This overview of the economy for 2021 includes addressing an existing pact between Ortega and big capital, something that part of the opposition have complained about since April 2018. This is also interesting in light of the recently proposed Consumer Defense Bill, which would obligate banks to reopen bank accounts for those 27 Sandinista leaders under US sanctions. Supposedly doing so would make those banks subject to the same US sanctions, in effect, cutting them off from any international activity. For a small country like Nicaragua, that would mean the entire economy would grind to a halt, as any payments for coffee, cacao or any exports, transfers, credit cards use, checks or family remittances that crossed borders would be completely halted. Big business is betting on the fact that in the end the US will not opt for the chaos that would cause.
The 2021 Economy: Slight improvement, Dark Horizons
By Oscar René Vargas in Artículo 66, February 1, 2021
The strategy has been to keep salaries low and labor precarious in nature, because that makes people fearful and keeps them out of daily politics.
Nicaragua has saved itself from entering into a phase of consolidated economic depression, everything indicates that the economy will be positive in 2021. This slight economic recovery and its effects will not benefit vulnerable families, excluded from the consumer market, and this will have repercussions on job creation and the standard of living of the population. One percent of the population receives the economic surplus.
The prospect for the labor market is going to have mild improvement. In Nicaragua there are more than 800,000 people who have lost their jobs or have not been able to join the labor force for the first time. The strategy has been to keep salaries low and work precarious, because that leads people to be afraid and to stay out of daily politics.
We are facing a severe or at least harsh toll because of the negative consequences of the three years of recession (2018-2020) and the appearance of the pandemic. It is evident that 2018-2020 were terrible years. And it is also evident that the slight positive data foreseen for 2021 cannot lead one to optimism.
The lightly favorable economic breeze, a result of the loans from international financial organizations, cannot encourage optimism for 2021 nor clear away the dark storm that persists for 77.2% of the Nicaraguan population. It is reasonable to think that a year of acute social suffering lies ahead because of the persistence of the five crises in the national scenario. The end of the tunnel is not close.
The dictatorship has contaminated the adversary, dynamiting their struggle. By limiting the opposition to their demands on electoral issues, it has impoverished them, a limitation that favors the dictator. Sectors of the youth opposition have embraced this strategy. The political center of the opposition moved toward the right. Justice, equality and democracy were the political center in April 2018, which has evolved toward the electoral fight: in other words, the political center of April 2018 has been lost, giving way to the fact that the de facto pact-making powers mark the new political center.
Orteguism by controlling all the State apparatus (Legislative, Judicial, Electoral, Army, Police, unions, municipal, etc.) is beginning to show cracks for having overextended itself. Ruptures will be difficult, fissures open and the “status quo” is questioned by part of its base. The factions with power are not immobile; all the followers in one or another way are defending their interests. What concerns Orteguism is keeping the system contained and it is afraid of the implosion of the regime. Possibly the regime will succumb from success, given that is has fossilized.
Between 2007 to 2017, Venezuelan money ran immeasurably, it was a type of “golden era”. The money disappeared through terrible fiscal fraud, public patrimony plundered, squandering in sumptuous spending, in the waste in the purchase of military tanks, paying illegitimate debts like CENIS and banks going broke; factors that kept productive investment from happening in the transformation of small and medium industry and improving the herd of small and medium ranchers, who are the majority.
Waiting for Ortega to not continue the repression is madness. He prioritizes confrontation, it is part of his political identity, the dictatorial system cannot change because it loses. He even maintains the repression to hide his incompetence. The data indicate that there is no democratic solution with the dictatorship in power. Nevertheless, the old regime has not died, and the new society has not been born; precisely in this period we have seen the birth of political monsters with the police and paramilitaries at the head.
Inequality has to be fought, but without practicing that standardized equalitarianism which is a counter-utopia. The role of the State and public policies are irreplaceable for correcting the market tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. Unbridled presidential ambition shows us that a small ingredient of the “Pedrarias Syndrome” survives.
All the powers that exist are afraid of another social tsunami, principally Ortega and big capital are afraid that with the fall of the dictatorship the shady and strange deals will come to light that have allowed for his accelerated and inexplicable enrichment, which is why they are in favor of a “soft landing,” so that nothing changes. Big capital and Ortega are forced to reach an understanding, because they are like two oxen tied to the yoke of the same cart.
In other words, Orteguism needs big capital as big capital needs Orteguism, because they are two sides of the same coin. The CxL party aspires to be recognized as the necessary complement to that team of oxen in the new pact. The time for building a society of unipolar and centralized power has ended.
The regime maintains itself through the support of military, police and paramilitary organizations, even though it conserves a certain amount of consensus from part of the population, it enjoys the complicity of the branches of the state (legislative, judicial, electoral) and the conditioned support of economic power (bankers + big capital).
As long as inequalities exist there is space to draw up alternative strategies for governing and transforming society. The challenge of the April 2018 Movement, as a political force, is having an alternative policy with a strategy for power, because a political force without a strategy for power always loses.
We cannot forget that truth and ideas, without a favorable correlation of forces of power are like leaves, which are blown by the wind.