Venezuela - a look back at the Nicaraguan War
Venezuela - a look back at the Nicaraguan War
Tortilla con Sal
Thursday, Jun 2, 2016
In Nicaragua, most people watch the dramatic situation our Venezuelan sisters and brothers are going through with concern and also with a degree of self-recognition. In many ways, for people old enough to remember here, it is déja vu. None of us want to see repeated in Venezuela the mistakes we made in the past. That is why we write this now.
In spite of all the libraries full of books on the subject, and all the academic and political careers built on the struggle of the heroic Nicaraguan people, the experience of the Popular Sandinista Revolution remains a big unknown all over the world. That is true both in the academic sphere and among the international Left in general. It is true both of the multi-faceted struggle against Somoza's genocidal dictatorship until its victory on July 19th, 1979 and even more so of the subsequent revolutionary decade of the 1980s. Needless to say, what happened after the electoral defeat in 1990 until the Sandinistas' return to power in 2007 and what has been achieved since then to date are even more unknown. Much, if not most, of what the Sandinista Front for National Liberation is doing today is to a great extent based upon all that experience.
In the 1980's, Nicaragua was one of the foci of the World's geopolitics and it attracted all kinds of sympathies... and also all kinds of antipathy. An entire generation of leftist activists, progressive and revolutionary, invested their hopes in this small, impoverished Central American country that had somehow managed to defeat one of the most genocidal dictatorships in Latin America. With its socialist program of political pluralism, mixed economy and social justice, and its slogan "Between Christianity and Socialism there is no contradiction" the Sandinista Revolution caught the dreams of the regional and worldwide Left in a time of crisis for utopias.
During those years, Managua was an almost mandatory pilgrimage site attracting a virtual "who's who" of worldwide progressives and revolutionaries : Allan Ginsberg recited his poems in the city of Leon; every revolutionary singer, from Pete Seeger to Daniel Viglietti, traveled to Nicaragua to sing to our people; such disparate figures of Left-wing politics as the notorious Régis Debray (who, surprisingly enough, brought to the country fast combat launches courtesy of Francois Mitterrand -- the only European weapons received by Sandinista Nicaragua in those years), or the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, or Comandante Fidel, who came to Managua to offer "all his beard" to our people.
Except for people like Fidel and a handful of other friends, mainly in the Third World with a few also in Europe and North America, most of those personalities and movements distanced themselves from the Sandinista Revolution after the electoral defeat in 1990. Every movement and every personality attempted to make sense of what had happened and why what had started so well ended so badly. In the vast majority of cases, the analysis came up short, tending to focus on one or two anecdotes (a case of corruption here, some arbitrary behavior there...) that more or less confirmed people's own prejudices of what a true revolution should be. Immediately afterward they turned the page, as they also did with the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, in which the Sandinista Revolution was included, and went on to engage in the moment's more urgent tasks of attempting to confront (or, in some cases, to adapt to) the newly dominant neoliberal regime of the Washington Consensus.
As a rule, the balances drawn up of Nicaragua's Revolution were hasty and un-selfcritical, often including some variety of the argument that the revolutionary Sandinista government had not been sufficiently radical and left wing. The task of making a serious evaluation of what had happened was left in the hands of those most affected and most interested : the Nicaraguan people themselves. The conclusions drawn from their balance, made between 1990 and 2007, are reflected in the current policies of the Sandinista government led by Comandante Daniel Ortega, successful policies which have achieved many victories in the midst of utterly difficult and precarious regional and global conditions.
Drawing up that balance based on the experience of the 1980s, has not been the product of academic speculation but of the Nicaraguan people's need to survive. It was carried out formally through very difficult Sandinista party congresses in 1990 and 1994. Perhaps more fundamentally, that process took place through the practical resistance to neoliberal policies and defense of the fundamental achievements of the Sandinista Revolution. The evaluative process was worked out through struggle and resistance by the Sandinista political party and related organizations of all kinds, but at a grass roots level too by groups of friends, by families and even by individuals. The process included revolutionary activists, but also many other kinds of people, including even those who had been enemies of the Revolution.
More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_74200.shtml
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