Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs

POLITICS-NICARAGUA: Stumping for Development

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Aug 14 2006 (IPS) - A recent United Nations initiative is aiming to plant the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) firmly on the platforms of the campaign for Nicaragua’s Nov. 5 elections. The idea is to encourage candidates to build commitment towards a better future for the country, one of Latin America’ poorest.

Five presidential candidates are vying to run this Central American country, where 75 percent of the population survives on less than two dollars per day and 45 percent lives on less than one dollar per day, according to Georgina Muñoz, national liaison for the Coordinadora Civil, a coalition of more than 350 social movements, non-governmental organisations and other civil groups.

Nicaragua, population 5.1 million, ranked 112th on the 2005 U.N. Human Development Index.

Muñoz says that widespread poverty prevents almost one million children from attending primary school each year. Many of these youngsters swell the ranks of child workers – who now number more than 230,000.

To help address these challenges, U.N. representatives in Nicaragua are holding meetings with the parties and political alliances registered with the Supreme Electoral Council for the 2006 election campaign. Specifically, candidates have been asked to promote the MDGs and make human rights a priority in their platforms.

The MDGs were adopted in 2000 by all U.N. member states, which committed themselves to fight inequality and improve human development throughout the world by reaching the 2015 targets outlined in the Millennium Declaration.

The goals include reducing by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger, universalising primary education, promoting gender equality, cutting infant and maternal mortality rates, combating HIV, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.

But on the political front, Nicaragua is held hostage by a pact between the top two parties: the leftwing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the rightwing Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC), which have basically divvied up the political posts in the country’s public institutions between themselves, said Muñoz.

The Public Prosecutors’ Office, Comptroller General’s Office, Supreme Court, Congress, Superintendence of Public Services, Supreme Electoral Council, the courts and even the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office are currently controlled by members of the FSLN and the PLC.

According to a poll conducted by the international consulting firm Borge y Asociados, published in Nicaraguan papers Aug. 4, the FSLN is ahead in voter preference.

The study showed 31.4 percent of respondents backing the FSLN. This will be the fifth run for former president Daniel Ortega (1985-1990), who won his first bid in 1984, democratically consolidating the power that the Sandinistas had wrested from the Somoza dynasty in July 1979 through armed resistance.

He was unsuccessful in the 1990, 1996 and 2001 elections. This time around, Ortega is campaigning on a platform of national reconciliation and benefits for the poor, to whom he has promised subsidies, loans, free healthcare and education and agricultural materials and supplies.

Ortega’s olive branch to the private sector, with which he has been at loggerheads since 1979, is a policy geared towards a mixed economy and cheaper oil, based partly on a political-trade alliance with Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, Latin America’s oil powerhouse.

To avoid a runoff election, the winning candidate must take at least 40 percent of the vote, or 35 percent with a five-point margin on the second-place candidate.

The same Borge y Asociados poll showed 29.1 percent of respondents throwing their support behind Eduardo Montealegre, representing the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance.

The rightwing Montealegre comes from a private banking background, and cast his name in the ring after breaking in 2005 with the PLC. That party is still headed by former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2001), sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison for money laundering and corruption, but serving his time with special privileges.

Montealegre enjoys the support of the U.S. government of George W. Bush, the current administration of Enrique Bolaños (a former PLC member) and the business community.

However, his candidacy and chances of winning have been clouded by his alleged ties to a scandal involving the issuance of 500 million dollars in state bonds to cover the debts of failed private banks, among them a bank in which Montealegre was a major shareholder.

For its part, the PLC is fielding lawyer and manufacturer José Rizo Castellón, who ranked third in the poll, with 15.7 percent of declared voter support. Rizo co-founded the PLC with Alemán, and served as vice president to current president Bolaños up to November 2005, when he declared himself a presidential candidate.

His decision was questioned in political and diplomatic circles, as most of the PLC’s leaders and members have been accused of corruption and mismanaging public funds, although Rizo himself has not been named.

The number four candidate, with 15.2 percent ratings, is economist Edmundo Jarquín of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a break-away FSLN group.

Jarquín, a Sandinista lawmaker in the early 1990s, was the MRS vice presidential candidate until early July, when his running mate, former guerrilla fighter and businessman Herty Lewites – a driving force behind the movement – died suddenly of a heart attack.

The MRS leadership then put forward Jarquín as its presidential candidate, and added singer-songwriter Carlos Mejía Godoy, also a former FSLN member, to the ticket.

Jarquín lived abroad from 1992 to 2005 while working for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as a public policy specialist, and as such is a relative unknown to younger voters.

Bringing up the rear is another former Sandinista fighter: Edén Pastora. Under the banner of the fledgling Alternative for Change party, Pastora earned less than 1.1 percent of voter support in the Borge y Asociados poll.

Pastora earned fame in 1978 when he seized the Palacio Nacional and forced dictator Anastasio Somoza to release several guerrillas and political prisoners. In the early 1980s, he withdrew from the then-governing FSLN and took up arms against his former allies. In 2004 he ran for mayor of Managua, garnering less than five percent of the vote.