The Return of Somocismo? The Rise Of Arnoldo Alemán
Caster, Mark
Arnoldo Alemin, presidential candidate of the revived Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC), arouses strong emotions among his opponents. Former President Daniel Ortega, addressing a crowd...
...He revived old taxes, garnered resources from U.S...
...ut as Alemin has prepared to campaign and then govern, it has become apparent that he does not enjoy the confidence of Nicaragua's upper crust nor, surprisingly, of significant parts of the diaspora in Miami...
...Since he came on board, sources say that Alemin's campaign has received individual contributions of up to $200,000...
...Viewed demographically, support for Alemin is all over the map...
...What few people in 1990 anticipated was the skill with which Alemin would use his mayoral base as a springboard for accumulating power...
...At a time when the Chamorro government was implementing adjustment policies that threw massive numbers of people out of work, Mayor Alemin was able to make modest improvements in Managua's popular barrios...
...He has support from the young, the old, the welleducated and the less literate, from people in the capital, the provincial cities and the countryside...
...How Alemin rose to his current heights is an untold story of graft and patronage...
...Not surprisingly, Daniel Ortega has repeatedly called on Alemn to negotiate a Alemin supporters at a neighborhood rally...
...Eduardo Sevilla Somoza, a can ignore the power centers in and nephew of the former dictator, is surrounding Nicaragua only at his also a prominent board member...
...These and other Alemrn allies are, no doubt, awaiting the opportunity to recover old properties, to harass Sandinistas, and, in many cases, to steal...
...His strategy consisted of three basic components: building the PLC by investing his own (and probably municipal) resources in the party...
...It is not the Nicaraguans in Miami, but rather the extreme wing of Miami Cubans, led by Jorge Mas Canosa and the Cuban-American Foundation, that has furnished Alemin with the most significant foreign financing-all of it illegal under Nicaragua's revised electoral law...
...He joined other coffee producers who were protesting government control of the dollars earned from the coffee trade...
...Alemin also began to rankle the Chamorro government, which he lambasted for developing a "co-government" with the FSLN...
...This will not be the return of Somocismo, or the beginnings of a new dynasty, but it may be a long run...
...Alemnn's agent electoral defeat and before Violeta in many of his Miami dealings is Chamorro's inauguration...
...The Sandinista media dismissed projects like the Malec6n as mere show, but ordinary people, caught in a cycle of increasing impoverishment and lacking inexpensive ways to spend their leisure time, flocked to them...
...and Sergio Garcia Quintero, a former Somocista judge, who will likely be Alemin's defense minister...
...Yet a more dispassionate analysis suggests that both the makeup of the Alemdn coalition and the reality of existing domestic and international 6 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Mark Caster is a freelance journalist based in Managua...
...AID-funded projects, and brought in additional aid from his Cuban friends in Miami's city hall...
...Thus, like Somoza before him, Alemin developed a popular base and a formidable political machine that reeks of traditional clientelism...
...forces will lead to a different result...
...In response, the government claimed that the growers were engaging in economic sabotage and confiscated the properties of three of them, including Alemin's...
...The Cuban-American Foundation supports an Alemin vehicle iami Cubans, particularly Sht-wing Cubancan Foundation, have d fill Alemn's campaign s. At fundraising events, in has expressed warm rt for the overthrow of :astro...
...After the PLC won the Atlantic Coast regional elections in February, 1994, national polls showed Alemin and his party growing in popularity...
...Who is going to vote for this alliance in October...
...One of Alemrin's first steps was to appoint municipal-council members to posts in his administration, where access to graft lured other UNO parties to the PLC...
...In northern Nicaragua, the remaining recontras are even engaged in armed propaganda on his The M behalf...
...In 1980, he was arrested in a raid of supposed counter-revolutionary plotters and spent nine months in jail, where, not surprisingly, his antipathy for the Sandinistas deepened...
...Ortega's words were intended to convince his followers, as well as undecided voters, into marking the Sandinista box on the October ballot...
...Although as strident as Alemin, Bolafios is reputed for his rectitude...
...When the Sandinista revolution defeated Somoza in 1979, Alem.in worked in a company called Nicaraguan Investment and Development (INDESA), which the Sandinistas soon nationalized...
...Although the election is not in the bag, Alemdn has a commanding lead...
...The underside of the image was unsavory-accusations of kickbacks, misuse of the municipal funds, and sundry other forms of corruption began to haunt Alemin...
...Only after June, 1989, with the campaign for national elections underway, did Alemdn become a more vocal opponent of the regime...
...The PLC was a splinter group from the National Liberal Party (PLN), the party of Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
...Alem n's chief objective is not revenge against the Sandinistas...
...He has become the COffer latest politician Nicaraguans have found to Alem6 believe in-a roughhewn populist who steals suppo but gets things done, Fidel C hammers away at powerful forces that ordinary people consider their enemies, and promises that if they will recognize his authority, he will take care of them...
...Former President Daniel Ortega, addressing a crowd of 40,000 people on July 19, 1996, the seventeenth anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, warned of what would happen if Alemdn won Nicaragua's October 20, 1996 national election...
...In the aftermath of these events, Alemdn decided to enter politics in earnest...
...Such actions aroused deep hostility among Sandinistas...
...But in a country where corruption is a tradition and ordinary people fear unemployment above all other ills, many forgave Alemin's sins because he was perceived as doing something for them, while Dofia Violeta was not...
...Clearly, however, the ric Alemin has gone beyond a right-wing, anti- Ameri Sandinista base, to occupy space in the cen- helped ter...
...Alemsn rejected Godoy's offer, and by early 1995, he had cobbled together the "Liberal Alliance," which includes the PLC, several letterhead-only groupings and remnants of the old Somocista PLN...
...A corpulent, harddrinking and rough-mannered politician, Alemin rubbed shoulders with women in the Oriental market and with the poorer classes in general in an effort to cultivate an image of a politician with a popular touch...
...Behind them stands a phalanx of other former property holders who want Alemdin to recover their holdings...
...known as the Nicaraguan Foundation for Development and Democracy (NFDD), apparently a conduit for campaign funds...
...Meanwhile, few other Nicaraguans seem to be listening...
...The desire for warm support for the overthrow of revenge is undoubtedly strong, Fidel Castro...
...and using publicworks projects and other populist gestures to build a popular support base...
...If victorious, he said, "the 'SomocistaLiberal' candidate would eliminate the Nicaraguan army, take all the land from the peasants, and continue the current economic policies of unemployment...
...Rather than opt for vanquishing the remnants of Sandinismo, it is more likely that Alemdin will follow the well-trodden Nicaraguan path of deal-making-to the benefit of both his own political aggrandizement and Nicaragua's renascent savage capitalism...
...To furbish his image, Alemin appointed Enrique Bolafios, a former president of the private-sector lobby, COSEP, as his running mate and fundraiser both at home and in Miami...
...Within his first year as mayor, virtually all the revolutionary murals, graffiti and FSLN election slogans throughout the city were painted over, although Alemin denied responsibility...
...It is, rather, his own political aggrandizement-and that is what Nicaraguans should fear most...
...with guarantees against "revenge-seeking" bethe Liberal candidate has expressed fore the voting starts...
...With the help of supporters in Miami and the High Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), an association of prominent Nicaraguan business leaders, Alemn won UNO's backing for his ultimately successful mayoral run...
...An exhausted Chamorro administration has bequeathed Nicaragua a reviving economy whose exports have doubled in two years, whose debts are being radically reduced, and to which foreign donors have committed large sums...
...But they are not numerous enough to stem the rising Liberal Party tide...
...Enrique constraint facing Alemin is the lock on Nicaragua's economic policies exercised by multilateral lending institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank...
...This does not mean that Sandinistas, many of them poor peasants, will not lose things anyway, but it will be mainly to market forces...
...These are powerful reasons for Alemin to engage in the Nicaraguan tradition of pact-making...
...In 1993, he rebuilt the palmlined Malec6n park along Managua's lake front, destroyed in the 1972 earthquake...
...Another former Somoza official...
...Contrary to rumors that he Additional key Alem.n supporters has promised to reinstate officers of include, among others: Jaime Somoza's National Guard, he is not Morales Carazo, a wealthy lawyer in a position to challenge the living in Mexico, and Alemdn's Nicaraguan ("Sandinista") army, campaign chief, who will likely be which in recent years has won named secretary to the president...
...The faithful need no such urging-they will vote for Ortega anyway...
...As part of a coaltion of opposition parties, the PLC tepidly opposed the dictator until his overthrow in 1979...
...If Alem.n does not rock the boat, he can expect to ride the crest of a wave of economic recovery that will offer him and his cronies opportunities far more lucrative than those offered by taking things away from Sandinistas...
...In the first place, Alemin Somoza...
...A few years after Somoza appointed himself president in 1967, a former Somocista cabinet member, Ramiro Sacasa, defected from the PLN and founded the PLC...
...Given the country's continued dependence on foreign aid, the next government will have no choice but to uphold Chamorro's agreements with the IMF...
...Some Nicaraguans see Alemrn's impending victory as the beginning of the final phase of counter-revolution, after six years of inconclusive "democratic" transition under current President Violeta Chamorro...
...Under Alemrn's guidance, the PLC joined the National Opposition Union (UNO), the 14party coalition that defeated the Sandinistas (FSLN) in the 1990 national elections...
...As the May, 1996 deadline for forming official campaign alliances neared, Alemin also picked up support from splinter groups of Independent Liberals, National Conservatives and members of the Resistance Party (PRN) who were eager to get on the gravy train...
...6 NACIAREPORT ON THE AMERICASUPDATE / NICARAGUA Some Sandinistas fear an Alem6n victory will mean nothing less than a full-blown return to Somocismo...
...acceptance as an apolitical army in Lorenzo Guerrero, an architect and a reborn capitalist state...
...especially the desire to make highThe governing board of the ranking Sandinistas return, or at NFDD shares members with the least pay for, properties appropriboards of companies in Miami that ated under the so-called piiiata, purchase supplies for the Managua which took place during the transimunicipal government, with much tional period after the FSLN's 1990 raking off the top...
...In mid-1994, Vice-President Virgilio Godoy of the Independent Liberals proposed a merger of all the Liberal fragments...
...He began transforming the PLC from an old men's club into a real political party...
...The quid pro quo, according to unconfirmed reports, is Alemnn's commitment to allow the Cubans to set up an anti-Castro radio station in Nicaragua...
...rnoldo Alemin was a student of law and finance whose father was an official in one of the Somoza governments...
...An apocalyptic vision of the Somocistas sweeping back into Managua, intent on reversing the gains of the revolution and determined to reinstall the pre-1979 dictatorship, haunts many Sandinistas...
...But most Nicaraguans can expect their lives to get modestly better as the economic recovery begins to take hold...
...Though muted now that the campaign is underway, his strident antiSandinista stance has made him heir to the anti-FSLN vote...
...Once again poor people had a place to stroll and gaze, admittedly at a lake becoming ever more polluted and foulsmelling...
...Alemin, who allegedly studied old Communist Party pamphlets to learn organizing techniques, spent his weekends building up the PLC's base outside Managua...
...Byron J6rez, known in the city as Equally powerful reasons exist, "Byron King," who supposedly par- however, for Alemin and his clique ticipated in the Mano Blanca to restrain themselves if they come (White Hand) death squad under to power...
...In short, an Alemin victory would spell disaster for ordinary Sandinistas, burying their aspirations of salvaging something from the debris of their revolutionary experiment and ending all hope of reversing the misery that six years of neoliberal economic policies have left in their wake...
...They also want to see corruption of the kind that has been rampant under Chamorro held in check...
...By all indications, the Nicaraguan Resistance is going to vote for him en masse...
...For that improvement, Arnoldo Alemin and his Liberal Alliance can expectdeservedly or not-to take credit, thus entrenching themselves in power...
...Both sectors find him too coarse, too divisive, too unsavory in his associations-in a word, unreliable as a guarantor of their present and prospective investments...
...Just as important is the fact that the IMF and the World Bank want to see stability-not another wave of destructive conflict over property...
...peril...
...A firstround victory cannot be ruled out, and a second-round victory is more than likely...
...As frustration with the Chamorro government mounted, the critique that former foes had become bedfellows and were jointly impeding Nicaragua's economic recovery became increasingly popular...
...Arnoldo Alemin, presidential candidate of the revived Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC), arouses strong emotions among his opponents...
...An insignificant party in 1990, Alemdn's PLC is now the preferred political option of 30% of Nicaraguans-roughly the same percentage that identifies with the FSLN...
...Upon his release, Alemdn neither went into exile nor adopted a stance of outright opposition...
...At fundraising events, 8NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8UPDATE / NICARAGUA Sdnchez Herdocia, a former Somoza-era senator and landowner in Le6n, whose deceased brother was contra leader Aristides Sdnchez...
...This outcome-which would likely pave the way for a lasting Liberal hegemony-is what Nicaraguans should fear most...
...He enjoyed a modest prominence through most of the 1980s, first as the head of the Managua coffee growers' association and then of the national organization, UNCAFENIC...
...The sign a, to gotat reads: "If God is with Alemn who could prevail against "pact of governability" Alemin...
...By this point, he had already set about debunking the myth that the Sandinistas were invincibile by systematically destroying the symbols of their rule...
...The Alemdn campaign has promised that it will provide property titles to poor people who lack them...
...taking advantage of public antipathy to the defeated Sandinista regime and later discontent with the Chamorro government...
...To garner support among the voters, Alemdn set about building public works-repairing roads and Vol XXX, No 2 SEPrIOcr 1996 7 Vol XXX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1996 7UPDATE / NICARAGUA constructing traffic circles and fountains...
...In his early years as mayor, even Alemin's style resembled that of the first Somoza...
...Indeed, the path of least resistance may also be the path to conventional success...
...He decided to run in the 1990 elections for the mayoralty of Managua, and he chose as his vehicle the tiny Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC...
...According to a Gallup-affiliate poll carried out in late June, 36% of the voters intend to cast their ballot for Alemin in October and only 26% for Daniel Ortega...
...Liberal Party candidate Amoldo Alemin on the campaign trail for Nicaragua's October 20 presidential elections...
Vol. 30 • September 1996 • No. 2
