6. The difference the revolution made: decision-making in Liberal and Sandinista communities

Hilary Francis

On returning to office in 2007, the FSLN introduced a range of social programmes, which provided farm animals, roofing and other goods to poor rural families. At the local level these schemes were initially administered by the Consejos de Poder Ciudadano (Citizen Power Councils, or CPCs), community-level committees made up of local residents. Opponents allege that the CPCs brought centralisation, politicisation and unprecedented interference into Nicaraguans’ daily lives.¹ Most commonly, the CPCs have been described as a means of establishing a clientelistic relationship between poor Nicaraguans and the FSLN.²

This chapter provides a detailed account of decision-making structures in two rural communities, where the evidence bears out many of the critics’ charges. In both the communities surveyed here, social programmes have been specifically targeted at non-Sandinistas, and this targeting has led some traditional Liberal voters to vote Sandinista for the first time. (Historically most of the right-wing vote in Nicaragua has belonged to parties which identify as Liberal, so the word has a distinct connotation in the Nicaraguan context.) But while the poaching of Liberal voters occurred in both the communities described here, the FSLN’s social programmes worked differently in the two villages. FSLN officials confronted two very different sets of social and political structures, a product of the two communities’ diverse experience of Nicaragua’s recent past. The revolution did make a difference, in the sense that the present is not the same as the past because of the events of 1979–90. It also created difference, in the sense that it caused previously similar communities to take very different ideological paths, and develop very different cultures of community decision-making.

1 S. Prado, ‘The mettle of our civil society is going to be put to the test’, Envío, no. 307, Feb. 2007; W. Miranda, ‘Aprueban los gabinetes de Rosario Murillo’, Confidencial, 21 Feb. 2013, R. Montoya, ‘Contradiction and struggle under the leftist phoenix: rural Nicaragua at the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution’.

2 K. Bay-Meyer, ‘Do Ortega’s citizen power councils empower the poor in Nicaragua?’; S. Prado, Entre los CDM y los CPC; J. Howard and L. Serra Vasquez, ‘The changing spaces of local governance in Nicaragua’.

This chapter looks at two rural communities in the north of Nicaragua, less than 40 kilometres apart. One, here called ‘El Junco’, was a bastion of support for the Sandinista government during the 1980s. The other, ‘Potrero’, was a stronghold for the anti-Sandinista Contra forces. This chapter shows that the legacy of the revolution means that El Junco has a far stronger tradition of community decision-making than Potrero. However, the effect of this revolutionary legacy is not wholly positive. El Junco’s stronger ties with the FSLN have meant that central government interference and control has been felt more keenly in El Junco than Potrero in the years since 2007.

Revolution, war and neoliberalism in El Junco and Potrero, 1979–2007

The inhabitants of El Junco first made contact with the Sandinistas in the late 1970s. Some community members were involved with progressive elements in the Catholic Church, and they attended religious retreats which led to their increased politicisation and opposition to the Somoza dictatorship. As a result of these contacts, religious meetings (with some political content) began to take place in the community. These were dangerous because they were forbidden by the Jueces de Mesta, which represented the Somoza state in the community. Nonetheless, those who were involved in this clandestine activity believe that this early organisation actually kept the community safe from harm:

These religious meetings were regularly attended by 35 to 45 community members and on occasion passing Sandinista guerrillas also came to observe. This early activism provided a reference point for community activism after the revolution, and a foundation for the belief that, despite apparent difficulties and dangers, being organised actually kept the community safe. Much of the land in El Junco belonged to a single landowner who was a supporter of the Somoza regime. After the triumph of the revolution in July 1979, these lands were expropriated and a state farm was established there. In addition, a local Sandinista Defence Committee was formed. El Junco’s current community leader remembers the work of organisation during the 1980s in glowing terms: ‘We were united, with a single purpose: production and defence. At that time we were more organised than now ... there was more political consciousness.’⁴ For others more actively involved in those first years, however, the picture was not so rosy: ‘At the beginning it was difficult, because people were afraid. And then when rumours about the counterrevolution started, it was worse. The whole thing nearly fell apart because people were scared.’⁵

3 Interview, Juan Carlos Centeno, July 2015. All names have been changed.

4 Interview, Augusto Zeledón, July 2015.

In spite of these difficulties, a strong tradition of local decision-making was forged in El Junco. In 1984 the state farm was made into a cooperative, which led to more support for devolved community decision-making. Training was provided in the theory and practice of democratic structures: how to hold a meeting and a vote; the standard roles and responsibilities for a committee’s secretary, treasurer and chair. Most importantly, consistent financial support allowed community members the space and time to develop these structures. The new cooperative had a full time adviser from UNAG (Union Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos, a farmers’ union) and the state also paid cooperative members’ full-time salaries.⁶

In Potrero, the history of community decision-making in the 1970s and 1980s is harder to reconstruct. Those members who have lived in the village since the 1970s tend to be virulently anti-Sandinista and reluctant to recognise any benefit at all that might be associated with the revolution. This position was not always so entrenched: the village was home to a Sandinista ‘political school’ in the early 1960s, shortly after the FSLN was formed, and one of the village’s more prominent families was actively involved in supporting the Sandinista guerrillas in the 1970s.⁷ In the period immediately after the revolution, local ties with the Sandinistas were broken. The reasons for this are complex, but the change was in part a result of anger about some of the land confiscations that took place in the area, as well as a feeling that local support for the Sandinistas had not been adequately repaid.⁸ As early as 1980 some community members had begun to support the fledgling Contra movement.⁹

In Potrero, as in El Junco, a cooperative was established in 1984. However, this new structure did nothing to embed a local commitment to community decision-making. Community member Alejandro Palacios explains:

5 Interview, Juan Carlos Centeno, July 2015.

6 Interview, Augusto Zeledón, July 2015.

7 Interview, Gregorio Flores, May 2012. The information about the Sandinista political school comes from a secondary source, but citing it here would reveal the location of ‘Potrero’.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Interview, Alejandro Palacios, July 2015.

Palacios was imprisoned by the Sandinistas for several years in the 1980s because of his support for the Contras in Potrero, so his testimony is in some ways problematic, since he was probably involved in organising the violence that made the settlers ‘a bit scared’. It may be that the cooperative in Potrero had more government support than this account suggests. Even if it did, it is clear that no tradition of community organisation was established, because the settlers came from elsewhere and were quickly forced to leave the area. The Contras and their supporters had their own clandestine organisation in the community, but these structures were more hierarchical and solely concerned with the organisation of the war effort. After 1990, the community began to organise and a committee was established to manage the maintenance of the water supply, a new initiative supported by a US charity. Still, there was nothing in this post-war experience equivalent to the time and space residents of El Junco had gained from the revolution – time and space that allowed them to develop their own tradition of community organisation.

In El Junco, the community’s decision-making structures were challenged by the transition which followed the Sandinistas’ defeat in the 1990 elections. These structures were now charged with working with, and for, a right-wing, anti-Sandinista government. El Junco resident Famnuel Centeno explains:

Despite these fears, the community in El Junco started to organise again from about 1993. The new effort was prompted by intervention from the (Sandinista) municipal government, which was trying to revive the cooperative movement. As for so many Sandinista-allied movements in these years, the end to the war removed the need for absolute unquestioning unity, and multiple fault lines and divisions began to appear. In the 1980s El Junco had one cooperative, but in the organisational revival of the mid 1990s three different cooperatives were formed. One comprised native-born community members, another was for settlers who had arrived in the 1980s. A third cooperative for women was subsequently formed, because they felt their voices were not being heard in either of the existing structures. These divisions notwithstanding, the community remained overwhelmingly Sandinista, and this shaped local decision-making even after the Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections:

11 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

12 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

This dominance at the community level was facilitated by the fact that El Junco was part of a municipality which voted Sandinista; in fact, the municipal government has always been Sandinista. Similarly, Liberal Potrero was part of a municipality that voted Liberal at every election from 1990 (when municipal elections were first introduced) until 2012, when the FSLN achieved an unprecedented dominance in the municipal elections (amid allegations of widespread fraud).¹³ This changing relationship with their respective municipal authorities would become crucial for both communities when the FSLN returned to power.

‘They don’t think any of it’s important’: community organisation in Potrero since 2007

When Daniel Ortega and the FSLN returned to government in January 2007, the new administration made community organisation an absolute priority. The third decree issued by Ortega on his first day in office made sweeping changes to Nicaragua’s structures for local governance. Decree 03-2007 announced the government’s intention to ‘facilitate genuine participation of citizens and citizen democracy via direct democracy’.¹⁴ This participation would be organised by the CPCs which comprised 16 members, each with a particular responsibility. As well as providing a focus for community deliberations, the councils were to oversee the management of the FSLN’s social programmes. A key component of these was the Bono Productivo Alimentario (or the Productive Food Bonus), known colloquially in Nicaragua as the ‘bono’. It comprised a grant of a pig or cow, chickens and seeds. It has been an important component in the FSLN government’s attempts to reduce poverty in Nicaragua, but it is also a tool for winning over anti-Sandinistas and increasing support for the FSLN.¹⁵

From the outset, this effort to change Nicaragua’s political landscape was vigorously resisted by the Sandinistas’ opponents. In 2008, before beginning research in Potrero for the first time, I visited the Liberal mayor who led the municipal government that governs the town. Press articles about the failure of the CPCs were prominently displayed his office walls. I was given the name of the ‘coordinator’ in Potrero, Alejandro Palacios, who was in fact the coordinator of the Junta Comunal (or community council) which had operated in the village before the Sandinistas returned to power. Palacios told me himself that there was no CPC in Potrero, but it subsequently transpired this was not the case, but that its coordinator was a Sandinista from another community who rarely visited Potrero. In 2009 I carried out interviews with every household in Potrero, but found only one person who would admit to being part of the 16-member CPC.¹⁶

13 ‘La violencia electoral en Nicaragua empezó en 2012’, La Prensa, 19 Nov. 2017.

14 La Gaceta: Diario Oficial, no. 7, 10 Jan. 2007, 246.

15 P. Kester, Informe evaluativo (2007–2008): Programa Productivo Alimentario (PPA) Hambre Cero.

16 Interview, Marvin Talavera, Mar. 2009. This does not mean that no one else had agreed to be listed a member of the CPC, at least on paper. Rather, it is indicative of the stigma attached to being associated with Sandinista programmes in Potrero. Gladys Hernández, who is cited below, was also involved briefly in the first iteration of the CPC, but she did not admit this to me until 2015.

There was considerable underlying tension in the community because of the strength of anti-Sandinista feeling, and for that reason the FSLN’s political structures were practically non-existent. Despite this, the FSLN’s social programmes functioned reasonably well. In 2009 five women from the community benefited from the bono. The programme requires that participants have at least one manzana of their own land where they can keep the animals, which excludes the poorest.¹⁷ In general, therefore, the beneficiaries were certainly not well off, but equally not the poorest in the community either: one ran a small shop and another had some support from relatives resident in the United States. The considerable stigma attached to cooperation with the Sandinistas meant that only the more confident community members felt able to take advantage of the programme in its early years. The reluctance of the community also meant that benefits often passed through familial networks – one of the first beneficiaries was a Liberal from a Liberal family, but she was also the niece by marriage of the Sandinistas’ municipal political secretary.

Although control of these social programmes fell to the Sandinistas, it was clear that political control in the community still remained in the hands of the Liberals in 2007–12. In rural Nicaragua, community leaders have significant power, because a letter with their signature is required for all kinds of contacts with the municipal government, including requests for funds or for permission to chop down trees for construction. As long as the municipal government remained Liberal, these kinds of requests continued to go to Palacios, rather than to the CPC coordinator. In 2009, Palacios made it clear to me that he would take immediate (unspecified) action if the CPC coordinator ‘presumed’ to give anyone permission to chop down trees in Potrero.¹⁸ Such fears were certainly misplaced, since the Liberal municipal government had no intention of dealing with the CPC.

According to the leaders of the Junta Comunal (the Liberal-era community council which remained the de facto authority until the Sandinistas took the municipality in the elections of 2012), the decision-making structures of Potrero were fully democratic between 1990 and 2012: the committee was elected by the whole community and regular meetings were held. In reality though, community participation was of a limited and particular kind. In the house-to-house survey I carried out in 2009, respondents were asked how community leaders were chosen, and whether regular meetings took place. These questions were most often met with blank stares and professions of ignorance, sometimes coupled with the response that the Junta Comunal handled those things.

17 Kester, Informe evaluativo, 15. A manzana is equal to 6987.4 square metres.

18 Informal conversation, Alejandro Palacios, Mar. 2009.

Despite this weak democratic structure, the community was more than capable of acting together in pursuit of shared goals. One evening in 2009, I happened to mention to Palacios that I was using a GPS to make a map of the community. He asked if it could be used to measure the pipes used for the community’s water supply as the municipality had asked the Junta to supply information about the exact quantity of pipe needed for a replacement. I said it could and we agreed to take measurements the next day. At 7.30 am the next morning I woke up to find that most of Potrero’s male population had assembled, with machetes, ready to help clear the brush that had grown around the pipes so that we could take accurate measurements. The efficiency of the operation was particularly surprising to me: I was more accustomed to the community structures of El Junco, which were certainly more democratic, but where a similar water project had been held up for years, in part because of a lack of action from some community members. Many of the men from Potrero fought with the Contras during the war, and the Contra forces were subject to a strict disciplinary regime, far more absolute and hierarchical than the equivalent structures of the Sandinista army.¹⁹ It seems likely, therefore, that the legacy of that experience partially explains this greater level of hierarchy – and efficiency – in community activity in Potrero.

In 2012 the uneasy coexistence of CPC-led social programmes and political control by the Liberal Junta Comunal came to an abrupt end. The Sandinistas won the municipal government elections in the municipality for the first time since 1990. Potrero is one of the most Liberal communities in this predominantly Liberal municipality, and on the day of the elections there was substantial conflict. A dispute arose because some of the ballot boxes containing Liberal votes were allegedly discarded in the community before the rest of the boxes had been taken to the municipal centre. There was little doubt in Potrero that the ballot boxes had been dumped. One resident who sympathised with the Sandinistas conceded that this had happened, but argued that it did not matter, because the count took place in Potrero before the votes were taken into town.²⁰ Community members forcibly tried to prevent the ballot boxes from leaving and the electoral officials had to be escorted away by riot police.

For Alejandro Palacios the presence of riot police is clear proof that the election itself was fraudulent:

19 This difference is frequently noted by former Contra combatants. In an interview for a different study one combatant recalled that during the war ‘we heard on the radio the way a [Sandinista] subaltern would respond with swear words to his superior – “why don’t you go in yourself you son of whatever” – when he told him to go ... When he said to him “go through the entrance, Franco” [the response would be] “why don’t you come here and go through yourself?” In the Contra you didn’t see that.’ Interview, Santiago Estrada, May 2012.

20 Nora Rodríguez, informal conversation, July 2015.

One might expect to see even greater levels of conflict and polarisation in Potrero as a result of the conflict over the election – but this is not quite what happened. A new community leader was named: Efraín Flores, a Sandinista who had recently moved to the village. Now that the municipality head was Sandinista, Flores became the key conduit between the community and the municipal government, taking on the role previously occupied by Palacios. Although the stalwart anti-Sandinistas were further alienated by the events of 2012, others were won over by the Sandinistas’ ongoing social programmes. At the same time, the climate of fear and stigma that prevented many from cooperating with the Sandinista programmes began to abate a little. Gladys Hernández, who had briefly been a member of the CPC back in 2007, began to participate in the FSLN’s structures again in 2015. She reflected on the change:

Of course, tensions have not disappeared completely: the continuing delicacy of such matters is evident in the lengths to which Hernández goes to avoid using the word ‘Sandinista’ in her account of her involvement. But even the hard-core Liberals concede that the Sandinista programmes have led some people in Potrero to change their political allegiance. For the stalwarts the shift is difficult to comprehend:

In Potrero it is clear that Sandinista social programmes have been used as a political tool – and a very effective one – to win support for the FSLN. But what of the critics’ other charges?²⁴ Is there a greater level of top-down control in community level governance? Are decision-making structures interfering in people’s daily lives in an unprecedented way?

21 Interview, Alejandro Palacios, July 2015.

22 Interview, Gladys Hernández, July 2015.

23 Interview, Ernesto Rugama, July 2015.

24 I am referring here to the criticisms of the CPC cited in the introduction to this chapter: Prado, ‘The mettle of our civil society’; Miranda, ‘Aprueban los gabinetes de Rosario Murillo’; Montoya, ‘Contradiction and struggle’; Bay-Meyer, ‘Do Ortega’s citizen power councils empower the poor in Nicaragua?’; Prado, Entre los CDM y los CPC; Howard and Serra Vasquez, ‘The changing spaces of local governance’.

In Potrero, the answer is mainly no. This is partly because the government has changed the format of community structures so many times. In 2013 the CPCs were discarded in favour of the Gabinetes de la Familia, Comunidad y Vida (or Cabinets for the Family, Community and Life).²⁵ Critics have voiced a particular concern that the new Gabinetes would have the power to interfere in private family life.²⁶ In both Potrero and El Junco this fear was misplaced because by 2015 the Gabinetes existed in name only and had little or no impact on how the communities were governed. In fact, at that stage, decision-making in both communities was in practice coordinated by the Comités de Liderazgo Sandinista (or Sandinista Leadership Committees, CLS). These committees have existed since 2007, but in both communities by 2015 they had taken on the functions originally charged to the CPCs: they allocated the bono and the zinc roofing distributed by the government, and they acted as intermediaries between the communities and the municipal government. Although the CPCs were always dominated by Sandinistas in both communities, the government was at least rhetorically committed to promoting the CPCs as apolitical organisations which valued the participation of all.²⁷ By 2015, the de facto situation was that all key decisions were made by an openly and exclusively Sandinista body.

Nonetheless, in Potrero in 2015 there was little evidence of absolute Sandinista control. The existence of a strong anti-Sandinista constituency meant that even though the political secretary of the CLS controlled the flow of goods and services to the community, he still remained extremely cautious in his dealings with community members. All other interviewees in Potrero and El Junco had a litany of complaints about the nature of local governance structures, the inadequacy of other community members’ participation and the mistakes made by regional and national government officials. In contrast, Potero’s political secretary, Efraín Flores, displayed a tight-lipped, forced enthusiasm for everything and everybody. ‘To do this work here you have to be everyone’s friend,’ he explained. ‘I have to make little jokes, all that, these people like me a lot.’²⁸ As both a newcomer and a Sandinista, Flores’ position was tenuous. During moments of crisis, like the elections of November 2012, his power could be backed up by riot police and the Sandinista state’s monopoly of violence. Most of the time, however, Flores was on his own, and the precariousness of Sandinista control meant that he had to tread very carefully.

25 ‘Gabinetes de la Familia, la Comunidad y la Vida profundizarán protagonismo y productividad de la Persona’.

26 J. Jiménez, ‘El Código de la Familia es el último eslabón de un proyecto de control social’, Envío, no. 398, May 2015.

27 Héctor M. Cruz, ‘Los CPC en Nicaragua: un análisis sobre la articulación, el diseño y la implementación del Poder Ciudadano’..

28 Interview, Efraín Flores, July 2015.

The Sandinistas’ tenuous control was partly a result of the persistence of anti-Sandinista feeling in Potrero. It also had to do with the community’s limited interest in, and experience of, democratic decision-making and participation. In the 2009 house-to-house survey, questions about community-wide meetings prompted more blank stares. The Junta Comunal was in charge at the time and Alejandro Palacios insisted that meetings did take place, just as Efraín Flores was adamant that they were happening under the Sandinistas in 2015.²⁹ The problem was that, in the main, community members had little interest in such activities. Gladys Hernández feels the fault lies with the community itself:

This lack of participation makes it difficult for decision-making structures in Potrero to have much power. Equally, though, there is no real expectation that community members have a right to be consulted. This lack of a democratic tradition perhaps partially explains the surprisingly muted reaction to power shifts in the community since 2012. In El Junco, in contrast, the revolution left a legacy of democratic participation and community decision-making, and as a result, the community’s interaction with the FSLN government since 2007 has been very different indeed.

‘The day the asambleas are lost, it will be the end of the world’: community organisation in El Junco since 2007

In 2015 interviewees in both El Junco and Potrero had a strong perception that their communities were apathetic and participation in decision-making was dwindling. For Augusto Zeledón, the political secretary in El Junco, the change was obvious but the cause was obscure:

There was an acute sense in El Junco that participation was falling and people did not care, but in relative terms the tradition of community decision-making was still extremely strong. By most standards the 50 per cent attendance rate that Zeledón reports is not at all bad, particularly since the large number of organisations in the community meant that meetings were frequent and the burden of participation was high:

29 Interview, Alejandro Palacios, July 2015. Interview, Efraín Flores, July 2015.

30 Interview, Gladys Hernández, July 2015.

31 Interview, Augusto Zeledón, July 2015.

Growing apathy was also related to the passage of time. For the older generation of community leaders, all of whom are devout Sandinistas who lived through the war in El Junco, the experience of the 1980s created an unshakeable commitment to community work and to the FSLN, one that is not always shared by their sons and daughters. In recent years, the FSLN has tried to ensure that the younger generation takes up positions of leadership at the local level, but this policy has failed. This is partly because most young people do not have the time nor the financial resources to carry out this voluntary work. Community members in El Junco, however, believe that it is also because younger people don’t have the same commitment to political work, because they did not live through the revolution and the war.

The younger people agreed with this assessment. Rafaela Castillo, who is a member of the CLS and coordinator of the Sandinista Youth in the community, explained that ‘We’ve tried to involve more young people, but the young people like having fun rather than serious things.’³⁴ Nonetheless, for a significant minority of this younger generation, community activism continued to matter, and the legacy of the revolution informed and shaped their involvement too:

32 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

33 Interview, Augusto Zeledón, July 2015.

34 Interview, Rafaela Castillo, July 2015.

35 Ibid.

The importance of this legacy, even for the younger generation, is clear in the community’s attitude to asambleas, or community-wide meetings. In spite of widespread concern about declining participation, and multiple problems related to the practical functioning of decision-making structures, all members considered the asambleas to be extremely important. Famnuel Centeno was not directly involved in the CLS and he was a child during the 1980s. Nonetheless, he considers the survival of the asambleas to be paramount:

Because of this deeper engagement with politics, the actions of the FSLN government have had a much greater impact in El Junco, not all of it positive. Greater community activity means that government directives can have a considerable, often unforeseen, effect on the delicate political balance within the community. In July 2015, shortly before the interviews for this study were carried out, the FSLN government distributed the latest tranche of zinc roofing and bono in El Junco and Potrero. In both communities a list of beneficiaries was drawn up by the political secretary of the CLS – and in both places officials from Managua came to check their choices and made changes to those lists. In Potrero this led to some grumbling about the fact that the Sandinistas ‘lied’, and political secretary Efrain Flores conceded (in a characteristically mild way) that the changes had caused him some problems.³⁷ In El Junco, in contrast, the changes prompted open warfare between CLS members.

In El Junco the CLS political secretaries are the aforementioned Zeledón and Amada Acuña.³⁸ Acuña and Zeledón had a considerable disagreement over the changes to the list. Zeledón suspected that Acuña had helped the visitors from Managua make the changes, a charge she vehemently denied:

In fact, for Acuña, the changes made were perfectly logical. The beneficiaries on the new list ‘are poorer, and there are some people who have too many animals ... maybe they saw they were a bit thin and so they think if they can’t even look after those ones ...’⁴⁰ Zeledón rejects this, but the conflict is not really about the specific beneficiaries. Rather, it has to do with the question of who has the power to make these decisions. For Zeledón, the incident was a violation of his local authority, one that has affected his relationship with the local community and the FSLN officials he reports to:

36 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

37 Interview, Efraín Flores, July 2015. Interview, Ernesto Rugama, July 2015.

38 Each CLS has one male and one female secretary, although in both El Junco and Potrero it is the male political secretary who is the overall coordinator on the committee.

39 Interview, Amada Acuña, July 2015.

Acuña has attempted to get Zeledón removed from his position, but she was told that unless he chooses to leave he cannot be removed before the end of his term. Clearly, such open conflict within the community’s key governance structure is problematic. Substantial concern also exists in the wider community that the CLS is running things, rather than the Gabinete, which ostensibly replaced the CPC:

Famnuel Centeno sees this structural change as evidence of a wider, creeping politicisation of community decision-making, and believes that this shift has caused increasing apathy more widely:

It may be that the present government’s approach alienates Liberal voters, but it is also true that these divisions are deep-seated and that Liberals have never participated much in El Junco’s community structures. In 2009, when I was making a map of El Junco, I discovered that there was a whole (Liberal) sector of the community that I had never heard of or visited, despite living there for a year in 2004–5. A friend, born in 1976, gave me directions for the route down a particular lane. He got this information second-hand: even though he had lived in the community his entire life, and the path was less than half a mile from his house, he had never walked that way because it was adjacent to the property of a prominent anti-Sandinista landowner. Just as the tradition of participation in Junco is a legacy of the revolution, so too are these extremely entrenched divisions. Just as the passage of time has diminished political commitment in the area, it has also gradually reduced this political polarisation. Nonetheless, participation in community decision-making is so intimately connected with the legacy of the revolution and the war that it is difficult to see how a truly apolitical structure could exist, regardless of the central government’s approach.

40 Ibid.

41 Interview, Augusto Zeledón, July 2015.

42 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

43 Ibid.

The strength of local decision-making in El Junco is a result of the community’s long experience of organising, and a widespread recognition that this kind of work is valuable and important. Critics of FSLN policies since 2007 have characterised the new social programmes and community committees as an attempt to build a clientelist state, and it is clear that the diffusion of benefits has won the Sandinistas some new supporters. However, it is also clear that the real backbone of the system – and the reason for its relative success in El Junco – was the work of particular individuals with a long-standing commitment to the revolution. The national government relied upon the voluntary work of committed individuals who were not paid for their contributions. That reliance has limited the government’s ability to run a truly centralised, top-down system of governance: any attempt to overrule local leaders results in considerable disagreement and pushback, as it did in El Junco in 2015.

The mechanisms of government control were starker, and more sinister, in relation to individuals who were directly employed by the state. One close friend in El Junco refused to talk on tape about the village’s governance structures, even though he knew that all names and locations would be changed. He was employed as a teacher in the village and he was afraid he might lose his job if it was discovered he had said anything negative about Zeledón. While the community’s volunteer leaders were more than happy to criticise their superiors and each other, those directly employed by the state have to be much more cautious. Alejandra Martínez ran a nursery school in the village; 20 children attend, the minimum number required for a nursery to qualify for state support. When another community member attempted to start another nursery school, thereby threatening Martínez’s quota, Zeledón vetoed the new nursery, thereby protecting Martínez’s income. Understandably, Martínez was thus reluctant to say anything against the political secretary. The caution demonstrated by state employees is amply justified: some individuals have been penalised for disagreeing with government policy. ‘Not long ago a teacher lost her job [in a nearby town] because she spoke out, brought up situations where she didn’t agree with the government. And her criticisms made sense, but they were complaints and so ... [she was fired].’⁴⁴

There were several different dynamics at play in the relationship between the Sandinista government and the residents of El Junco. Some villagers, previously Liberal voters, had begun to vote for the FSLN as a result of the current government’s social programmes. This alliance is a clear example of a clientelistic relationship, but not all the links between El Junco and the FSLN government can be understood in terms of pure clientelism. For state employees, the restrictions on freedom of expression suggest a relationship that is too coercive to be described as mere clientelism. On the other hand, the community’s many committed Sandinistas have a relationship with the state that is as much ideological as it is material. Community members in El Junco have contributed considerable time and effort to organisation because of a sense of civic duty, ideological commitment and a desire to continue the revolutionary project.⁴⁵ This kind of commitment is particularly notable among the older generation. Famnuel Centeno is one of six children, all of whom are professionals and university graduates. His parents, who did not learn to read and write until after the revolution, are stalwart Sandinistas:

As Rocha and Soto’s contributions to this volume attest, the revolution failed to provide permanent access to land and opportunities for many of the desperately poor Nicaraguans who needed it. Even in El Junco this process was by no means as clear-cut as local collective memory might imply: community members only gained individual plots when the revolutionary-era cooperative was broken up in 1990. There is no doubt that it is the granting of individual plots, rather than participation in the collective, which is the pivotal moment celebrated in local memories. The actual chronology is elided so that land ownership is seen as the primary benefit of the revolution, as a reward given for the community members’ many sacrifices during the years of war. Even as local memory rewrites some of the crucial elements of this recent past, this constructed ideal of the FSLN’s role belies a deeper truth. For many Sandinistas in El Junco, their experience of the revolution was transformative. It forged an unshakeable commitment to the FSLN. The very strength of this commitment is a cause for concern: it allows the FSLN government to become increasingly autocratic without any fear of reproach from their core supporters.

44 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

45 Scholars focusing on other regions in Latin America have debated the relationship between clientelism and ideology, and the question of whether these dynamics are always mutually exclusive, but the scholarship on Nicaragua has not yet addressed such questions. D.J. Epstein, ‘Clientelism versus ideology: problems of party development in Brazil’; M. Coppedge, ‘The dynamic diversity of Latin American party systems’.

46 Interview, Famnuel Centeno, July 2015.

This revolutionary legacy also powers a robust tradition of community organisation, although it could certainly be argued that this tradition has its limits. One standard measure of community democracy, Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, ranks such structures according to the amount of power they have: are they truly autonomous? Do they have the capacity to make their decisions felt at higher levels of authority?⁴⁷ In El Junco, the answer to these questions has always been a resounding ‘no’. In both the first and second stages of the revolution, being organised never meant genuine, bottom-up democracy. That state of affairs continues. In 2017, as a result of a decision reached in an asamblea, the community sent a united plea to the municipal government for much-needed improvements to the only access road, but the request went unheeded. And as the conflict over the distribution of the bono in 2015 clearly shows, there is little that the community can do when the central authorities choose to overrule local decisions.

Why, then, does the community place so much value on the asambleas and other aspects of this culture of participation and ‘being organised’? These attitudes are certainly not universal. In 2012 Birgit Kvernflaten noted the lacklustre approach of local residents towards a municipal cabildo (or municipal assembly) in rural Matagalpa. The event was poorly attended and nobody asked questions. ‘Some sit in the front and applaud hard’, one of her informants told her, ‘but only because they got their project funded.’⁴⁸ El Junco residents’ commitment to being organised is driven partly by the fact that it brings clear benefits not directly related to the state. As Rocha notes, a capacity for participation and organisation makes it much easier to integrate into global Fair Trade networks,⁴⁹ and El Junco’s cooperatives have strong links with national and international buyers for their Fair Trade, organic coffee. Equally, as Cooper argues, being organised brings benefits in the form of links with national and international NGOs.⁵⁰ Compared to Potrero, El Junco has a much broader range of links to such organisations, which have brought a variety of projects to the community.

Although local community members certainly recognise the material benefits that being organised provides, it would be a mistake to reduce these traditions to some kind of rational choice or profit-seeking urge. The generational divide which exists in community work, and the greater involvement of the generation that lived through the revolution and the Contra War, makes it clear that this particular heritage has created a particular way of doing things in El Junco. That same generational divide makes it difficult to predict how these local traditions will fare with the passing of time – it is certainly possible that community participation is dependent upon the activism of the revolutionary generation. With its endless meetings, petty fiefdoms and often-vicious infighting, El Junco is no revolutionary utopia. Nevertheless, a commitment to local democracy has survived here, despite the upheaval of the war, the uncertainty and poverty of the neoliberal years and the multiple interventions of the FSLN. This culture of participation is far from perfect but, for now, it does deserve to be called exceptional.

47 S. Arnstein, ‘A ladder of citizen participation’, 216–24.

48 B. Kvernflaten, ‘Conflicting health interventions: participation in health in rural Nicaragua’, 308.

49 See the chapter by Jose Luis Rocha in this book.

50 See the chapter by David Cooper in this book.

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