Neo-liberal Nicaragua: Neo Banana Republic

[Karmadillo]

This one died a quick death in the GD forum a few days ago. I thought a few more people might see it over here.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00085.htm

Neo-liberal Nicaragua: Neo Banana Republic
By Toni Solo

When US-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro won the most observed election ever in Nicaragua in 1990, she promised Nicaraguans that US government aid would quickly put the country back on its feet. After a decade of war, exhausted Nicaraguans took Chamorro at her word. However, US aid currently averages around US$38 million a year — a trickle by any standard <1>. Nicaragua has taken twenty years to recover output levels it attained in 1982. Always among the poorest countries in the region, the war and its aftermath have left Nicaragua the second poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti.

Nicaragua has been a hapless guinea pig for a neoliberal and neoconservative experiment — if one can call it that. The neoliberal treatment is better described as “misery by design”, and the neoconservative penchant for democracy has meant corrupt and inept governments installed by means of rigged elections in which US government representatives have actively campaigned for their preferred candidate. A quest for self-determination and overcoming the legacy of dictatorship and war has given way to a systematic impoverishment of the country, and to craven subjugation by the country's governments to the whims of the US embassy. The implicit promise once made to Nicaragua before 1990, to bring the country out of its misery, has given way to neglect. An observer may conclude that the US is still punishing Nicaragua for having attempted to obtain its independence and exercise its right to self-determination. One wonders how much longer this torture must continue.

A Snapshot

Nicaragua’s economy has always depended on agriculture. But, whereas the US subsidizes its farmers at record levels, the doctrine imposed on Nicaragua has been rigidly free-market. Predictably, Nicaragua's agriculture is in crisis. The extensive network of cooperatives built up prior to 1990 has fallen apart, unable to compete through lack of access to credit, spiraling costs and stagnant or falling prices. Government policy, while not openly attacking agricultural cooperatives, has been deliberately unhelpful.

Until 2000, coffee had been Nicaragua’s main foreign exchange earner, and it had a long history since the 1870s. After years of World Bank pushing countries (especially Vietnam) to plant this cash crop, the coffee sector in Nicaragua, as elsewhere, has collapsed. The resulting migration from the land has exacerbated all of Nicaragua’s serious social problems, compounding the economic crisis that is affecting the whole region. Last year, hundreds of destitute families camped out for months on the roads leading to the coffee growing areas, pleading for work. Television showed pictures of children in Matagalpa, the coffee capital, showing levels of starvation usually associated with Africa.

This month the Nicaraguan Institute of Statistics and Census announced that 30% of people in the Matagalpa suffer malnutrition. 5000 rural workers and their families are marching from Matagalpa to the capital Managua to demand assistance agreed between the government and the rural workers - promises the government has not kept. CENIDH, the national human rights organization has confirmed that nine people have died of hunger on the march so far, including several children.

more...