Nicaragua: on the Tightrope

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As Bolivia's generals try to reconsolidate their control after the crisis provoked by the recent coup, SANTIAGO FORTIN sent us this report GROWING hostility from the bourgeoisie and the United States, coupled pressure from the Wr ırkers and peasants have now forced the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua into new measures.

The Sandinistas have organised huge rallie made a concerted ci for expropriating decapi lised industries and lands.

Slaughter

Workers have brought proot of indiscriminate slaughter of livestock and the sabotage of harvests for example. Many are also calling for 'mano dura' (iron hand) to be exercised against right wing terrorism: inflittion, shortages of consumer goods, bureaucracy, poor public services, the inadequacy of labour law reforms and the conflict between work schedules and militia training.

At a Sandinista trade union rally on June 18, leader Enis Melendez said:

"It is true that we beat Somoza's National Guard, but we haven't yet beaten our main class enemy, the stubborn bourgeoisie."

On July 19 about halt a million Nicaraguans converged on Managua for a rally on the second anniversary of the revolution - including about 700 truck loads from Matagalpa, the northern region most hard hit by right wing terrorism. They were addressed by Daniel Ortega, the junta's coordinator, who in a recent interview admitted:

"The pressure from the rank and file is high. We've got to realize it and give it goal. otherwise we are going to find ourselves without the people and with the bourgeoisie against us."

To a storm of applause he announced measures which were adopted by acclamation.

The tirst was a new law enabling the government to place enterprises under its control on receiving a charge of decapitalisation from the workers. If after investigation the complaint is dismissed, workers are protected from reprisals.

Fourteen enterprises were to be immediately expropriated but he rejected the roar for the confiscation of the leading bourgeois paper, Prensa.

The property of Nicaraguans leaving the country for more than six months was also to be immediately expropriated, domestic distribution of sugar is to be under government control and government controls of foreign trade are to be strengthened.

After the revolution two years ago, when the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by a coalition of forces including a major sector of the bourgeoisie, the country was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It still has a shortfall of 100 million dollars in foreign exchange income this year.

The Government of National Reconstruction has walked a fatal tightrope by from La Paz.

Two years after the threw Somoza, Nica problems and hostilit! WOOLCOCK reports.

evicting workers and peasants from occupied lands and factories belonging to the anti-Somoza bourgeoisie, making tax concessions to the private sector and leaving the two main export crops, sugar and coffee almost entirely in private hands in an attempt to encourage local investment by the local bourgeoisie and appease the US and win aid and loans in order to buy wheat.

The response of the Us was to cancel loans and ald (wheat has finally been donated by the Soviet Union and Sweden, Switzerland and Canada), harbour and train former National Guard militias in Horida to carry out terrorist campaigns from the Honduran border and poise the 10,000 strong Rapid Deployment Force in

revol ution th 'agua faces e from the US.

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The private sector in Nicaragua has been similarly uncooperative. Its representatives have walked out of the Council of State and set up the right wing Nicaraguan Democratic Movement (MDN) which speaks through the daily Prensa. Wealthy industrialists and agriculturalists have decapitalised at a phenomenal rate, and bureaucracy in the civil service has continued unimpeded and even worsened.

Balance

The latest measures still leave the country in the grip of capitalism and committed to pluralism and the mixed economy. However they show that the Nicaraguan revolution is still in the balance and has not been

able to stabilise at a level comfortable either for its leadership or for the forces of reaction.

The way forward surely lies in the expropriation of all major privately owned industry under workers' control and the transformation of the militias and defence committees into soviet-style bodies - and also in the success of revolutionary upheavals particularly in neighbouring Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

After the so-called 'final offensive' in El Salvador tailed to change the deadlock between government forces and the guerrillas, a directive was sent out by the Nicaraguan government forbidding any spokesperson to appear on a platform with Salvadorean representatives.

This failed in its aim of favourably impressing the US and it is clear than unless the rest of Central America rises up against its oppressors Nicaragua will find itself increasingly isolated and doomed within a relatively short period.