The era of Somoza family rule was characterized by rising inequality and political corruption, strong US support for the government and its military,[19] as well as a reliance on US-based multinational corporations.
(Many observers attributed the result to president Daniel Ortega’s failure to abolish military conscription — ed.).
The Nicaraguan Agrarian Reform developed into four phases: In 1985, the Agrarian Reform distributed 950 square kilometres (235,000 acres) of land to the peasantry.
“They destroy ambulances; they kill drivers; they kill health workers and education workers.”, “We lived through this in the years after the victory of the revolution,” Ortega continued. This had not been planned beforehand; it truly happened at the grassroots.
Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. The Left has many more reasons to denounce the policies of the regime.
[40] As early as 1980–1981 an anti-Sandinista movement, the Contrarrevolución (Counter-revolution) or just Contras, was forming along the border with Honduras. Wage increases were limited and the bosses recieved fiscal incentives in the form of lower taxation. Ortega’s central aims in that alliance were to reduce the percentage needed to win the presidential elections on the first round, divvy up between their two parties the top posts in all state institutions [such as the Electoral Council, the Court of Auditors and the Supreme Court] and guarantee security to the FSLN leaders’ personal properties and businesses [acquired during and after the piñata].
The "Esquipulas II Accord" emerged from this and was signed in Guatemala City by the five presidents on 7 August 1987. Such an alliance should have been rejected.
Nor did they promote active citizen participation in the economic and political decision-making processes.
And the US empire is hellbent restoring the lost privileges of its loyal oligarchic allies. It placed limits that were highly detrimental to the revolutionary process.
After the importance of universal socialized healthcare, the other theme that Daniel Ortega stressed the most in his speech was how fundamental peace must be for the country to advance.
Well, productive activity would collapse, and many people in our country would go hungry and die, as billions of people across the planet do,” the FSLN leader added.
The public sector in both agriculture and manufacturing was reduced, the public banking sector dismantled and the State’s monopoly on foreign trade ended. In the 13 years since the Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007 through democratic elections, Ortega boasted, the FSLN government has built 19 new hospitals, 18 regional health centers, 452 neighborhood health offices, and 128 maternal homes, where pregnant women with few resources or from rural areas can go to live and/or receive free medical attention. the Sandinista Assembly and the FSLN Congress itself, were replaced with an assembly whose participants were mainly the leaders of the grassroots organizations loyal to Ortega. It sparked tremendous anger among the liberal opposition as well as among the population. Nicaragua has the fifth-highest gender-equality rating in the world, and the smallest gender gap in all of the Americas. Land and businesses of the Somoza regime were expropriated, the old courts were abolished, and workers were organized into Civil Defense Committees. Somoza had developed an almost semifeudalist rural economy with few productive goods, such as cotton, sugar and other tropical agricultural products. So imagine what “it means to manage an economy like ours, so small, so fragile, attacked by the empire,” he continued.
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