Silver bullets 25 years after Esquipulas

It’s been 25 years since the signing of the Esquipulas II peace agreement that ultimately ended the wars flogging Central America and ushered in a regional commitment to build a “firm and lasting peace.” How are things in Nicaragua, 25 years later?

Envío team

The silver bullet is laden with symbolism due to the extraordinarily destructive power attributed to it over history. Balas de plata [Silver Bullets] is the title of a novel published in 2008 by Élmer Mendoza, a writer from Sinaloa, Mexico, who in 1999 was already being touted in his country as “the first narrator to accurately gather the effects of the drug-trafficking culture in Mexico.”

We’re using the title of his novel as a symbol to frame the realities of our country and region—ever more penetrated by the destructive silver bullets of drug trafficking—on this “silver anniversary” of the Esquipulas II agreements.

The end of the wars

August 7, 1987. A drum roll greets the five Central American Presidents as they enter Guatemala’s National Palace. After listening to the hymns of their respective countries, Costa Rica’s President Oscar Arias reads the “Procedure to establish firm and lasting peace in Central America,” a collection of the agreements signed by the five rulers. A five-minute ovation accompanies the signing of the commitments by Arias, Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, José Napoleón Duarte of El Salvador and José Azcona del Hoyo of Honduras.

They were the Esquipulas II agreements. After enduring pressures, obstacles and other ups and downs from various quarters, not the least the US government, their most important result over the next several years was the end of the military conflicts in Central America: in 1990 in Nicaragua with the defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) at the polls and subsequent end of US aid to the contras; in 1992 in El Salvador with the peace agreements between the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN); and in 1996 in Guatemala with the peace accords between the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG).

Following decades of insurrections, wars and guerrilla movements in the region generated by the scandalous economic and social inequalities and the systematic violations of the populations’ civil and political rights, the Esquipulas agreements aimed at more than just an end to armed hostilities. They comprised a comprehensive proposal that went to the roots of the conflicts by proposing democratization, reconciliation, pluralism, clean elections, development with social justice, and so many other dreams that have not been fulfilled. These same demands were later detailed insofar as possible in the specific peace agreements in El Salvador and Guatemala, whose armed guerrilla movements, unlike the contras in Nicaragua, had been fighting precisely for a full-blown vision of a just society.

The persistence of violence

Twenty-five years after Esquipulas there are no longer wars in Central America between established governments and irregular forces, but nor is there much “firm” peace, and the little there is doesn’t feel very “lasting.” Although the extrajudicial executions and torture of opposition prisoners in clandestine jails are behind us, violence persists in the region in varied forms because our electoral democracies are fragile and economic democracy remains a seemingly unreachable utopia. Coups (in Honduras) and electoral frauds (in Nicaragua) have both reemerged.

Central America is currently considered the world’s most violent region that’s not in outright war, particularly in what’s known as the “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Honduras holds the world record for homicides and Guatemala for femicides, while El Salvador has more deaths from murder than from all the years of war and Nicaragua’s indices of sexual and gender violence are chilling.

The word “organized,” used in those years to express the option of people willing to risk their life for change in their countries and raised by Monsignor Romero to an ethical cate¬gory in his homilies, has changed course and is now married to another word: “crime.” Organized crime abounds in all Central American countries. Drug trafficking is taking over the institutions that Esquipulas created and tried to democratize. Alongside it are arms trafficking; human trafficking for sexual exploitation and lumber trafficking, which is consuming what little is left of our forests… It isn’t the proposals of the Central American Integration System (SICA)—which are only empty rhetoric on the lips of govern¬ments lacking the political will to implement them—that have inte¬grated our region. The job has been done by the drug cartels, which have had the will, the skill and above all the money to overcome borders, customs, ideologies and obsolete nationalisms. Esquipulas’ silver anniversary is being celebrated today by drug lords with silver bullets…

The breeding ground
of this violence

The region’s slow economic growth, the extremely low educational level of our populations and insufficient investment to improve it, the unwillingness of governments and big business to accept the eternally postponed fiscal reform that would make them pay the taxes they rightly owe, and the continuing social stagnation of the region’s impoverished majorities are the breeding ground of the deeply rooted violence we coexist with today.

Esquipulas awakened the illusion that the end of the armed conflicts would generate a “peace dividend.” But it hasn’t materialized for the majority of Central Americans who today aren’t political refugees but economic emigrants in search of the opportunities the land of their birth has been unable to offer them.

In this context of persistent vio¬lence, Costa Rica—also a signatory of Esquipulas—continues to be some-what of an exception. While drug trafficking is making inroads there as well, bringing increased crime and other ills, the country left its civil wars behind forty years before these peace agreements; it decided to abolish its army and dedicate itself to sustained, long-term investment in its people’s education.

An historic milestone
of propitious events

The Esquipulas agreements were an historic milestone: Central America united to distance itself from the aggressive policy of the US government, which was financing the contra war in Nicaragua: 23 times the US Congress voted millions to finance the irregular forces that President Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters.” The US government also militarily sustained the government of El Salvador in its war against the FMLN to the tune of US$2 million a day and converted Honduras into its regional aircraft carrier and rearguard for the contras. Aware that the Esquipulas agreements were legitimizing the FSLN government in Nicaragua, President Reagan tried and failed to scuttle them with a number of different initiatives.

It was the dynamic in the rest of the continent that made Esquipulas possible. Starting in 1983, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama joined together in what they called the Contadora Group and made ongoing efforts to achieve a peace agreement. In 1986 the Democrats won back Congress in the US legislative elections and began limiting it to approving “humanitarian” aid to the contras. For its part, the Reagan government ended its second term two years later enveloped in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal, when the CIA was discovered trafficking in weapons and drugs to continue military financing for the contras.

In 1986 Vinicio Cerezo was elected as the first civilian President in Guatemala after the years of bloody military dictatorships. That same year, Oscar Arias was elected in Costa Rica. Worried that the war in neighboring Nicaragua was pitting his country with contra bases, refugee camps and arms trafficking, he allied with Cerezo to promote what a year later would be known as Esquipulas II.

The world dynamic helped as well: Perestroika was rocking the USSR and the Berlin Wall was beginning to crumble. The Cold War, that ideological framework that so distorted the perception of the Central American wars, making them far hotter than they would otherwise have been—was reaching its end.

The beginning of the end

The dynamism of Central American unity that led to the Esquipulas II proposal wouldn’t have existed without the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. It had the backing and sympathies of many governments and societies all over the world that saw this process as a “good example” and wanted it to be able to play itself out in peace, without war, while other governments and societies saw the Sandinista model’s authoritarian bent as a “bad example” that generated fears and had to be halted.

In those years Nicaragua was something of a navel of the universe, which helps explain why Esquipulas had near-unanimous support from the outset. All of Latin America, all of Europe, the USSR and Cuba, the Nonaligned Movement, the Organization of American States (OAS), an important sector of US Congress members… basically almost everywhere except Washington was banking on Esquipulas and in so doing the central objective was fundamentally—and contradictorily—Nicaragua. For most the goal was to put an end to the war but for others it was to put an end to the revolution itself.

As a result, Nicaragua was where the effects of Esquipulas were felt soonest and most strongly. Although the Sandinista Army officially announced as early as 1986 that the counterrevolution was in a strategic decline, the country was economically devastated and its government saw Esquipulas as the fastest and most diplomatic way to reach a negotiated peace. What it failed to see was the degree of political erosion that accompanied the economic disaster. And so the Esquipulas II agreements did indeed mark the beginning of the end of the revolution.

When Ortega
was a statesman

Esquipulas II was followed by Esqui¬pulas III (San José, Costa Rica, January 1988), in which the five Presidents again committed themselves to the peace and democracy measures agreed to five months earlier—this time “unconditionally and unilaterally,” “totally and unavoidably.” All five governments were there, but thanks to backstage directing by the US, the other four ganged up on Nicaragua, pressuring it the most and requiring the most results from it, both in the ceasefire process with the counterrevolutionary forces and in the dialogue with civilian forces opposing the revolutionary process.

In March of that same year the contra leadership and the Sandinista Army signed their first ceasefire agreements in the town of Sapoá on the border with Costa Rica. Parallel to that, the revolutionary government and the civilian opposition dialogued about democratizing the political scene.

Spurred on by the nation’s economic ruin, the Nicaraguan government took leadership of the process to speed up the sluggish advance toward the longed-for Esquipulas horizon throughout the region. After five consecutive postponements it managed to pull off a new presidential summit: Esquipulas IV (La Paz, El Salvador, February 1989).

In that meeting, President Ortega, acting as a statesman seriously worried about the population he represented, announced a series of measures, among them a commitment that would end up in a way he never imagined: he brought forward Nicaragua’s presidential, legislative and municipal elections by seven months and, through various specific mechanisms that included the presence of United Nations and OAS observers, guaranteed “the purity of that electoral process.” The specter of the unanticipated defeat on February 25, 1990, still haunts leaders of the current government and a generation of FSLN militants.

“We’re becoming like villages”

Two of the five Presidents who signed the Esquipulas agreements have since died—Duarte and Azcona—and only Daniel Ortega is still governing. The 25th anniversary of Esquipulas coincides with his new six-month rotating term as president pro-tem of SICA, another result of the dreams awakened by Esquipulas, created in 1993 after numerous delays.

The anniversary was commemorated in Managua in the framework of an official SICA event Ortega presided over with Vinicio Cerezo at his side. Also attending were current Presidents Mauricio Funes of El Salvador and Porfirio Lobo of Honduras. Those of Guatemala and Costa Rica didn’t come, although they did send diplomatic delegations. Ortega didn’t invite former President Oscar Arias, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the Esquipulas agree¬ments, leaving no doubts five presi¬dential terms later about Ortega’s historical animosity toward him.

The issues up for discussion in this SICA meeting were climate change, food security, citizen security and democratic security. None of them moved beyond the customary rhetorical declarations.

In international interviews, Cerezo suggested the need to sign on to “another Esquipulas,” considering somewhat optimistically that in Central America “we have peace, democracy and development and what we still need is quality in those three variables.” Roberto Carpio Nicolle, who was Cerezo’s Vice President back then, focused on the important issue of regional integration and touched the sore spot by noting the lack of political will among our elites: “We proclaim integration,” he said, “but fight like villages.” heaping responsibility for this divisiveness onto the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), another of the entities born of the Esquipulas agreements. Defined at the time as a “symbol of freedom and independence, of the reconciliation to which we aspire in Central America,” PARLACEN is today just a very costly institution and yet another expression of the distancing from the Esquipulas ideals thanks to our rulers’ indolence.

Peace and the Constitution

The coexistence of the two events in Managua exhibited an interesting contrast. While President Ortega made barely any reference to the profound significance of Esquipulas in the SICA meeting, his brother Humberto, who headed the Sandinista Army in the eighties and signed the Sapoá agreements with the contras, reflected in depth on where Esquipulas stands today. The commemorative event he spoke at was sponsored by the Esquipulas Foundation and supported by the Embassy of France, the US National Democratic Institute and the business leaders in Nicaragua’s Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP).

As is his custom, General Ortega came out of retirement and broke his normal silence to send a message to his brother, emphasizing aspects of the democratization that Esquipulas proposed to end the war, aspects severely deteriorated in today’s Nicaragua: “The peace we won with weapons can only be defended today by the rule of law. Weapons gave us independence and liberty, but laws are the only things that can ensure the liberty is maintained and sustained…. We must know how to respond to the wrongheaded authoritarian expressions that all power has to a greater or lesser degree…. Power in any part of the world is confronted not only with ideas, but with pressure, social pressure, in the framework of nonviolence, of respect for law and order.…

“Through different forms of pressure we have to insist that our political class and the established power comply with our Constitution and duly respect the rule of law and the freedoms for which so many Nicaraguans went off to die on one side or the other…. A strong government like Daniel’s ought to give due importance to the problem of the current political polarization, just as he gives it to the macro-economy…. Without a Constitution that is respected, that matures and is increasingly strengthened, without a rule of law that is truly respected and complied with, we’re going to have serious problems providing continuity to this peace effort, because the greatest achievement of Esquipulas [in Nicaragua] is having achieved peace and having a Constitution and an Army that have demonstrated that their Sandinista origins don’t matter.…”

Signs of backpedaling

Among the 17 constitutional reforms that Nicaragua’s political opposition proposed to the revolutionary government 25 years ago to institutionalize the democratizing commitments that were assumed in Esquipulas, 8 are again being demanded by the opposition in this, Ortega’s unconstitutional third term in office. The fact that they are back on the opposition agenda is a clear sign of the backpedaling on political issues experienced in Nicaragua.

Those demands are the non-reelection of the President, reform of the electoral branch, independence of the judicial branch, guarantees to the right to property, limitation of presidential faculties, university autonomy, municipal autonomy and separation of the State and army from the FSLN.

One of those demands—non-consecutive reelection of the President and prohibition of a third term whether consecutive or not—was written into the Constitution in 1995 and is still there. Ortega simply overrode it through a ruling tailor-made for him in 2009 by his party’s justices in the Supreme Court.

“Such anomalies have
never occurred before”

The judicial branch became a bipartite body controlled by those loyal to then-President Arnoldo Alemán and opposi¬tion leader Daniel Ortega thanks to the pact they forged at the end of the nineties. Today it is totally under the FSLN’s control, along with the electoral branch: the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE).

In late August, Roberto Argüello, who had presided over the Supreme Court in the eighties, bitterly lamented what he’s seeing now. He mentioned the creation of “nepotistic structures” in the judicial branch because it has become commonplace to name children and other relatives of justices in the courts, in express violation of the law.

He also referred to the continuation of a majority of justices in the Supreme Court who continue ruling de facto even though their terms ended as long as two years ago. “In my 45 years of professional practice at the various court levels, including as a Supreme Court justice, nothing close to such anomalies ever occurred in the justice branch. We must realize the damage they are causing the country’s institutionality and the rule of law. And they are embarrassing us with the international community.”

Similarities and differences
with the eighties

Property rights have again entered into crisis in Ortega’s current presidential period. But unlike what happened in the revolutionary years, when there was an active policy of confiscating the properties of Somocistas, counterrevolutionaries and the opposition in general, today’s confiscations are no longer covered by the agrarian reform law and other laws on the books at the time. They are illegal takeovers, often by force, of properties—especially land, some of which has great economic value—that then end up in the hands of people close to the circle of power. Some of these arbitrary acts are revealed by the media, but many are litigated away from the light of day in courts skewed in favor of the FSLN’s interests.

Having inherited Somoza’s strongly presidentialist system, President Ortega had virtually total faculties 25 years ago; he governed largely by presidential decree. The 1995 constitutional reforms transferred a good number of those faculties to the legislative branch to thus re-jig the traditional balance of power somewhat. Once back in government in 2007, Ortega turned again to decrees, but in his new term, initiated in January of this year, he no longer needs to do so because last November’s allegedly fraudulent elections gave him an absolute and unconditional majority in the legislative body. Now the executive branch goes through the motions of submitting bills to the National Assembly, although in practice Ortega’s still governing by decree.

University autonomy, which returned in 1990, has been weakened again through the governing party’s control over the university student organizations, which is based on perks and the ever more limited academic freedom in the public universities. Municipal autonomy, born of the revolution in 1988 in the framework of the democratization proposed by Esquipulas, is similarly under siege by the governing party, which is seeking to weaken and manipulate it, as municipal expert Silvio Prado explains in the Speaking Out article in this issue.

The FSLN-State fusion—an identification that characterized the revolu¬tionary model of the eighties—has today adopted a different design. Former FDSLN guerrilla commander Dora María Téllez, who was minister of health in the revolutionary government, an elected FSLN representative to the National Assembly in the early nineties and now a leader of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), explains it like this: “In the eighties we were really a party-State. Not now; what we have now is worse: it’s a family-State.”

The electoral collapse

The 1988 reform of the electoral law—a demand the opposition presented to the revolutionary government and was accepted in compliance with Esquipulas—guaranteed the purity of the 1990 elections that resulted in the FSLN’s loss.

Less than a decade later, the CSE—conceived as one of the under¬pinnings of firm and lasting peace—began its downhill slide with the pact between Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán. That pact launched an onslaught against political pluralism by eliminating municipal candidacies by popular petition and reforming the electoral law for the third time since 1988. This time it institutionalized a bipartite system, establishing rigorous norms that impede the emergence and development of new political options. In all fairness, it must be admitted that the 1996 elections that brought Alemán to office included no fewer than 47 registered parties that com¬bined into alliances to run some two dozen presidential candidates, each with the right to state funds for their campaign.

Worse than the paring down of questionably serious political parties was the arbitrary elimination of genuine political alternatives, such as occurred in the run-up to the 2008 municipal elections with the Conservative Party and the MRS, neither of whose legal standing has been restored. The definitive collapse of the electoral system was sealed by the two “highly irregular” elections organized by the FSLN—the municipal elections in 2008 and the presidential elections last year. According to strongly substantiated allegations, the former gave the FSLN the mayoral seat in 40 more municipalities than it had won fairly and the latter gave it a calculated 8 legislative seats it also didn’t win, providing it such a large majority in the National Assembly that it can even reform the Constitution without a single vote from the opposition benches. The electoral branch is so recognizably corrupt and loyal to the FSLN that today, 25 years later, not only the opposition but also sectors of the FSLN are demanding sweeping changes to restore its credibility.

These strange elections

Nicaragua’s next municipal elections fall this November. It’s a strange electoral process, reflecting the collapse of the country’s electoral system. FSLN militants organized months of protests in some 40 municipalities and 11 departments against candidates imposed by the presidential couple.

Instead of listening to their objections, the FSLN called a quick Congress on August 15. Many assumed that the candidate list, widely rumored to have been largely chosen by the First Lady, would be officially endorsed by Daniel Ortega to quiet the unhappiness. But to their surprise, he didn’t even present the list. Instead he declared that “individuals don’t matter in the FSLN; what matters is the project.” While there’s merit to that ideological message in a tight-knit revolutionary party, it expresses something entirely different in an electoral context. With victory assured by the party’s control over the electoral branch and voters limited to choosing between one party slate and another, not individual candidates, the message was that it doesn’t matter whether the candidates are corrupt or not, popular or not, with legitimate leadership or not. It’s an odd position to take, particularly in municipal-level elections, where the electorate knows who’s who and who to demand accountability from.

Fifteen of the 18 registered parties are running candidates; of those 12 are so small they made an electoral alliance with the FSLN as their survival strategy. One of the three that aren’t running is the Christian Democratic Union (UDC), which was allied with the FSLN for 12 years. National UDC leader Agustín Jarquín, Ortega’s running mate in the 2001 presidential elections and elected on the FSLN’s legislative slate in 2011, actively lobbied the governing party some months ago to be its candidate for mayor of Managua. Instead, the FSLN chose journalist Daisy Torres, who has been acting mayor ever since the fatal shooting three years ago of boxer Alexis Argüello—one of the FSLN candidates who allegedly won his mayoral seat by fraud. With Jarquín’s rejection, the UDC decided to pull out of its alliance with the FSLN and run him as its own candidate in the capital, with UDC leader Wendy Puerto as his running mate.

Following that decision, the CSE promptly disqualified it on the grounds that it hadn’t complied with the law by presenting municipal candidates in at least 80% of the country’s 153 municipalities. Puerto insists that it did and says they were largely members of the country’s evangelical churches. Both she and Jarquín are convinced their party was disqualified because internal surveys showed Jarquín with a 60% positive rating in Managua, even among FSLN militants, giving him a good chance of beating Torres. It’s not overly skeptical to wonder if the three parties that are still running alone really passed the Electoral Law’s rigorous standards or were just given a “pass” so the government could ensure the appearance of pluralist competitive elections.

Elected or assigned?

Not since the Somoza times has the pre-electoral environment been so strange and discouraging. There’s virtually no institutional space the governing party hasn’t glommed on to, and the Nicaraguan political opposition appears even weaker and more dispersed than ever, with no capacity to organize or mobilize and no alternative project to shake an electorate increasingly fed up with the country’s political course out of its ennui, resignation and passivity.

Nicaragua’s two human rights organizations, CENIDH and CPDH, both announced they won’t urge people to vote this time. CENIDH president Vilma Núñez explained her reasoning as follows: “These elections are already null because they are being organized and developed by a null institution [the Supreme Electoral Council], in that the electoral magistrates are all illegally in their posts because their terms ended months ago. They are committing an illegality due to the unlawful prolongation of their functions.”

The civil society organizations that worked closely within the PLI Alliance in last year’s general elections have also taken that position. So has the MRS—an important and active member of the same alliance that helped bring it to a respectable second place even with the alleged theft of a significant number of votes last year. The Independent Liberal Party (PLI), the alliance’s namesake party, will run alone because the MRS is insisting on the need to keep fighting, but not to vote. While some stress that voting is a right and a duty, MRS spokespeople counter that not voting is also a right and a duty given the circumstances in which these elections are developing. “The electoral path has been closed in Nicaragua,” argued MRS legislator Víctor Hugo Tinoco. “Objectively there won’t be elections, since it won’t be the ones with the most votes who win but rather the ones assigned the most votes by the de facto electoral branch functionaries.”

Various generations
are frustrated

The text of the Esquipulas II agree¬ments officially and firmly proclaimed that “peace and development are inseparable.” The agreements applauded that day in Esquipulas, Guatemala, were dedicated “to Central America’s youth, whose legitimate aspirations for peace and social justice, freedom and reconciliation, have been frustrated for many generations.”

After twenty-five years and bil¬lions of dollars in aid from around the world, Nicaragua is still the second most impoverished country in Latin America after Haiti. The legitimate aspirations of the two generations that were born and grew up after the Esquipulas agreements are still frustrated. The population’s main demand in all polls is a job that provides a decent and steady salary, social security and the chance to get ahead in life. Twenty-five years later, seven out of ten economically active Nicaraguans still don’t have such a job, but are “self-employed” in the vast and precarious informal economy. And it’s a growing problem. In 2009, 200,000 people were in that situation; today there are 500,000.

According to the latest M&R poll, seven out of ten Nicaraguans also have family members who decided to emigrate in search of better jobs in Costa Rica, the United States, Spain and other countries. The money they send back to Nicaragua as family remittances is what allows many of those Nicaraguan families to survive.

Less extreme poverty,
but more extreme wealth

So here we are: although the per-capita income index can hide vast economic inequalities, it does indicate something. It tells us that if Nicaragua were to continue growing at the rate of the past four years (an average of 2.8% annually), it would take between 50 and 70 years to equal the average annual per-capita income of our Costa Rican neighbors… assuming of course that their economy doesn’t grow at all in that same period.

The government talks a lot about how it’s reducing extreme poverty. That may be true, in fact it surely is, but it’s also increasing extreme wealth. According to the World Report on the Ultra-Rich for 2011-2012, prepared by the Wealth-X firm, there are 180 “ultra-rich” in Nicaragua, defined as those whose personal fortunes exceed $30 million. Nicaragua tops El Salvador’s 140 and is in turn topped by Honduras’ 185 and Guatemala’s 310 (there are no figures for Costa Rica or Panama).

So that’s how things stand on the silver anniversary of Esquipulas. This deplorable situation is the responsi¬bility of Nicaragua’s entire political class, from those who signed the Esquipulas agreements 25 years ago, through those who began to fulfill them and then abandoned them, to all those who followed. It’s also the responsibility of our business class and everyone who had responsibilities for transforming the situation and didn’t. Those with the least responsibility are the youth to whom those agreements were dedicated, above all the latest generation.

Education is the only way out

The Civil Coordinator and various social organizations have been pointing to the road that must be decisively taken to change the country’s course: invest in human capital, prioritize quality public education, exploit the demographic dividend that the inversion of the demographic pyramid is now offering Nicaragua, and keep up that investment over the next 25 years. We are currently in the most strategic population stage of our entire history: fewer children and elderly people and an abundant youth and adult population that is working or reaching working age. If we don’t invest in the education of today’s children and youth so they can get quality jobs, in another 25 years Nicaragua will enter a phase of its population’s aging from which there will be no return, with the average population not only older but also still poor.

With Venezuelan cooperation’s extraordinary resources—averaging US$500 million a year—the governing party has had an opportunity over the past five years to deal significantly with the challenge of helping Nicaragua climb out of its poverty. How much longer it will continue to have that opportunity depends on the transition in Venezuela itself. The priority should be a national effort to improve education. But so far the Ortega government’s priorities have been to finance the governing party’s apparatus and the investments of the ALBA business group linked to the Ortega family and cronies. With what’s left it gives zinc roofing and other handouts and subsidies, particularly to poor women heads of household, but investment in education remains below the regional average and well below the minimum that would begin to make a difference in the quality and quantity of education the poor receive.

A retaining wall against
drug trafficking?

Twenty-five years after Esquipulas finds the Central American region invaded, captured and “integrated” by international drug trafficking. This plague is unquestionably advancing in Nicaragua, the country considered one of the safest in the region. The official discourse of the presidency, the Army and the Police reiterates daily that an effective “state policy” against drug trafficking has turned the country into a regional “retaining wall.” Nonetheless, the chance murder of Argentine singer Facundo Cabral in Guatemala in July of last year and all the revelations that have followed have shown a different reality: an active, well organized drug trafficking presence in our country that has been territorially and institutionally established for years and is continually extending its reach.

The trial of Henry Fariñas, the intended target of the bullets that killed Cabral, and two dozen others accused of money laundering, organized crime and drug trafficking got underway in Managua on August 22. What has been reported about the trial, as well as what we can imagine by simply taking previous dispersed information into account, permits us to assume that the dock probably doesn’t contain all the accused who should be there… and that some who are there shouldn’t be.

Cracks in the retaining wall

A caravan of six costly vans bearing the logo of the powerful Mexican TV chain Televisa detained on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua on August 20 backs up that assumption. The mobile units, sporting state-of-the-art transmission equipment, were accompanied by 17 men and 1 woman who identified themselves as Televisa journalists. As captivating as the Fariñas trial might prove to be, this seemed journalist overkill. As it turned out, over US$9 million was hidden in secret compartments of the vans, smuggled across the borders of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras before the whistle was blown in Nicaragua.

The caravan was detained while the police chiefs of the entire region happened to be meeting in Managua to coordinate strategies against drug trafficking, and the capture was a moment of glory for the Nicaraguan National Police. But Costa Rica quickly reported that the same caravan had already made 16 round trips as far as that neighbor to the south in the past two years, raising a flood of new questions.

Why was the caravan stopped this time if it should have raised suspicions on any one of the 32 other crossings? Nicaragua’s Police Chief Aminta Granera said they had been “following up on it” and that an anonymous call alerted them this time. Can this be explained away by faults and weaknesses in border and migratory controls or is there complicity at the borders and in the institutions that allowed the vans to circulate openly through our country and the rest of the region “integrating” us? Were they shuffling drugs about as well, or only money? And for whom?

It’s hard to believe that Televisa, a Mexican TV monopoly linked to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and to Mexico’s new President Peña Nieto, has nothing to do with this. According to a recent charge by his defeated opponent Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Peña Nieto will be heading “a corrupt government with complicities that are destroying Mexico.” We all know that the Central American drug cartels linked to the Cabral-Fariñas case are affiliates of the powerful Mexican cartels.

Much still to learn

The coming months will surely uncover new elements, interesting revelations. The Televisa case—the most spectacular and strange operation against drug trafficking this country has ever seen—made even more clear one of the lessons of the Cabral-Fariñas case: the “retaining wall” Nicaragua boasts of has many serious cracks.

Just one such crack is the government’s lack of political will to create the Administrative Unit of Seized, Confiscated or Abandoned Goods, ordered two years ago by the Law of Prevention, Investigation and Pursuit of Organized Crime (Law 735) to receive, guard, protect, invest, auction off, donate, return or destroy seized goods. The National Police deposited the over $9 million captured in the Televisa operation into the accounts of the Supreme Court of Justice, which was an illegal move because in the absence of the Administrative Unit the money must go to the Treasury Ministry. According to the calculations of security export Roberto Orozco of Nicaragua’s Strategic Studies and Public Policies Institute (IIEEP), the equivalent of US$500 million in drug trafficking assets has been captured as cash, real estate, vehicles and other valuable goods between 2004 and 2010. “These seized goods are a turbulent river,” commented Orozco, “in which fishermen are making a good catch.” Roberto Cajina, another security export, agrees, noting that this illegality “opens doors and hallways to corruption.”

These times of silver bullets

In mid-August Carlos Barrachina, a Mexican expert in security and professor of the University of Quintana Roo, visited Managua. His talk at a conference sponsored by IEEPP only deepened the concern. The summary published by the newspaper La Prensa of his message about the place Central America occupies today on the international drug-trafficking map is extremely distressing.

Barrachina drew four conclusions. First: while the war against organized crime is barely beginning to affect Central America, none of the countries, even working together, have the capacity to deal with it.
Second: The aid from the United States and the rest of the world is insufficient and fighting crime by following what they’re asking us to do amounts to throwing the region into a war without the weapons to defend itself.

Third: Central America is the perfect region for the drug lords fleeing Mexico and Colombia to strengthen themselves; getting them out of here will be much tougher than eradicating them from Mexico or Colombia.

Fourth: It’s a myth that Central America is only a transit route or service station for the movers of drugs; we’re now consumers as well. The United States is not the only market; all of Central America is using drugs, which makes things even worse, because the cartels aren’t only fighting over routes but also over markets.

The final conclusion—our own—is that 25 years after Esquipulas the bullets of war have been silenced, but the military peace brought neither social peace nor development and we are now fully immersed in another stage, one of silver bullets.

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