Interesting Times: Nicaragua In Revolution
Haugaard, Lisa
FIFTY THOUSAND NICARAGUANSthe DIED IN the late 1970s overthrowing the brutal dictatorship that had ruled the country for half a century. Cities were reduced to rubble by Somoza's air force;...
...He described what happened when the army came in: "Excuse us, muchachos, we have to clear the streets," the soldiers explained...
...2. For an account of human rights abuses under the Somoza regime, see Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Organization of American States, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Nicaragua (Washington: OAS, 1978...
...9. Interview withyoungfarmer, hills outside Camoapa, August, 1989...
...They did all the work themselves, making improvements whenever they could gather enough money to proceed...
...Although top jobs were still generally reserved for men, the ranks of women expanded in the work force...
...This ranged from giving a Lada-the small Soviet-made car whose door handles always fell off-to public workers in compensation for a decade of hard work for dismal wages, to more serious abuses...
...In that house, they gave us food...
...He started drinking heavily andbecame increasingly hostile to Nelson, who was not his child, although he continued to show affection for his two daughters...
...invasion seemed imminent...
...Olga recounts the story sadly for a certain camaraderie lost...
...To Olga, this freedom from fear for her son probably made the single greatest difference in her life...
...The person who had owned the land where Olga's neighborhood was built sent agents to tell the several thousand residents to clear out...
...Women did virtually all of the "second shift": the housework, cooking and chitdcare...
...Once the barricades had been cleared away and the soldiers were marching off, one turned to Nelson and winked, "Next time, son, build them higher...
...Unsure whether or not they would return alive, peace commission members rode out into the mountains to meet Contra leaders...
...Olga had grown up in this region of independent, frontier ranchers and farmers...
...Some of their projects were supported by foreign aid, mainly of the small-scale, people-to-people variety...
...By no Lisa Haugaard is directorof the Central American Historical Institute at Georgetown University, and the author of many articles on Nicaragua...
...We speak to the husband," said one women's organizer in a new squatters' settlement...
...For more on the internal dynamics of the CDSs, see Gary Ruchwarger, People in Power: Forging a Grassroots Democracy in Nicaragua (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1987...
...In the mid-1980s, at the height of the war, CDSs were involved in food distribution and rationing, which embroiled the organizations in charges of favoritism and inefficiency.(5)Dofia Coco got very discouraged later on with how few people shared the burdens of participation, but she herself kept on working...
...The revolution brought to Olga's family, and to many Nicara-guans, new opportunities to contribute to community and national life...
...Eventually, the owner settled for a smaller neighboring lot, the site of a more recent squatters' occupation...
...They came when she brought home the ten pounds of rice and beans and five pounds of sugar that supplemented state workers' meager salaries each month...
...The strike brought to the surface divisions which had remained hidden even during the height of the war...
...While the insurrection and the years of revolutionary government may have accelerated the pace of social change, however, the changes also were part of modernization, and reflective of trends affecting much of the rest of the world...
...Olga led Nelson and her nieces and nephews out along the main highway...
...Arriving in Los Angeles shortly before the riots, she had trouble finding ajob, and struggled to fight deportation...
...Their story is not everyone's...
...In the early days, the entire staff from the minister on down ate lunch together in the makeshift headquarters...
...But it became harder to afford the basics of food and clothing, even if you had a job...
...The state trading company where Olga worked was privatized, and not long after that she was laid off...
...Similar episodes took place throughout the city and, especially, in the countryside...
...Nelson, by then an outgoing teenager, volunteered with other students to pick crops in the countryside during his school vacations, and once helped a construction crew build a coffee-processing plant...
...The threat was never carried out...
...only gradually did his former cheerful nature reemerge...
...6 Olga's momenLs of triumph had little to do with politics...
...And there were moments of great tension when a U.S...
...Strike supporters sat by peacefully...
...Women's organizations, from the official Sandinista group AMNLAE to more feminist offshoots that later started independent "Casas de la Mujer," taught women that they did not have to tolerate physical abuse...
...She received several thousand dollars from a U.S.AID-funded program to downsize the public sector, as well as the old Honda...
...JaneDeighton, RossanaHorsley, Sarah Stewartand Cathy Cain, Sweet Ramparts: Women in Revolutionary Nicaragua (Birmingham, UK: War on Want and Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, 1983...
...During this time, DoNa Coco was never free from worry...
...10, No...
...Lantern in the streets, darkness at home," was how some described the discrepancy between a number of party members' public and private behavior...
...Under both administrations, someone was always unemployed, and those with jobs had to stretch their dismal salaries to meet the whole family's needs...
...Olga and Nelson stood guard all night...
...After class, she'd take the bus home to tuck her children into bed...
...At that time Nelson was approaching draft age...
...Strike supporters rekindled unwelcome images oi me insurrection when they tore up paving stones and erected barricades to ward off attacks by strikebreakers...
...He was so eager he tried to volunteer...
...The impact of Olga's unemployment has been partly mitigated by Aristides's return from Los Angeles...
...Life in the home was much slower to change...
...The bulk of the volunteers for community activities were women...
...For an analysis of post-election dynamics in Nicaragua, see George Vickers and Jack Spence, "After The Fall," World Policy Journal, Fall, 1992...
...He seems to have it together," she says...
...The family had to line up once a week to fill barrels...
...3 (Summer 1990...
...She occupied a professional post in the Ministry, one that in earlier times would likely have gone to a man...
...Olga went to college, majoring in agricultural (admin-) istration...
...3 (1990...
...A 17-year-old boy standing next to Nelson was killed...
...In the early years, many Managuans joined militia to protect their neighborhoods...
...Even though he was a veteran, he could not find work...
...She sewed beautiful dresses with sashes and frills for neighbors, for her younger daughter Marivel, and for Olga's daughters...
...Nelson helped erect barricades in his neighborhood...
...She bought shoes and clothes to bring back to sell...
...Olga was left to support not only her own household, but a good part of her mother's as well...
...At the end of five years of hard work, their relatively spacious house had concrete-block walls, an asbestos roof, dirt floors and an outhouse...
...Despite everything, she has not stopped dreaming of the success of her hardware stand, or cooking up other schemes to insure her family's survival...
...Jairo found work at a soft-drink factory, and held on to the job despite the factory's privatization...
...Olga's husband Aristides and her sister Marivel had little faith or interest in such activities...
...98 (September 1989...
...Fear continued, though, with the long years of war...
...He's fixed up the neighborhood...
...Even if Nelson hadn't been carrying packets of leaflets under his shirt for the older students of the Sandinista Front, Olga had cause for worry...
...25, No...
...In the end, the transition was peaceful, if a bit surreal...
...and Paola P6rez, "Economic Crisis and Women in Nicaragua," in Lourdes Beneria, ed., Economic Crisis, Persistent Poverty and Gender Inequality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991...
...Years later, Olga held a mid-level position in a trading company associated with the ministry's sprawling bureaucracy, but she rarely saw "the Comandante" in person...
...or when Aristides sent dollars from the United States...
...The war was over, but not all the forces knew...
...Worried that the new administration's policies would be unfavorable, squatters occupied vacant lots, while peasants and farmworkers took over farms...
...Complaining of headaches and other pains, she would sit all day stooped over a sewing machine...
...The CDS lobbied the city government for donated materials, and built a community center and a pre-school using volunteer labor...
...Olga's relatives, who turned out to be Guard supporters, fled secretly in the night, leaving her alone with her son and several young nieces and nephews...
...Even though abandonment by husbands, single motherhood, and common-law marriages had long been common, women now felt freer to leave their husbands or boyfriends...
...Olga Marina Sdnchez Guido's son Nelson was only nine when the fight to overthrow Anastasio Somoza escalated in 1978...
...For a while, Marivel seemed to lose her bearings...
...In that house, they let us stay the night...
...Now she wants to start a hardware stand, stocked mainly with Nicaraguan, not imported, items...
...means did all family members support the Sandinista Party, but neither do they represent the experience of those most actively opposed to the revolution...
...Olga's brother Jairo was the closest family member to go to war...
...She was a victim of one of the first waves of layoffs that resulted from the government's attempts to curb inflation that reached four, and later five, digits...
...I want to help in the countryside," she said...
...Olga's situation was fairly typical of what the revolution meant for women...
...5. Interview with Enrique Reynoso, August 4, 1988...
...It is a singular accomplishment of those years that Olga, along with tens of thousands of poor Nicaraguans, earned a college degree, while many others finished high school...
...Families rushed to newly opened border crossings in search of relatives living in Honduran camps...
...Reynoso conducted case studies of the CDSs in 1985...
...when she bartered some possession for something more urgent, or managed to spend her money before, not after, a major devaluation...
...After his two years of service, Jairo came back, mercifully unscathed...
...Jn the workplace and the home, "compaNero" or "co;npaflera" (friend or colleague) became the term of choice.8 Significantly, one of the first measures adopted by President Violeta Chamorro was to ban the use of "cooipaNero" in the ministries-along with the wearing of miniskirts...
...Olga used part of the money for a round-trip ticket to Miami...
...Olga took food she found in the house to the muchachos, the youngsters behind the barricades...
...Then she took the dangerous journey overland to the United States...
...Olga's mother, Dofia Coco, was a seamstress...
...After he lost part of his foot in a work-related accident, the company paid him $10,000, which seemed to him a great windfall...
...Everyone describes the day after the elections as the quietest day they can remember...
...For analyses of the impact of the revolution on women, see, for example, Donna Vukelich, "Women in Nicaragua: The Revolution on Hold," envio, Vol...
...t The continuing economic crisis hit the family hard...
...4. To understand the magnitude of the change in organizing, it is important tonote that prior to 1979, the Nicaraguan populace was one of the least organized in Central America...
...But people were not about to move from the homes they had built and lived in for years...
...Then a lone plane flew overhead and bombed the town again...
...He enrolled in an electrical training institute so he could at least learn a skill while unemployed...
...7 Nicaragua's conservatives believe the revolution led to a loss of moral values...
...Two of Olga's neighbors threatened to set fire to her car because, they said, "We know your son is with the strikers...
...Nelson, who dreams of being an architect, attends college at night...
...3. See Kosta Mathey, "An Appraisal of Sandinista Housing Policies," Latin American Perspectives, VoL 17, No...
...Olga shared a garden with her mother, sister and brother, who lived in a wooden house next door...
...Perhaps the most profound and lasting impact of the revolution is not to be found in the material realm...
...Marivel and Aristides each decided to join the thousands of Nicaraguans who were fleeing to the United States...
...Some of those opportunities are closing as government aid to the universities is reduced, and fees for textbooks and matriculation are introduced in primary and secondary public schools...
...Men were mobilized for war, and there was a general sense that "the people," who even in the most retrograde party official's vocabulary included women, could now do tasks once reserved for an elite...
...Olga's two daughters, Xochil and Yara, born during this time, frequently fell ill from parasites despite Olga's efforts to keep the water covered and the dishes clean...
...Marx had it wrong," one observer commented as people got thinner and thinner...
...It could be the army or the Contras...
...Professors demanded a lot from working students, and her job never allowed her time to study...
...But the venture never took off...
...Like many, she tried hitting the streets each morning with a basket of baked goods...
...Since Chamorro took office, electricity service in the neighborhood has improved, some roads were paved, and running water is due to be installed...
...These opportunities are changing, but not closing, with the Chamorro Administration...
...Years later, she pointed out different houses along the road...
...Like many Nicaraguans, the family could face a few years of war, but not an endless battle...
...I do it...
...They will not easily be quieted again...
...By then, the war was over...
...6. For a detailed analysis of the downward trend in wages, particularly after 1985, see Richard Stahler-Sholk, "Stabilization, Destabilization and the Popular Classes in Nicaragua, 1979-88," Latin American Research Review, Vol...
...But with un- and underemployment reaching a staggering 58%, her neighbors bought on credit, and some couldn't pay her at all...
...Yet, they are representative in what they gained from the revolution, and in what they failed to gain-and in the ways that they struggled to live day to day amidst a relentless storm of change...
...I (N 1987, OLGA'S HUSBAND ARISTIDES LOST)his job as a bus driver...
...She learned-and fast...
...55-75...
...there were no lines, and no rationing...
...119 (June 1991...
...Nicaraguans have learned to speak out for their right to a decent life...
...A year later, Olga's sister Marivel, who earned most of the money in her mother's household, also lost her job as a skilled draftswoman in a factory...
...DoNa Coco continues to sew...
...8, No...
...But they were hardly unaffected by the war...
...Materially, neither the Sandinista years nor, so far, Chamorro's term, has been easy on the family...
...His main client is Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who is building a cathedral with financial help from the owner of Domino's Pizza...
...What did these "interesting times" mean for Olga and her family...
...It thus represents a maximum, not minimum, estimate...
...Wheelock was perhaps the most egregious example of a Sandinista leader who grew ever more aloof from the people he served...
...It isn't the state that withers away with socialism, it's state workers...
...Ironically, the very lack of connection between grassroots movements and the government has spawned new possibilities for organizing, even while concrete achievements may be harder to attain...
...The nation pinned its hopes on the February 1990 elections...
...While the previous government had forcibly evicted squatters, often removing them to areas far outside the city, the new leaders recognized such settlements as legitimate and, as far as possible, sought to extend city services to them.(3)Olga received a small plot and, like their neighbors, she and her husband Aristides set to building a home...
...Marivel went first to Guatemala, where for two years she worked long, hard hours in a factory, and was able to send a little money home to her mother...
...Given her determination, she may succeed...
...Their wages went for household expenses, while many husbands spent theirs on rum-or mistresses...
...They were staying with relatives in the town of La Gateada, when the Guard surrounded the town and began to bombard it...
...They told him that since the war was winding down and he was a good student, they wouldn't sign him up until he graduated from high school...
...The government installed potable water posts, but did not lay pipes for indoor plumbing...
...He did not want to fight.' In the late 1980s, Nicaraguans began to see tantalizing glimpses of peace, as the government moved dramatically forward with the Central American peace accords...
...Chamorro called out the army to confront the strikers-another surreal moment, since the army was still Sandinista, although it had pledged to support Chamorro's government...
...Over the next decade, 30,000 more died in a savage counter-revolutionary war, which left $17.8 billion in damages in its wake.' Some 200,000 Nicaraguans left the country during the 1980s, fleeing revolution or counter-revolution, or plain economic hard times...
...Nelson was devastated...
...one way or another, maybe they would bring peace...
...But she will be competing with tens of thousands of laid-off workers all starting small businesses with little capital during a recession...
...O LGA HEARD OF PLANS FOR A SQUATTERS' settlement not far from where she had found temporary housing...
...Aristides bought a used pick-up truck and some household items, and headed back to Managua...
...During this exhilarating, anxious time, nervous Sandinista and Contra soldiers met in ceasefire zones to share cigarettes...
...This is the story of one family who lived through these interesting times...
...17, No...
...Olga is impressed...
...In that house they gave us water," she said...
...He helps Aristides in the business...
...For the development of rural organizations, see Ilya A. Luciak, "Democracy in the Nicaraguan Countryside: A Comparative Analysis of Sandinista Grassroots Movements," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...Someone went around in a truck with a loudspeaker, and people came out to celebrate...
...This was late in the Sandinista Administration, when some things were easier-the market shelves were better stocked...
...The first conflict came several months later, when unions called a national strike to protest broken wage agreements and threats of layoffs, as the new government sought to downsize an privatize parts or me pub- lic sector...
...Aristides went straight to Los Angeles, where he found work in a factory and occasionally was able to send Olga a hundred dollars or some children's clothes...
...One breakthrough came when her office assigned her a broken-down Honda, which she could use to commute to work and the university...
...But no one had to fear eviction anymore...
...While in the United States Aristides joined an evangelical church, which he credits with helping him stop drinking and teaching him to value his family...
...Marivel finally found steady work in Los Angeles...
...The roads were never paved, and in the rainy season huge torrents would cut gashes down the middle, sometimes making them impassable...
...Their husbands often paced the house while they were out at meetings after dark, and yelled at them when they returned...
...Later, two men rode by on a motorcycle, and shot into the crowd...
...To be young was a virtual crime...
...And in that house...they refused to let us in...
...There the Contras had deep, genuine roots-and thus it was the site of some of the war's worst fighting...
...For farmworker organizing, see Richard Stahler-Sholk, "Organized Labor in Nicaragua" in Latin American Labor Organizations (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1987...
...She scraped together packages of candy, cookies and personal necessities to send to Jairo at the front...
...In the war zones, government gestures were not enough to win back confidence shattered by years of war, while many Sandinista supporters believed the government was moving too far too fast, and getting little in return...
...Yet a revolution can hardly maintain the intensity of the years of clandestine struggle, nor the cohesion and intimacy of the first moments of rebuilding and reshaping society...
...A high school-educated woman in her late twenties from a farming area in Nicaragua's heartland, Olga had long dreamed of bettering the lot of her country's dirt-poor farmers...
...Not everything has grown worse...
...Rubbish collection was sporadic at best, and residents would leave garbage in uncovered piles...
...When the ax fell, she had to fight to receive her full severance pay...
...some brought the soldiers coffee...
...W HEN WORD FILTERED OUT THAT VIOLETA Chamorro had won the elections, the country was suspended in an eerie state of shock...
...People struggled to keep food on the table when inflation reached 33,000%, and under the drastic adjustment policies pursued first by the Sandinista government, and then by Chamorro...
...For six years, Olga went straight from work to class several nights a week, while Nelson and DoNa Coco helped out with the two girls...
...She has to learn it is possible to live alone...
...Olga herself supported DoNa Coco and Nelson's efforts, but was too busy with work, child care and school (to)join in...
...Having lost most of her capital, Olga sold the Honda to make another investment...
...For months he barely spoke...
...Mathey points out that housing construction never kept pace with demand, but that the government's pro-tenant policies and lenient treatment of squatters provided solutions for many...
...3 (Summer 1990), pp...
...Two weeks later, when people were still digging through the rubble and trying to find water and food, Olga showed up at the door of the Ministry of Agriculture...
...The National Guard, faced with a student-led uprising, routinely imprisoned, disappeared orkilled teenagers-boys in particular.(2)Olga and Nelson's most frightening moment came in 1979, when the dictatorship took its last, brutal stand...
...And at six the next morning, she'd be up to get them ready for school and begin the routine again...
...Like tens of thousands of urban residents and over 100,000 peasant families, the family got a plot of land...
...Surviving this history, many Nicaraguans would surely appreciate the Chinese blessing, "May you live in uninteresting times...
...8. This certainly did not mean that social and political hierarchy disappeared...
...it did not matter which...
...Although Nelson and Jairo's willingness to comply with the draft was not atypical, the draft was highly unpopular with many, particularly in those parts of the countryside where the Contras were active...
...Dofia Coco and her grandson Nelson were the family members most active in the community...
...U.S.AID is funneling substantial money through Managua's right-wing mayor, Arnoldo AlemAn...
...Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas y Censos, Nicaragua: Diez Altos en Cifras (Managua: INEC, 1989...
...She landed a job and stayed with the Ministry throughout 11 years of the Sandinista Administration and two years into the new government's term...
...Soon, however, the country entered a state of feverish activity...
...Once she made a long trek into the countryside with other mothers when the army arranged a gathering for families, and returned happier for having finally seen her son...
...He was drafted and sent to Boaco-Chontales, where he was placed in charge of (and had to carry) his battalion's heavy communications equipment...
...For workforce organizing see Carlos Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation, (New York: Monthly Review, 1986), p.176...
...After Chamorro's victory, a number of Nicaraguans returned from Miami, Los Angeles and other parts of the United States, expecting to repossess their old houses, plantations and factories...
...A(S RESIDENTS OF MANAGUA, OLGA'S FAM-)ily did not have to fear night-time attacks nor endure blackouts lasting several days, as did town-dwellers in the North where the Contras were most active...
...In some cases, government or party officials transferred state property to themselves or others...
...Olga, who did not actively practice religion before and still remains a bit leery of evangelicals, now attends church with him-a result, perhaps, of having lost some of her faith in politics...
...Chamorro's UNO coalition was so taken aback by the prospect of governing this unruly country that it held no celebration...
...They also got access to free health care, which although it deteriorated in the later years, may have been key to preventing Xochil and Yara from succumbing to deadly childhood diseases...
...Fernando, a young boy on a remote farm in Camoapa, once told me he used to hide whenever he heard anyone approach...
...He now runs a business carrying lumber to Managua...
...When they reached the town of Muelle de los Bueyes, they heard that Somoza had fled the country...
...When Minister Jaime Wheelock was making copies, he'd say, "Olga, do you have anything I can copy for you...
...Interesting Times: Nicaragua in Revolution 1. This estimate of the economic effects of the Contra war is from the account of direct and indirect damages which the Nicaraguan government presented to the World Court, as updated through 1988...
...7. Interview with Francisca Centena, AMNLAE base leader, Barrio Boris Vega, Estelf, March, 1987...
...Although Olga believed he had a duty to serve, she was relieved when the recruiters turned him away...
...indeed, it was reinforced in different ways by the hierarchical structure of the party...
...It was a relief to be able to attend meetings without fear of the National Guard.' As members of the local Sandinista Defense Committee (CDS), they went door to door vaccinating children...
...Nelson, as a politically active youngster, might very well have met his death in a National Guard prison cell had the revolution not succeeded...
...For an evaluation of the CDSs, see Millie Thayer, "CDS: Revolution in the Barrio," in envio, Vol...
...Young people stayed out at night, and, like Nelson, went on volunteer missions away from their families...
...Public workers were no exception...
...factories and farms were destroyed...
...The government brought in electricity, although it was enough to light only one or two dim bulbs...
...People were less likely to call their bosses or professionals respectful titles like "licenciado...
...Army recruiters would show up one day, followed by Contra forces the next...
...When she wasn't sewing, she was caring for animals-a parrot, the occasional stray cat or dog, pigeons-or helping out in the neighborhood...
...There were floods and droughts, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption that blanketed cities with ash, and a tidal wave that ripped sleeping children from their beds...
...The only problem was she couldn't drive...
...Fearful that war might break out again, people hoarded rice and beans, or hid weapons...
...The inuchachos mounted a diversionary action so women and children could escape the town...
...But if that doesn't work, we tell the woman that she can leave her husband...
...And Olga finally got her degree in agricultural administration, but after so much effort she is unable to use it...
...For those who supported the Sandinistas-like some members of Olga's family-it was like looking over the edge of a cliff...
...Thanks to the Jesuit university's free tuition policy-made possible by large-scale government support-Olga could afford to study...
...The Ministry of Agriculture busily churned out formal titles for land they had distributed but had never bothered to legalize...
...To all but perhaps Nelson, the most ardent supporter of the revolution, this sacrifice was the most bitter...
Vol. 26 • December 1992 • No. 3
