Sandinistas Seize All Properties of 3 Dissenting Coffee Growers

In a major conflict with Nicaragua’s private business sector, the Sandinista government Wednesday decreed the nationalization of all real estate owned by three prominent coffee growers who are forceful critics of its state-oriented economic policy.

The move was part of a Sandinista effort to weather a new outburst of inflation, labor unrest and farmer protests that have shaken the revolutionary government as it approaches an election campaign.

Jaime Wheelock, minister of agrarian reform and a member of the ruling nine-man Sandinista directorate, announced the expropriations after the union of private coffee growers broke ranks with state coffee producers and issued a list of economic demands unacceptable to the government.

The growers dispossessed by the decree are leaders of the Nicaraguan Union of Coffee Growers who spoke at a stormy meeting last Sunday. They are Arnoldo Aleman, president of the union; Nicolas Bolanos, a member of its board of directors, and Jaime Cuadra, president of the union’s chapter in the city of Matagalpa.

Wheelock said the three men “adopted attitudes of confrontation” to discourage production of Nicaragua’s most valuable export crop. He claimed that they spoke for growers who are paying low wages to farm workers and abusing government credits to speculate against the national currency.

The expropriations were the first of major consequence since Nicaragua’s largest sugar mill was seized last July. They came after months of government promises to stop state takeovers in an effort to woo private business support for a severe austerity program of recovery from the seven-year war against the U.S.-supported Contras.

But Wheelock said that the coffee growers had crossed the line between economic and political protest. “While we were calling for conciliation, they were calling for anarchy and chaos,” he declared.

“The only way this government knows how to react to criticism is to destroy its critics,” said Bolanos, who owns three farms and a coffee mill. “In some cases they kill us, in others they put us in jail. In this case, they are confiscating us.”

Private growers are demanding that the government abolish a 40% tax on coffee exports. In his speech Sunday, Bolanos voiced support for opposition parties in the elections next February and ridiculed Wheelock as “the biggest and worst coffee grower in Nicaragua,” a reference to the minister’s control of the state farming sector.