7. Grassroots verticalism? A Comunidad Eclesial de Base in rural Nicaragua*

David Cooper

How do we come to form judgements about the way something so intangible as a nation, or a society, might change or remain the same? If a society is understood to have changed, what values or images do we refer to in order to gauge whether that change is for the better or for the worse? If a process of social change is thought to have rendered a nation exceptional, then on what conceptual basis are comparisons made? In the case of Nicaragua, and in relation to the question of how, and whether, the Sandinista Revolution gave rise to a state of exceptionality – in comparison both with its neighbours and its own pre-revolutionary past – a central analytical imagery has been an orthogonal opposition between the ‘vertical’ and the ‘horizontal’. This chapter delves in detail into a highly localised ethnographic scenario – examining the continuing activity of a liberation theology group in rural Nicaragua – and aims to draw insight from that scenario for these larger questions of political and historical evaluation. While forming broad comparative judgements about Nicaraguan society by reference to an opposition between the vertical and the horizontal has been of central importance for scholars – and, indeed, for liberation theologians – the case explored here suggests that this potent evaluative framework is not necessarily the most pertinent one for some of those whose lives have been most profoundly affected by the revolution.

For the Nicaraguan campesinos (or farmers) among whom I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, the movement of socio-political history was often gauged by a different measure. Rather than referring to a diagrammatic opposition between vertical and horizontal social or political forms, they focused upon the difference between a politics characterised by inclusion and care, and a politics of abandonment. The contrast carries concrete political implications. The notion that desirable social change amounts to an elimination of the vertical – as the ethnography explored below makes clear – can easily translate into a sense that the minds of campesinos require structural adjustment through the inculcation of a culture of horizontalism. But the campesinos I came to know attributed their ongoing economic struggle not to flaws in their own way of understanding the world, but instead to the degree to which the moral behaviour of those in positions of power facilitated the kinds of inclusion that were desired. They focused their energies, correspondingly, upon the effort to elicit an appropriate ethical orientation, as they understood it, from powerholders. The basic aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which these contrasting models of socio-political transformation found expression in one particular ethnographic scenario, but then to think through the implications of that discussion for scholarly debates about Nicaragua’s broad trajectory of change, the kind of difference the revolution is taken to have made, and the implications of established perspectives in those debates for our understanding of campesino political culture.

* This chapter is based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gualiqueme and neighbouring villages from Nov. 2011–July 2012 and Jan. 2013–July 2013. A return visit was made in Nov.–Dec. 2015. Names of individuals and those of some locations and organisations have been changed. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant ES/H012478/1, and by the European Research Council (ERC) under Grant ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP.

Grassroots verticalism

‘Just “Ricardo”’, requested the priest leading the proceedings, as he was once again addressed honorifically as ‘don Ricardo’. During the 2012 annual meeting of PROOR (Proyecto Oscar Romero), a development initiative established by liberation theologians in northern Nicaragua, the tensions underlying this minor exchange emerged time and again. When I spoke to Ricardo about the PROOR project, he expressed his pride in what had been achieved by participants over the years. The organisation had been established after a small group of Spanish priests, Ricardo among them, secured a generous donation from Germany to provide emergency relief in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in 1991. Wishing to ensure that the money was used wisely, PROOR was established to give beneficiaries a say in how funds would be administered. Developments since then had been entirely in the hands of participants, Ricardo stressed. They took the initiative themselves to propose and establish a mutual savings and credit organisation. The structure of meetings, and the concrete form the project had eventually taken, had all been directed by participants’ own suggestions and ideas. His role has always been merely one of facilitator, he emphasised, taking on such minor responsibilities as arranging for the rental of chairs for the meetings.

During the meeting, however, Ricardo encountered some starkly contrasting readings of his own role in the organisation. The honorific ‘don’ persistently prefixed his name, despite his repeated requests, as speakers apparently insisted upon placing him in a position of seniority and status. When he announced that this was to be the last meeting for which he would be convener, a series of individuals proceeded to stand up and make impromptu, celebratory speeches of gratitude, each commending him for his commitment to the project and praising him for the successes that had come as a result. The majority of these improvised contributions emphasised the benefits of having participated in the project in highly personalised terms, constructing their own lives as having been positively improved due to Ricardo’s transformative assistance. Ricardo’s discomfort with the hagiographic tones of these homilies was all too clear – one speaker even suggested that he would go down in local memory alongside Oscar Romero himself.

The central ethnographic focus of this chapter is an active Comunidad Eclesial de Base (CEB) in the village of Gualiqueme, in the Segovian mountains, and their regional network based in the city of Estelí. As we shall see, the tension in PROOR’s meeting described above encapsulates a substantive disagreement regarding the form of the forces underpinning relevant social and historical change which runs through liberation theology activities. Among CEB participants and their neighbours, the prospects and possibilities of CEB activity are frequently discussed in relation to a set of social and political assumptions which I will tentatively term ‘grassroots verticalism’; tentatively, because the discussion below ultimately leads me to reject the concept. I use the phrase to point to understandings of political possibility which view apparently vertical – even hierarchical – social relations as a source of potential and as a viable target of political activity. Ricardo’s discomfort, however, points to the way in which grassroots verticalism shows up as problematic from the perspective of liberation theology itself. At issue in PROOR’s meeting were two competing readings of the productive, transformative potentials enabled by participation in the project. Ricardo emphasised the extent to which transformative possibilities were enabled by the horizontal, self-organising capabilities of participants, while many of the latter put forward an image which construed Ricardo himself as a transformative figure, whose personal input and capacity as an intermediary was the crucial factor in the project’s value. For Gualiqueme residents, as we shall see, CEB activity is shot through with such tensions. Participants often speak about the value of taking part in terms of the possibilities it opens up of gaining access to the valued ‘help’ of liberation theologians themselves – assistance which is viewed as an instance of a broader developmental force associated with Sandinismo and the revolution – while liberation theologians understand themselves to be working to dislodge and combat hierarchical social and religious thinking.

In viewing moments of apparent preference for vertical political forms as disturbing – and, as we shall see, something to be combated – liberation theologians draw upon a set of assumptions about the shape of political history that is often shared by scholarly analysts of Nicaragua’s post-revolutionary situation. Indeed, evaluations of Nicaragua’s trajectory since 1990 make frequent recourse to an analytic which constructs the vertical as corresponding to a process of historical regression. On this analysis, the revolution’s ‘progressive’ advances are viewed as having been overturned to the extent that horizontal political forms and intra-class solidarities have been eroded, with a resurgent and disempowering verticalism taking their place. Here progress is viewed as coterminous with a diagrammatic shift from the vertical to the horizontal.¹ Drawing upon concepts such as clientelism, populism and caudillismo to describe these developments, scholars work to construct Nicaragua’s political trajectory as veering tragically backwards, towards a standardised Latin American form.² If the revolution’s transformations once rendered Nicaragua exceptional insofar as the nation made concrete ‘advances’ towards a horizontal social order, these analyses amount to the claim that Nicaragua’s exceptionalism has been slipping away.

My aim in this chapter will be to use an exploration of one community’s involvement with CEB activity to think through the implications of this depiction of verticalist politics. Though the orthogonal imagery I chart is central to a critique of trends towards authoritarianism, corruption and caudillismo at Nicaragua’s political centre, it is important to ensure that this potent line of political polemic does not eclipse the possibility of perceiving ways in which hierarchy may be drawn upon as an active political resource by subaltern populations. In interrogating – and finally rejecting – the notion of grassroots verticalism, I point towards aspects of the political thought of Nicaraguan campesinos that risks being obscured by a model of political change founded upon horizonal-vertical oppositions. If constituencies of present-day Sandinista supporters are not to be dismissed as the mere dupes of populist strategies deployed by political elites, or as helplessly caught up in overarching processes of political regression, attending to the specific contours of the political imaginaries which inform continuing commitment to the FSLN is crucial. The broader intention here, then, is to use the ethnographic tension identified in one local CEB to open up analytical space for comprehending grassroots participation in Ortega’s ‘assistentialism’ in a way that does not cast rural people as simply responding mechanically, inevitably and predictably to political distribution.

1 It should also be noted that, during the 1980s, Sandinista governance was explicitly tied to theories of revolutionary vanguardism that have themselves been described in terms of ‘verticalist’ politics. Indeed, a central line of analysis in diagnoses of the problems faced by the revolutionary government in the 1980s has been grounded in critique of such verticalist tendencies: see, e.g., R. Montoya, Gendered Scenarios of Revolution.

2 E.g., Hoyt warned us that the Ortega-Alemán pact ‘returned Nicaragua to the old days of caudilllismo’: K. Hoyt ‘Parties and pacts in contemporary Nicaragua’, 18. A recent analysis by Close and Marti í Puig, ‘The Scandinistas and Nicaragua since 1977’, 9, views Alemán’s politics as ‘the perfect adaptation of classical Latin American caudillo politics to the demands of electoral democracy. Rosario Montoya, ‘Contradiction and struggle under the leftist phoenix’, 46, views Ortega’s incumbency as characterised by ‘assistentialism’, and suggests that the ‘caciquismo [...], familialism, and exclusion of women’ evident in recent state and NGO projects stands as a return of ‘familiar rural forms’ that worked to undermine revolutionary practice in the 1980s. And Dennis Rodgers, ‘Searching for the time of beautiful madness’, 84, portrays the ‘social atomisation’ of the neoliberal present as standing in stark contrast with the ‘pervasive solidarity and collective support’ of the 1980s. This line of analysis resonates with a key argument regarding the development of rural political support for the FSLN in first place. Pre-revolutionary rural politics is widely understood to have been founded upon patron-client ties: J. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979; V. González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979; M. Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under US Imperial Rule. Revolutionary political mobilisation, correspondingly, has been viewed as having been possible where sociological shifts undermined that hierarchical social pact; see, e.g., L.R. Horton, Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994, 55–61. To the extent that revolutionary political practice has been understood to depend upon the erosion of clientelism, recent vertical trends come to appear as primarily a step backwards.

After providing a brief historical account of Gualiqueme’s history, the chapter will describe the nature of CEB activity both in village meetings and in the regional meetings periodically held in the city of Estelí. An exploration will follow of the view of hierarchical thinking that emerges from the theoretical perspective of liberation theology itself. This perspective – in common with many critical commentaries on the clientelism of Ortega’s recent governance – mobilises a strong historical narrative in which hierarchy is rendered coterminous with an oppressive past. Hierarchy is constructed as integral to a traditional Latin American culture, and CEB activity is theorised as offering the possibility of leaving that culture behind and achieving authentic subaltern political agency. If apparently vertical thinking persists among CEB participants, this perspective takes it as evidence of an incomplete process of cultural change. The chapter will proceed, however, to explore the practical activities of the CEB group. By examining the practical engagement of Gualiqueme residents with their CEB, and exploring the parallels villagers draw between CEB participation and a range of other institutional experiences, it will argue that the ideas we provisionally termed grassroots verticalism are, in fact, bound up with a view of political possibility which an orthogonal imagery fails to adequately illuminate. Revolving around a sense that crucial prerequisites for political and economic progress are located elsewhere, this view implicitly contests the notion that social change should be sought by modifying campesino culture or social practice. Instead, it is the moral orientations of elites that are presumed to stand as the most coherent target for transformative endeavour.

CEBs in Gualiqueme

The village of Gualiqueme was established in 1984, in the middle of the Contra War and in the midst of Contra activity in the northern mountains near Honduras. It was created as an asentamiento as part of the creation of a Cooperativa de Autodefensa (CAD), a militarised and collectivised agricultural organisation, the founding members of which comprised displaced campesinos whose previous villages had been attacked by the Contras.³ After the Sandinista victory in 1979, the land later granted to the cooperative had initially been established as a state farm. Comprising areas formerly belonging to three large haciendas, the farm had been well endowed with a substantial dairy herd, a coffee farm and a commercially exploited pine forest. As FSLN agrarian policy shifted over the course of the 1980s, an initial preference for state farms gave way and the formation of cooperatives became a priority. In war-torn regions, granting land to agrarian cooperatives came to be viewed as offering the possibility of creating outposts of loyal Sandinistas capable of defending vulnerable territories against Contra incursions.⁴ The formation of the Rigoberto Cruz cooperative, then, was intended to meet a range of goals: resettlement, military defence and rural development.

3 On the creation of asentamientos during the Contra War, see J. Ercoreca Bilbao, et al., ‘Reforma agraria, migraciones y guerra: asentamientos en Nicaragua’; J.L. Hammond, ‘Resettlement and rural development in Nicaragua’.

For several years after it was established, the cooperative functioned collectively, with members assigned work responsibilities by an elected leadership and receiving a salary. Ultimately, however, amid the economic turbulence caused by the Contra War – and subsequently, with the complete withdrawal of state support for agricultural cooperatives once the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990 – the members ended up dividing the land out among themselves and working individually. Today the cooperative still exists as an institution, and the land is still legally owned by the cooperative, although land sales to non-residents are an increasing problem. Residents speak about the history of their cooperative in a range of ways: they often readily acknowledge the difficulties the institution experienced and are sometimes critical of the poor performance of some leaders, but mostly they emphasise the tremendous value of the cooperative as an organisation. Local accounts of the village’s early years, however, tend to be overwhelmingly focused upon the difficulties and suffering of the war. These difficulties have done nothing to dent the loyalty of villagers to the FSLN, however. Gualiqueme residents describe themselves as Sandinistas through and through, and many proudly affirmed that every single person in the village voted for the FSLN in the 2011 elections.

The close relationship of liberation theologians to the revolutionary process in Nicaragua has been well-documented, and activists within the popular church have become personally known to Gualiqueme residents over the years.⁵ For example, narratives of the community’s history invariably emphasise the fact that when people arrived at the village site, the area was just puro monte (wilderness), and initially people had to live collectively in old hacienda buildings. They were able to build their own houses, people explained, when Padre Bonifacio, the director of an organisation known as the Escuela Radiofonica Nicaragua, established a project which provided them with the materials to do so. This historic involvement continues to the present day. Several villagers are involved with PROOR, the organisation whose meeting I described at the start of the chapter. Considerably more active within the everyday life of the village, however, were the activities of the Comunidad Eclesial de Base.

4 The changing priorities in Sandinista agrarian policy in the 1980s have been well-discussed in the literature, with many scholars viewing rural discontent with FSLN governance as the result of a refusal to grant land to individuals until late in the revolutionary decade. M.J. Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development offers one of the more recent overviews of these debates.

5 J. Kirk, Politics and the Catholic Church in Nicaragua; M. Foroohar, The Catholic Church and Social Change in Nicaragua; D. Sabia, Contradiction and Conflict: The Popular Church in Nicaragua; and P.J. Williams, The Catholic Church and Politics in Nicaragua and Costa Rica provide historical accounts of the development of the liberation theology movement in Nicaragua and its relationship with the Sandinista Revolution.

Theology and practicality in CEB activity

Village meetings

The CEB group in Gualiqueme meets each week, on a Sunday, at around 11am. They own a small adobe building, purchased in recent years in order to have a dedicated space to hold their activities, which generally remains locked and unused for the rest of the week. As some other villagers make their way to the Catholic chapel for their regular Sunday service, CEB members assemble in their modest building. The timing means that participants face a clear choice: they cannot attend the conventional Catholic service in addition to the CEB celebration. If a female participant arrives early, she might quickly sweep the floor, as the men remove the heavy wooden stakes blocking the windows to let in the light. The walls are decorated with posters of Óscar Romero, one displaying a montage of dozens of photos of the martyred Salvadoran priest at different stages of his life. Plastic chairs are unstacked and placed optimistically at the front of the room – as other participants arrive, they will usually be repositioned towards the back when people take their places. Well-worn books containing hymns in the liberation theology tradition, photocopied and bound by hand, are handed around. There are rarely enough for a copy each. Once a reasonable number of people have assembled, the celebration will begin.

The group comprises a small number of core members, who take responsibility for proceedings, undertake to lead or contribute to these weekly sessions, and frequently attend the regional meetings which are occasionally held in the city of Estelí. In addition, a number of villagers are associated with the group to a degree, but do not attend as frequently. Always present, however, are a group of seven or eight teenage girls, sometimes referred to as las becadas – those who are receiving becas (studentships for secondary study) from the CEB – who sit right at the back of the room and firmly resist the attempts of more senior participants to encourage them to contribute to discussions. After a request has been made for a volunteer, and following a long silence, one or two of these apparently reluctant participants will be made to stand up and give a scripture reading.

Proceedings always follow a regular structure. Meetings open with a prayer, followed by several hymns. Perhaps surprisingly, the opening prayer in meetings I attended was frequently the Novus Ordo, or ‘Yo Confieso’ (I confess), containing the strong emphasis of personal sin; ‘Yo confieso ante dios todopoderoso … que he pecado mucho … por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi gran culpa.’⁶ The hymnbooks, however, contained songs from the Misa Campesina Nicaragüense, such as ‘vos sos el dios de los pobres’, and ‘vamos a la milpa del señor’, which would be accompanied by guitar on those occasions when a musician had brought an instrument along.⁷

6 ‘I confess before God almighty … that I have sinned greatly … I am to blame, I am to blame, I am truly to blame.’

Following printed guidelines for scriptural readings and themes to explore, the proceedings attended were generally led by don Lucas, sometimes by Samuel, another leading member of the group. After the opening prayer and songs, a reading of a selected biblical passage is made. Subsequently the person leading the proceedings offers a commentary on the text and invites participants to contribute to the discussions. Contributions I witnessed were frequently striking in their stark conjunction of themes; participants occasionally referred to ideas that drew very clearly from a liberationist tradition, but it was also common for discussion to centre upon more conventional Catholic questions of personal sin or prospects of salvation and damnation in the afterlife.

Once the discussion of the weekly scriptural reading draws to a close, the meeting shifts to administrative and organisational concerns. Upcoming financial requirements of the group are discussed – for example, the need for everyone to contribute to pay for the meeting house’s electricity bill. Arrangements for any upcoming events being held by the regional group are discussed. On occasions when there are plans for other members of the regional group to visit Gualiqueme for a celebration, for example, such discussions might revolve around who will contribute food or make a financial contribution, who will cook, and who will be able to offer accommodation to visiting members of other groups – commitments which place considerable demands upon participants. An offering of a few córdobas will generally be placed on a table at the front, which will be used to cover the basic running costs of the group itself, before people make their way home.

Regional meetings

Central to the activities of the group are monthly regional meetings, which are conducted in a sizeable CEB building in Estelí. These being together leading members of local groups from a number of villages surrounding the city, as well as some members based in Estelí itself. It is significant that several practising Evangelicals are among those who attend.⁸ The regional group is overseen and administered by Camila, a liberation theologian of Spanish origin, who has lived for many years in the village of one of the member groups. Participants described her to me as a former nun, and when speaking about the activities of the CEB, active participants and other villagers almost always emphasised her central organising role and her Spanish origins. As well as meeting in Estelí, the groups that are linked together through the regional nucleus occasionally assemble in meeting houses within particular villages.

7 ‘You are the God of the poor’, and ‘Let’s go to the Lord’s cornfield’.

8 In meetings I attended participants openly discussed some of the difficulties potentially faced by Evangelicals who involved themselves in CEB activities. E.g. one woman described how her pastor had subjected her to sanctions within her church as a consequence of having been involved. The pastor imposed the standard disciplinary procedure of withdrawing ‘privileges’ such as the right to read or sing in services for a fixed period, in her case two months. This form of punishment might also be directed at those who have ‘sinned’ by committing adultery, drinking or smoking.

The participants I knew in Gualiqueme looked forward to regional meetings as an exciting event, as it can be a somewhat rare opportunity to visit the city.⁹ They take place over a weekend, beginning at around lunchtime on Saturday, and finishing in the early afternoon the following day. Members who have travelled from rural areas sleep in the building, for which purpose the group has a supply of mattresses and pillows which are spread out on the floors of back rooms as people arrive. Travel costs are reimbursed from the group’s funds and meals are provided. These, which include meat and cheese, especially in months when cash is in short supply, and when many weeks may have passed with no alteration in the boiled beans and tortilla eaten daily at home, are a real attraction.

As with those at village-level, regional meetings were generally organised around a dual structure. First, a scriptural session which might involve a reading and discussion of particular biblical passages, lessons on elements of liberation theology’s history and thought given by Camila, and extended presentations or performances on a prepared theme given by leading members of the group, interspersed with liberation theology hymns. First thing on a Sunday, a mass might be performed, with one of the group’s lay leaders or Camila leading proceedings, and using tortilla as Communion bread. Subsequently, however, attention would be turned to more practical matters and the group would discuss financial issues, organisational requirements for upcoming activities, and ideas for new projects.

Both village and regional meetings, then, exhibit a clear organisational distinction between theological matters and practical concerns. Though liberation theology itself generally insists that theology and praxis are inseparable, and is committed to the idea that praxis is closely informed by theology, and vice versa, my suggestion here is that my provisional term ‘grassroots verticalism’ shows up in a different light in relation to each key segment of CEB activity. The theological component completely works to construct verticalism as an entrenched idea that needs to be examined and confronted. Within the domain of the practical organisation of CEB projects, however, a focus on hierarchy and personalised assistance can be understood as a pragmatic engagement with organisational structures related to forms of top-down funding and the channelling of social provision through local leaders, something common to CEB activity, NGO practice and state social projects alike.

9 During the main periods of fieldwork in 2011–13, return bus fares to Estelí from Gualiqueme cost 80 córdobas (or 110 if an ‘express’ bus was taken between Condega and Estelí). No CEB participants had access to any other means of transport. During the same period, a day labourer might have been paid between 60 and 120 córdobas per day, depending on the nature of the work and whether or not food was provided by the employer; 80 córdobas without food was the most common arrangement. At the time, US$1 was worth approximately 22 córdobas.

Theological intervention: confronting entrenched ideas

A critical element of the theological component of the CEB endeavour is the injunction to rework forms of thought inherited from the Catholic tradition, which are viewed as antithetical to liberation. Liberation theologians and critical scholars frequently emphasise this model of cultural re-examination. Through the encounter with scripture facilitated by CEB activity, religious assumptions, cosmological ideas or ethical norms, viewed as working to foster the forms of dependency and hierarchy that characterise the traditional Catholic Church and the social order of the past, can be examined alongside their possible role in reproducing the present-day social conditions underpinning poverty. Through this process, it is assumed, authentic political agency among the poor can be awakened, precisely to the degree that those old, disempowering forms of thought can be confronted, challenged and changed.¹⁰

This model of theological-cultural change was also particularly evident in the regional meetings in Estelí attended by Gualiqueme residents. Indeed, Camila, the group’s coordinator, was at times clearly conscious of needing to temper her explicit evaluations of participants’ thinking as part of what she understood as a slow, long-term project of cultural change. One regional meeting activity I participated in, for example, involved discussing the scientific account of the world’s origin in the ‘Latin American bible’. Camila had prepared a handout which conveyed a ‘creation’ narrative: modelled upon the biblical creation story, it described the origins of the world and the genesis of human life on earth in terms drawn from modern science and made reference to biological evolution. Camila herself was keenly aware that this modern account stood in stark contrast to deeply held understandings among the group’s participants. She commented, however, that the biblical stories were just that, stories, and what the scientists said about these things were true. She knew that it was difficult for people to get their heads around, she said. The biblical stories are of great value, they are sacred, she affirmed – but they aren’t true. However, she said, she had no intention of pressing that point, because she knew that it would take a long time for people’s thinking on those matters to change.

Discussion of the handout was subsequently undertaken in smaller groups, with responses fed back to the whole group afterwards. The conversations elicited by this activity revealed considerable diversity in the participants’ evaluation of this putatively scientific account of creation. In the group I joined, several people observed that the narrative in the handout could not possibly be accurate, given that it contradicted starkly the account of creation given in the bible. Rosa disagreed, arguing that the bible story was itself simply a lie foisted upon people by ‘power’, and that it had to do with the ‘God of Fear’. With most participants in my group, however, this radical interpretation – placing the biblical and scientific narratives in stark opposition – did not appear to resonate. Most discussants found much more persuasive the idea that, despite the superficial differences between the scientific story and biblical creation, they exhibited an underlying compatibility. This, they argued, was because it was evidently the case that scientists have themselves learned from the bible (se han preparado de la biblia) in developing their knowledge. The text in question involved the explicit literary device of rewriting the biblical creation story with a scientific account. Rather than simply misunderstanding this device, though, it appeared to me that, in concluding that science is grounded in biblical insight, the discussants worked quite specifically to avoid a stark oppositional framing such as that articulated by Camila or by Rosa’s reference to the God of Fear.

10 See A. Dawson ‘The origins and character of the base ecclesial community: a Brazilian perspective’. In the Nicaraguanist literature, Montoya shows how mainstream liberation theology’s effort to forge a society without hierarchy sits at odds with the thinking of one campesino intellectual. R. Montoya, ‘Liberation theology and the socialist utopia of a Nicaraguan shoemaker’.

Despite acknowledging that transforming long-standing religious thinking would be a slow process, sometimes Camila was less forgiving in her evaluation of the ideas articulated by participants. In the subsequent month’s regional meeting, the group was reading a handout about the 2012 ‘Integral Law against Violence Towards Women’, a new law which had strengthened legal protections for women in circumstances of domestic violence.¹¹ In the course of discussion, one participant made reference to the idea that ‘we’re all born in sin’, an idea that many conventional Catholics would consider unproblematic – and which was also a frequent theme in village CEB meetings where Camila had not been present. Camila’s response to the comment was unequivocal; ‘No, no, no!’ she insisted. ‘Nobody, ever, is born already in sin! Not even somebody who had been born of a prostitute, a mother living the worst kind of life, no matter what the conditions, that baby would be born clean, absolutely clean!’ These kinds of ideas, Camila argued throughout the session, were integral to the old ‘Church of Power’ to which the liberation theology tradition was opposed, the Church that the conservative hierarchy still fought to sustain. She argued that it cultivated fear specifically in order to instil passivity among the people and a consequent dependency upon the Church itself for the promise of otherworldly salvation.

A clear dynamic was established, then, by this kind of exchange. Certain ideas needed to be combated, some of them slowly and gradually, and some of them immediately and with force. The project of social transformation promised by the popular Church – and the enabling of subaltern political agency that Camila presumed it to produce – necessarily depended upon this project of introspective examination and religious transformation. The promise it offered depended upon participants working to examine these old, entrenched assumptions in the light of scripture, investigate their implications and develop a new perspective on their old theological commitments. Social change required a change of campesino minds still in the grip of the Church of Power.

It is certainly the case that this model of liberationist thinking, which stands at odds with entrenched theological assumptions, can find plenty of supporting material within the dynamic of CEB meetings. The striking difference in theological tone between village meetings at which Camila was not present, and regional meetings where she was able to guide discussions, certainly resonates with this model. However, I do not want to focus here on the extent to which CEB activity has, so far, succeeded or failed in a project to instil ideological and theological change among participants, however that might be understood. While this model is very much part of liberation theology’s own theorisation of what CEB participation should involve, my argument here is that in evaluating verticalist thought among CEB participants, this model potentially obscures as much as it reveals. In constructing the aim of CEB activity as overcoming ‘traditional’ theological ideas – ideas which themselves contribute to social inequality and the condition of poverty by cultivating passivity and dependency – liberation theology evaluates verticalist thinking within a paradigm that opposes conservative tradition to liberatory change.

11 For a critical discussion of this law, see A.Z. Miklos, ‘Mediated intimacies: state intervention and gender violence in Nicaragua’.

Grassroots verticalism of the kind articulated by CEB participants in Gualiqueme, then, shows up in the light of liberation theology’s own theorisation of its activities as exactly this kind of phenomon: the heavy weight of cultural baggage. The argument I wish to develop here is that this view of verticalist thinking does not correspond to the way Gualiqueme residents themselves thought about politics. To do so, I will focus in particular upon one crucial aspect of liberation theology’s theorisation of CEB activity. As mentioned previously, CEBs are viewed as enabling scripture to become relevant by allowing it to be read in the light of everyday problems, thereby facilitating a scripturally informed critique of those problems. Critical here is the assumption that the problems in question exist apart from and external to the activities of the group itself. That problems will need to be confronted goes without saying – this is a simple implication of the defining commitment of liberation theology to work with ‘the poor’. Liberation theology’s (uncontentious) understanding of poverty as a condition of struggle and suffering is integral to this orientation. Poor people’s lives are difficult by definition, it is assumed. It is this integral difficulty of impoverished existence which is taken to be the vital context – the relevant domain of the actual and everyday – which CEB discussions are committed to acknowledging, engaging with and confronting.

The radical nature of this commitment in relation to Catholic theology prior to Vatican II and Medellín is clear, and is well-appreciated in the literature. Vitally important as a critical acknowledgement of the struggles of poverty may be, I would argue that in developing an ethnographic analysis of grassroots hierarchy, positing the problems of life as an a priori background condition of poverty risks passing over the ways in which involvement with CEB activity itself has come to be closely bound up with one of the most critical problems faced by rural people in Nicaragua in grappling with their conditions of existence. A simple observation guides this statement: poverty as a condition of life in rural Nicaragua at present cannot be understood separately from the interventions which aim to grapple with that condition. Rural Nicaraguans, as the ongoing targets of varied interventions intended to overcome their economic plight – interventions themselves premised on a broad range of analyses regarding the causes and dynamics of poverty itself – now confront their own conditions in a context itself thoroughly conditioned by these interventions.¹² CEB institutional arrangements, in their close mirroring of NGO methods of distributing and administering aid funds, are viewed by participants as one among a range of possibilities for gaining distributive material support by performing the requirements of being ‘organised’. Examining the social projects integral to CEB activity will clarify this point.

CEB social projects

If, for Camila, CEB activity was viewed as facilitating a process of reflection whereby hierarchical thinking – assumed to be traditional and politically regressive – might be left behind, residents of Gualiqueme participating in the group appeared to work from somewhat different assumptions. Indeed, while religious interest in the theological and spiritual components of CEB activity was clear, these group members primarily described the value of participation in material terms, which was closely related to the idea that Camila herself stood as a valuable intermediary. The first thing that don Lucas, a senior member of the group, mentioned to me about their activities was that their leader, a dynamic Spaniard, had access to significant international funds for social projects. Time and again, participants pointed out that the group provides a number of Gualiqueme youths with scholarships to pursue their secondary studies. As with the ovations to ‘don’ Ricardo’s activities in PROOR and the historical narratives which imputed the infrastructural development of the village itself to the personal benevolence of a liberation theologian priest, discussion of the material prospects attendant upon CEB participation were strongly personalised. Camila’s work, I was often told, was to go around Spain looking for funding, which would go towards the projects that the group arranged. The value of CEB activity was frequently depicted as a product of Camila’s own ayuda (help), assistance which derived from her position as a foreigner with ties to wealthy church organisations abroad.

Central to CEB activity for participants in Gualiqueme are the economic and social projects undertaken and funded by the group. The regional group has access to a considerable stream of international financing which is deployed in a variety of different endeavours, each aimed at providing economic opportunities and the possibility of income and security for participants. Decisions about how to allocate and spend this money are taken in regional meetings, and Camila ensures that participants play a central role in proposing, designing and implementing the projects in question. At the time of research, active projects included natural medicine workshops, in which participants received a wage to provide training sessions for other members of the community; the maintenance of several cows which had been purchased from the funds and were to be raised and sold at a profit; and the provision of secondary-school scholarships. Though the aim of projects was generally economic or educational, some projects had cultural goals. A series of painting workshops, for example, were also being conducted at the time of research.

12 A number of studies examine the way in which development discourse has constructed the Nicaraguan peasantry as a target for intervention in recent history. See, e.g., Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas; S. Langley, ‘Revisiting “resistance”, “the peasantry”, and liberation/development: the case of Sandinismo in the 1980s’; and Montoya, Gendered Scenarios of Revolution.

Initiatives frequently took forms that were familiar to participants both from NGO activity and from state programmes. Another project active at the time of research was a fondo revolvente (revolving fund), a micro-credit scheme which theoretically should have been self-sustaining. Small loans were offered to members of the group for a variety of purposes, to be repaid at low interest. This kind of community savings scheme was frequently a component of both development projects and government programmes. Participants in the Bono Productivo, for example, have been required to make contributions that in theory will be used in a similar way.

Participants in CEB were able to propose projects of their own design. Many of the active projects had emerged from a collaborative decision-making process in regional meetings. In line with a commitment to the horizontal, group consultation and deliberative decision-making regarding the allocation of funds was strongly emphasised, although decisions were not always taken collectively. During the period of research, a new project was proposed by several of the more senior CEB participants from Gualiqueme. At that time, a severe coffee rust epidemic was just beginning to take hold across Central America.¹³ In the face of potentially severe threats to their income should their own coffee fall victim to the disease, and alert to the possibility that many farmers in the region might need to replant areas of their plantations completely, don Lucas and Samuel suggested that it would be an opportune time to undertake a vivero (nursery) project in order to grow coffee saplings. On this occasion, the idea was not discussed among the group as a whole; Samuel took Camila aside during one of the breaks to discuss the idea privately. The group’s plan for Gualiqueme was to solicit a loan from the CEB, via Camila, in order to fund the equipment needed for the endeavour. The loan (eventually agreed at 6,000 córdobas) would cover the cost of purchasing 20,000 plastic bags required for the plants as well as the cost of labour needed for the project.¹⁴ The original loan would eventually be repaid from the profits made from the vivero sales. Coffee plants might sell for anywhere between 4 and 10 córdobas, and so if the project were to realise its full potential, a decent profit could be achieved. As with the revolving credit scheme, the design of this nursery project was strongly reminiscent of many NGO projects experienced by the residents of Gualiqueme and with its design the group was following a familiar institutional model.¹⁵

13 See M. Vidaurre, ‘El café en los tiempos de la roya’, Envío, no. 372.

14 Though there are a range of methods for planting coffee, nursery cultivation has become standard. Earth first needs to be dug up and prepared to a fine tilth, which is used to fill plastic planting bags. In 2012 a tarea (requirements for a day’s work) generally stood at 500 bags and would be paid at 100 córdobas. Achieving that many was a full day’s work for a skilled worker.

Being organised

The parallels between CEB activity and the organisational structures of NGOs and state projects were by no means overlooked by Gualiqueme residents. Indeed, the notion of being organised and its implications and potentials were a constant topic of discussion and a central point of reference in local analyses of political life. When a Sandinista official stated in a local Comite de Liderazgo Sandinista meeting – while discussing upcoming government projects – that ‘todo viene por medio de organización’ (everything comes through organisation), he echoed a sentiment I had heard articulated innumerable times among the villagers. The official in question intended this statement to dissuade attendees from applying themselves to getting personally involved in the projects. He was asserting that everything would be delivered through the proper institutional channels, making clear the extent to which direct solicitation is, in fact, employed as a strategy.¹⁶ For Gualiqueme residents, however, being organised had come to represent a key political status, upon which viable citizenship was, to a large extent, understood to depend. Beneficial forms of political incorporation, and associated material support, were broadly understood to be contingent upon this status of being organised. Personal and collective advancement were conceptualised as requiring the successful achievement of this status. CEB activity was depicted as part and parcel of this broad range of distributive political possibility and viewed as just one of many ways of realising the state of organisation that might render flows of enabling assistance possible.¹⁷

Intensive NGO activity in Nicaragua has been central to the emergence of this set of associations. Horton informs us that ‘in the post-1990 era, access to development aid and projects is often conditioned on demonstrating at least minimal forms of community organization’.¹⁸ And indeed, Gualiqueme has been the location of a long series of development projects exhibiting precisely these demands. Perhaps most significantly, Ortega’s flagship social programmes since 2007, such as Plan Techo and the Bono Productivo, have been integral to further amplifying associations between the imperative of being organised, a demand for subjective transformation and the prospect of accessing social projects. Residents of Gualiqueme were intensely interested in these programmes, particularly those who sensed they were being excluded from their benefits. Many residents perceived these projects to be administered unfairly, and felt the only people able to secure any kind of benefit were those directly organised in the local Gabinetes de la Familia, formerly CPCs.¹⁹

15 The literature makes clear that Nicaragua is one of the Latin American countries with the highest density of active NGOs. See, e.g., R.N. Gwynne and C. Kay, Latin America Transformed: Globalization and Modernity, 205.

16 The proper channels in question were the Gabinetes de Familia, Salud y Vida as well as the various agricultural cooperatives active in the area, the institutions of an ‘organised’ citizenry as defined by the FSLN. Established in 2013, Gabinetes replaced the earlier form of local organisation, the Consejo de Poder Cindadano (Citizen’s Power Council, CPC).

17 Indeed, one village resident, Wilber, noting the social projects available to participants, was led to conclude that the CEB was not really a religious group at all. The group was in fact an ‘organismo’, he said, using the term by which NGOs are known. Furthermore, Mauricio, a senior member of one of Gualiqueme’s Pentecostal congregations, spoke critically of CEB activity by comparing with that of NGOs. ‘Christian’ groups should not involve themselves in such mundane matters, he insisted, drawing on a definition of Christian which excludes all non-Evangelicals. However, CEB participants made similar comparisons with a positive ethical valence, asserting that CEB activity was equal in value.

Don Lucas and Samuel, leading participants in the Gualiqueme CEB, were deeply concerned about the accessibility of the distributive resources associated with Ortega’s post-2007 welfare programmes. At the time of research, they were also important members of a group that had caused a political stir locally by registering to vote in the adjacent municipality of Telpaneca, despite being resident in an area officially part of the territory of Condega. This move was motivated by profound discontent both with the leadership of the cooperative and the way it had previously administered government programmes such as Plan Techo and with the role of the mayor of Condega as an intermediary capable of properly channelling the distributive resources of Ortega’s ‘assistentialist’ regime. Telpaneca’s mayoress was described as being willing to work hard and continuously attract projects for her constituents. It is worth noting that this evaluation closely parallels the qualities emphasised in their descriptions of Camila’s role as head of the regional CEB grouping. By realigning with Telpaneca, this group aimed to overcome the frustrations they had experienced in realising the local ideal of being organised as a form of political incorporation.

It is in this context, I suggest, that Gualiqueme residents’ emphasis of the value of personalised assistance in relation to CEB activity needs to be understood. With Ortega’s distributive politics comprising a central point of political reference – and yet with everyday political life frequently characterised by an effort to negotiate and overcome obstacles to fully realising the promise of incorporation projects such as Plan Techo – CEB activity offers a scenario in which the local vision of being organised might be viably fulfilled. In this vision social hierarchy stands as a target of solicitation, the exploitation of which offers a possibility of security and development. Far from being viewed as antithetical to progress, proper negotiation of vertical social forms is held to be integral to the possibility of advance. In being receptive to petitioning, and in placing resources in the hands of participants to administer as they deemed most appropriate, Camila – and other liberation theologians active in the area such as Ricardo in PROOR – came to stand as model intermediaries of the kind Gualiqueme residents like don Lucas and Samuel were striving to secure in relation to state projects.

18 L.R. Horton, ‘From collectivism to capitalism: neoliberalism and rural mobilization in Nicaragua’, 132. See also D. Chahim and A. Prakash, ‘NGOization, foreign funding, and the Nicaraguan civil society’.

19 Among Gualiqueme residents these were mostly perceived to be the same organisation and were mostly referred to as ‘CPCs’ rather than the new name.

The idea that the value of being organised amounted to the creation of a horizontal political culture was therefore far from being what Gualiqueme residents meant when they embraced FSLN rhetoric emphasising the importance of organisation. The notion that developing peer-to-peer organisational ties among fellow campesinos was enough to deal with the problem of poverty seemed implausible. Rural Nicaraguans in this relatively well-connected part of the country have had abundant exposure to the ways in which foreigners – whether NGO staff, internationalistas or liberation theologians – appear able to tap into and marshal economic wellsprings deriving from elsewhere. This luxury is unimaginable for smallholding farmers and landless rural labourers. For Gualiqueme residents, the idea that the most viable solution to local economic problems might derive from reforming the immanent structures of campesino organisational or cultural life therefore seemed to ignore the developmental possibilities of participating in a range of redistributive flows quite evidently coming from outside. But likewise, any sense that the hierarchical, vertical quality of relationships with figures like Camila was what mattered does not seem to capture the sentiments documented here. Rather than an orthogonal model depicting elites as standing vertically ‘above’, Gualiqueme residents understood Camila and others to offer the prospect of binding them into crucial redistributive flows originating elsewhere. The prospect of development here was imagined to be possible – not as the product of a shift from the vertical to the horizontal – but through the connective work that moral appeals to elites promised to perform. If the possibility of development lay elsewhere, the value of being organised was taken to lie in organisational methods which served to open up channels of involvement with distant, otherwise disconnected, sources of economic abundance.

Conclusion

to return to the opening questions of this chapter, it would appear that an imagery of verticality, while neatly mapping a view of political transformation shared by liberation theologians and many scholarly critics of the FSLN’s recent political trajectory, fails to capture an important analytical model, that drawn upon when rural supporters of the FSLN discuss current political possibilities. Rather than viewing the basic trajectory of desirable political change as being a transition from the vertical to the horizontal, Gualiqueme residents cultivated a potent sense that abundant developmental resources lay beyond local boundaries. In the light of that image, desirable political change appeared to be connected with the work of establishing the right kinds of connection with these abundant resources. Instead of verticalism, it might be more appropriate to refer to this as a desire for inclusion.

When compared with the orthogonal analytic described above, this imagery led to a completely different view of the kind of work that would need to be done in order to actively propel desirable change. Liberation theology’s tradition of social analysis, in conversation with Latin American dependency theory, posits hierarchical thinking as part of an oppressive cultural tradition which renders subaltern populations passive and dependent, and which the vital encounter with scripture enabled by CEBs promises to challenge and gradually overturn. In addition, critical commentaries on Nicaragua’s political trajectory since 1990 frequently mobilise an evaluative model of history which draws on comparable associations, casting desirable progress and the possibility of popular political agency as coterminous with the elimination of social hierarchy. When assessing the revolution’s legacy in the light of this model, scholars are led to the conclusion that Nicaragua’s revolutionary exceptionality has been lost. For Gualiqueme’s Sandinista supporters, however, a central change effected by the revolution is understood to be connected with how much those in positions of influence and power are able to bind campesino lives into broader national and international redistributive flows. If anything needs to be worked upon in order to effect such change, it is the moral orientation of elites, intermediaries and powerholders. As the material above makes clear, the association of vertical thinking with the passivity and dependency of a benighted past fails to do justice to how the relationships which might realise this connective vision stand as a target of active political effort among Gualiqueme residents. Daniel Ortega’s increasing support among rural people – and the plausibility for many of them of his claim that Nicaragua’s revolutionary exceptionality continues in full force – might therefore be understood to reflect a successful effort to play into this desire for inclusion in material flows which offer a sense of connection to an abundant elsewhere.

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