The first thing you notice in Nicaragua are the dogs—mangy, often lame, with fearful eyes, roaming the streets in packs. The writer Robert Kaplan says one way to tell the progress of a country is by the condition of its stray dog population. If this is so, then Nicaragua has always been desperately poor because, for as long as anyone can remember, the dogs have prowled the barrios, and even the beaches, of this Central American nation.
It is 25 years since the revolution that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to power and 14 years since the controversial election that ended the rule of the Sandinista government in favour of a series of centrist and right-wing regimes. In the past quarter century, Nicaraguans have experimented with left-wing populism and free-market capitalism. Neither seems to have worked.
It is still the poorest country in the region and despite four free elections since 1984, no one can seriously call Nicaragua a complete and authentic democracy. ‘We have a certain degree of pluralism, but that is it’, says Carlos Chamorro, a former Sandinista revolutionary and now one of the country’s leading intellectuals, through his daily television program and weekly magazine.
‘In a sense, we have two countries in one. On the one hand, institutions work pretty well; the business world, the press. But if you go into the countryside, you will see the role of the state is very small and there is a large segment of the population that lives in poverty and does not enjoy the same rights as other citizens.’
When the Sandinistas assumed power on 19 July 1979, they were welcomed almost everywhere—in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Europe (east and west), even in the United States, which for 40 years, had sponsored the Somoza family and its dictatorship of ever-increasing brutality. As Franklin D. Roosevelt had once said, in a rare moment of candour, ‘Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’.
By 1979, the Carter administration was no longer willing to succour the regime. As the Sandinistas—who had been operating as a guerilla force in the countryside, directed by a government-in-exile in neighbouring Costa Rica—reached the capital Managua, Carter dispatched his Under Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs to join them.
For Carter, the reassuring factor was that, while unmistakably leftist, the Sandinistas were not Marxist-Leninists. Their leadership—principally guerilla commander Daniel Ortega,