Sandinistas Are in No Peril Despite Nicaraguans’ Anger

Among Latin Americans, Nicaraguans have a reputation for being an outspoken people. Just how candid they can be was made obvious to me the first time I came here in 1978, when the revolution that eventually toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza was beginning to gather momentum. Even then, a full year before Somoza fell, the hatred that Nicaraguans felt for him was clear. From this capital city to rural villages, people spoke openly of their contempt for a man whose family had turned Nicaragua into a fiefdom. They also made no attempt to hide their fear and mistrust of the National Guard, Somoza’s private army that helped prop up the dynasty for almost 45 years.

Since then, whenever I’ve been in Nicaragua I’ve tried to talk to as many common people as I can. I listen for a change in their attitude, for signs that the old hatred of dictatorship has been transferred from Somoza to President Daniel Ortega and his fellow comandantes de la revolucion .

It hasn’t happened yet.

But that should be no comfort to the Sandinistas, for the Nicaraguan people are angry, and very disillusioned. Their nation, especially the economy, is a shambles. Inflation last year was an estimated 650%. There are long lines at gasoline stations and shortages of the most basic foodstuffs. Everything from the telephone system to the waterworks seems to be falling apart because of a lack of spare parts.

The people blame the Sandinistas as much as the U.S.-sponsored contra rebels and their patron, Ronald Reagan. This was made clear in dozens of conversations that I had with all sorts of Nicaraguans--cabbies, maids, waiters, businessmen, secretaries, even government officials who are not militant members of the Sandinista party.

Even in the working-class barrio known as Riguero, a hotbed of anti-Somoza feeling before the revolution and the site of some of its fiercest street-fighting, it was hard to find anyone who had anything good to say about the present government. Finally I asked one man if there were any Sandinista loyalists left in Riguero. “Yes,” he replied, “the school principal.”

So I visited Maria Auxiliadora Navas in her office at the local elementary school, which the government has tried to make a showpiece of the revolution’s advances in education. She conceded that some people in Nicaragua are complaining.

“Maybe they thought the revolution would be easy,” she said. “Of course there are shortages, and there have been failures. But they forget we inherited a nation that was bankrupt after a war and several natural disasters. And the war is still going on.

“In time we will do better,” she insisted, “when our people are better prepared to run the country and have a stronger revolutionary consciousness--people educated at schools like this.”

That remark came back to me later when I met a husky, middle-aged man who had been a successful business executive when the revolution broke out, but went to work for the government afterward. Carlos Bohorquez is now the secretary general of the Nicaraguan Institute for Social Security and Welfare, whose programs were often mentioned when I asked people what was going well in revolutionary Nicaragua.

Bohorquez spent hours telling me, with pride and in impressive detail, about the institute’s health programs, day-care centers, programs to prevent juvenile delinquency, the pension system for senior citizens and even a program that subsidizes the cost of funerals for poor families. “We will help every Nicaraguan citizen who needs it, from the time he is born until he dies,” he said with a laugh.

Here, obviously, was an educated, well-trained man with a revolutionary consciousness. How did a businessman come to work for the Sandinistas?

“I could not be indifferent to what Somoza did to my country,” he said. “I could not be indifferent to the corruption and the theft, and I could not be indifferent to what he did to young men during the revolution.

“I did no fighting during the revolution,” he recalled quietly. “I did not pick up a rifle--I still don’t know how to use one. But I remember how terribly young boys were treated during the war against Somoza,” he said, using the term los muchachos to refer to the young men who battled the National Guard. (In those days few people called the rebels Sandinistas ; it was always los muchachos. ) “The guardsmen would drag boys out of their homes and shoot them if they even suspected them of being with the rebellion,” Bohorquez recalled. “I could not be indifferent to all that.”

Neither could the rest of Nicaragua. That’s why the Sandinistas won. And until the bitter memories of that bloody rebellion--and of the 45 years of Somoza and his National Guard--fade away, it will take more than gasoline lines and food shortages to make the Nicaraguan people turn against los muchachos.