Why the Sandinistas Lost

...Anytime that non-Sandinista movements or institutions threatened to become sufficiently active to influence events, the Sandinistas' first instinct was to denounce them as foes of the revolution...

...Large numbers of families, poor as they are, have never lost their claim to a tiny plot of farmland, or a part-time or full-time artisan business, or rights over a stall at the market...

...But the Nicaraguan revolution has all along followed another course, hidden beneath the political struggles of the different parties...

...They tried to impose their own church faction, the so-called Popular Church of the Poor, over the orthodox Catholic mainstream—all of this through methods of popular enthusiasm, honest persuasion, state coercion, mob control, defamation campaigns, and outright repression...

...Why did people who felt that way come to demonstrate for him...

...Observers who failed to notice the steady decline in Sandinista popularity have tended to say in the aftermath of last February's election that Nicaraguans voted their stomachs, not their hearts...

...Trying to tally up economic consequences of a war can seem a little revolting...

...The Sandinistas pointed in the direction of state modernization and a proletarianized party-led egalitarianism, and the people silently trudged the other way, as if determined to undermine every scheme, even the commendable schemes, that emanated from the Ministry of Planning...

...These young people may bring back a different sort of education than they were intended to receive...

...The East Germans, Cubans, and others sent additional aid and technical advice...

...Yet they never granted these groups a moral legitimacy...

...Yet it was only then, in SUMMER • 1990 • 309 Nicaragua 1988 and 1989, that the economy finally tumbled down the stairs...

...During the 1989 Polish elections, emigres were allowed to vote from abroad...

...The blocking of financial credits beginning early in the 1980s, the U.S...

...The Soviet Union in recent years sent Nicaragua, according to a Soviet acknowledgement early in 1990, almost a million dollars a day of civilian aid in credits and goods— possibly more in earlier years...

...Will they have public conventions and publicly acknowledged factions...

...When Ted Koppel said on Nightline two days before the election, "Almost certainly, the Sandinistas will win," he was relying on scientific polling data...

...And the vanguard of the people never noticed that the list of "CIA agents," "oligarchic elements," "Somocista National Guards," and "agents of imperialism" gradually came to resemble an entity that could SUMMER • 1990 • 311 Nicaragua only be described, except by the Sandinistas, as "the people...

...Undoubtedly the external pressures to go in democratic directions are considerable right now, and undoubtedly many Sandinistas agree...

...A Nicaraguan journalist tells me that, looking at the immensity and enthusiasm of the crowd, one would never have guessed that most Nicaraguans hated Somoza and that even some of the cheering multitude secretly detested the man and his government...

...Or in the case of getting neighborhoods to collaborate, control over rice and bean rations...

...A similar incongruity cropped up in the famously disastrous pre-election polls...

...Finally, the contra war wreaked physical damage to the coffee harvest, to livestock, and to mining...

...The result was a short period of stunned confusion on the part of everyone who had expected something more democratic from the overthrow of the Somozas...

...The Miskito Indians of the east coast who rejected centralization, the northern campesinos who rejected state agriculture, the Catholic hierarchy with their following among the poor who rejected the Sandinista-dominated church faction, the right-wing and left-wing trade unionists who struggled for trade union autonomy, the small right-wing and left-wing political parties that declined to merge with the Sandinista Front, the market women who carried canastas of nonstate tangerines into hungry Managua, the staff at La Prensa who published the country's most popular newspaper— all found themselves beyond the pale of Sandinista acceptability...

...Yet four days later, when the people voted in what was guaranteed to be a secret ballot, only five hundred eighty thousand persons from the entire country put their mark in the Sandinista column...

...Or, as other people say, was "mismanagement" the main problem...

...The rise of a Sandinista bureaucracy did generate the kind of extreme class division that is characteristic of communist regimes—the system, above all, of special stores with American products for the elite nomenklatura...

...policy was intended to strangle Nicaragua...

...The local legitimacy of these contras can now be seen from the election results in rustic towns like Siuna and La Rosita, which voted anti-Sandinista in spite of having been the sites of grisly contra atrocities...

...The Soviet Union was supportive...

...To vote against the Sandinista Front in spite of every threat, to sustain a belief in opposition groups that had been made to appear for ten years as impotent foolish agents of an enemy country, to hold on to a sense of a non-Sandinista Nicaraguan reality that even most foreign reporters were unable to perceive—all this reveals a considerable ability to resist domination from above...

...When the Sandinistas asked you to carry a banner through the streets or to cheer Daniel Ortega, you might have any number of reasons, then, to cooperate...

...His splinter movement is unlikely to grow into a powerful party, but the fact of finishing third must mean that significant numbers of Sandinista supporters who would never consider voting for Violeta Chamorro nonetheless wanted to protest the orientation of the Front...

...It required the Sandinistas to divert probably more than 50 percent of the government budget to defense...

...If previously productive lands sometimes went untilled under Sandinista rule, that was not because the army swallowed the work force...

...When the commandantes walked to the mike to address the chanting multitude, they said: At least we have forged a national independence!' Which was sort of a truth but mostly sort of a lie, given that the people who sweltered in the sun listening to the fiery speeches did not feel so independent...

...The Chamorro family (prominent among the Sandinistas, too) does not exactly represent a break from Nicaraguan tradition...

...Some of the landowners who for good or bad reasons have lost property to Sandinista expropriations will now try to get their lands returned, which will lead to nasty fights...

...Obviously the economic consequences were profound...

...customers disappeared by White House executive order...

...Plus the Sandinistas, too, maintained government mobs—though, this time, the mobs didn't come from the criminal class but from the 19th of July Sandinista Youth and the government employees...

...An important means of social control was the threat of expropriation...

...It's a little-known fact, but some of the first contras had originally been Sandinista guerrillas themselves...

...But is it possible to define these consequences without appearing to minimize the horror of what has occurred...

...On top of which came Hurricane Joan in 1988, followed the next year by droughts, then by excessive rains...

...But as the Somozas showed years ago, out-and-out totalitarianism is not necessary for getting crowds of unhappy Nicaraguans to chant praise of the government...

...How could it not be, when the Sandinistas honestly imagined themselves to be the leaders of the vast Nicaraguan majority...

...People who told the pollsters they were going to vote Sandinista must have behaved precisely like the mammoth assemblage in Managua—public Sandinistas who privately got rid of the Sandinistas at the first possible moment...

...February's election is a dramatic instance...

...There was the additional intimidating fact that Somoza maintained a ruthless army of eight thousand men...

...Most of the physical damage occurred, however, in the regions where the contras were strongest—the remotest, poorest, least developed sections of the country, which have never been central to the economy...

...How that new government will perform, whether it will favor capital at the expense of everything else, whether it will control corruption, whether it will be able to cope with dangerous contra bands in the remote districts and with a Sandinista bureaucracy— all that is impossible to predict...

...They tried to establish an ideological orientation toward Cuban-like ideals (for instance, by using Cuban teachers and East German materials in the grand literacy program of the early years, while rejecting Costa Rican teachers who were eager to participate...

...Some spectacular examples of high living have turned up: the private fleets of cars, the expropriated beach houses...

...Hassan has offered articulate criticisms of Sandinista self-deception...

...The Sandinistas have a quality of relative modernity that none of the opposition groups can claim and that exercises an attraction for the more forward-thinking and secular university students, who always did 312 • DISSENT Nicaragua make up the core of Sandinista support...

...The Sandinista small farmers and ranchers' association is well regarded...

...The mass scrounging in garbage dumps, the widespread signs of a hunger that modern Nicaragua had never previously known, the reduction to two and even one meal a day for masses of the poor—these horrible phenomena, which had been visible in earlier years but were usually denied by Sandinista supporters, now became undeniable...

...The result was the biggest incongruity of all...

...Central Amer310 • DISSENT Nicaragua icans flee to Costa Rica, not from it...

...Democratic instincts among the Sandinistas may end up being reinforced...

...They were, as Sergio Ramirez has recognized, a Nicaraguan Vendee, though in some cases they weren't even right-wing...

...Still, as the years wore on, your feelings sorted themselves out...

...Then came the Arias plan and the 1987 ceasefire, and though sporadic fighting continued ever after, the remote coffee fincas, livestock ranches, and mines in the contra zones were in most cases physically able to revive production...

...A little more than a year before the 1990 election I attended a national day parade in the town of Masaya and watched hundreds of schoolchildren bearing red-and-black Sandinista banners march in formation down the muddy avenue to the cathedral plaza...

...Yet imperial destructiveness can explain only so much...

...Costa Rica was and remains a living proof that, in spite of every reactionary instinct of the State Department's Latin American desk, Central America need not dwell forever under the shadow of oligarchic feudalism and political terror...

...The countryside in Nicaragua has changed shape...

...In this last election, the prospect that Sandinismo might end up winning less than a majority seems never to have crossed their minds...

...hundreds...

...Those explanations are, in my view, further examples of "false consciousness...

...The Sandinistas dominated Nicaragua for ten years, but the more they dominated, the less they controlled...

...Sandinista mobs played an active role in the early months...

...Military aid reached equivalent levels, making altogether, according to the usual estimate, a billion dollars a year of East Bloc aid during most of the 1980s...

...The Sandinistas, when they seized power in 1979, likewise employed a social democratic vocabulary and spoke of nonalignment...

...In the aftermath of the election, a writer for the L.A...

...Later still, when the Front made a well-advised turn away from state agriculture, SUMMER • 1990 • 313 Nicaragua the campesinos continued to struggle for land, this time with the blessings of the Front...

...A large percentage of the crowd that chanted the Sandinista slogans must have entered the polling booth and voted for the person who had been vilified for years as the antipatriotic representative of the oligarchs and Yankee imperialists, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro— whose own crowds never exceeded fifty thousand...

...The Sandinistas ordered the campesinos to buy and sell through the state at disastrous prices and to join the Sandinista militia and other institutions, and a portion of the campesinos not only refused but ran away to the mountains to join the contras...

...The Sandinistas could, if necessary, call on violence, too...

...The grimmest consequences of all occurred among the primitive campesinos of certain areas in the north, Jinotega, Chontales, and Boaco...

...Weekly, Anthony Palazzo, reporting from a small Atlantic coast town, asked the innkeeper about Chamorro, and the innkeeper replied: "We Nicaraguans love to fight...

...Why didn't the Sandinistas back off and re-create at least some aspect of the original revolutionary coalition...

...To what degree is the United States responsible for turning people against the Sandinista Front...

...Merely by expropriating the Somoza properties and the estates of Somoza's cronies, the revolutionary government controlled 20 percent of the national wealth, plus the national banking system, which ought to have sufficed for instituting a thoroughgoing social reform...

...A few days before the Nicaraguan elections last February, the Sandinista Front for National Liberation held a mammoth campaign rally in the big Managua plaza...

...Serious reporters and commentators on 308 • DISSENT Nicaragua Nicaraguan politics were badly misled about last February's election by the polls and the immensity of the Sandinista demonstrations because these observers seemed to think that, what with the antigovernment newspapers and radio stations and opposition parties, the average Nicaraguan must have felt sufficiently free to express true opinions...

...Will the Sandinistas abandon their military like vertical organization and the idea of bringing all of society into it, as some of the East Bloc communists have done...

...As the economist Medal has observed, a humble class of traders has been emerging from the unofficial peddler stalls and the backroom dealings of the black market—people who may not be so poor as they seem and who may, in fact, be taking the first steps toward a modest accumulation of capital...

...As Tomas Borge, the Minister of the Interior, repeated early this year, "Sandinismo is Marxism applied to the reality of Nicaragua"—by which he meant, of course, the Marxism of Lenin and Fidel...

...The possibility of endowing at least some of these movements with a socialist ethic, which was undeniable at the start of the revolution, has been lost in large measure...

...Violence, terror, and absolute power weren't required to get those children to carry Sandinista flags...

...There are of course people who still love the Sandinistas—people who honestly agree with them, the families of leaders, the people who are loyal to the Sandinista cult of the martyrs, people who have undergone too much in the name of Sandinismo to give it up now...

...Yet the children carried the red-and-black, while on the sidewalks, the proud parents—or perhaps humiliated parents—cheered...

...In reality the town of Masaya was the most radical place in Nicaragua, a Kronstadt of the tropics that had long since come to oppose the Sandinistas, as anyone could tell from private conversations (and indeed the town and especially its proletarian barrio voted strongly against the Sandinistas in the election...

...In accord with their pluralist commitments from 1979, the Sandinistas steadfastly specified that opposition groups would retain the right to exist in a Sandinista Nicaragua...

...Yet schooling grew to be as democratically available as in France or Norway...

...If the revolution is defined along the lines of Third World Marxist national liberation, defeat appears to be at hand...

...Infant mortality sank to as low as any place in Latin America...

...The war damaged the economy in three main ways...

...And what will happen to the Front when large numbers of Sandinista stalwarts who have been studying in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe return to Nicaragua...

...Not to mention that, should you ever tilt into opposition, the Somocista government was likely to organize a Liberal party mob to keep you in line—tough characters drawn from the jails and the underworld who could be called out to march in the streets and assault anyone thought to oppose the regime...

...You might put them on...

...The Sandinistas came to power at an auspicious moment...

...The Sandinista Front is a vertical, centralized, military-style structure that, during its ten years in power, incorporated political coercion into its activity, including the best of its features: its revolutionary reforms in land distribution, health services, and education...

...You stood in the sun and chanted, "Viva Somoza...

...Labor won rights...

...314 • DISSENT...

...Nicaragua's national debt multiplied many times...

...Chamorro and two guerrilla heroes went into opposition, leaving only Daniel Ortega and his eventual vice president, Sergio Ramirez...

...Will the rank and file be given the chance to elect party leaders...

...When General Somoza asked you to come to a demonstration and cheer at his name, you had good reason, therefore, to give that invitation serious thought...

...Everyone in Nicaragua recalls the time when a tractor tire cost more than a tractor, a glass of ice water more than a gallon of gasoline...

...Everyone knew that the elements in question were, of course, the supporters of UNO...

...Even so, the energy that led impoverished campesinos to seize their own farms or to come to the city and go into some sort of tiny business, the dynamism that led other people to flee to Costa Rica and the United States and to send back hundreds of millions of dollars—this energy remains...

...Still, if other aspects of Nicaraguan life had been going well, neither the war nor hostility from the United States would have sufficed to sink the economy...

...In the early years, Mexico and Venezuela sent oil, and in recent years emigrant remittances may have reached as high as (roughly estimating) a hundred million...

...From the start of the revolution, campesinos set out to take land...

...Control over the schools was sufficient...

...Sandinismo is the kind of doctrine that Vaclav Havel had in mind when he wrote of the inability of Marxists to understand the "mechanisms of their own political influence, thus paradoxically making them precisely what they, as Marxists, so often suspect others of being—victims of 'false consciousness.' " The Sandinistas, when they look in the mirror, have always seen the vanguard of the people, the highest expression of the workers and the campesinos...

...The campesinos, artisans, and traders have always needed cooperative institutions and a friendly government to make their tiny enterprises efficient...

...The revolution is no longer young...

...These families were vulnerable in the extreme to Sandinista threats of expropriation (just as, under Somoza, they were vulnerable to the identical threat, though in different forms...

...In Sandinista myth making, the lies ultimately got the upper hand...

...Inflation in 1988 reached 36,000 percent...

...Life expectancy rose as high as in the United States...

...The groups could exist, thanks to Sandinista forbearance, but they were never supposed to mount a serious opposition...

...Some of the campesinos who have won land titles will remain loyal...

...Perhaps if the Sandinistas had cracked down a lot harder, things would have gone a little smoother...

...The intelligentsia is Sandinista...

...Labor displacement to the army, harmful though it was, cannot by itself explain the economic collapse...

...But with the ceasefire more or less in place, production fell by 7 or 8 percent a year...

...yet customers from other countries largely took their place, sometimes by order of the Kremlin...

...There were at least two hundred thousand people, or, by the most common estimate, three hundred fifty thousand (meaning ten percent of the entire country), or possibly more than four hundred thousand...

...But in the case of the Sandinistas, one other crucial element played a role...

...L normal democratic circumstances, the discovery by the government that its program was less than wildly popular should not have provoked still graver problems...

...Of the countries in the region, Venezuela, one of the richest, and Costa Rica, the nearest, were enthusiastically pro-Sandinista...

...There were threats of expropriation— even a threat from Daniel Ortega to expropriate Violeta Chamorro's home after the election, which ordinary people must have taken as a threat to them as well...

...We fought to get Somoza out and we fought to get the Sandinistas out...

...The election of a government whose top figures are committed to democratic rights is in itself a step forward for the real revolution, the revolution of the poor...

...None of these threats became severe enough to produce an international outcry, but neither did they let up...

...agents, enemies of the people...

...But neither is it over...

...The period after the ceasefire was when industrial workers in Managua finally sank to an incredible 10 percent of what they had enjoyed under the last Somoza...

...Chamorro herself is not a powerful individual, or even a healthy one...

...It was the biggest election rally in Nicaraguan history and widely regarded as a sure indication of impending Sandinista victory...

...Sandinista privileges could not have had much effect on the economy...

...The army was abolished...

...Possibly the Sandinistas offered you a T-shirt and a cap with Sandinista emblems...

...The war displaced part of the labor force into the army, which was another bad blow to the economy...

...And when two thousand election observers from around the world had tramped across every plaza in Nicaragua and everyone had a chance to see these observers in the flesh, when at last you came to suspect that the February 1990 ballot was going to be secret, and when you have meditated sufficiently on Cardinal Obando y Bravo's repeated admonition that a dignified person does not sell his vote—well...

...And when the opportunity arose—you overthrew the bastard...

...But the Sandinistas never had a Stalinist vocation, and in any case, every time they did crack down, which was often enough, the effects went from bad to worse...

...The shirt and cap were very likely the newest, cleanest clothes you owned...

...and when they look at their opponents, they have always seen the enemies of the people and the representatives of the oligarchic past...

...When Sandinistas used the word socialism, they meant a party-state system characterized by centralized administration and state ownership—state farms, for instance, as in Cuba...

...The growth of shanty towns combined with the rise of the black market (which the Sandinistas first tried to suppress, then were forced to legalize or at least tolerate) has meant the development of thousands of new tiny businesses — wretched peddler-sized enterprises, which by themselves will never generate wealth...

...Capital mostly flowed out of Latin America in the last decade, because of the debt crisis and other disasters...

...Why did Nicaraguans behave in those mysterious ways...

...Costa Rica is a poor country with drug problems, a bad press law, a vulnerability to foreign meddling, and every sort of difficulty...

...Because for anyone who depended on state contracts or employment or needed some sort of favor, attending Somocista rallies was the soul of common sense...

...Still, the work force in Nicaragua, owing to overall population growth, did not diminish during the last ten years...

...All in all the Sandinista vote reached 40.8 percent—though that figure surely overstates the reality...

...But whatever the fate of these disputes under Chamorro's government, a massive agrarian reform, the largest in Latin America, remains a stubborn fact, unlikely to disappear...

...Then the Sandinistas discovered that one sector after another was no longer cooperating with the revolutionary junta...

...The Sandinistas relied partly on Bulgarian advisers for the economy, and it may be that, yes, the Bulgarians proved less than brilliant...

...That has a Nicaraguan timbre to it...

...The heart of the economy, in the rich agricultural departments on the Pacific coast, was pretty much untouched by the fighting...

...The Sandinistas called the contras a tiny mercenary force of U.S...

...One of the main goals of the Nicaraguan revolution was to eliminate dependence on the United States, to diversify the foreign market and sources of capital...

...Yet these enterprises of the so-called marginal sector do represent a further distribution of economic power...

...yet the country as a whole has never taken on a proletarian quality...

...Local death threats against UNO supporters were a constant...

...A dispossessed rural and urban labor force has been growing in Nicaragua ever since the coffee boom of the 1880s...

...The Sandinistas were not wholly unsuccessful in these efforts...

...It was the sort of scene that struck naive visitors as a sign of Sandinista popularity...

...Nicaragua's emigres of the last ten years account for between 15 and 20 percent of the entire population, who, if they had enjoyed a similar right, would have lowered the Sandinista percentage to the middle thirties (the overwhelming emigre opinion detests the Sandinistas...

...Ever since the overthrow of Somoza, the poor have undertaken what can be described as large-scale programs of their own—above all, a mass seizure of property...

...Of the five original junta members, Mrs...

...And if we don't like her, we'll push her out too...

...What hasn't happened to poor Nicaragua...

...They may have dissuaded many people from voting for Chamorro...

...Even so, I think the gravest of the problems was political, in its origin ideological...

...The original revolutionary junta included both the Sandinistas and Mrs...

...But the Sandinista elite in Nicaragua never exceeded some 5,000 persons...

...At the end of the Sandinista period, unemployment reached 30 percent, in spite of army enlistment...

...It increased by four hundred thousand persons...

...The revolution in that country is an authentic social revolution, not merely a political one...

...It is tragic that Sandinista policies ended up in bitter conflict with these movements of very poor people...

...They did this at first by occupying the Somocista haciendas, even without Sandinista backing...

...Most of the top commandantes didn't even bother to run for the National Assembly, so certain were they of maintaining their government portfolios (or party posts in a party-state...

...In reality the original Sandinista idea was Cuban, with some significant democratic modifications...

...Production fell 1 or 2 percent a year during the period when the war was at full steam, with inflation at 1,800 percent...

...The workday quietly diminished...

...The privileges had a bad effect on morale and on Sandinista popularity and led to a couple of celebrated party resignations...

...A degree of freedom for a paper like La Prensa and for a multiparty parliament—dozens of SUMMER • 1990 307 Nicaragua parties...

...The effect of the defense budget was to limit what was nonetheless a growth in funds at the government's disposal...

...A sentiment for some sort of democratic socialism was so widespread that even the traditional Catholic hierarchy pronounced in favor of the word "socialism," though most people seemed to mean by that something like what existed in Costa Rica...

...Big industrial investments—a deepwater port on the Atlantic coast, a milk refinery—were ill conceived...

...But their backing off was always partial and begrudging...

...It was not because Sandinista Nicaragua ever became an out-and-out totalitarian state...

...And why not...

...Will they support the useful projects that the Chamorro government may undertake, or will they continue to regard any force but their own as illegitimate...

...However, in Nicaragua's case, as the economist Jose Luis Medal has pointed out, net capital flowed in...

...Does the turn against Sandinismo meanwhile signal the end or the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution...

...The grotesqueries of Sandinista pricing have become clichés...

...Accordingly the Sandinistas nationalized foreign commerce and, as much as possible, internal commerce, too, so that almost everyone who wanted to buy or sell was supposed to conduct business through the Sandinista ministries...

...The Sandinistas let themselves be carried away by their own grand and colorful mythology— and a myth, as Cyrano de Bergerac says, is a sort of a truth that is also a sort of a lie...

...embargo that began in 1985, above all the contra war that was financed and for several years directed by American agents—these policies were never justified, morally or politically, and have had terrible effects...

...In that case you entered the polling booth, and you put your faith in God and Jimmy Carter...

...The Sandinistas set out to absorb every possible institution into either the new state system or into the Sandinista Front, to incorporate all the existing workers' organizations, cooperatives, trade unions, and political parties into a pyramidal "people's democracy" of mass participation under Sandinista control...

...Will the Sandinistas be able to mobilize their significant remaining social base for progressive goals in the future...

...Was a corrupt and privileged bureaucratic "new class" an additional factor of major proportions, as some people say...

...Naturally the Front has a strong base among the more privileged managers and administrators in the state sector or the state-dependent sector and among army officers (though a shocking percentage at some of the army bases voted for Chamorro's coalition...

...Or voted for Chamorro in a mad whim that instantly they regretted...

...The black market grew...

...is perfectly compatible with a reasonably effective system for coercing the population, so long as the opposition press and political groups have no power...

...Yet the remainder, because of the aid pouring in from around the world, still surpassed what the Somoza government ever had...

...The United States, still with the administration of Jimmy Carter, sent more aid than the Somozas had seen in years...

...Democratic instincts have never been absent from the Front...

...The Sandinista People's Army (a translation of Ejercito Popular Sandinista), eight times larger than Somoza's National Guard, exercised political control merely through selective use of the draft, plus the political indoctrination that accompanied military training...

...the word "socialism" itself, which people esteemed ten years ago, has taken on some of the odor that the Somozas managed to give to the word "capitalism...

...After the invasion of Panama, General Humberto Ortega said that, in case of a similar invasion of Nicaragua, treasonable "elements" would be executed...

...Western Europe sent a hundred million dollars or more a year...

...That has never occurred in the history of the Sandinista Front...

...When the Sandinistas organized state farms and seminationalized cooperatives, the campesinos struggled against these new rulers, too—sometimes by protesting from within the Sandinista system (supported by the small farmers and ranchers' association), sometimes by going over to the contras...

...But in Nicaragua pluralism and authoritarianism have coexisted through two social systems...

...Almost 1 percent of the entire population, an extraordinary figure, was killed in the contra fighting...

...Somehow the Costa Ricans managed not to fall into a state of hostility with Washington, D.C...

...One sign of that during the election, virtually unnoticed in the American press, was the distant but notable third-place finish of a left-wing splinter candidate, Moises Hassan, one of the guerrilla heroes who served in the original revolutionary junta and who was for several years the mayor of Managua...

...But in these remote hill regions, the contras, misled and deceived and exploited though they were by the CIA, did not take up arms for mercenary reasons...

...To advance in school, for instance, to get grade points, it was a good idea to cooperate with the draft and to march in the Sandinista parades...

...yet the actual effect was to prevent capital from flowing at a higher rate than it did...

...Or else that people voted for Chamorro—but never intended for her to win...

...The circle around Chamorro contains some highminded individuals with an orientation to the democratic left, but also some parties and figures from the anti-Somocista right...

...Chamorro and was supported by an overwhelming and ardent majority...

...You might not even be entirely certain of the true state of your own feelings—given that almost everyone authentically loved the Sandinistas at the beginning of the revolution...

...The war was a crucial element in that calamity...

...There are no political exiles...

...The social democratic party in Costa Rica— Oscar Arias's National Liberation party— staged a revolution of its own at the end of the 1940s and was able during the next years to institute magnificent reforms...

...Or in the case of artisans or farmers, control over raw materials...

...The professional and managerial class (followed by poorer people) fled to Costa Rica and the United States...

...The campaign was accompanied by a steady drizzle of Sandinista threats and pressures...

...They tried...

...A similar grass-roots democratization of property has been going on in the cities, though in ways that tend to be economically unproductive...

...The central point nonetheless remains that masses of poor people have somehow not yet lost their own initiative...

...The Ministry of the Interior fielded a small army of its own along with a secret police whose training (from East Germany's fraternal Ministry of the Interior) was strictly the best...

...When pollsters came around to ask you questions, you might have greater wariness over East German security techniques than the pollsters seemed to recognize (even if, in the political "opening" of the last three years, fear of the Ministry of Interior police tended to diminish...