population to have a role, to play a part,” he said.

One complaint of the opposition is that the financing of both the committees and the social programs they administer remains murky. Last year, Nicaragua and Venezuela signed a deal that opposition leaders and budget experts say has given Mr. Ortega’s administration essentially a slush fund outside the national budget, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Under the deal, Venezuela supplies Nicaragua with about 10 million barrels of oil a year, enough to cover all the country’s energy needs. Nicaragua pays half the market price and has 23 years to pay off the rest at 2 percent interest. The deal hands Nicaragua what amounts to a large low-interest loan every month for infrastructure projects and social programs.

But the loans are not reflected in the national budget, since the transactions are handled through a quasi-public company called Albanisa and the state-owned oil company, Petronic. (The treasurer of the Sandinista party, Francisco López, also runs Petronic and is a vice president of Albanisa.) The Ortega administration has never given a full accounting to the legislature of how the money is spent.

“It’s off the books — no institutions, no controls,” said Roberto Courtney, the executive director of Ethics and Transparency, a Nicaragua-based lobby group advocating openness in government. “That’s how the C.P.C. gets its money.”

The network of citizen councils is overseen by Ms. Murillo, Mr. Ortega’s wife and communications director, who is widely seen here as a powerful political figure. She did not respond to a request for an interview.

Each council has 15 members, and each member has a portfolio, roughly paralleling the government ministries. Though members of other parties sit on the committees, a vast majority are Sandinistas.

Among other things, the committees decide which stores will handle the subsidized food program for the poor, which streets will be paved under an infrastructure project financed by Venezuela, which women will receive low-income loans to start small businesses and which farmers will get free cattle, pigs and seeds. They also oversee vaccinations and literacy classes.

Jeannette Suazo, a Sandinista, is the chairwoman of the committee in a Managua neighborhood known as September 14th. She insists that aid is handed out without regard to politics, and she said that her committee had four members who belonged to the opposition party. All are volunteers and get no pay, though some have government jobs, she said.

“We are the communicators between the people and the government,” she said. “It’s easier to solve these problems with an organized people than with a disorganized people.”

On the impoverished streets of Managua, people complain more about the scarcity of government aid coming from the councils than about favoritism in doling it out. Subsidized supplies of beans, rice and oil, for instance, run out long before the lines disappear outside stores, some said.

“They give us too little product for too many people,” said Lidia Urbina, whose family runs the tiny store in the September 14th neighborhood chosen to distribute food. She said the program was not partisan. “There are liberals, Sandinistas, people from all parties, all of them carry off their food.”

Among the poorest residents of Managua are those who live in shanties constructed within the ruins of buildings in the old city center, which was destroyed in an earthquake in December 1972.

Maria Auxiliadora Rivera, 37, lives in a filthy, one-room hut in the ruins with six children and her husband, surviving on a kitchen job that pays $60 a month. She makes tortillas over an open fire against a sooty wall of a destroyed building.

Though not a Sandinista, she said she received a $230 loan recently through the local citizen’s committee to start a business making and selling tortillas on the street. She said the loans were not going solely to Sandinistas.

Still, she said, it would only help her survive, not make a permanent difference in her standard of living. “We are really abandoned,” she said.

Others living in squalid and dangerous structures in the ruins said Sandinista party members and civil servants were getting preferential treatment for units in a public housing development going up nearby, a project financed with Venezuelan aid.

“They are building houses, but only for the people in the party,” said Carlos Reyes Herrera, 46, who ekes out a living collecting cans and bottles. A veteran of the Sandinista revolution in the 1970s, he lives with his wife and two children in a plywood shack among the ruins. “For me, the committees are all Sandinista. They look out for their own.”

Nicaragua is a beautiful country, although Managua is not very impressive. It still shows a lot of damage from the big earthquake in 1972.

Most countries would have had enough time to repair the damage in 36 years.

The people of Nicaragua are very nice. Remember, Ortega won with only about 1/3rd of the popular vote because the conservatives split their votes among other candidates. He certainly has most of the country who never voted for him.

I’m originally from Nicaragua and I was saddened and enraged when that character won the elections. I moved to the US because of his policies against everyone specially my family. I’m under political asylum here and it just repulses me of hearing that my birth country is going back further into the stone age, which they’re not that far by the way.

Yes it is a beautiful country and the people are nice there, thank you for saying that Tailgunnery Joe. I hope they wake up from their perpetual slumber sometime during my lifetime.

I visited Nicaragua less than two years ago, before Ortega was elected but while the campaign was already underway.

It’s a drop dead gorgeous country. The beauty is simply outstanding.

And the people were very friendly to me. But the country is very primitive in comparison to its neighbors. I saw farmers using oxen and plows for their fields. Outside of Managua, it’s not uncommon to see donkeys pulling carts on the public roads.

The rural housing is startling bad, often consisting of cinder block and sheet metal. Plumbing looked like it might be a luxury many did not have.

This should not be the case there. Nicaragua has many national resources, and a friendly but impoverished population that is not afraid of hard work.

Unfortunately, it has had horrible government. I like the fact that Somoza’s beach house has been turned into a restaurant and casino for the gringos, but the people of Nicaragua need more than that to emerge from the 19th century.

Ortega gone, would help.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.