A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism? Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution edited by Hilary Francis INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism? Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution edited by Hilary Francis Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2020 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/. This book is also available online at http://humanities-digital-library.org. ISBN: 978-1-908857-57-6 (paperback edition) 978-1-908857-78-1 (.epub edition) 978-1-908857-79-8 (.mobi edition) 978-1-908857-77-4 (PDF edition) DOI: 10.14296/220.9781908857774 (PDF edition) Institute of Latin American Studies School of Advanced Study University of London Senate House London WC1E 7HU Telephone: 020 7862 8844 Email: [email protected] Web: http://ilas.sas.ac.uk Typesetting by Thomas Bohm, User Design, Illustration and Typesetting. Cover image © Franklin Villavicencio. Contents List of illustrations v Notes on contributors vii Introduction: exceptionalism and agency in Nicaragua’s revolutionary heritage 1 Hilary Francis 1. ‘We didn’t want to be like Somoza’s Guardia’: policing, crime and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 21 Robert Sierakowski 2. ‘The revolution was so many things’ 45 Fernanda Soto 3. Nicaraguan food policy: between self-sufficiency and dependency 61 Christiane Berth 4. On Sandinista ideas of past connections to the Soviet Union and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 87 Johannes Wilm 5. Agrarian reform in Nicaragua in the 1980s: lights and shadows of its legacy 103 José Luis Rocha 6. The difference the revolution made: decision-making in Liberal and Sandinista communities 127 Hilary Francis 7. Grassroots verticalism? A Comunidad Eclesial de Base in rural Nicaragua 145 David Cooper 8. Nicaraguan legacies: advances and setbacks in feminist and LGBTQ activism 165 Florence E. Babb 9. Conclusion: exceptionalism and Nicaragua’s many revolutions 179 Justin Wolfe Index 185 iii List of illustrations Figure 1.1 ‘Courtesy and respect for the law are inseparable’. ‘A man who does not respect a woman is a coward. A man who does not respect a young female police officer (una muchacha policía) and does not follow her instructions is twice as cowardly and also an enemy of the law.’ (Tomás Borge). 29 3.1 Basic grain production, 1977–90 (in t). 67 5.1 Evolution in the size of farms by range (in percentages of land used for agriculture). 120 v Notes on contributors Florence Babb is Harrington Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in gender and sexuality as well as race and class in changing contexts in Latin America. Her publications include After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (University of Texas Press, 2001), The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories (Stanford University Press, 2011), and Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (University of California Press, 2018). Christiane Berth is Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Costa Rica. A historian of food politics and consumer history in global perspective, with a particular focus on Mexico and Central America, Dr Berth has published widely on the history of food politics in Nicaragua. Other recent works include a book on the history of the coffee trade between Germany and Central America; a chapter on Sandinista comics for the University of Pittsburgh Press; and an edited volume on the culture of Sandinismo in Nicaragua. David Cooper is a social anthropologist, and received his PhD from the department of anthropology at UCL in 2015. He has since held several postdoctoral positions, most recently the ESRC-funded ‘Politicised provision: development and welfare under Latin America’s new left’. His publications include ‘Grounding rights: populist and peasant conceptions of entitlement in rural Nicaragua’ (Social Analysis) and ‘Pentecostalism and the peasantry: domestic and spiritual economies in rural Nicaragua’ (Ethnos). He is currently teaching at the University of Bristol. Hilary Francis is a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Northumbria. Her doctoral research – on Nicaragua’s Contra War – drew on extensive oral history research with ex-combatants in Nicaragua. She is currently working on two postdoctoral projects: a history of the relationship between US aid and pesticide use in Nicaragua; and a collaborative study of the environmental and health impacts of the Masaya volcano from 1850 to the present. vii viii A NICARAGUAN EXCEPTIONALISM? José Luis Rocha is Senior Researcher at the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala and Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” in El Salvador, and associate Researcher with the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Philipps- Universität Marburg, Germany. His work focuses on issues relating to youth gangs, social movements, political analysis, and migration. He is a member of the editorial committee of the academic journal Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos (Costa Rica) and the magazine Envío. His last publications include the books Autoconvocados y conectados. Los universitarios en la revuelta de abril en Nicaragua (UCA publicaciones y UCA editores, 2019), El debate sobre la justica maya. Encuentros y desencuentros del pluralismo jurídico en la Guatemala del siglo XXI (EDUSAC, 2019), La desobediencia de las masas. La migración no autorizada de centroamericanos a Estados Unidos como desobediencia civil (UCA editores, 2018), and Expulsados de la globalización (IHNCA, 2011). Robert Sierakowski received his PhD in history from UCLA. His book Sandinistas: A Moral History is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. Dr Sierakowski is a history teacher and advisor in the Department of History, Trevor Day School. He is a former lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies. Fernanda Soto (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is the author of Ventanas en la Memoria: recuerdos de la Revolución en la Frontera Agrícola (UCA, 2011). Dr Soto is Projects Coordinator at the NGO Winds of Peace and a researcher at the Center for Global Education and Experience, Ausgburg University, USA. Johannes Wilm obtained his PhD from Goldsmiths College in 2013. His book Nicaragua, Back from the Dead? An Anthropological View of the Sandinista Movement in the Early 21st Century was published by New Left Notes in 2011. Wilm is currently affiliated with the Historical Studies section at the Department of Society, Culture and Identity at the University of Malmö. Justin Wolfe is a William Arceneaux Professor of Latin American History and Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow. He specializes in Central America, particularly post-colonial social and cultural history. His research interest include nation-formation, race and ethnicity, and the African Diaspora. His publications include Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Duke University Press, 2010) and The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Introduction: exceptionalism and agency in Nicaragua’s revolutionary heritage Hilary Francis n 10 January 2017, ten days before Donald Trump took his oath of office, Daniel Ortega was sworn in as President of Nicaragua for the fourth time. These two very different presidents both gave inauguration speechesO suffused with nationalism, but only one of them claimed that his country was exceptional. In his remarks to scattered crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump promised to make America great again (again), but in spite of his inflated jingoistic rhetoric, Trump is not, in fact, an American exceptionalist. He does not believe that his country is innately different, nor that accidents of geography or history have conspired to set the United States apart as a nation with a particular role in the world. It was Ortega, not Trump, who used his inauguration speech to emphasise, once more, his belief in Nicaragua’s exceptionalism, calling this small Central American country of six million people a ‘blessed’ nation.1 The contrast between the two indicates something fundamental about the nature of exceptionalism: it relies on a sense of a particular moral purpose. Trump rejects the concept because he rejects morality. For him, international politics is a zero sum game in pursuit of material resources. Therefore, the United States cannot be exceptional as long as other countries ‘are eating our lunch’.2 This logic leads him to conclude that the Iraq War was a bad idea because Americans did not ‘take the oil’ before getting out.3 Daniel Ortega, in contrast, asserts that Nicaragua is exceptional precisely because, in spite of an acute lack of material resources, the particular moral character of Nicaraguans allows them to overcome great odds. Claiming that Nicaragua has ‘the lowest crime rate in Latin America and one of the lowest on the planet’, Ortega argues that ‘These goals have been reached with limited material resources, because we have infinite moral 1 ‘Toma de