So this was Nicaragua when democracy returned in 1990, a place where the currency literally wasn't worth wiping your butt with, a place where the only growth export was refugees, a place where the national motto was, "Thank God for Haiti"--because it was the only thing that kept Nicaragua from finishing dead last on every single economic trend chart in the hemisphere.
How do you rebuild a place like that? Obviously, the simple fact that 15 years of near-continuous warfare (first the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza dynasty, then the counterrevolution against the Sandinistas) had ended was a major step. Sweeping away the nuttiest of the Sandinista economic policies--SNOTS, the government purchasing and export monopolies in so many key industries, the collectivization of agriculture--was another.
But President Arnoldo Aleman, elected in 1996, has gone further, attacking not only the Marxist remnants of the Sandinista economy but the crony capitalism that has turned so many Latin American countries into family farms for a handful of swaggering plutocrats. He eased restrictions on foreign investment and hacked away at protectionist import duties--especially on what economists call inputs, stuff like seed and fertilizer and concrete, the building blocks of the economy.
And in a bold attack that was little noticed outside the country but made him plenty of powerful enemies inside, he did away with a law that granted a handful of Nicaraguan firms monopolies on importing those inputs. It worked like this: If you were the first guy to import, say, Kodak film into Nicaragua, then you were the only guy who could import it--no matter what Kodak thought about it.
Now, a monopoly on Kodak film, while it may be unfair and annoying, is probably not the end of the world--there's Fuji and Polaroid and lots of other brands. But holding the exclusive rights to import the only pesticide known to kill Nicaraguan boll weevils, or the only fertilizer suited to the soil in Nicaraguan coffee country, gives you a choke hold on a huge chunk of the economy. That's why Aleman's most relentless enemies in Nicaragua are not Sandinista die-hards but zillionaire oligarchs.
It's no accident that the Nicaraguan economy really took off after Aleman got his reforms in place. But Managua being located well off all known journalistic trade routes these days, you don't read much about any of this. The occasional foreign reporter who stumbles in by error inevitably mentions the new shopping malls and hotels only by way of pointing out that most Nicaraguans can't afford them. The jobs created by their construction--and the jobs that will be created by the tourists and business travelers they'll lure--are never noted.
The story, it seems, is never that life is improving, little by little, for most Nicaraguans, but that for a few, it's improving quickly and bounteously. It is only recently, watching the way other reporters describe Nicaragua now, that I have come to understand why the Sandinistas got such favorable press in the 1980s, when they were wrecking their own country. What mattered to the journalists was equality, and if the Sandinistas achieved it only by plunging the entire country into poverty, well, it was still equality.
Despite their degrees and lofty places of employment, the foreign journalists ultimately draw a picture of this country that is no more accurate, and considerably less interesting, than that drawn by their Nicaraguan counterparts, who gleefully specialize in tales of exorcisms, vampires, and doctors who counsel female patients that gastrointestinal distress can be quieted by oral sex. Certainly no foreign journalist would break into a long discourse on the International Monetary Fund, as a Nicaraguan radio reporter did last year, to ask the grizzled Sandinista comandante Tomas Borge if he still had both his testicles.
Actually, the remarkable thing is not that the reporter was more interested in Borge's testicles than in his views on economics--Borge's expertise on the latter stems from having spent the Sandinista party newspaper into a bankruptcy so profound that even the workers' social security payments were lost--but that anyone wanted to talk to him about anything at all. The Sandinista party, once considered the blueprint for the leftist future of Latin America, has withered away into irrelevance.
With their guerrilla days behind them, the Sandinistas have never really gotten the hang of electoral politics, losing four national elections in a row by overwhelming margins. They've tried to restyle themselves as a center-left party, even abandoning the old Sandinista hymn ("We fight against the yanqui, enemy of humanity") for well-known socialist Ludwig van Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." That's not to say that they've turned away completely from the old school: At a party congress last year, there was prolonged applause for observer delegations from Libya, China, and Vietnam, and a moment of silence in honor of recently deceased Cuban spymaster Manuel Piñeiro.
But many of the Sandinista leaders have in fact jumped ship. Jaime Wheelock, the central committee member who authored scathing tomes of Marxist history such as Imperialism and Dictatorship, is now writing cookbooks. Humberto Ortega, once the head of the armed forces, has dropped out of sight to manage his multimillion-dollar business portfolio. (You've got to love those revolutionary pension plans.) Daniel Ortega is still head of the party, but spends most of his time fighting his stepdaughter's attempts to force him to face trial on charges that he sexually abused her for years, starting when she was 11. Those legal problems could eventually spread to the United States, where the stepdaughter says Ortega molested her during visits to the United Nations in New York. But in gringo territory, she says, Ortega insisted they take care of business inside hotel-room closets, the better to avoid the CIA spy cameras he was certain were present.
When they ruled the country in the 1980s, figuring out what the Sandinistas were up to was a maddening and mostly fruitless task for journalists. Interviews with top party officials were virtually impossible to come by, and as the years went by, even their public appearances dwindled to a few carefully managed events where questions were impossible. By contrast, the staff of the current president is constantly begging him to stay away from reporters, because he can't resisting arguing with (and occasionally bellowing threats at) the cantankerous Managua press corps.
President Aleman is a hard-drinking, back-slapping pol who would have been at home in Mayor Daley's Chicago. When I interviewed him at his coffee farm outside Managua last year, he made breakfast and then told me a slew of unprintable Bill-and-Monica jokes he had read on the Internet. He once threatened to use a bulldozer to tear down the wall around Daniel Ortega's "house," a one-square-block compound that Ortega confiscated from the previous owner and then sold to himself at a five-fingered discount price of $1,000 as he was leaving office in 1990. Aleman is only marginally fonder of journalists. Once, as reporters surged into a room for a press conference with him, he thrust his fingers at them in the sign of a cross and yelled, "Back, you paparazzi!"
Nonetheless, Aleman continues the blizzard of ribbon cuttings and cornerstone layings that has continued nonstop since the day he took office. He is photographed at construction sites so often that some Nicaraguans have taken to referring to the presidential entourage as "The Flintstones."
His vice president, Enrique Bolaños, is almost as hyperactive and has an even sharper tongue. When Bolaños presided at the opening of Nicaragua's first McDonald's last year, he pronounced the occasion as nothing less than the attainment of civilization: "When foreign investors see that big M, they know we're not running around in loincloths." Not only that, he added, the french fries were pretty good: "Much better than the ones at the McDonald's in Moscow."
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