On July 28, 2021 the dictatorship cancelled the legal status of 24 NGOs, including 15 medical associations in the midst of the pandemic. Then in mid August the government cancelled the legal status of 6 more NGOs including OXFAM and 3 other US based NGOs. This article, written by the person in Nicaragua with arguably the most experience and study of civil society, analyzes this behavior and its implications.
The dictatorship is attempting to demolish the social capital of Nicaragua
By Silvio Prado in Confidencial, August 9, 2021
Participating in any type of organizations not controlled by the FSLN and its satellites has become a crime in Nicaragua; worse still if it is an NGO [Non Governmental Organization]. This tendency is not new, it started immediately after the return to power of Daniel Ortega by way of a moral lynching through all its black propaganda media outlets. Well known spokespeople participated in this task who – what a coincidence! – had been owners – or still were – of their respective NGOs. The demolition that started in 2008 was consummated with the confiscation of the first NGOs in 2018 and has escalated in 2021. Just that in this last chapter it has been extended to all possible forms of association, including medical associations, trying to erode the most elemental forms of social capital: interpersonal trust and relationships of community reciprocity.
The fabric of community organizations in Nicaragua experienced a high degree of density and complexity starting in the decade of the 1990s because of the influence of several factors, of which it is helpful here to highlight three: the withdrawal of the State from social areas because of the effect of the reduction of its size, the disappearance of the vanguard party as the multi-organizer of society, and the multiplication of NGOs as advocacy factors for community development.
The densification of the community fabric reached into spheres of local life that, either previously had been organized in a highly primary way, or never had been organized, like the Potable Water and Sewage Committees (CAPS by their Spanish acronym). To the extent that these organizational forms interrelated, they became more complex and turned into networks that moved into addressing crosscutting issues, like community development plans. NGOs contributed to this complexity who, prior to the abandonment of public agencies and the implosion of the “party” in 1990, performed the roles of energizers of organization and communal improvements.
Countless studies done prior to 2008 showed that, in addition to the Catholic Church, NGOs and autonomous organizations of civil society played a role promoting the strengthening of local social capital, knowing how to take advantage of the interpersonal connections of trust and relationships of community reciprocity that flourished after the years of political polarization that the war of the 1980s left behind.
None of the training programs aimed at the population taught them how to make barricades, organize demonstrations nor make homemade explosives, contact bombs or Molotov cocktails. Even less did they teach tactics of urban or rural guerrilla warfare, nor the use of firearms. It would have been an absurdity to teach such elemental things to a population that because it was coming out of a long war, had already learned them well. In addition, if training of that nature would have been implemented on a national level, the Police would not have hesitated to find out about it and intervene to abort it. On the contrary, as an exhaustive mapping of civil society showed in 2006 (ASDI-IADB Mapping and characterization of civil society organizations in Nicaragua), 82.4% of civil organizations had political advocacy within their objectives (p. 113), and because of its aspirations of replacing protests with proposals, many times they were accused of deactivating social struggles.
In other words, if civil organizations could be criticized for something, and particularly the NGOs, it is for having supplanted formal education and parties in the construction of citizenship, in the development of civic values that neither schools nor politicians were interested in promoting. In other words, the maligned civil organizations of today were committed to strengthening the degree of associativity and relationships of trust and reciprocity that already existed within communities; they were not proposing breaking the social order, nor the construction of any political actors that might contest traditional parties over power.
But if that has not been left clear, it is helpful to underline it one more time: social organizations, among them the NGOs, contributed to patch up the fractures that the war had left behind, to rebuild public space without exclusions, and to re-establish the sense of common assets that the sectarianism had degraded.
But then what was never thought would happen happened: in 2007 fanaticism returned to contaminate intercommunity relationships and political bias as a criteria for access to public programs. The CPCs [Citizen Power Committees] were imposed and letters of support from political secretaries in order to deserve a sheet of roofing tin, scholarships and other transfers conditioned by politics.
Nevertheless, the CPCs never were able to replace the complex latticework of organizations in the communities, even though they have been able to weaken, absorb or dissolve some local committees. The CPCs became one more organization among many, but their lack of autonomy condemned them to inaction or the reductionism of organizations of political intelligence to denounce their neighbors, especially after the rebellion of 2018.
Now with the pretext of finding those guilty for the social explosion three years ago, they have been reloaded and aimed at everything that smells of an organization autonomous from the Party in power. For that purpose, they make use of laws whose purposes were known from the beginning: persecute and punish any form of freedom of thought (betrayal of the country), organizing and carrying out projects without paying bribes to the de facto power of the political secretaries (money laundering) and expressing an opinion that diverges from official discourse (cybercrimes).
But recent events show that they are not thinking of staying there. The arbitrary use of the cancelation of legal statuses of political parties and health organizations (NGOs and associations), reveal that they are going even further: they aspire to reduce to zero the will to self organize; feed the selfishness of “run for your lives”; sow distrust and destroy the bonds of solidarity that political apathy brings with it.
Canceling the legal status of those who have obtained it, they try to leave segments of the population who legitimately want to challenge those in power by peaceful means in all spheres of society without options, in spite of the fact that freedom of association continues being ensured by the laws of the State. In this way the dictatorship is trying to eradicate any right to form parties which are not complacent with the authoritarian project, like what is happening in Russia, Belorussia and Turkey. Likewise, it wants all of Nicaragua to be a desert of social capital; it knows that self convocation was gestated on the bases of free association, which three years ago left the utopia of “responsible authoritarianism” as a bag of bones, and that is why it now pursues with virulence organizations that promote citizen empowerment.
But in spite of this extermination crusade, they forget that the experiences of other people reveal that legal statuses are not needed to self-organize. Only airheads can affirm such a solemn absurdity. Prior to the formal recognition of the State, there is the will to meet, associate and participate. In the same way that community problems are the best incentive for re-establishing relationships of cooperation where previously there was distrust, parties, medical associations, lawyers or any other profession do not need the seal of some agency of the dictatorship to meet, deliberate on national problems, nor hold conventions or congresses. So, when an improvement committee of a neighborhood or community meets, a group of people meet for partisan purposes, or a medical association holds a session to get up to date with the latest scientific advances, the dictatorship will have only been defeated time and again and social capital will show that it continues enjoying very good health.