NICARAGUA: Chamorro Leaves Government with the People Behind Her

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Roberto Fonseca L.

MANAGUA, Jan 7 1997 (IPS) - Nicaragua’s outgoing Violeta Barrios de Chamorro will end her six year term in office this week with the highest popularity rating since she came to power on April 25, 1990, despite the continuing poverty and unemployment.

The most recent CID-Gallup poll showed 71 percent of Nicaraguans had a favourable opinion of Chamorro, on the eve of President-elect Arnoldo Aleman’s takeover.

In 1990, the CID-Gallup figures showed only 56 percent of Nicaraguans approved of the leader.

“This is an emotional opinion, a message where they tell her (Chamorro) that she is an excellent woman and as she is going, she is pardonned on personal grounds rather than a positive evaluation of her leadership,” Carlos Denton, CID-Gallup director told IPS.

Chamorro, a housewife who came to political life as widow of the anti-Somoza leader Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, led the country successfully through a triple transition: from war to peace, from a centralised to free market and from an authoritarian regime to a democratic government.

And she did this leaving her personal stamp, of excellent hostess, a good sense of humour, tolerant mother and honest leader behind her.

Indeed, she and her family became practically a representation of the nation, for her husband was murdered and her children were divided between the Contra and Sandinista camps.

“Dona Violeta managed to put herself above the mechanisms and snares of power, with good grace, a deal of craftiness, and more intelligence than many would like to believe,” said Sergio Ramirez, writer and former presidential candidate from a Sandinista faction.

“Her role was different, discretionary, more of head of State than head of government. And she showed that in order to govern it is not arrogance that is needed, but simplicity,” he added.

The people of Nicaragua recognise she played a transcendental role in the pacification of the country, achieving the demobilisation of more than 20,000 contras, and later, the withdrawal of 85,000 army troops.

They also acknowledge she put an end to hyperinflation, taming it from 13,490.3 percent in 1990 to 12.1 percent in 1996.

Similarly, that the national economy registered an annual growth rate of five percent in 1996, and that foreign debt fell from 11 billion dollars to 3.5 billion due to a successful policy of debt cancellation and renegotiation.

However, the debt is still a heavy burden for the national economy. The servicing of this swallows up 250 million dollars each year.

“I feel happy to leave a united, reconciled country. A country very different to the other,” Chamorro told Nicaraguan newspaper “El Semanario.”

“Thanks be to God I am leaving behind a country different from the one I received, that “nacatamal” (a sort of pork filled pasty), as I like to call it, full of chili peppers, smells and bad-feeling,” she added.

According to the CID-Gallup poll, which surveyed 1,200 people nationwide, nearly five of every 10 Nicaraguans qualified Chamorro’s leadership as “good” or “very good.”

They say her achievements included making peace, the elimination of obligatory military service, economic improvements, and leaving behind a democratic nation where there are no political prisoners nor press censorship.

They also credited her with having assured democratic elections and the trasparent change from one elected government to another. However, the majority considered that “little” or “nothing” had been done to resolve two crucial problems: unemployment and poverty.

According to official data, when Chamorro assumed the presidency, 44.3 percent of Nicaraguans were unemployed, a percentage which now stands at 52.8 percent.

And poverty is unofficially estimated at more than 60 percent of the urban population, between poverty and indigence. In rural areas the figure is closer to 70 percent.

The outgoing leader, however, plays down the importance of these social problems.

“Poverty and unemployment were around in Somoza’s time and under Sandinism, what happens is that now they are more noticeable,” she said.

These problems will be bequeathed to the right-wing Arnoldo Aleman, and at the same time, the Nicaraguan people are also questioning government corruption, the weak justice system and the only slight advances in the solution of the property problem.

There are sectors who criticise the amount of power she handed over to her son-in-law, Antonio Lacayo, when he became Presidency Minister, along with the co-government with the Sandinistas.

However, commemorative plaques and emotional farewells show that most sectors of the nation and the international community are aware of the historical role played by the woman who referred to her Central American colleagues as “my boys.”

“The government which is about to end under the presidency of Violeta Chamorro will be recorded as one of the most extraordinary in the history of this century; and the figure of the president will be something to remember,” concluded Ramirez.