From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Analysis: Social Turmoil in Nicaragua
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 22:17:13 GMT

/** pacnews.sample: 170.0 **/
** Topic: Social Turmoil in Nicaragua **
** Written  2:14 pm  Apr 14, 1992 by newsdesk in cdp:pacnews.sample **
From: News Desk <newsdesk>
Subject: Social Turmoil in Nicaragua

/* Written 10:53 am  Apr 14, 1992 by pacificnews in cdp:pacnews.storie */
/* ---------- "Social Turmoil in Nicaragua" ---------- */
COPYRIGHT PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
450 Mission Street,  Room 506
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364

NEWS ANALYSIS -- 750 WORDS

SOCIAL TURMOIL THREATENS NICARAGUA

EDITOR'S NOTE:  Early in April some 200 armed women -- former 
adversaries in Nicaragua's long and brutal civil war -- met in Ocotal to 
form a united front and proclaim that their lives have become 
intolerable.  The meeting is only one of numerous signs of growing 
popular outrage against all forms of leadership in Nicaragua.  PNS 
correspondent Roger Burbach, director of the Center for the Study of 
Latin America in Berkeley, Ca., has reported on Nicaragua for over a 
decade.

BY ROGER BURBACH, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA -- Just over two years after the Sandinistas 
lost power in Nicaragua, the country finds itself in an ever deepening 
state of social turmoil.  "The rural and urban classes are in a state of 
rebellion" over rising unemployment, hunger and poverty, says 
Orlando Nunez, a respected sociologist here.  "They trust no 
leadership."

In recent weeks, sugar plantation workers went out on strike; 
employees in Nicaragua's central banking system shut down financial 
operations; Managua's bus drivers threatened to walk off the job and 
paralyze the city.  Simultaneously, ex-contra combatants, former 
Sandinista soldiers and fired security police held meetings have jointly 
condemned the government for its economic policies and the 
Sandinista leadership for backing them.  

The anger is as pronounced in the countryside as it is in the city.  In 
northern Nicaragua these same former adversaries have joined forces 
to take over roads, lands and towns in protest over government 
neglect.  

By far the most dramatic sign of the rebellious mood at the grassroots 
level was a meeting of 200 armed women in the northern city of Ocotal 
to found the Nora Astorga Northern Women's Front. (Astorga, who 
helped entrap and assassinate the head of the intelligence unit under 
the old Samoza regime, died of cancer in 1988 while serving as 
Nicaragua's ambassador to the U.N.)  

The women, mostly veterans of both the Sandinista and the Contra 
forces, claim their lives have become intolerable -- they have no jobs, 
little food, and as yet no land.  Only 6.5 percent of the beneficiaries of 
agrarian reform have been women, although they do much of the 
work in the countryside.  The women want land, financial aid, 
reforestation programs that would hire them, free medicine for their 
children.  If their demands are not met, the women threaten to "take 
over roads, lands and public buildings."

The women's action, staged on the eve of a meeting by the Sandinista 
party's governing national assembly, signals the depth of anger over 
the growing collaboration between top Sandinista leaders and the 
Chamorro government.  Only a week earlier, ex-Sandinista President 
Daniel Ortega and Chamorro's chief government minister, Antonio 
Lacayo, had made a joint appeal in Washington for financial support at 
a special meeting of donor nations led by the U.S.

Lucio Jimenez, charismatic leader of the Sandinista Trade Union 
Confederation, has openly attacked Ortega and the hierarchy "for not 
being on the side of the workers and the people."  

But Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of the Sandinista newspaper 
Barricada, counters that with the disastrous economic conditions 
Nicaragua is facing, the Sandinistas' main priority has to be "to 
stabilize the country by working with the Chamorro government."

Chamorro worries that "the wave of strikes and confrontations... might 
end the open environment that currently exists for workers and 
popular movements" and lead to bloodshed on the streets.

Indeed, even as the women were launching their movement in Ocotal, 
strikers at ENABASS, a state-run enterprise that buys, stores and sells 
basic grains throughout Nicaragua, were forcibly evicted from their 
work sites in the Sebaco-San Isidro region by Sandinista army troops.  
The strikers were protesting Chamorro government plans to sell off 
ENABASS to private investors.  Production in the region has 
plummeted since the government denied short-term credits to local 
grain cooperatives set up under the Sandinistas.  In response, workers 
have also taken over private coffee planations and state farms, 
demanding that they be legally privatized in their favor.

The army's actions have stunned the country and provoked a public 
split between the head of the army, Humberto Ortega, who defended 
the army's responsibility to defend private and state property, and his 
brother, ex-president Daniel Ortega, who proclaimed it was 
unconstitutional to use army troops as an internal police force.

After two days of stormy debate the Sandinista Assembly approved 
negotiations to reach a formal accord with the government.  But it also 
condemned the army's action.  "I am finally convinced we are facing 
an explosive situation," admitted Henry Ruiz, a member of the 
national directorate.

No one can predict where the profound discontent will lead -- there 
could be a massive and bloody upheaval, or the discontent could ebb 
into hopelessness, pessimism and cynicism about politics and the 
possibility of change in general.

As sociologist Orlando Nunez notes, "the 10 years of the Sandinista 
revolution have totally transformed this country.  The people at the 
base now know how to organize, to strike, and to go after what they 
want.  They can't be contained or repressed." 

(04141992)      **** END ****    COPYRIGHT PNS





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