Plan Colombia and Beyond

The international relief and rebuilding funds that flooded Nicaragua after that earthquake were mostly stolen by Anastasio Somoza, the U.S.-backed dictator whose family had ruled since the 1930s, and who by then owned as much as a quarter of the country. This galvanized opposition to the regime, even among much of the church and the business community. The opposition coalesced behind what had been a small leftist guerrilla group, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which took power in July of 1979.

Peace was short-lived, though. The Sandinistas' victory alarmed Ronald Reagan, then the leading Republican candidate for the 1980 presidential elections, and the new government's leftward lurches alienated many of those in the country's establishment who had initially joined forces with the FSLN. The Reagan administration funded and equipped a large rightist guerrilla force, the contras, with the goal of toppling the Sandinistas. The ensuing civil war lasted until 1990 and cost about 20,000 lives.

The war was brought to an end by a presidential election in 1990 that the Sandinistas narrowly lost. Running each time with former President Daniel Ortega as its candidate, the FSLN proceeded to lose presidential elections to right-of-center candidates in 1996 and 2001. By then, Nicaragua had sunk to the status of the hemisphere's second-poorest country, after Haiti.

The country continued to suffer during the postwar period - this time not as a result of earthquakes, dictatorships, or war, but due to large-scale corruption. Arnoldo Alemán, Nicaragua's president between 1997 and 2002, reportedly stole as much as $100 million from Nicaragua's treasury. He continues to be a very powerful figure; even though he was condemned to twenty years in prison for corruption, he has been conditionally released for health reasons, and controls one of the largest political parties.

Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinistas carried out a spree of property confiscation before leaving power, entered into a power-sharing "pact" with his former archenemy Alemán in 1999, essentially guaranteeing that neither would seek to prosecute the other for corruption. What most Nicaraguans derisively refer to as "El Pacto" continues to dominate the country's politics. Ortega's and Aleman's combined political machines control the Congress, divide up key political posts, and install their supporters into dominance of the judiciary, the prosecutor's office, the elections tribunal, and other oversight bodies. They have made it extremely difficult for President Enrique Bolaños, a critic of the pacto, to govern. And of course, with their mutual impunity assured, they brazenly divide up the spoils of corruption. With the FSLN and the right in such a cozy, sleazy relationship today, many Nicaraguans wonder why 20,000 people had to give their lives in the 1980s.

This is a long story, and the city of Managua bears scars from every chapter. When I first visited Nicaragua as a college student in 1991, I recall seeing many shells of buidlings and uncleared rubble left over from the earthquake that had happened nineteen years earlier. Years of official theft, war and economic ruin had left what had been downtown looking like the 1972 disaster was much more recent.

Now, the rubble has been cleared. Other than the old national cathedral, a windowless shell on what had been Managua's main square, it is rare to see a half-ruined building. But in its place, especially in what was once downtown, are many empty spaces - weedy, overgrown lots. Some of the larger empty spaces have long since been occupied by squatters who built their own shacks on the empty properties; many of these are now established, dense, and very poor urban neighborhoods.

But the empty spaces, with their tall grass and mounds of garbage, are still visible everywhere. Driving near downtown at night, one can find oneself in total darkness - no streetlights, no buildings near the street - for hundreds of yards, passing through "dead zones" between urbanized areas.

I don't mean to give the impression that Managua is a post-apocalyptic horror. Much has been built there, especially during the relative economic boom of the past few years. Managua now has shopping malls and gated communities, with houses and lawns that resemble any U.S. suburb. The wealthy have turned their backs on the old city center and are making Managua into a dispersed, Los-Angeles style sprawl where one really needs a car to get around. ("A suburb without an urb," one Nicarguan colleague described it.)

But as one drives around, it is hard not to notice that the vast stretches of the city that have been "left behind" are far from abandoned. In fact, they're packed with people - the semi-employed majority who live in poverty, as do their many children. The informal economy rules: every intersection is thick with people selling whatever they can in the scorching mid-day heat. On the roads connecting Managua with other cities one finds, every kilometer or so, somebody by the side of the road with a shovel asking for change in return for having filled in a pothole. The prosperity one sees in a few corners of Managua - and evidenced by the past few years' high economic growth rates - has not translated significantly into improvement for the poor, such as gains in formal employment.

Amid the vendors and the empty lots, Managua's landscape is currently dominated by billboards, flags, painted signs and placards. It is election season - Nicaraguans will choose a new president on November 5 - and in a country with one of Latin America's highest voter-turnout rates, the campaign is very much on people's minds. It seems as though about half of the paid advertising space on Managua's streets is currently occupied by ads for political candidates, while radio and television are saturated with campaign commercials.

Many of these ubiquitous ads and commercials look quite sophisticated and expensive; the amount being spent on publicity would seem to befit a much wealthier country. There are four major candidates - one from each side of the Ortega-Alemán pacto, and two independent candidates, each a dissident from one of the parties to the pacto. The two pacto candidates, Ortega and Alemán's stand-in, José Rizo, clearly have more money and a much bigger advertising presence.

Ortega leads most polls, though the surveys vary widely and it is hard to predict what will happen. His hot pink and aqua blue FSLN billboards are everywhere promoting "reconciliation" and "peace" (Ortega's vice-presidential running mate is a wealthy man whose house Ortega confiscated for own use shortly after the Sandinistas took power, and Ortega has welcomed several old Somocistas and former contras into his campaign. The candidate has also repaired an old rift with Nicaragua's influential Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo.) He has been promising cheaper fuel prices and employment-creation projects with help from Hugo Chávez's government in Venezuela. Though he leads in polling, however, Ortega almost never appears with more than 30 to 35 percent support. Many analysts believe that, as a controversial and polarizing figure, he is unlikely to go beyond this hard core of backers. An electoral majority is not necessary to avoid a second round of voting; to do so, though, Ortega would have to defeat his nearest opponent by five or more percentage points. Few see that as likely.

Also everywhere are signs showing the face of Rizo, Alemán's ally, the pacto candidate of the right. Bright red posters show him with his arm raised and his finger pointed in the air like a statue of a 20th-century dictator. Slightly less visible, but still easy to find, are signs touting Eduardo Montealegre, a pro-business, anti-pacto dissident who has broken with Alemán, whom he served as finance minister.

The U.S. government has made clear its distaste not just for Daniel Ortega but for the entire pacto arrangement, and has implied rather clearly that Montealegre would be the president with whom it would most prefer to work. U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli has made headlines here with his openly critical statements about Ortega. The Bush administration has apparently made the calculation that implying a U.S. aid reduction under Ortega would convince voters to turn away from the candidate it opposes, instead of increasing support for him as has happened elsewhere in Latin America (Bolivia in 2002, for instance). This may have backfired, as it has allowed Ortega to play the nationalist card and to capitalize on President Bush's evident unpopularity.

Finally, and less visibly in the battle of billboards and posters, is Edmundo "Mundo" Jarquín, a former Inter-American Development Bank official and candidate of the center-left Sandinista dissidents. Jarquín started the campaign as the vice-presidential running mate of Herty Lewites, a popular former mayor of Managua and strong critic of the pacto whom Ortega did his utmost to push out of the picture. Lewites, however, died of a heart attack in July. Jarquín has sought to fill Lewites' shoes, bringing along one of the country's best known musicians, folksinger Carlos Mejía Godoy, as his running mate. The Sandinista dissidents have most of the country's intellectuals on their side, including many heroes of the FSLN's struggles of the 1970s and 1980s (among them poet Ernesto Cardenal and author Gioconda Belli). But they clearly have less campaign cash on hand and lack the connection to the masses, and the get-out-the-vote machinery, of the Ortega-dominated FSLN. The polls only occasionally put Jarquín above 20 percent.

Obviously, almost everyone with whom I spoke had something to say about the elections. I asked often why the pacto candidates were performing as strongly as they were, since so many associate the pacto with corruption and the hollowing out of the country's already-weak institutions. Part of the answer is simply money, both money to get people to the polls, and to carry out the same sort of election-season favor-buying that you see everywhere from Chicago to Chichicastenango. Some also said that many Nicaraguans simply crave a unity government instead of more of the political infighting that has paralyzed the country's politics. They may steal, the reasoning goes, but at least they will be able to get things done because they control everything.

Despite these apparent advantages, disgust with the pacto has kept the dissident candidates in the race. A second round is quite likely, and it will probably be between Ortega and somebody. If the matchup is Ortega and Rizo, the pacto will have uncontested control over the government, including the presidency that it lacked during Bolaños' term. U.S. relations will sour, and especially if Ortega wins, relations with Venezuela will become very warm. If Montealegre or Jarquín should win, U.S. relations will be better and aid levels - including about $35 million per year in Milliennium Challenge funds - would be sustained. However, the non-pacto president would face many of the same obstacles to governing that Bolaños has faced.

No matter the outcome, then, it is unwise to expect downtown Managua to rise again anytime soon.