NICARAGUA : MACRI SHOULD TAKE NOTE
English Version
Barely a week before the popular massive demonstrations that had been unleashed in Nicaragua, the government of Daniel Ortega received the award for the “best project of foreign investment” (Forbes, 4/11). “The recognition” took place in the “Annual Investment Meeting, in the city of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates”. The unexpected distinction for a government that advertises its “national and popular” condition, wasn’t reduced to an occasional celebration, because according to the same information, “the project of Direct Foreign Investment most innovating in Latin America and the Caribbean”, responds to the “investments program PRONicaragua”, that the Sandinist government promotes with fiscal resources.
The huge reaction it aroused in the population and especially in the university youth, the “pensions reform” that imposed by decree Daniel Ortega almost a week ago, must be characterized in this context. The reductions of pensions in a 5%, and the rise in personal contributions (from 6.25 to 7%) and bosses’ ones (from 19 to 22.5%), not only upset the popular sectors – it also provoked a rupture of the government pact which rules since more than a decade between the great bosses, joint in the Superior Council of the Private Company, and the Orteguism. The “reform”, nevertheless, had been ‘recommended’ by the IMF, to cover a deficit of 75 million USD of the Social Security. The same Social Security which loans its guarantee fund to subsidize the “PRONicaragua” greeted by international investors.
“The protestors were convened by the powerful Superior Council of the Private Company (Cosep-acronym in Spanish)”, inform the agencies to (Argentine newspapers) Clarín and La Nación (4/24), “which was allied to Ortega in his eleven years of government, but which after the reform of the pensions system became in an opposition entity”. By this way, the great bosses, to whom the Agricultural Producers’ Union added up, had turned into the political direction of the popular mobilization. Forced by the generalized rebellion to derogate the pensions’ decree, Daniel Ortega convened the businessmen “to dialogue” – which gave themselves the joy of rejecting him until “all imprisoned are released”. The Cosep was accompanied by the clergy of Nicaragua, the private universities and the American Embassy. “I’ve opened them my heart and they’ve answered with the wallet”, ‘reflected’ thirty years ago the minister of Alfonsín, Juan Carlos Pugliese, before a similar inconveniency. Nicaragua is one of the coveted objectives by China, who have offered in its moment to build a channel between the Caribbean and the Pacific, for the displeasure – provisional, of the United States.
The political direction of the mobilizations is not disputed by any other organization, apart from the bosses-clergy-university front. This is the core of the Nicaraguan situation. This front does not vindicate the exit of Ortega from government, because it hasn’t armed a replacement political alternative. It has left posed a crucial political transition. The media efforts to present as positive this lack of leadership, with the intention of preventing a political differentiation to be produced. The united front between the great bosses, in one hand, and the people in the streets, on the other, hides the contradiction between the social class that supported the Orteguism for ten years and a mass of workers and youngsters which let loose to the indignation they had accumulated along the decade.
The brutality of the repression exercised by Orteguism, which nevertheless would retreat immediately derogating the decree, has left naked the political banditry of Sandinism. The thing is that beside the brutal attacks of the police and the army against demonstrators, operated ‘militias’ of the official party, which have nothing to do, of course, with the “masses armament”. In the facts, in Nicaragua rules a single party regime. These ‘militias’ are not the ‘nac & pop’ resistance weapon for the ‘neoliberal offensive’, but an instrument against the masses and against the effort to develop a worker independent alternative to the bosses’ government awarded in Dubai.
The pensions collapse of Nicaragua leaves into evidence the level that equals the different tendencies’ governments in Latin America – the crisis without exit of the capitalist political domination in Latin America, in the frame of the global economical and political impasse. The exhaustion of the Macri and Ortega, of the Maduro and Kuczinski, of the Piñera and Lula, has the common historical base of the capital decadence.
Macri should take note.
nota publicada en: https://prensaobrera.com/politicas/42037-