[News] Why We Joined the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3250


Why We Joined the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo

The reflection below by the legendary FSLN 
guerrilla commander and member of the FSLN’s 
Democratic Left tendency opened with this: “We 
call on all Sandinista militants, all who share 
the dream of a different Nicaragua, to join this 
effort to rescue Sandinismo.” We publish it here 
because we believe it also enriches the current 
debate about the Latin American Left as a whole.



Mónica Baltodano

Our Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) 
was that of Carlos Fonseca and we first knew 
about it through the mysterious paintings that 
appeared on the walls of homes in the early 
sixties. It was an FSLN of values and a 
convincing mystique, drawing us into the fight 
and even the challenge of death. It was an FSLN 
of hope that has now been transformed into just 
another political party, usufruct of an 
economically and politically dominant group in 
the party structures whose fundamental aim is to 
dispute arenas of power. This transmutation 
didn’t happen overnight. It has been a long and 
continuous process not without its share of 
resistance. A politically conscious grassroots 
membership is still resisting the intent to annul 
their historic role as a transforming force committed to the excluded.


The Democratic Left:
Critical consciousness and grassroots struggle

Many of us have been involved in the struggle to 
maintain the original vocation of this political 
force, trying to form small groups, movements, 
organic tendencies and currents of opinion within 
the Sandinista Front under various names. The 
most persistent group in this respect has been 
the Democratic Left (ID), which grew out of the 
“Group of 29” that emerged in October 1993—three 
years after the FSLN’s electoral defeat—to 
challenge the FSLN’s policy of “co-government” 
with the Chamorro government. Later, the ID 
became a tendency that fought for leadership of 
the FSLN in the 1994 Congress, where new statutes 
were debated and a new party leadership was 
elected. We struggled convinced that there were 
forces interested in “moderating” the FSLN to 
turn it into a centrist force, something we 
rejected. The Democratic Left was also the main 
force behind Daniel Ortega at that time. We have 
to acknowledge that this permitted his 
leadership—at the time very weakened within the 
party—to recover the strength to establish and 
ensure what he now is: the autocratic head of a good part of Sandinismo.

Starting with the 1994 Congress, at a time when 
the revolution was being dismantled and 
neoliberal “packages” were being imposed, the 
Democratic Left insisted on maintaining the 
FSLN’s grassroots nature and ideologically 
identifying with revolutionary proposals. It 
counseled that the party should start 
establishing a social correlation for change 
based on developing educated and critical 
grassroots consciousness, resistance and above 
all struggle against the neoliberal avalanche and 
the ideological backpedaling so in vogue in those years.

 From within the FSLN leadership we also pushed 
for internal changes, convinced that internal 
democracy was not at odds with its revolutionary 
nature. We aspired to improve our party’s 
existing organization, inherited from the years 
of war. Our forces pushed for the election of 
internal authorities through a democratic process 
of mass participation and encouraged the 
development of alliances with forces such as the 
Women’s Coalition, which allowed us to seek a new 
relationship with autonomous movements. We also 
promoted women’s participation through the 
“braid,” in which every other candidate on the 
slate had to be a woman, and the consulting of 
candidacies, which led to genuine primary 
elections with over 400,000 participants in 1996.


Distrust, maneuvers, accusations and exclusion

This transforming vision led us to propose a new 
presidential candidate. Few know that in 1995, 
our tendency persuaded the National Directorate 
plenary and the main FSLN bodies that allowing 
Daniel Ortega to run again would be a mistake. We 
even managed to temporarily convince him, as FSLN 
general secretary, of this point of view. So we 
unanimously decided that Mariano Fiallos, the 
prestigious former rector of the National 
Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) and 
then president of the electoral branch of 
government, would be the presidential candidate, 
but this decision was aborted by a combination of 
maneuvers by Daniel and his closest cronies, plus 
certain vacillations by Mariano. In the end, we 
went into the 1996 elections with Daniel Ortega 
as the candidate. Arnoldo Alemán won.

The tension and constant struggles within the 
National Directorate gradually convinced Daniel 
Ortega that our forces weren’t as unconditional 
as he would like. He was right. We were 
advocating principles, values and a vision of 
Nicaragua and the FSLN. Our current was not about 
strengthening a figure or gravitating around a single person.

Thus we came to the 1998 Congress. It was by then 
evident that General Secretary Daniel Ortega no 
longer trusted a a good part of the Democratic 
Left. The most important shifts were felt 
internally in late 1997 when, with his 
endorsement, conservative forces within the party 
totally neutralized a proposal to reorganize the 
party that had been carefully drafted by an 
internal commission. The most important arguments 
revolved around the idea that the proposal’s real 
purpose was to weaken Daniel’s strength.

Another significant sign was the FSLN’s excessive 
opening—at Daniel Ortega’s initiative—to the 
development of a new current within the FSLN 
called the Sandinista Business Bloc, which 
included Herty Lewites. For the 1998 Congress, 
Ortega offered this group his full support to 
increase its corresponding quotas of internal 
power. By then Zoilamérica had already accused 
Ortega of sexual abuse and harassment, shaking 
the party and all Sandinistas. The reaction was a 
classic Stalinist-style internal maneuver, 
accusing important members of our current of what 
were called “imperialist lies” to weaken Daniel’s 
leadership.* The idea behind unjustly blaming us 
was to disqualify our tendency.

All this led us to the conviction not to run for 
posts in the FSLN’s National Directorate. We were 
convinced of the importance of occupying spaces 
in the middle-level leadership, closer to the 
base. Backed by the Carlos Fonseca Initiative in 
Managua, we sought spaces in the departmental 
leadership. All internal paths were closed to us 
in a manner worthy of a police state and we were 
finally relegated from all party posts. Even so, 
we persevered without resigning our militancy.


The pact: Perks, property,
putrefaction and politicking

Daniel Ortega’s closing speech to the 1998 party 
congress marked the way to the deals and pacts 
that had been opened with the negotiation of the 
Law of Reformed, Urban and Rural Property in 
August 1997, just months after Arnold Alemán took 
presidential office. This new approach was a 
unilateral decision, not consulted with any structures.

Immediately after that congress, the path was 
cleared for the pact with the PLC. The top 
leadership of both parties agreed to 
constitutional reforms and pocket-lining 
agreements whose implementation was postponed 
only because Hurricane Mitch left the Alemán 
government seriously questioned. From then on, 
our tendency’s differences with the transactional 
policies and lines of the Daniel backers became 
increasingly evident within the FSLN’s bench in 
the National Assembly. The FSLN pact with Alemán 
was felt even in Ministry of Government 
interventions against social foundations, NGOs 
and media belonging to members of our tendency.

The worst part of the pact—in the Democratic 
Left’s judgment—was the commitment to demobilize 
the grassroots forces, pulling the plug on the 
struggle against the privatizations and other 
International Monetary Fund and World Bank 
policies, including the structural adjustment 
plans. The takeover of Nicaragua by the market 
economy and its imbalances encountered no 
resistance. The pact was also expressed in a huge 
number of under-the-table property negotiations, 
which ensured the new holdings of the emerging 
Sandinista economic group, including former 
worker and peasant leaders who had appropriated 
part of the business properties negotiated in the 
first and second concertation agreements signed 
during the Chamorro government. The pact further 
opened the way for the most raging corruption 
ever seen, with no official denunciation or 
opposition from the FSLN. As a result, the 
capital of the emerging economic group headed up 
by Arnoldo Alemán also grew apace.

The Democratic Left warned of the pact’s 
disastrous political-ideological consequences. 
Early on we charged that it was intensifying the 
FSLN’s slide down the slippery slope of 
politicking, election mania and a logic of power 
based on divvying up public posts and personal 
businesses. We argued that this behavior was 
changing the FSLN into a party along the lines of 
the “historical parallels” denounced by Carlos 
Fonseca, which was precisely what had triggered 
the construction of a new force representing the 
oppressed in the sixties: the FSLN.


Whatever works for the moment:
Pact with Bolaños, pact with Alemán

The Democratic Left was able to pull together 
hundreds of Sandinistas around rejection of the 
pact between the FSLN and Arnoldo Alemán. Opinion 
polls showed that over 80% of the population 
opposed the pact’s agreements, and over half of 
all Sandinistas disagreed with the path chosen 
despite the propagandistic campaign arguing that 
the constitutional and electoral reforms agreed 
to in the pact would guarantee the FSLN victory in the 2001 elections.

In 2000, the Democratic Left again reiterated its 
opposition to Daniel Ortega’s perpetual 
presidential candidacy and thousands of 
Sandinistas expressed their own disagreement in 
the FSLN primaries elections. Despite rigged 
elections, official results showed over 40% for 
pre-candidates Víctor Hugo Tinoco and Alejandro 
Martínez Cuenca, although it is known that they 
really pulled over 50%. The results of the 2001 
general elections did not justify the main 
pro-pact argument and again the Right won the 
presidency, this time with Enrique Bolaños.

Recent events are better known. The FSLN 
leadership—by then one official body and another 
equally real one in the shadows representing the 
interests of the economic groups and with evident 
power assigned to Rosario Murillo, General 
Secretary Daniel Ortega’s wife—chose to “play 
both sides,” cutting deals with either Bolaños or 
Alemán based on the needs of the moment.

This explains why, despite strong pressure from 
the base and the population in general, the 
FSLN’s official position on corruption was timid, 
ambiguous and irrelevant. Not until commitments 
had been wrung from the Bolaños government did 
Daniel give the FSLN legislative bench the nod to 
strip Arnoldo Alemán of his parliamentary 
immunity so he could be tried on corruption charges.

US meddling, Washington’s visceral hatred of 
anything Sandinista and President Bolaños’ 
servile attitude shattered the Ortega-Bolaños 
pact’s precarious equilibrium and Ortega returned 
with renewed energy to his pact with Alemán, by 
that time sentenced to 20 years in “prison,” 
which he is still serving on his luxurious 
hacienda. Daniel Ortega and his buddies met with 
Alemán innumerable times in his residential 
“prison” and in the drunken atmosphere of that 
union signed “strategic agreements” with a man 
convicted of brazenly pillaging the public 
treasury! They even recorded this ignominy in a 
despicable photograph that has provided inerasable proof of their conspiring.


Demobilized, resigned and cowed
in the Ortega-Murillo family’s hands

There is more to these commitments than is 
publicly visible. Under the perverse “one for 
you, one for me” logic, Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo 
Alemán divvied up all the important public posts, 
public funds, laws and judges’ sentences. This 
process has intensified the conviction that all 
decisions taken in Nicaraguan state institutions 
directly depend on the will of the two caudillos.

Simultaneously, many FSLN leaders have begun to 
get actively involved in fundamentalist religious 
sects, creating an objective confusion between 
their political and religious militancy. It was 
no accident that this coincided with the evident 
pact between the Ortega-Murillo family and 
Cardinal Obando after it became clear that the 
corruption had sunk its roots into various 
institutions linked to the Catholic hierarchy as well.

This other pact also has expressions in the 
public institutions. The PLC evidently demanded 
the presidency of the Supreme Electoral Council 
for one of its own militants, but the FSLN made 
sure it went to Obando’s highly questioned 
protégé, Roberto Rivas. It was also expressed in 
the public defense of Cardinal Obando by Ortega 
backers through radio and TV campaigns, banners 
and flyers with mottoes such as “Obando, prince 
of reconciliation, the FSLN supports you”; in 
banners alluding to the Virgin Mary, all signed 
officially by the FSLN; or in the meshing of 
political and private activities such the 
Ortega-Murillo religious marriage officiated by 
Obando, covered by the FSLN propaganda 
secretariat and sent out to all the TV channels as if it were a party act.

The official FSLN is increasingly controlled by 
the Ortega-Murillo family circle and its economic 
group. Together with their intimate allies from 
the powerful Business Bloc, they have not only 
wrested the FSLN as an instrument of change away 
from the people, but have slid down the path of 
conformity and resignation—similar to the effects 
of certain religious currents—through the opiate 
of electioneering and the insane competition for posts of power.


Today’s FSLN: Autocrat surrounded by courtiers

Autocracy—power in the hands of a single 
person—is the polar opposite of democracy. It 
damages the development of any political or 
social force, particularly one that claims to 
work for transformation. The FSLN hasn’t been led 
in a political direction as a result of debate, 
analysis and joint decisions since the 1998 
congress. It has instead suffered an involution 
from collective leadership to authentic autocracy.

What has happened to the citizenry has also 
happened to the party membership. It isn’t 
passive, but rather engages every day, in 
practice. It can’t be called submissive, because 
it is not blindly subordinate. We have the right 
and duty to be critical, self-critical, 
thoughtful and belligerent and to take an active 
part in our party’s decisions. Autocratic power 
promotes a passive membership, one that deposits 
its sovereignty in the autocrat. This isn’t being 
a militant; it’s being a vassal. Autocratic power 
seeks to reduce militancy to vassalage, which is 
why thousands of us have been rebelling for 
years, refusing to subordinate ourselves to what’s happening in our party.

In our Nicaragua, desperation is growing 
alongside poverty. And we Sandinistas haven’t 
only been despoiled of a force for change that 
used to represent us, we’ve also been plunged 
into alienation. Because autocrats don’t educate, 
don’t provide tools for shaping subjects who feel 
that they are owners of their own destiny. 
Autocrats have no interest in debate, diversity 
of thought, alternative information or political formation.

Autocrats need a compact contingent of courtiers 
to guarantee and maintain their power. They 
depend on their court just as the courtiers 
depend on their power. They need each other. 
Autocratic power also needs religious power on 
its side, turning spiritual affairs into an 
instrument of domination. It even needs magic and 
the stars lined up to sustain it.

In the Ortega court everything revolves around 
proximity to power and struggles for leadership 
positions and public posts. Its main cadres 
periodically get embroiled in internal battles 
over inclusion on the privileged list and many 
unemployed middle-level cadres systematically 
sell out for some space that will toss them 
salary crumbs from the tables of power served 
from the courtiers’ control of the institutions.

But we know many revolutionaries inside the 
current party structures who are making 
unflagging efforts to remain faithful to Carlos 
Fonseca’s legacy, fighting for political 
education and the party’s grassroots orientation. 
Their efforts are praiseworthy, inspired by the 
colors of our banner and an understandable 
concern to preserve the party’s unity in the hope 
that one day Daniel Ortega will rectify his path.


Resisting and struggling
against an inhuman capitalism

As a current of opinion, the Democratic Left has 
consistently demanded that Daniel’s wing of the 
party return to the FSLN’s original postulates. 
As historical militants in our organization, we 
have demanded rectification time and again, 
warning of the de facto capitulation implied by 
all these attitudes and decisions.

We’ve done it by political means, writing in the 
media, developing activities with grassroots 
Sandinista sectors, participating in all spaces 
of resistance we’ve been able to pry open, with a 
legitimate agenda that includes total rejection 
of imperialist policies and the war against Iraq; 
militant solidarity with the people, revolution 
and leadership of the Cuban revolution, 
especially with Fidel Castro; and militant 
backing of the Palestinian people’s struggle and 
Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution.

We’ve been participating in the forums of 
resistance against the Free Trade Agreements and 
Plan Puebla Panama and have particularly 
mobilized against ratification of the Central 
American Free Trade Agreement, against 
privatiza-tion of water and in defense of 
people’s rights in general. We’ve also been 
supporting the struggle of workers affected by 
Nemagon and the just demands of consumers against 
the public service rate hikes.

 From the different spaces the Democratic Left’s 
members occupy in civil society, in the 
alternative social movements and grassroots 
organizations, we have supported people’s efforts 
to get some social responses and have developed 
civic education efforts. At the same time that 
“Danielismo” has been deconstructing the FSLN as 
a force for change, we have continued struggling 
to reconstruct San-dinismo inside the party and from other arenas of society.


The FSLN’s only conflict
with the current government

Neoliberalism has succeeded in dismantling almost 
all social transformations achieved by the 
revolution and has instituted a voracious, 
inhuman capitalism: it has privatized public 
services, providing opportunities to strengthen 
transnational control of our economy; it has 
handed out national territory in mining and 
forestry concessions; it has promoted the 
privatization of water for all kinds of purposes, 
including huge dams. Businesses with foreign 
capital and gas stations have cropped up 
everywhere, while the only options left to the 
vast majority of the population are the 
precarious jobs offered by the maquilas, 
emigration to Costa Rica and other countries or the most absolute poverty.

The current economic policy has favored only a 
group of oligarchs. Today’s government is a 
complete sell-out, in the strict sense of the 
word: the best land, the youngest and best 
workers, the economic legislation, energy, 
communications, the mines, the best coasts, the 
exportables, water
 everything is earmarked for 
foreign capital And because it has thrown its lot 
in with the pact, the FSLN has come into conflict 
with the government over divvying up public 
posts, not over questioning its policies in any 
depth—beyond the rhetoric—because its leaders 
also participate in the above-mentioned businesses.


“Better to lose with Daniel
than win with anyone else”

In early 2005, a sizable group of Sandinistas 
initiated a political process aimed at putting 
Herty Lewites forward as an FSLN presidential 
pre-candidate in the internal primary elections 
established in the party statutes. The official 
leadership responded by expelling Lewites and his 
campaign chief Víctor Hugo Tinoco from the party 
without recurring to any legitimate statutory 
proceeding, eliminating the primaries themselves 
and again confirming Daniel Ortega as the FSLN’s 
arbitrary presidential candidate. They launched 
all manner of disqualifiers against Lewites’ 
supporters, the most common being that they were 
agents of imperialism, rightwing infiltrators and 
betrayers of the popular interest.

As the Democratic Left, we came out immediately 
in favor of the militancy’s right to primary 
elections and of a political debate that would 
permit informed and mature candidate selection. 
We were aware that Herty Lewites represents 
centrist positions and that we don’t share his 
discourse on various issues, but we did share his 
concern for a renovation within Sandinismo, and 
above all a break with the pact-fed official line.

We rejected the disqualifiers because they were 
also inconsistent: over the years Lewites has 
been one of the people Daniel Ortega himself most 
trusted, until he dared challenge his 
presidential candidacy. This dual discourse, this 
double standard, has become the pro-Daniel crowd’s modus operandi.

We also charged that Daniel’s stubborn insistence 
on the presidential candidacy despite the 
repeatedly demonstrated solid and broad vote 
against him can only be understood through the 
explicitly declared logic that it’s “preferable 
to lose with Daniel than to win with anyone 
else,” which expresses the pragmatism and aims of 
the power group around him. For them the status 
quo will be maintained whether he wins or loses 
the elections. Their only goal is to defend their 
interests, and seen from the logic of the pact, 
having a pro-Alemán PLC in office poses no risk 
to them, while a pro-Alemán PLC out of office 
would only mean more of the same.


It’s not only about winning elections

We have declared repeatedly that the changes 
Nicaragua needs require modifications in the 
social correlation of forces. It’s a question not 
just of winning elections but doing so based on 
an attractive program of changes that enjoys the 
backing of an aware public. To that end, we’ve 
put our bets on grassroots work, the construction 
of autonomous and belligerent social movements, 
the organization of the citizenry around its own 
interests and the development of civic consciousness.

Our conviction has been nourished by innumerable 
Latin American examples. It’s not enough for a 
party that declares itself leftist to come to 
power. It must do so with a program involving 
real breaks with the prevailing economic model 
based on the Washington Consensus. Declared 
desire isn’t enough; also required is a 
grassroots correlation rooted in the formation of 
a critical consciousness, grassroots organization 
and an autonomous social movement able to 
pressure even the leftist government for social changes.

We thus advocate organizational efforts and an 
articulation of Sandinismo that goes beyond 
electoral expectations and overcomes the tendency 
to create movements that revolve around 
individual caudillos. This is what we’ve worked 
for all these years, independent of the electoral processes.


We can’t stay on the sidelines;
what happened isn’t acceptable

We can’t, however, stay on the sidelines of the 
real political processes taking place in the 
country. If we coldly analyze what we see in the 
opinion polls, in the population’s direct 
participation in the media and in our own direct 
contacts with grassroots Sandinistas, it is 
obvious that thousands believe we can’t go into 
the presidential elections with Sandinismo again 
straightjacketed by the logic that it doesn’t 
matter what the leaders do, what interests they 
favor, how questionable their conduct. because 
Sandinistas will supposedly end up “closing 
ranks,” eternally voting for the candidates that 
the upper echelons loyal to Daniel have imposed 
without respect for any democratic procedure.

This is no longer acceptable to us. In the 
November 5 national elections, Sandinistas in the 
broadest sense of the term must be allowed other 
options. It’s an elemental democratic right. 
Daniel Ortega’s continuism is a form of 
authoritarianism that limits the most elemental 
political rights, particularly those of 
Sandinistas, and contradicts the longed-for 
freedom and democracy for which we’ve fought all 
our lives and for which so many gave their life.


Herty Lewites is a Sandinista option

Herty Lewites is a Sandinista figure and the 
backing and sympathy he’s receiving from a wide 
range of people—not just Sandinistas—must be seen 
as an opportunity for Sandinismo as a whole. If 
the pro-Ortega upper echelons were really 
thinking about people’s interests and the 
importance of winning presidential office to 
modify the prevailing model, they would have 
taken advantage of Lewites’ appeal as a candidate 
and thrown their efforts behind the FSLN’s 
formation of a belligerent, organized grassroots 
social correlation that would ensure people 
maximum social advantages from a Sandinista government.

It’s unacceptable for other options linked to 
Sandinismo to be barred from electoral 
participation based on exclusionary or rigged 
processes using the levers of the electoral 
branch of government. We believe that this time 
the electoral gamut must be expanded to surmount 
the effects of the pact we Nicaraguans are 
suffering and allow voters to choose from truly 
different options, without the kind of 
polarization that has favored the current situation.


They’re trying to submerge us in polarization

The polarization into which the two party elite 
blocs want to submerge us only serves to keep us 
subjected. They fake contradictions to the death, 
but it’s almost all words. They push the base 
into “closing ranks” to be consistent with their 
old-time banners, but in reality they eat from 
the same plate in the parliament, the Supreme 
Court, the Supreme Electoral Council, the 
Comptroller General’s Office, the Human Rights 
Defense Attorney’s Office and their own 
corporations. Everything is divvied up between 
them, while their rank and file are supposed to 
believe that they’re different.

We believe FSLN militants have a legitimate right 
to support other Sandinista candidates, even if 
this time they aren’t running on the official 
ballot, which has been sequestered by a minority 
that controls the party apparatus. For the vast 
majority of Sandinistas, internal democracy has 
been castrated and restricted to unacceptable 
limits, excluding them from participation and decision-making.


Beyond elections and
for a more just Nicaragua

 From our militancy in the FSLN, we’ve decided to 
back the efforts the Movement to Rescue 
Sandinismo has been making since 2005 to 
construct an option that unites all Sandinistas 
who don’t agree with the official policies pushed 
by the pro-Ortega elite, which have led Nicaragua 
into a blind alley. In particular, we back the 
effort to pull together all Sandinistas who 
disagree with Daniel Ortega’s eternal 
presidential candidacy, which would undoubtedly 
end in yet another Sandinista electoral defeat.

In expressing its support for this movement, the 
Left of the FSLN is aware that so far the 
emphasis has been on promoting a Sandinista 
electoral alternative. This doesn’t mean 
unconditional agreement with all the proposals 
and postulates put forward by Herty Lewites and 
other founders of the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo.

As leftists, we defend the right to come together 
around common points, based on respect for the 
differences we obviously have. We don’t believe 
that absolute unanimity of the broad spectrum of 
Sandinistas is possible, but it is urgent to 
build consensus based on tolerance, considering 
that the priority for Nicaragua today is to break 
the pact’s logic, which has only deepened the 
lack of genuine alternatives to Nicaragua’s major problems.


An opportunity to build agreement

As Sandinista militants, we consider it 
legitimate to call for more than the creation of 
an electoral consensus. Better still is to see 
this movement as an opportunity to build common 
agreements that enable us to join together more 
permanently around a comprehensive national 
program, based on a Sandinismo that insists on 
the need to build a more just, equitable, humane, 
democratic and honest Nicaragua.

There is a need to bring together those who have 
not renounced the dream of a world of greater 
solidarity, a Sandinismo loyal to the values and 
postulates of our heroes and martyrs, faithful to 
the ethics of the common good, which doesn’t seek 
perks or posts and whose function is to enforce 
the interests of the excluded. This mission 
requires mystique, self-sacrifice, abnegation and 
daily work with the people, not with caudillo 
ambitions but with the goal of developing the 
only subject capable of taking on the greatest 
tasks. That subject is the people itself, once it 
has appropriated its own destiny aware of the 
causes of its precarious situation and thus 
endowed with the tools for its own emancipation.

We’re joining the Movement for the Rescue of 
Sandinismo from our leftist tendency and our 
organizational militancy in the FSLN. We do so 
safe in the knowledge that the efforts to reunite 
the broad array of Sandinistas, which have been 
dispersed up to now, will allow new initiatives 
on behalf of genuine grassroots interests either 
from government, if it is won, or from the opposition.


Rebuild Sandinismo with the
banners of yesterday and today

The only possibility of reforging Sandinismo as a 
transforming Leftist force is to construct an 
historical project of emancipation and end the 
Danielista monopoly aimed at co-opting the 
people’s history of struggle, its symbols, 
commemorative events and even its dead. We have 
joined the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo with our 
own banners, those we’ve always defended because 
they’ve inspired each rebellion against the status quo:

  The struggle for peace and life and§ the 
creation of a just, humane, peaceful world in 
which conflicts are decided by negotiations and 
by treating all parties as equals.
  The creation of a new§ economy that ends the 
exclusion of the great majorities from their 
right to access progress, well-being, education and a more human life.
  Equality for§ all citizens and nations and the 
struggle against discrimination, marginalization and backwardness.
Liberty, national independence, § sovereignty and 
the struggle against oppression and dictatorship.
In addition to these traditional banners, we 
assume those courageously raised by thousands of 
men and women on the planet who are organized in 
the new social movements and civil organizations:
  Honesty and transparency in public§ 
administration and the fight against corruption.
  Full equality of rights§ between the sexes; 
dialogue; the democratization of family 
relations; and the struggle against the 
dictatorship of men over women and parents over children.
  Tolerance and coexistence among races, respect 
for differences and the§ struggle against double standards and discrimination.
  Integrity and§ sincerity, the struggle against opportunism and lies.
  Defense of nature§ and the environment, the 
struggle against the squandering of resources and abuse of other species.
  Regional and municipal autonomy, the struggle against§ “capital-centrism.”
§


This isn’t just an electoral gamble

We consider it urgently important to build a new 
democracy in our Nicaragua that is committed to 
social equity and liberates citizens from the 
schizophrenia of formal and real democracy in 
which the laws say one thing and quite another 
ends up being done, the parties promise one thing 
and actually do something quite different and the 
actions of courts and judges have nothing to do with justice.

We want to build a new democracy that resolves 
the growing disassociation between law and 
reality; harmonizes the doctrine and practice of 
democracy; eradicates the crisis of legality and 
institutionality, of representation and 
legitimacy; levels the playing field between 
those represented and those who represent; and 
ends the hateful imposition of the pact’s 
majority electoral delegates over those of the 
minorities with no debate. It will be a new 
democracy that promotes security and offers new 
values and hopes to the majority of Nicaraguans.

We’re convinced that our main adversary in the 
efforts to construct “another possible world” is 
the world-dominating imperialism practiced by the 
US government and all those who support 
globalization and the imposition of the 
capitalist model, now in its neoliberal form. 
They organize measures to protect the interests 
of the great corporations, propagate and defend 
their common interests, conquer new markets and 
re-colonize entire nations. They then impose this 
domination on our countries through multiple 
means, of which the conditions of the IMF and 
World Bank programs are the best known by our people.

But we also know that the subordination to this 
model in each of our countries takes place with 
the complicity of docile governments that are in 
turn subordinated to economic groups that benefit 
from these exclusionary policies. It is therefore 
urgent to develop alternative national proposals 
that build popular power and another social 
correlation, and that place their faith in independent, sovereign governments.

We’re not just gambling on another electoral 
alternative, but on the creation of a truly 
alternative political movement, identified with 
the ideology of social change. Of course we need 
an alternative electoral victory, but it is even 
more important to build a social majority for 
change beyond the coming elections.

Mónica Baltodano has been an elected Managua 
Municipal Council member and National Assembly 
representative for the FSLN as well as a member 
of the party’s National Directorate.



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