"Nothing Will Stop This Revolution"

By George Russell

Vestiges of pluralism remain, but the Sandinistas steadily tighten their grip

The country's leaders have proclaimed it the Year of the Militarization of the Process. And, indeed, almost everywhere in revolutionary Nicaragua there are signs of a nation girding for war. In the capital of Managua and throughout the countryside, youthful reservists, peasants and members of so-called mass organizations are being armed and dispatched to the borders under the red-and-black banners of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front. Along roadsides and on the adobe walls of village buildings, posters inveigh against the evils of "Yankee imperialism." Other placards extol "revolutionary heroes" who have fought against and died in a U.S.-backed "counterrevolutionary" threat. In local schools, factories and farming cooperatives, activists exhort citizens to volunteer for militia duty. Under a new conscription law that went into effect this month, Nicaragua, which already has the largest armed forces in Central America, will be able to double the size of its military, to 250,000 troops.

There is another kind of mobilization in Nicaragua: a daily muster to find food. Men, women and children line up outside government-run "supermarkets of the people" in Managua and other cities. Their hope is to be first for whatever minimal, unpredictable rations of meat and chicken may be available that day. Even the early risers are frequently disappointed. At a typical scramble, housewives confront a butcher who tells them that the meat locker is empty and he has "no idea" when more supplies will arrive. Milk and fish are scarce, fresh eggs are the rarest of treats, and produce counters display only limp, miserable specimens of vegetables and fruit.

In some lush corners of Nicaragua, food shortages are not a problem. At a doctor's ranch-style home in a tree-lined southern suburb of Managua, thick churrasco steaks wait beside an outdoor barbecue grill as some 20 weekend guests sip cocktails and pick at turtle egg and black conch appetizers. Half a dozen children race through the garden to the swimming pool. Most of the guests are middle-aged relatives. They talk little of politics but much of their kin who have left for the U.S. There is only a brief flare-up of political emotion as a woman berates her brother-in-law for the behavior of his son, who is a high-ranking member of the Sandinista Party. The man listens to the tirade with his head down. Finally, he lifts his eyes and declares, "My son is not a Communist. I'm convinced that he is not."

That sense of political separation is common among members of the rapidly dwindling middle and upper classes in Nicaragua (pop. 2.9 million). Their feeling of disquiet about the country's future is loudly echoed by the Reagan Administration. In Washington's view, Nicaragua and its four-year-old Sandinista government have emerged as a new and threatening variety of Marxist-Leninist rule on the mainland of the Americas. The Reagan Administration has not hesitated to signal its concern by military means: a fleet of U.S. warships has been conducting "readiness exercises" off Nicaraguan shores, while 3,500 U.S. troops have assembled across the border in Honduras for the largest series of war games ever held in Central America. Most important, the U.S. is continuing to provide covert support to thousands of Nicaraguan insurgents, known as contras (counterrevolutionaries), whose hit-and-run attacks along Nicaragua's northern and southern borders have, according to the Sandinistas, claimed more than 700 lives. President Reagan has justified U.S. support for the contras by accusing the Sandinistas of having "betrayed" their countrymen, calling the junta members "counterfeit revolutionaries who wear fatigues and drive around in Mercedes sedans."

Four years after the popular uprising that overthrew the bloody and grasping dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua is still lurching through an erratic political and social transformation, in which many of the ultimate goals of the regime are, at best, haphazardly defined. Consequently, Nicaragua abounds in paradox and ambiguity as its leadership claims to be launched upon a new experiment: an attempt to align Marxism-Leninism with the principles of political pluralism and democracy. Says a sympathetic American observer: "The Sandinistas really like to believe they have invented a new way, a laissez-faire, nonstructured Marxism in which people, if given a free choice, will naturally become more socialist."

While this may have been the intention of the Sandinistas, the reality is different. No one could deny that drastic social change of some kind was inevitable in Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution. Under Somoza, the country had an illiteracy rate (50%) and a health-care record (infant mortality: 46 per 1,000 live births) high even in a region notorious for its backwardness and poverty. The Sandinistas can claim with justification to have addressed at least some of Nicaragua's crying social needs.

One showcase of Sandinista popularity is Barrio Riguero (pop. 11,000), an eastern slum neighborhood of Managua that was the scene of serious street fighting against Somoza. Spray-painted revolutionary slogans adorn virtually every ramshackle wall. Pigs root through street trash, and mothers bathe squealing infants in concrete laundry sinks in cramped backyards. A notable change in the landscape, however, is a tiny, spotless health post in the district. In four modest examining rooms, crisply attired nurses provide basic diagnostic and preventive care for anyone who wants it, free of charge.

A different kind of novelty in Barrio Riguero is the network of block associations, known as Sandinista Defense Committees (C.D.S.), that blankets the neighborhood. Modeled on similar organizations in Cuba, the committees provide a Sandinista-controlled conduit for a variety of needs, like monitoring local health-care requirements. But the committees also provide a means to disseminate Sandinista propaganda, call pro-government political rallies and arbitrate mundane neighborhood disputes.

The C.D.S. function that arouses the most concern is "revolutionary vigilance," meaning that committee volunteers keep careful tabs on every movement in the area. Suspicious activities are reported to the police and the local Sandinista chain of command. Government officials describe the C.D.S. as being little different from a U.S. block association. According to others, however, revolutionary vigilance is used to call out Nicaragua's highly organized security police and to unleash Sandinista mobs against anyone who is labeled a counterrevolutionary. Says a young Sandinista in a classically Orwellian turn of phrase: "There is no repression in Nicaragua. Just people keeping an eye on each other."

In El Dorado, a tidy, single-family haven of the Nicaraguan managerial middle class, just across the highway from Barrio Riguero, there is little enthusiasm for the system. Many El Dorado residents spurn the social welfare services of the block committees. But they seem acutely aware that the vigilance system is active. One El Dorado householder, the manager of a local pharmaceutical plant, chooses his words carefully as he says, "I am not an enemy of the revolution, but I am not in agreement with it." The manager testifies to the group pressure that the C.D.S. can bring to bear on dissidents. Says he: "If you are not a Sandinista, it is a crime: they call you a reactionary. There is no freedom of speech."

Other ambiguous benefits are attached to another area where the government claims to have made social strides: education. One of the earliest Sandinista triumphs was a "popular literacy campaign" in which thousands of teachers brought the Nicaraguan illiteracy rate down to a mere 12% in one year. The government now claims that 1 million Nicaraguans of all ages are enrolled in some kind of education program, up from 500,000 in 1979. But the system is suffering from rapid expansion: poorly educated teachers, too few textbooks, no paper. The consequences have been severe. Last year 53% of Nicaraguan first-graders were not promoted.

On the surface, the Sandinistas have done little to alter the basic three-Rs curriculum in the country's elementary schools. Still, there are disquieting signs that the educational system is being used as a propaganda outlet for the government. The government's newly issued primer at first seems to be little more than a Dick-and-Jane clone. But one of the examples of words beginning with the letter d is defense, and it is accompanied by a photograph of soldiers. "Valiant militias march into the plaza," the caption reads. "The militias are from the people. The pueblo is ready for defense." In secondary schools, liberal disciplines in the Nicaraguan social sciences and humanities have been downgraded or replaced by courses on revolutionary history and Marxist economics and sociology. Even a natural science class at one of Managua's largest public schools includes a lesson on the alleged exploitation of the Third World by multinational corporations.

The same process has taken place at Nicaragua's Jesuit-run University of Central America. The social sciences are dominated by the Marxist disciplines of historical and dialectical materialism. There are also ugly signs of political intimidation on campus. A philosophy professor was recently expelled from the university after members of the so-called Sandinista Youth held protests outside her office. Her crime: in an interview she said, "If a university professor is not in agreement with the Sandinista Front, the Sandinista Youth consider you a counterrevolutionary."

Comparable principles of harassment and intimidation have been applied by the Sandinistas to the country's three main opposition political parties and its handful of independent labor unions. Roving Sandinista gangs known as turbas (mobs) have broken up meetings and stoned the houses of leaders. The Sandinistas claim no direct responsibility, and in fact there is evidence that the government has moved to quiet the turbas. Still, the net result has been to leave most of the country's remaining opposition spokesmen cowed, or at least in a state of uneasy truce with the government and its overwhelming monopoly force.

The most bizarre Sandinista double standards seem to apply to the media. Nicaragua's two Sandinista-owned television stations offer a cultural hodgepodge without seeming to be ideologically biased: everything from documentaries on Cuban classical dancers to delayed showings of U.S. major league baseball games to reruns of Lou Grant. Print is another matter. The Sandinistas own or control two daily newspapers, the pro-government Nuevo Diario and the official Sandinista paper Barricada. Both provide a predictable medley of government propaganda, while the only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, is subject to strict censorship.

That newspaper's editors are forbidden to print anything negative about the Sandinistas either at home or abroad; criticism of Cuba, the Soviet Union or any other East bloc country; local stories about unclaimed bodies in the Managua morgue; reports on Nicaraguan unemployment; and news analysis that criticizes both the U.S. and the Soviet Union for their Central American policies. The very mention of censorship is forbidden.

The reason for the strict daily supervision, says State Censor Nelba Blandon, is that "La Prensa always distorts reality." But the censor's decisions can be capricious. For example, one La Prensa headline saying that Nicaragua's seasonal rains had not arrived on schedule was suppressed for fear that it would cause general alarm. La Prensa Editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro (see box) also accuses the government of deliberately delaying the return of censored copy so as to prevent the paper from coming out in time for workers to buy it on their way home. According to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas Borge Martinez, the fact that the newspaper survives at all is "just another example of how this government supports freedom of the press." In fact, the Sandinistas allow La Prensa to stay in business because they realize that it has become a kind of test case of their commitment to pluralism.

Another target for Sandinista transformation is the Roman Catholic Church. In a Managua slum, the squat, red brick and stained-glass Santa Maria de los Angeles church has become a shrine of Nicaragua's new, revolutionary "popular religion." Inside the building, a painting depicts "Christ the Peasant" struggling under a crucifix; another panel features cherubim escorting slain fighters to heaven under the Sandinista flag. Says the local priest, Father Uriel Molina: "Revolutionary values are now in the everyday faith of the people."

Churchmen who do not accept the new credo get short shrift. The country's archbishop, Miguel Obando y Bravo, was long ago deprived of the right to give a televised sermon on Sundays without prior censorship; other priests have come in for selective abuse. Perhaps the most famous Sandinista attempt at intimidation came last March, when hecklers in Managua attempted to shout down Pope John Paul II during his Central American tour. The nation's best-known radical priest, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, later declared that the Pope was "against pluralism. He wants everyone to think like himself."

The Sandinistas are particularly proud of their major economic program, land reform. The Nicaraguan effort, they say, is more flexible and productive than similar U.S.-sponsored reforms in El Salvador. In four years, the Sandinistas claim, Nicaragua has moved from an agrarian economy in which 2% of the population owned the largest and most lucrative holdings to one where 23% of the rural population works on state farms and 15% in new cooperatives, and the remaining 62% enjoy private land ownership.

Nicaraguan human rights observers tell a different story. According to the Managua-based Permanent Commission on Human Rights, private ownership in Nicaragua, as codified in Articles 27 and 31 of the Statute on the Rights and Guarantees of the Nicaraguan People, now means only the "right to the use of the land" and to "receive the fruits of some thing not belonging to oneself." The regime has also reneged on promises to respect "responsible" private ownership by passing new decrees allowing the confiscation of property with government-determined compensation for reasons of "public utility." Says a prosperous Nicaraguan cotton farmer: "That is why there are so few of us left who are staying and reinvesting. They can take your land if they decide it is underutilized. If you show them it is really producing far above average yields, they can also confiscate it as a model for national priority."

The chaos that the Sandinista economic measures have spread is one reason for the shortages that have allowed sardonic Nicaraguans to dub Managua "the capital of queues." So far as the Sandinistas are concerned, the problem is simply being called "distribution," meaning a chronic short supply of operating buses and trucks in the country due to a lack of imported spare parts. The government blames that shortage on the U.S. for leading a campaign to cut off Nicaragua's international credit at a time when the country is staggering beneath an estimated $3 billion in foreign debt. "If we do not have oil, bread and soap, it is the fault of aggressor imperialism," declares a typically hostile sign outside a low-income housing project in Managua.

The shortage of goods poses the danger of creating disaffection among the poor, whose interests the revolutionaries claim to represent. Many of the Sandinista leaders have moved into the luxury residences vacated by Somoza supporters who fled the country; members of the regime's elite 25,000-strong Sandinista People's Army have access to special gasoline supplies, duty-free stores and food outlets. Says a matronly nurse in a health clinic: "The situation is critical. The Sandinista leadership has benefited from this revolution but not the masses. I am 100% Sandinista, but not their type of Sandinista."

Complaints of that kind are more likely to come from older Nicaraguans. In general, the country's youth is still very sympathetic to the revolution, and many blame their hardships on "Yankee imperialism." Says Antonia Garcia, a Managua church administrator: "Adults do not want to change their ways, but young people view the changes with enthusiasm."

The government has exploited that enthusiasm by invoking the threat of the CIA-backed contras. The Sandinistas began cracking down on dissent shortly after their 1979 takeover, and to impose a tough "emergency law" in March 1982 they seized upon an incident in which contras blew up two bridges near the Honduran border. Among the law's provisions: prior censorship and detention without due process. As the contra attacks have continued, the Sandinistas have successfully appealed to nationalist sentiment while using the external menace as an excuse for not fulfilling earlier promises. Says Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra: "For a country to achieve democracy, it needs stability." The Sandinistas have also discovered that the fervor of their young people has provided them with an effective, albeit inexperienced corps of militiamen eager to confront the enemy.

Typical of the young reservists is Miguel Sarria, 24, a truck mechanic from the southern city of Chichigalpa, who recently served in the border militia near the center of Ocotal. Sarria has lost two close friends to contra fire. "Nothing will stop this revolution," he says defiantly.

A U.S. analyst in the region agrees. "I don't see how the revolution can be dislodged or pre-empted," he asserts. But, in his view, the pressures in favor of maintaining some semblance of pluralism are still strong enough to prevent Nicaragua from becoming another Cuba soon. The analyst adds: "My guess is that Nicaragua will remain a relatively pluralistic Marxist state for some time."

Last month the Sandinistas made a concession by announcing legislative approval of a law recognizing that opposition political parties could be formed with the goal of "achieving political power." How that might occur is still unclear; the Sandinistas have promised to hold elections by 1985, but so far they have not determined the stakes in the race, or even the election rules.

The Sandinistas profess little concern about the fact that an estimated 77,000 Nicaraguans have fled the country in the past four years. "We made no promises to the bourgeoisie," says Junta Member SergioRamirez Mercado. "We made no promises to the U.S. We made our promises to the poor." Indeed, the Sandinistas repeatedly assert that continued U.S. hostility, particularly through support of the contras, guarantees a continued clampdown in Nicaragua. Warns Ortega: "The Reagan Administration can force us to take steps we do not want to take." Still unanswered is the question of what course Ortega and his colleagues would follow if they could not conveniently blame the U.S. for their own actions.

--By George Russell. Reported by Timothy Loughran, William McWhirter and Alessandra Stanley/Managua

With reporting by Timothy Loughran, William McWhirter, Alessandra Stanley This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.