5. Agrarian reform in Nicaragua in the 1980s: lights and shadows of its legacy

José Luis Rocha

Nicaragua embarked on an agrarian reform adventure in the 1980s, inspired by a revolutionary government that longed to make great transformations. Despite these grand dreams, however, initial reform was state-centric and progress was slow. The inadequacy of these early efforts led to the deterioration of relations between the state and the peasants in the countryside and the intensification of armed conflict. Agrarian reform measures were bitterly contested and their results were ambiguous – a conflict and ambiguity that has continued to mark the descendants of those affected by the original reforms. The 1980s was a time of bitterness for those whose land was confiscated and of jubilation for the beneficiaries of reform, but the 1990s brought compensation for those whose land had been confiscated, just as embargoes by banks transformed the original beneficiaries’ joyous dream into a nightmare. Together, dubious and inadequate land titles, contested reallocations of land to former owners, and compensation awarded on the basis of fraudulent claims created a heavy burden of debt that Nicaraguan taxpayers are still servicing to this day. At the same time, ongoing uncertainty over land ownership continues to block access to loans, discourages long-term investment and undermines productivity.

From the beginning, agrarian reform was presented as an essential part of the exceptionalist ideal that the Sandinista Revolution expected to make flesh in Nicaragua: it was assumed that successful reform was the inevitable destination, and the path towards it was laid out with apparently clairvoyant clarity. In reality, though, an analysis of the actual trajectory of the reforms reveals constant oscillations between illusion and realism, principles and pragmatism, grandness and misery.¹ Agrarian reform was a stage on which different concepts, both reformist and anti-reformist, faced off against each other, leading the country to a point of no return – neither the restitution and compensation measures of the 1990s, nor the resurgence of extreme inequality in land ownership ever succeeded in restoring the status quo ante. The Sandinistas’ agrarian reform did not provide a blueprint that led ineluctably to exceptionalism; in practice, the collision between multiple initiatives, forces and circumstances ensured that property ownership was shaken up enough to introduce substantial changes in the way that land tenure was structured. For many, this shift was not as penetrating and widespread as it should have been, but its impact was significant enough so that 40 years later we can still discern its imprints, some of them etched in now-hard lava, while others are traced in sand. What were the reform’s achievements and flaws? What legacy did it leave us, for better or worse? Did the agrarian reform make Nicaragua an exceptional country? If so, in what sense? The data in this section will provide tentative answers to these questions.

1 J. Wheelock, La reforma agraria sandinista.

In 1979 the new Sandinista government inherited a system of land distribution that was dominated by a class known as the ‘rural bourgeoisie’. Out of a total of 5.6 million hectares of land dedicated to agriculture, almost 2.1 million (36 per cent) were held in properties larger than 350 hectares. Small farms of less than 35 hectares only accounted for 17.5 per cent of the land in use.² Extreme inequality in the distribution of land was linked to inequality of access to credit: in the 1960s and ’70s, 90 per cent of the loans destined for the agricultural sector went to the big agro-export landowners.³ In agriculture the poor comprised 61.4 per cent of the economically active population. Of these, 36.5 per cent were smallholders who hired themselves out as workers at certain periods of the agricultural cycle, 17.4 per cent were farmhands who made up the permanent labour force on the big agro-export haciendas and 7.5 per cent were seasonal labourers who could only access full-time work during the coffee, cotton or sugar-cane harvests.⁴

After Somoza fled the country the question of land distribution was a primary concern of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). The third decree issued by the new Government Junta of National Reconstruction ordered the confiscation of all properties owned by Somoza’s family and his allies, including soldiers and officials of the defeated regime. Soon after, another decree expanded the scope of the confiscations to ‘people connected with Somoza’. These two decrees affected 20 per cent of all farmland in Nicaragua. The confiscated land was known as the People’s Property Area (APP). It was not distributed to individual farmers but instead organised into 1,500 state farms under the management of the newly created Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA).⁵ Some 50,000 people, perhaps 13 per cent of all agricultural workers, were employed by the state in these enterprises. Despite these initial measures most landless labourers and smallholders – a total of 322,549 people – remained in limbo.⁶

2 Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de la Reforma Agraria (CIERA), La reforma agraria en Nicaragua 1979–1989, vol. I, 292.

3 S. and J. Saravia-Matus, ‘Agrarian reform: theory and practice. The Nicaraguan experience’.

4 C. Maldidier and P. Marchetti, El Campesino-Finquero y el potencial económico del campesinado nicaragüense, 15.

5 Saravia-Matus, ‘Agrarian reform’, 30.

Initial reforms did not match the Sandinista government’s revolutionary aims. In 1981, two years after the Sandinistas took power, the speech that announced the new Agrarian Reform Law noted that 1.2 per cent of the population still owned 47.1 per cent of the land, while 30 per cent of the rural population had no land at all.⁷ Between 1979 and 1981 around 1.2 million hectares had been confiscated from Somocistas and senior National Guard officers, many of whom had mortgaged their land and escaped with the cash before the Sandinistas took power. Much of this land consisted of huge plantations with tens of thousands of agricultural workers, which the government did not consider suitable for distribution among peasants. In these early days of agrarian reform the government opted to expropriate huge farms such as La Fundadora and La Cumplida and convert them into state enterprises, and they also expropriated medium-sized properties that could be joined together and made into big state-run haciendas. One faction within the revolutionary government sincerely believed that breaking up large and medium-sized haciendas into small plots would reduce their productivity and jeopardise the generation of hard cash from exports. Beyond the problem of land distribution, the Sandinista state was also concerned with agricultural production and income generation, income which was essential if the revolutionary government was to secure the social transformation it promised. And all this in a context where the dark clouds of the US economic blockade and armed aggression, financed and managed by the Reagan government, could already be discerned. It was thus decided to add disused farmland to the properties subject to expropriation, and a year after the triumph of the revolution Sandinista officials began drafting the Agrarian Reform Law.⁸

The law streamlined the agrarian reform process and triggered a boom in different forms of property ownership. Fallow, underused or abandoned properties larger than 350 hectares in the Pacific region and 700 acres in the country’s interior were subject to the new legislation. Even so, only 558 properties covering an area of 350,000 hectares were affected in the first phase of the programme (1981–4). Subsequently, Law 14, passed on 11 January 1986, legalised the confiscation of all disused or underused properties, regardless of their size.⁹ This law accelerated agrarian reform and increased the bank of available land. At the risk of stating the obvious, it should be noted that these laws did not penalise large landowners as such, only those people who were letting their land lie fallow, something the country could ill afford. Nonetheless, there were substantial shifts in patterns of land distribution. In 1988, two years before the FSLN’s electoral defeat, the private sector owned 2.6 million hectares of productive agricultural land, down from 5.6 million in 1979. Overall, the state had reallocated 48 per cent of productive agricultural land. In 1979 private properties larger than 350 hectares made up 36 per cent (2.1 million hectares) of the total available land. By 1988 this figure had dropped to 6.4 per cent or 350,000 hectares.¹⁰

6 Ibid., 31.

7 Ley de Reforma Agraria, Decreto no. 782, Junta de Gobierno de Reconstrucción Nacional de la República de Nicaragua, 16 Oct. 1981; CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VIII, 58–89; Envío, ‘The Agrarian Reform Law in Nicaragua’, no. 3, Aug. 1981.

8 Wheelock, La reforma agraria, 52–3 and 56.

9 Ibid., 57–8 and 64.

Most of the reallocated land was absorbed by state farms – known as State Production Units (UPE) – and cooperatives. Of productive agricultural land, UPEs accounted for close to 12 per cent, while nearly 14 per cent ended up in the hands of cooperatives. Most (11.4 per cent) of this land was farmed by Sandinista Agricultural Cooperatives (CAS), whose members held a joint title to their property and carried out all work collectively. Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCS), where small farmers worked their own land but received credit via collective loans, were less common, comprising just 1.7 per cent of the total.¹¹ Overall, with almost a quarter of the land ultimately being farmed collectively in some form, the programme represented an unprecedented shift in patterns of agricultural land ownership. These shifts were clearly linked to the model of agrarian change promulgated by the Sandinista government. At the same time, other reformist pressures did not form part of the state’s original plans and these forced the Sandinistas to take unforeseen decisions. These pressures, particularly the demands of the peasantry, also made their mark and, arguably, proved to be more durable than the state’s efforts, because they came from below. The history of these collisions between state and non-state ideals gives the lie to any notion of exceptionalism forged directly and solely from the Sandinista programmes.

In 1984, the expropriation of farms was intended to increase the amount of land available for redistribution, but it was also a means of strengthening the government’s hand in its fight against the Contras. Counterrevolutionaries were punished (the 1984 measures sanctioned the confiscation of lands belonging to anyone aiding the Contras) and allies were rewarded. Land awarded to Sandinistas and their allies helped to cement support, and state farms and cooperatives played an active part in the government’s defence strategy by helping to repel Contra attacks. Above all, the state provided titles for those holding land following occupation or invasion, in effect legalising a de facto process of agrarian reform that had been unfolding since before the triumph of the revolution. These measures marked a change in FSLN policy, made possible by the impetus of the war and a shift in thinking among INRA leaders. The overall trend was simple – less state property and more peasant property – but the political and ideological battles that lay behind the changes were complex and contested. In the next section a discussion of the conflict between two trade unions that organised farmers and farmworkers – the Rural Workers Association (ATC) and the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (UNAG) – sheds light on the wider ideological battle, revealing the stakes and positions held by the opposing camps.

10 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. I, 292.

11 Ibid., vol. IX, 39.

ATC demands salaries, not land

The ATC was founded on 25 March 1978 as an organisation for agricultural and semi-proletarian workers. Within a year it had 47,851 members who acted as a logistical support network for the Sandinista guerrillas in the months leading up to the Sandinista Revolution. Its members cut communication lines, destroyed telephones and roads, joined the fighting and transmitted information, within a network that was organised geographically, dividing areas into units for each community and district.¹² After the revolution, the ATC organised the SACs (cooperatives which were initially called agricultural communes), made up of organised agricultural workers’ collectives that seized Somocista farms and worked them collectively. In this way, the ATC as an organisation was aligned from the beginning with the Sandinista state’s initial preference for maintaining large farm estates as single productive units, an approach that was meant to allow a greater concentration of capital, land and workers as well as facilitate their use of superior technology.

Originally peasants and farmers with small and medium holdings were also supposed to be included in the ATC. However, the difference between their perspectives and interests and those of salaried farmworkers made their coexistence within one organisation difficult. Peasants’ demands for land were entirely different from workers’ demands for higher wages, and the ATC’s leadership was more interested in defending the farmworkers’ interests.¹³ When peasants founded UNAG, the ATC prioritised organising workers in state agrarian-reform enterprises. It replaced its district-by-district organisational structure with a network of local unions which had offices in the state farms. In 1983, despite the loss of peasant members who had moved to UNAG, the ATC had 44,413 members on its books.

Work in ‘bureaucratic capitalism’

The ATC prioritised two lines of action: to raise productivity and to train workers so that they could take over management of the state farms in the future. In practice, however, the ATC’s demands in the early years related chiefly to wages and the prices of consumer goods, because management of the haciendas was the preserve of state bureaucracy.¹⁴ Farmworkers no longer answered to the farmer-boss but to the state-boss – the bureaucrat-boss characteristic of what Cornelius Castoriadis calls ‘bureaucratic capitalism’, based on the social division between the proletariat and a bureaucracy that excludes workers from managing the means of production.¹⁵

12 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 60.

13 C. Vilas, Perfiles de la revolución sandinista, 271.

14 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 77, 83 and 85.

Although the ATC’s intervention forced the enterprises to keep paying the wages of workers mobilised in the armed struggle against the Contras, there were many limitations to its achievements. For example, the unions were never able to get the bosses to make temporary workers permanent.¹⁶ They were not even able to maintain the value of their wages: the nominal pay for piecework in the coffee harvest only went up by 0.15 córdobas between 1980 and 1983. In real terms, measured by purchasing power relative to inflation, this was a reduction of almost 40 per cent. Coffee pickers’ wages were particularly vulnerable, even in times of good international prices. The price of some basic goods fell, but the drop in salaries was much more significant: the price of corn and beans dropped by at least 5 per cent while cotton pickers’ wages fell by 28 per cent.¹⁷

The deterioration in wages went hand-in-hand with a declining work culture, made apparent in the wry joke which defined socialism as ‘a system in which the state pretends to pay and the workers pretend to work’. A widespread belief was prevalent that the revolution should change the rules of the game and instigate a more relaxed work ethic, thus distinguishing itself from capitalist exploitation of the labour force. In fact, the working day dwindled to two or three hours, a phenomenon that was a key factor in the slowing of production during those years.¹⁸ While farm workers waited for their historic vacation, those without land longed for more aggressive agrarian reform.

The UNAG is born, with a peasant seal

In April 1981, UNAG was born, supported by peasants who were poor but had experienced a rapid economic ascent during the coffee and cattle booms of the years immediately prior to the revolution’s triumph. Many had collaborated with the guerrillas and were loyal to the FSLN, even when they did not necessarily share the Sandinistas’ politics. At their initial 1981 gathering, in the Perla de Matagalpa theatre, 3,000 farmers with small and medium holdings, representing 100,000 peasants came together to break publicly with the Central Cooperative of Coffee Growers, a Somoza-era organisation whose middle-class anti-Sandinista members had hoped to create a broad front against the revolution. The peasants who met that day were to become the embryonic UNAG.¹⁹

Typical UNAG members owned a medium-sized portion of land and had been sidelined by the elite-dominated associations of agro exporters in the Somoza era. They were now targets of proselytizing work from those same associations, but UNAG filled a gap and neutralised the agricultural elite’s attempts to build opposition to the revolution. It sought to unite all farmers, regardless of their class status, to achieve hegemony among the rural sectors that had not been organised by the ATC. This interaction between classes helped to assuage the fears of many peasants, who already held land and employed a small workforce, and who felt threatened by the clamour for land from those who had no property of their own.²⁰ The farmers with small and medium holdings who had come together in UNAG were particularly anxious to secure long-term loans, agricultural supplies, technical assistance, new roads, participation in state institutions, and decision-making on prices and marketing. Farmers from this sector also pressured INRA to pass the Agrarian Reform Law in 1981.

15 C. Castoriadis, La sociedad burocrática.

16 CIERA, Las clases sociales en el campo de Jinotega.

17 Vilas, Perfiles, 387.

18 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 95. M. Spoor, ‘Rural employment and agrarian markets in transition: Nicaragua (1979–89)’, 538.

19 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 80–1.

Directed by the FSLN, UNAG initially worked with cooperatives and successfully urged many of its members to form CCSs. In the 1980s, 93 per cent of UNAG members belonged to cooperatives, largely the CCSs.²¹ In 1984, as the Contra War heated up, UNAG sought to extend its social base to incorporate other farmers with similar portions of land who were not in cooperatives and even those portrayed – in Sandinista propaganda – as representatives of the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’. They were involved in the farming associations and commissions that promoted each crop and they energised the district committees of UNAG.

While the ATC dedicated itself exclusively to agricultural workers, UNAG recruited poor peasants through district outreach work as well as middle-income and well-off peasants, giving the organisation a particularily heterogeneous social base. This situation had disadvantages for some. The predominance of landowning peasants meant that UNAG’s demands mirrored the concerns of the farmer with a medium-sized holding, who was worried about prices, access to markets, transport and the availability of agricultural inputs. It did not give the same voice to poor peasants clamouring for land.²² In the early years of the revolution, the FSLN feared that demands for land by poor peasants, who had not been absorbed into state enterprises, might destroy the revolution’s plans for national unity, which were predicated upon an alliance with the rural bourgeoisie. The FSLN was reluctant to give up this unity project and it did not want to distribute the land belonging to state enterprises, which were seen as the linchpin of national wealth. In other words, if the FSLN aspired to some form of exceptionalism, it expected to achieve it thanks to the productive capacity of the state and its vast supply of agricultural land, not by distributing land to small farmers.

As the economic crisis worsened, peasants grew increasingly frustrated with the FSLN’s failure to respond to their demands. This eroded UNAG’s power to unite farmers, although the organisation continued to attract new members. It became increasingly critical of the FSLN and its farming policy, especially after 1986, when it began to give voice to the peasants’ demand for land. Projecting itself as the key mass organisation in the countryside, UNAG took the lead in peasant protests, changing both its discourse and its practice in the process. In 1986 UNAG’s slogan was ‘An organisation for struggle’ – and the struggle was for land.²³ This shift ensured that UNAG recovered its previous strength.

20 M. Merlet and C. Maldidier, ‘El movimiento cooperativo, eje de la sobrevivencia de la revolución’, 56.

21 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 133.

22 V. Fitzgerald and A. Chamorro, ‘Las cooperativas en el proyecto de transición en Nicaragua’, 30 (1987): 31.

Cooperatives = solidarity

The demands of UNAG’s members collided with an ideological sacred cow: the veneration of collectivism. From the start, the Sandinista government had promoted cooperatives in order to forge ‘a spirit of solidarity and cooperation’ and overcome ‘competitive and exploitative relationships among men’.²⁴ Competition was perceived as a capitalist evil that had to be suppressed. Solidarity was integral to the figure of the ‘new man’ and multiple devices were employed to promote it. In Nicaragua, this collectivist impetus sprang in part from an ideological debt to Sandino who, in the 1920s, said he was ‘in favour of land belonging to the state’ and inclined ‘towards a cooperative regime’ along the Río Coco.²⁵ Cooperatives were part of the FSLN’s 1969 historic programme, which was committed to motivating and encouraging peasants to organise and take their destiny into their own hands and participate directly in the country’s development.²⁶ These local precedents were reinforced by modes of thought common in revolutionary states, where a dichotomy between individualism (bourgeois and reactionary) and collectivism (revolutionary) prevailed. This opposition, and its role in the strengthening of the revolutionary state, are the subject of two books by Lynne Viola, whose work on the Soviet Union reveals divisions greatly similar to those that existed between the ATC and UNAG in Nicaragua.²⁷

The emphasis on collectivism, therefore, was the result of a mix of local and transnational ideological currents. It was also driven by the perception that only large-scale units could deliver the material wealth so desperately needed by the fledgling Sandinista state. The economies of scale involved in working a large landholding made it possible to use irrigation and mechanisation, and to apply modern technology; operating as a group would also facilitate access to loans, technical assistance, the buying and storage of harvests, and the supply of agricultural inputs. The plan also included the provision of educational programmes and health, housing and cultural services.²⁸ In 1988 the state even went so far as to exempt productive cooperatives from paying income tax.²⁹ The cooperativist project soon achieved wide coverage: by 1982, 2,849 cooperatives with 65,820 members had already been set up and controlled an area of some 700,000 hectares. By 1988, the project seemed to have gained even more ground, with 3,151 cooperatives and 76,715 members who controlled over a million hectares.³⁰ We must remember, though, that two kinds of cooperative existed: the CASs, which required a more complete form of collectivisation, and the CCSs, with a lighter touch, which collectivised administration but not cultivation. As the next section will show, these different types of cooperative evolved differently, in ways which again reflect the contested nature of agrarian reform.

23 Merlet and Maldidier, ‘El movimiento cooperativo’, 62.

24 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VIII, 135.

25 Wheelock, La reforma agraria, 42.

26 Ibid., 44–5.

27 L. Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization L. Viola, Peasants Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance.

UNAG v. MIDINRA, Bukharin v. Preobrazhenski

From its foundation, UNAG challenged Sandinista officials’ view of the collectivisation process. In January 1980 INRA was merged with the agriculture ministry to form the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA), triggering what would become a long-running dispute between it and UNAG. Social scientist Peter Marchetti compared this controversy to the 1924 debate between Eugene Preobrazhenski and Nikolai Bukharin over the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy instituted between 1921 and 1929. Preobrazhenski favoured a rapid transition to socialism supported by the expansion of state enterprises and industrialisation, at the expense of the peasantry. Similarly, MIDINRA supported large-scale projects involving directly controlled state farms or fully collectivised CASs. This would allow the state to control the harvest and sale of crops, thereby securing a supply of cheap agricultural produce for the cities. Preobrazhenski and MIDINRA viewed the peasantry as ‘backward’, a seedbed of capitalism. Bukharin and UNAG held the opposing view. For them a more moderate approach to collectivisation was necessary in order to maintain an alliance with the peasantry. They also believed that a greater emphasis on individual production would help to limit the state’s monopoly, make better use of the nation’s productive potential, and ensure that the agricultural sector responded better to market forces.³¹

The Cooperatives Law expressed these conflicting visions by facilitating the creation of two types of cooperatives: credit and service cooperatives with individual land ownership (the CCS model) and production cooperatives with collective property (the CAS model). The CCS model was much more popular with farmers’ groups because it was more flexible and did not involve collectivisation or a commitment to the state.³² There were far fewer CAS cooperatives, partly because their foundation depended on the allocation of agrarian reform land. Initially the CSS cooperatives outnumbered the CAS by seven to one, in terms of both land and members. Landless peasants were the most willing to organise into a CAS, because establishing one involved the granting of new land. Middle-income peasant farmers who already had land and were interested in gaining access to loans were far more likely to form CCSs.³³ Cooperative status was a prerequisite for government loans, so many peasants registered as CCS members who did not comply with the minimal operational requirements. Many formally constituted CCSs never called a member’s assembly and those who had joined never did anything together aside from filling in the paperwork needed to apply for a loan. The 1981 Cooperatives Law stipulated that ‘the revolutionary state will grant farming cooperatives special financial support through programs that offer preferential interest rates’.³⁴ Actual practice went even further than this and cooperatives’ debts were forgiven so frequently that non-repayment of loans became an implicit norm.

28 Wheelock, La reforma agraria, 136.

29 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VIII, 148–9.

30 Ibid., vol. I, 304–6.

31 P. Marchetti, ‘Semejanzas y diferencias en dos debates sobre el campesinado: la economía mixta y la vía al socialismo’, 35–45.

Despite the CCSs’ early preponderance, it soon became clear that the CAS model would predominate. In 1982 the cooperative development strategy prioritised giving CASs access to land, loans and technical supplies, and CAS holdings grew substantially. At the start of the agrarian reform, cooperatives received an average of 11 to 12 hectares per member; by 1988 the CCSs were still within this range, but they now controlled an average of 20 hectares per member, chiefly because state farms had been converted into CAS cooperatives.³⁵ By 1986 the CASs had received 75 per cent of the land assigned by the agrarian reform to cooperatives and individual owners, with predictable consequences for the relative importance of the two models.³⁶ Between 1982 and 1988 the number of CAS cooperatives increased by 129 per cent, their membership grew by 217 per cent and the area of land they controlled expanded by 453 per cent. In contrast, the number of CCS cooperatives fell by 6 per cent, with a 14 per cent reduction in membership and a 38 per cent drop in landholdings.³⁷ Many of the CCSs which had existed in name only were disappearing, but the CCSs were also seriously affected by the war – the number of cooperatives fell by 17 per cent in the central region, the area of the country where most fighting took place, partly because CCS members were afraid of armed counter-revolutionaries accusing them of having links to the FSLN. In contrast, the war actually strengthened the CASs, as they owed a greater debt to the Frente. Significantly, the first bands of armed counter-revolutionaries – the MILPAS (Anti-Sandinista People’s Militias) – appeared in 1980 in the northern part of the country, supported by owners of small and medium coffee farm and cattle ranches who feared that the growing nationalisation of the rural economy would lead to the confiscation of their property. The MILPAS leaders were former Sandinista guerrillas unhappy that confiscated land had been turned into state enterprises.³⁸

32 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. V, 288–9.

33 Fitzgerald and Chamorro, ‘Las cooperativas’; 31.

34 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VIII, 145.

35 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. I, 305.

36 Fitzgerald and Chamorro, ‘Las cooperativas’, 37.

37 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. I, 304–5.

The war forced the pace

The war meant that the CAS cooperatives won out over the CCSs, but ultimately the conflict resulted in a shift towards the UNAG-Bukharin model, with a reduction in large units directly controlled by the state. The war was intensifying in the border area with Honduras, a mountainous area ideal for insurgency. Between 1981 and 1985 the Contras carried out a reported 133 attacks in this area, leaving 242 dead, 49 wounded and 44 abducted, limited to cooperative members and workers on state farms only.³⁹ The FSLN responded by introducing the draft, which it dubbed Patriotic Military Service (SMP), and by changing its agrarian policy. The goal was to regain the political initiative and promote the defence of territory adjacent to the cooperatives’ lands.⁴⁰ The need was particularly acute because worsening economic conditions were creating support for the Contras.⁴¹ Farmers whose land had been confiscated, and those who thought their land might be expropriated, were especially disaffected. Most of the Contra leaders were farmers from Matagalpa and Jinotega who saw the revolution as a threat. Their dissatisfaction had to be allayed.

The state’s new policy on land tenure was designed, in simple terms, to confiscate land from ten people and hand it over to one hundred. The high point of the agrarian reform was 1984, when 37 per cent of the 2.7 million hectares ultimately affected by the agrarian reform was given out in the form of ‘special titles’. In reality, these titles simply recognised families’ legal right to occupy small plots that they had been farming for decades, but the issuing of this type of title was also due to the war: 66 per cent of the special titles were ‘granted’ in 1984, and only 13.57 per cent had been issued prior to that. The reform that benefited cooperatives was similar: 86 per cent of the land granted to cooperatives was received between 1983 and 1987, whereas only 10 per cent of the total land ultimately allocated was distributed between 1979 and 1982.⁴²

Strengthening a peasant front that would be loyal to the revolution and that would hold back the advance of the counterrevolutionaries was a matter of urgency. A tight network of individual FSLN sympathisers and cooperatives was built, all of them beneficiaries of land reform. The land was taken from recently confiscated farms or from former state farms.⁴³ Some 39 per cent of the land allocated in 1986–7 came from confiscated farms of over 350 hectares and only 8 per cent came from farms smaller in size. The remaining land was formerly state-controlled.⁴⁴ The war meant the growth of the Bukharin-UNAG model marked a rupture with the blueprint that had, until then, guided land distribution policies. The war laid the groundwork for an exceptionalism that had not featured in the FSLN’s original plans.

38 A. Grigsby, ‘Nicaragua: conflicto armado y políticas económicas y sociales’, Mimeo, 2001.

39 Wheelock, La reforma agraria, 127.

40 D. Kaimowitz, ‘La planificación agropecuaria en Nicaragua, 70.

41 CIERA, La reforma agraria, 414.

42 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. IX, 39–44.

The redistribution that took place in those years changed the structure of land tenure in Nicaragua, creating a greater proportion of small farms. This shift in tenure patterns created the conditions for different kinds of innovation and facilitated later experiments with organic production and participation in fair trade networks. These far-reaching achievements might have gone even further, but the FSLN never wholeheartedly embraced the UNAG-Bukharin model. Michel Merlet, an agroeconomy expert who worked with INRA throughout most of the 1980s and now directs AGTER, an association for the improved governance of natural resources, notes that,

The last line is discouraging. According to Merlet’s figures, the transformation of the land tenure structure was significant, but still only partial, in 1988:

The Sandinista land reform repeated all the errors and abuses of the reform undertaken by Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas 50 years previously: a slow start to redistribution, successive debt pardons, a prohibition on selling or inheriting land, the under-utilisation of plots, a fall in production and productivity, a mix of paternalism and subjection, and investment wasted on extravagant projects.⁴⁷

43 The FSLN granted some 383,600 hectares between 1984 and 1987. Eduardo Baumeister, ‘Transformaciones agrarias y revolución en Nicaragua’. Paper presented at the LASA conference, New Orleans, 17–19 Mar. 1988.

44 Ibid.

45 M. Merlet, ‘Fragilidad y límites de las reformas agrarias en América Central. Las enseñanzas de dos países: Honduras y Nicaragua’. Course for ‘Gestión y Tenencia de la Tierra en Centroamérica’, BIVICAT-RECCAT, FAUSAC, URACCAN, IRAM, París, Francia, from 1 July to 30 Sept. 2004.

46 Ibid.

The Sandinista piñata and the neoliberal turn

The 1990s brought an abrupt change in approach. Violeta Chamorro’s electoral victory meant that the government cabinet was largely made up of a group of technocrats educated in US universities, well-versed in theories of monetarism and neoliberal ideology. Sharing the business sector’s faith in the market’s invisible hand, they implemented a series of policies aimed at dismantling state controls, privatising state-owned land and lowering taxes. The General Board of National Public Sector Corporations (CORNAP) was created in 1990 to take over the state’s business functions. It was effectively a holding company responsible for offloading state enterprises.

However, even before CORNAP had gestated in the neoliberal womb, the Sandinista regime had begun privatising state assets. In the two-month transition period between the FSLN’s electoral defeat in February and Violeta Chamorro’s inauguration in April, the Sandinista leadership implemented the swiftest transfer of goods in national history: farms, houses, buildings, factories, vehicles, tractors, small islands and millions of dollars in cash were taken from the state and given to the Sandinista elite. Compared to the Sandinista ‘piñata’, as it came to be known, the other redistribution programmes of the 1980s pale into insignificance. The piñata contributed to a rollback of agrarian reform that has never been fully examined. Leading Sandinistas, including the agrarian reform minister and deputy ministers, ended up with some of the country’s best farms, with the result that CORNAP started operating with what remained after the Sandinista piñata. Most of the properties bestowed by CORNAP – 52 per cent of transfers, accounting for 59 per cent of their value – went to private buyers or tenants. Only after a major battle did the new government reluctantly reward workers of the former state-owned entities with 23 per cent of the properties, representing 30 per cent of the total value. The percentage of former combatants who gained from the privatisation process, either from the Sandinista Popular Army or the National Resistance, was tiny.⁴⁸ Former combatants were beneficiaries of just 241 of the 1,532 transactions carried out by CORNAP between 1991 and 1994, but the value of the property given to them – a little over 15 million córdobas – represented less than 1.4 per cent of the total value of the property transferred.⁴⁹ They made their dissatisfaction felt immediately.

47 E. Krauze, Biografía del poder. Caudillos de la revolución mexicana (1910–1940), 458–60.

48 National Resistance is what all armed counterrevolutionary groups called themselves. It included the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN, in Spanish) in the north, the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) in the south and MISURASATA, from the Miskito, Sumo and Rama Amerindian peoples of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.

49 D. Close, Los años de Doña Violeta, 214.

Meanwhile the US government, which had generously disbursed millions to keep the armed counterrevolution in weaponry, refused to have anything to do with the now retired ‘freedom fighters’ and pressured the Chamorro government into reducing the Sandinista Popular Army to a bare minimum. Troops plunged from 86,810 in January 1990 to 16,200 in 1992 and then to 14,553 by 1994, making the recently renamed Army of Nicaragua the smallest in Central America. It was reduced by 86 per cent overall, at a rate of 21.5 per cent per year. According to Nicaraguan military expert Roberto Cajina, the scale of demobilisation that took place in Nicaragua is unprecedented – we might say exceptional – in contemporary military history.

The process was hastily implemented and chaotic, with benefits unfairly skewed towards the more senior ranks. For the most part, the thousands of two-year conscripts were simply happy to return home, but for those of all ranks who had made the army their career and had committed to revolution, there were various plans, some of which stressed seniority criteria and others the rank reached. They also had diverse compensation methods such as houses, land, money or staggered disbursements. Worst of all, the seemingly political criteria for deciding who would remain in active service and who would retire were never made clear. Even more so than the unequal compensation and subsequent lack of government compliance due to insufficient resources, the emotions related to being summarily dismissed from the herd after all the sacrifice and danger, without any clear and understandable explanation, fuelled resentment.

‘Recompas’ and ‘recontras’: together for land

Between April and December 1992 many demobilised soldiers, fed up with broken promises, led a series of protests and hunger strikes to spotlight the government’s failure to implement signed agreements corresponding to the three discharge plans. They sought proper titles to their lands and access to loans and technical assistance. They argued that grants of land to demobilised army personnel had been based on elitist criteria that favoured high-ranking officers – the total of 582 officers (2 colonels, 25 lieutenant colonels, 97 majors and 458 captains), represented just 5.8 per cent of all demobilised officers. Many of the latter were also adversely affected by the mechanism of compensation payments disbursed over a long period. Many dissenters organised into groups, rearming themselves: some to get the government’s attention, some to carry on the war and others to engage in low-level banditry.

Ex-National Resistance members were also dissatisfied. In their case the main problem was the chaos in the land titling process and facilitation of repayments or compensation prioritised in agreement two of the disarmament protocol. Meagre resources were meted out to provide for the war wounded, orphans and widows, resulting in miserable pensions. Talk began to be heard of a social divide that did not allow services to get through to the regions where settlements of demobilised Resistance fighters were situated.

Bands of armed army veterans (‘Recompas’) and Resistance veterans (‘Recontras’) turned their rearmament and rebellion into a means of demanding land and forcing the government to keep other unmet promises. At first some Recompa groups reactivated to respond to Recontras’ revenge abuses, but more often than not, the two formerly adversarial groups discovered they had shared interests and united in bands under separate commands known as ‘Rejuntos’, or a joint command known as ‘Revueltos’, to engage in publicity-seeking actions such as taking over a city or stretch of highway.⁵⁰

The Chamorro land reform was mostly an instrument for awarding severance pay and unemployment benefit to Army and Resistance veterans, and an attempt to pacify the rearmed groups. Although the government did not always keep its promises, some land distribution took place on the agricultural frontier, sometimes fanning the flames of ethnic conflicts with indigenous peoples on the Caribbean side of the country, and sometimes being drawn from privatised state properties. Of the 22,000 demobilised Contras, 11,385 had received a total of 231,000 hectares of land by 1992.⁵¹ Some of these together with certain land grants conflicted with other state programmes. For example, the Chamorro government granted land in areas later demarcated as forestry reserves, generating conflict in both directions. The presence of settlers had the demonstrable effect of attracting new invaders to the reserve areas, so the army would carry out evictions that were legitimate according to one law but in violation of another. In spite of these short circuits, possibly expressions of the diverse interests at play, the post-1990 reform – which was meant to strengthen the peace process – was in many ways a continuation of the Sandinista agrarian reform. Both were shaped by a combination of peasant demands and the consequences of the war itself. This new distribution of land, in significant if not enormous quantities, was an exceptional policy within Central America. Demobilised soldiers in other Central American countries did not receive the same benefits and, as a result, went on to form organised crime groups or to carry out contract killings for drug cartels, as happened with the Guatemalan kaibiles.⁵²

Better a hired hand on another’s farm than the boss of one’s own

At the end of the 1980s the ATC, with its 65,000 members, had grouped together union branches according to the kind of crop or enterprises their workers were involved in. For the branches related to coffee production, the ATC guaranteed workers’ participation, putting its money into a ‘deprofessionalisation’ of the organisation to rid it of bureaucrats and allow greater union participation in the economic management of the enterprises within it. This process accelerated with the privatisation of state enterprises in the 1990s, especially following farm seizures. The ATC promoted these to upset the Chamorro government’s privatisation plans, which were designed to favour business owners with which it was connected. The ATC was thus finally able to achieve the objective pursued in training received in the 1980s: worker-managed state enterprises.⁵³ The workers thus became owners too, a situation unforeseen in the revolutionary government’s early plans.

50 These names are an emblematic example of Nicaraguan humour in adversity: permutations on the well-known phrase ‘juntos pero no revueltos’ – together but not mixed – referring to generations of families forced to live under the same roof due to poverty rather than choice.

51 E. Baumeister and A. Fauné, ‘Elementos para una nueva estrategia gremial de la UNAG’. Paper presented at a seminar to Junta Directiva Nacional of UNAG, Managua, 8 June 1992.

52 A. Hernández, Los señores del narco, 399.

The farm workers organised in the ATC managed to acquire a coffee-processing operation and nine coffee estates, covering a combined area of 16,670 hectares, scattered across Matagalpa, Jinotega, Carazo and Managua. In 1999 these properties were combined to form a coffee company, AGROCAFE S.A., with 2,032 members, 98 per cent of whom were workers on the farms, which also grew basic grains and managed cattle ranches and a large area of forest. According to AGROCAFE, the estates belonging to the Workers’ Property Area (APT), the new name for these lands, were responsible for 7 per cent of the country’s coffee production, which was, and still is, the country’s most important export.⁵⁴

By 1994 the situation for the worker/entrepreneurs on these farms was already looking unpromising. In one of them, the Adolfo García, covering 255 hectares in El Crucero, only 16 out of 165 members knew how to read and write. School dropout rates did not augur a better future for them: only half of 250 farmworkers’ children managed to finish the 1993 academic year. They were acutely aware of their limitations in managing their own businesses. Furthermore, they were being strangled by a financial debt of 583,000 córdobas and a dearth of agricultural inputs. The migration of some members to other farms, the cities and Costa Rica started undermining their capacity for self-management. The ten córdobas a day they could get as hired hands on other farms was almost double the income they received working for themselves.⁵⁵ Some of their farms were sold or rendered unproductive due to lack of credit.

A range of circumstances conspired against worker management. Merlet points to ‘economic insecurity’ as a big factor, explaining that structural adjustment policies brutally changed the rules of the game by getting rid of the various subsidies that benefited farmers. The new small farmers and the former state enterprises, now managed by workers, were subjected to pressure from former owners and the police, who were able to justify their interference because of various unresolved legal problems with property titles. The new owners were also economically asphyxiated by a drastic reduction in access to credit and little or no renegotiation of the debts previously acquired by their cooperatives or enterprises. According to Merlet, who has followed the fate of the agrarian reform through all the years since it began, a considerable portion of the land awarded was sold at prices way below its market value. This was partly because of the lack of adequate title deeds, especially in the case of the best lands or those with urban development or tourism potential. If a balance sheet were drawn up of the gains (land given to former combatants, for example) and losses (sales of land and land returned to former owners), beneficiaries of the reformed sector would have a net loss of some 400,000 hectares between 1990 and 2000. And the process is not yet over.⁵⁶

53 CIERA, La reforma agraria, vol. VI, 101.

54 M. González, ‘Worker-owned coffee farms: the bitter and the sweet,’ Envío, no. 154, May 1994.

55 Ibid.

Forty years later?

It has often been said that a return to extreme inequality in land tenure has occurred in the last decade, an agrarian counter-reform spurred on by elites, old and new, grabbing farms of all sizes. Eduardo Baumeister charts the state of land tenure to four milestones in Nicaraguan history which fall close to census dates: the start of Somoza’s decline, the end of the Somoza dynasty, the end of Sandinista agrarian reform and the end of two neoliberal governments (those of Violeta Chamorro and Arnoldo Alemán).⁵⁷

Between 1963 and 1978 there were no significant changes in landholdings. The relative drop in the area of farms larger than 350 hectares is a result of the division of farms between multiple heirs. This stratum was transformed, although not as much as some desired, between 1978 and 1988. Collectives absorbed 25.5 per cent of the farmland, while holdings of 140 hectares or more dropped precipitously, from just over 52 per cent of total landholdings to just over 26 per cent: basically, the big farms fed the collectives. The most significant increase in the number of small farms took place between 1988 and 2001: the proportion of land held in units of 140 hectares or less grew by almost 13 percentage points, partly due to the breaking up of cooperative land and state farms into individual plots, and partly due to the land being given to veterans of both sides and to returning exiles. The fact that collectives shrank by more than 20 per cent does not just reflect their being parcelled out to farm workers and cooperative members. A large part of this land was returned to former owners or acquired by old or new large-scale owners, which accounts for the number of farms over 140 hectares having also increased in the same period.

It should be noted that the increase in the number of smallholdings does not necessarily imply a rise in the number of smallholders. Some of the change is due to members of the middle class having acquired many small farms to diversify their sources of income. There is also a risk that the governing party could use the current situation, in which the Nicaraguan is described – according to current propaganda – as ‘Christian, socialist and in solidarity’, to bring back the methods of the outmoded paternalist state to engage in new expropriations and distribute properties among the ‘good’. The later in this ‘second stage of the revolution’ are submissive yes-men.

56 Merlet, ‘Fragilidad y límites’.

57 E. Baumeister, ‘Treinta años de agricultura nicaragüense (1978–2008)’, 400.

Figure 5.1. Evolution in the size of farms by range (in percentages of land used for agriculture).
Source: CIERA and agricultural census of 1963, 1978, and 2001.⁵⁸

Without doubt, a fresh attempt at redistribution would be welcomed by the many who are again landless, from the recipients of freebies and by those who benefit from troubled waters. The passage of time is a great fragmenter of smallholdings. It is inevitable that any such project would necessarily ignore the burden of unresolved conflict that Nicaraguans still carry as a result of the agrarian reform of the 1980s. This time redistribution would be implemented without the legitimacy the FSLN once enjoyed and abused, and it would ignore the fact that property rights are not the only – or even the most important – reason for the struggle around land, its use and the distribution of its benefits.

New struggles could be more aligned to common interests and the common good, and they might include other components, provide more options, adopt new strategies and diversify demands and approaches. This could happen, if, as Merlet suggests, instead of talking about ‘land,’ we talked about ‘rights to land’; if we understood that a title or deed covers different rights, but not all rights; and if we talked about ‘land tenure regimes’ instead of ‘terms of ownership’.⁵⁹

Another factor might come into play which could have the opposite effect, as it tends towards the rolling back of the agrarian reform: the expropriation of small- and medium-sized properties along the possible route of the interoceanic canal which is unlikely to be constructed. This coup de main would result in the concentration of farms and residential properties in the hands of the canal company and its shareholders.⁶⁰ Considerable resistance has been made against the expropriations of the canal project, in the form of four protest marches, all led principally by medium and small-scale farmers.⁶¹ So far, the government has reacted with indifference and repression: the authorities have not passed judgement on the matter and the police have turned a blind eye when government sympathisers attack the demonstrators. At the same time, the government cannot feign indifference in the face of the peasants’ ability to communicate their complaints to various national stakeholders and international fora. Government apathy on this matter is a result of the fact that the FSLN wins far more votes in urban areas, which is where most of Nicaragua’s population is now concentrated.⁶²

58 E. Baumeister, ‘Treinta años de agricultura nicaragüense (1978-2008)’, in Nicaragua y el FSLN [1979-2009] ¿Qué queda de la revolución? (Barcelona, 2009): 400.

59 M. Merlet, ‘Regímenes de tenencia de la tierra, sistemas financieros y construcción de nuevas modalidades de gobernanza’. Paper presented at the international seminar ‘Economías campesinas y sistemas financieros rurales’, Foro latinoamericano y del Caribe sobre finanzas rurales (FOROLACFR), La Paz, Bolivia, July 2007.

This indifference is built upon a sense of contempt for some of the most lasting achievements of the agrarian reform – achievements which have survived for 40 years. The Nicaraguan peasantry has shown itself to be organised and conscious of its interests, even though it was required to subordinate them to the directives of the revolutionary government in the 1980s, when urban-focused policies that were harmful to peasant interests were emphasised.⁶³ Since ‘consciousness’ is an intangible benefit, the exact scope of which is not easily measured, I will mention a more concrete and tangible achievement: in the 2002/2003 cycle Nicaragua sold 3,925,364 kilograms of coffee through Fair Trade channels, which was 6.12 per cent of Fair Trade coffee originating from Latin America, and 3.45 per cent of the global output, making it the fifth largest producer in Latin America.⁶⁴ The democratisation of coffee cultivation in Nicaragua has created the right conditions for Fair Trade. Its cooperatives and small-scale farmers are highly attractive partners for institutions that promote this alternative to the conventional market, including Espanica, a Fair Trade organisation that distributes coffee in Spain, sourced from farmers in Matagalpa and Condega who are organised in cooperatives that own lands from the old APP.

Some agrarian reform cooperatives continue to stand out in Fair Trade circles. The Promoter for Cooperative Development in Las Segovias (PRODECOOP) is one of the most successful examples of coffee-producing cooperatives in the Fair Trade market. Founded in 1993, it brings together more than 2,000 small farmers who are members of 40 different cooperatives. In 2002 it controlled assets worth more than a million dollars.⁶⁵ The Centre for Coffee Cooperatives of the North (CECOCAFEN) comprises 12 organisations which have 2,637 members (709 women and 1,928 men). Both of these cooperatives have gained in strength because Fair Trade prices are considerably higher than the price on the New York exchange. For example, in the 2002/2003 cycle, when the average price of coffee in Nicaragua was US$68.93 dollars per quintal, CECOCAFEN and PRODECOOP paid US$110 and 104.76 per quintal respectively. The average prices paid by the commercial giants CISA and Atlantic were US$71.15 and 64.94 dollars per quintal respectively.⁶⁶ In times of crisis, thanks to Fair Trade’s relatively captive customers, the difference between the Fair Trade price and the price on the New York exchange increases. In 2001, when the average price of coffee in Nicaragua was US$60.22 per quintal and CISA and Atlantic paid no more than US$56, the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (UCA) paid US$87.15, PRODECOOP paid US$80.25, while CECOCAFEN averaged US$99.61 and COSATIN – a cooperative in Boaco – paid more than US$104.⁶⁷

60 M. López Baltodano, ‘Truths about the canal concession all Nicaraguans should know’, Envío, no. 390, Jan. 2014.

61 E. Romero, ‘Campesinos marcharon contra el canal’, La Prensa, 22 Apr. 2016.

62 J.L. Rocha and T. Martínez, ‘A country divided: relative defeats and victories’, Envío, no. 232, Nov. 2000.

63 R. Mendoza Vidaurre, ‘We erred to win...’, Envío, no. 111, Oct. 1990.

64 J. Vieto, ‘Foro Internacional. El café sostenible en América Latina. Situación actual de la oferta y tendencias’, Centro de Inteligencia sobre Mercados Sostenibles, 25 Nov. 2003, Lima, Perú.

To a great extent Nicaragua’s participation in the Fair Trade and organic markets is rooted in the legacy of the two models of cooperativism. It is not just that farmers with small/medium holdings are obvious targets for Fair Trade, but rather that a series of ideological affinities has ensured that cooperativists, organised peasants and NGOs promoting them have worked together to boost Fair Trade – and this situation is clear in the case of coffee.⁶⁸ However, huge gaps in knowledge exist in other areas where the likelihood of the positive impact of agrarian reform is also detectable. That impact makes Nicaragua an exceptional case in Central America. It remains for future studies to investigate whether the diversification of agricultural production and the incursion into less conventional products for export – mangoes, pineapples, yucca – is also, at least partially, rooted in the legacy of the agrarian reform. With the onslaught of Monsanto and its control over seeds, as well as the importation of corn and other basic products for which national demand used to be satisfied with domestic production, another question is raised: to what extent has food sovereignty and the food security crisis been halted as a result of the structure of land tenure which in turn is a result of the agrarian reform?

There is no doubt that the trend towards inequality in land tenure and the threat of an abrupt seizure of large amounts of land to benefit the canal owners are threats to this more democratic system of land use. The banks and the local loan sharks are the principal agents of this move towards concentration. Their daily work takes place silently but constantly. In contrast, the business of the interoceanic canal, including the highly probable fact that in the end there will be no canal, would be a more sudden blow and of greater concern: it affects 27 per cent of the territory of 13 municipalities and 23,847 farmers, most of them small or medium producers.⁶⁹ This tour de force of the counterreform would establish a perverse symmetry with the reform of the 1980s: while in the past the process of granting land was accelerated for military reasons, here the expropriations would be carried out for economic reasons. Land tenure would again be a dependent variable shaped by the macropolitics of a state that has another goal in mind. The peasants who were sacrificed on the altar of the revolution are now being asked to make another sacrifice in the name of progress or, more probably, for the sake of the greed of a group of politicians and investors. It is, at the very least, disconcerting and disheartening that the same organisation – the FSLN – is the one that has always demanded and still does, the one that gave and now seeks to take away. Nevertheless, the FSLN’s actions make sense: to a great extent land tenure will again be determined by the requirements of geopolitics.

65 PRODECOOP, ‘Quinta asamblea de delegados. Informa a la Asamblea General’, Nov. 2002.

66 Datos del Centro de Trámites de las Exportaciones (CETREX), Exportaciones de café por empresa. Cosecha 2002/2003.

67 Ibid., Cosecha 2001/2002.

68 R. Mendoza Vidaurre, ‘La paradoja del café.

In the past, the progress that the FSLN had in mind revolved around one great landowner who guaranteed greater productivity and cohesion: the state. In the present, progress consists of ceding control of the area to large private landowners, a project that resembles the model developed by liberals in the 19th century. In both cases, the final results do not match the original plans. In the 1980s, peasant resistance and the war itself – which was fought by a discontented peasantry – were the real drivers of Nicaraguan exceptionalism, because they accelerated agrarian reform, pushing it closer to the Bukharin model and prolonging it beyond the revolutionary decade. This culminated in the Chamorro government’s post-1990 reform, which was necessary to secure a lasting peace. Peasant actions made agrarian reform exceptional in terms of both infrastructure and superstructure, shaping land ownership and ideology. Nicaragua’s participation in Fair Trade networks is built upon these achievements. At the time of writing, as the spectre of the interoceanic canal threatens to prompt a massive reconcentration of land ownership, it is once again the strength of peasant activism that has halted the trend towards greater inequality.

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