Without Venezuelan aid, the president can no longer buy the support of potential adversaries
RARELY has a political movement so young been blessed with a symbol so potent. In 2013 the Nicaraguan government began installing garishly coloured metal “trees of life” around Managua, the capital. Advertised as a gift to the people from Rosario Murillo, the first lady, the 140 sculptures cost $25,000 each to install. They consume $1m worth of electricity a year. The contract for maintaining them belongs to a company owned by a relative of the president, Daniel Ortega. So when demonstrators began thronging the city’s streets on April 18th, they were surrounded by fitting targets for their ire. Banding together, they tugged on chains to uproot Ms Murillo’s beloved trees (see picture)—and perhaps the country’s political future too.
Days after the protests began, one of the trees was still lying atop a roundabout. Passing cars honked in satisfaction at the subversive sight. Several young Nicaraguans sat on it as though it were a sofa; others scavenged along the ground for light bulbs to take as souvenirs. “It’s like [a piece of] the Berlin Wall,” said one. A nearby security guard speculated that the government was too afraid of the people’s wrath to clean up its own fallen monument.
The protests sprang up across the country after Mr Ortega announced an overhaul of public pensions, in which Nicaraguans would pay more to receive less. The government, along with goons doing its bidding, responded with a brutal show of force: live ammunition was used on unarmed demonstrators. Hundreds of people were injured, and according to a local human-rights group, at least 34 have been killed. It is still unclear whether police were ordered to open fire, and how many of the attacks were committed by uniformed security forces. But the government is doing its best to stop the public from finding out more: several media organisations were taken offline or had their signals scrambled. The dead include a journalist who was shot in the head while broadcasting on Facebook Live.
The ex-Marxist and his missus
The violence was particularly jarring in a country that has been a relative bastion of calm in a volatile region. Mr Ortega is no stranger to unrest: he led a left-wing revolution in the 1970s against the kleptocratic dictatorship of the Somoza family, and spent much of the next decade as president fending off American-backed insurgents. But since his return to power in 2006, both he and Nicaragua have been transformed.
After feuding with businesses, the church and the United States during his first stint in office, Mr Ortega reinvented himself as a conservative Catholic promising stability to his former adversaries. America has found him pleasingly pragmatic on migration and drug-trafficking, even though his anti-imperialist rhetoric and UN voting patterns mimic those of Venezuela and Cuba. To placate the church, he has strictly enforced one of the world’s toughest abortion laws. And he has won over business leaders with orthodox macroeconomic policies, even inserting a “permanent consensus-seeking dialogue” between the state and the private sector into the constitution. In practice, this gave big business predictable economic conditions and influence over policy in exchange for staying out of politics.
With his old opponents co-opted, Mr Ortega moved to undermine Nicaragua’s democracy and replace it with a mild cult of personality. He seized the electoral authority and supreme court, shut down opposition parties, rigged elections and abolished term limits. In 2016 he installed Ms Murillo as vice-president and put her in charge of most day-to-day governing, establishing a family dynasty reminiscent of the dictatorship he overthrew in 1979. The presidential couple feature on countless billboards, claim responsibility for every government project and seek to play the role of the nation’s parents. In Ms Murillo’s daily radio address, she not only touts public spending but, as one diplomat recalls, has even told citizens to wear socks when the evening was expected to be cold.
As Nicaraguan institutions shrivelled, Western governments withdrew aid. But rather than buckle to their demands, Mr Ortega sought patronage from a fellow autocrat in Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Between 2008 and 2015, Nicaragua bought $4.5bn of Venezuelan oil at discount prices. Venezuela then funnelled the money back as a loan to a Nicaraguan bank owned by the ruling party, which spent the cash on social projects for Mr Ortega’s supporters, free from legislative oversight.
Mr Ortega’s canny strategy has made Nicaragua an inconvenient case for liberal-minded observers. The country is both the least democratic in Central America and has enjoyed economic growth and low crime rates that are the envy of many of its neighbours. His example of authoritarianism has already spawned imitators: Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, was re-elected last year in a vote widely believed to have been fraudulent.
In the space of a week, however, the dependence of the Nicaraguan model on an external sponsor has been laid bare, just as Fidel Castro’s Cuba was after the fall of the Soviet Union. As Venezuela’s economy has collapsed, it can no longer afford to prop up allies. In 2016 Venezuela’s oil exports to Nicaragua dropped by two-thirds. In turn, Nicaraguan exports to Venezuela have fallen sharply since their peak in 2012.
Without Venezuela’s largesse, Mr Ortega can no longer maintain the public spending that kept dissent at bay. To curb a worsening deficit, he has already increased electricity prices by a double-digit percentage. His programme to hand out free zinc roofs to the poor now merely offers subsidised roofs. And the pension system—whose assets, according to the local newspaper La Prensa, have partly been invested in firms with ties to officials in the government and Mr Ortega’s party—is projected to run out of money in August. This shortfall forced the government to implement the cuts that set off the protests. After taking personal credit for all of Nicaragua’s successes during the past decade, the first couple will now be saddled with the blame for the failures to come.
On April 23rd several hundred thousand Nicaraguans marched through the streets of Managua, shouting “we are not afraid” and “Daniel and Somoza are the same.” In the sweltering tropical heat, old women poked their garden hoses through the front gates of their homes to refill the water bottles of passing youths. At one point, several people climbed a 15-metre-high billboard featuring the Ortegas, demolishing it as thousands cheered. According to Félix Maradiaga of the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies, a think-tank, the march was almost certainly the biggest protest in the country’s history.
Mr Ortega’s initial response only added fuel to the fire. On April 21st he claimed that the protests had been infiltrated by gangs and manipulated by unspecified “minority” forces. But the next day, he seemed to recognise his predicament, and said he would reverse the pension overhaul. Nonetheless, the demonstrations continued, suggesting that the pension fiasco was only one of the public’s gripes.
The president has now adopted a more conciliatory stance, pulling the police off the streets and calling for a national dialogue. However, business leaders doubt that he can restore the old status quo. “I don’t know what is happening…in three days they lost their minds,” one influential executive says of the government.
To restore confidence, the regime would have to include a wide range of social groups in any talks, such as indigenous and women’s organisations, farmers and, crucially, students. In less than a week a group of political-science students from the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua have become the country’s strongest opposition force. On April 23rd they diverted the planned path of the main march and led demonstrators on a 6km walk to the university, where a candlelit vigil was held for two students killed the previous night.
Inside the campus, protected by roadblocks to keep police away, students walk around in balaclavas to avoid identification and paramedics wear doctors’ masks. Some think the call for dialogue is a trap. “They want us to let our guard down,” says one student. But one of the leaders insists that the movement is not opposed to dialogue in principle. “We want a democratic solution. We don’t want war,” he says.
The students have called for Mr Ortega, who is 72, to resign immediately. Some business leaders want him to step aside before his term ends in 2021. However, the flash point in any negotiation is likely to be his choice of successor. If he insists on putting forward his wife—and on using his control of state institutions to ensure she wins—the protests are likely to swell.
For now, Mr Ortega still retains a firm hold on power. His about-face on the pension reform shows that unlike Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela, he is willing to beat a tactical retreat when he has overstepped. But now that Nicaragua must live within its means, the president can no longer expect to enjoy near-absolute power without facing forceful opposition. In that sense, the country’s second Ortega era has already come to a close.