14 | Steering Capability Question Score
Since the return of the FSLN in power, the Ortega government’s long-term political strategy aims to consolidate its control over power rather than strengthen democratization and the rule of law. It claims to be setting strategic priorities, but does so only in certain policy areas, and often replaces strategic priorities with short-term interests, or fails to prioritize and organize its policy measures adequately.
Before the crisis, Ortega has continued the macroeconomic policy developed in the 1990s and has emphasized pro-poor policies more than previous governments, but has made no major long-term efforts to enhance the rule of law, depoliticize public administration or fight corruption. Since the crisis, the situation had changed as neither macroeconomic policies nor pro-poor policies are realized.
There are no more strategic priorities, as the government replaces it by short-term measures to respond the political crisis. Some examples of these short-term policies
Prioritization
3
are the latest economic reforms that the government is promoting to raise funds in its critical economic situation: the reform of the social security system, which launched the crisis in April 2018, and the tax reform that, according to the COSEP, will have drastic consequences for the national economy, causing the increase of the basic product prices and the closure of more companies.
Nine months after the crisis, there is no clear way for how the Ortega government is planning to get the country out of the most important political and economic crisis since the 1980s.
Since 2007, the Nicaraguan state shows several strengths as the parliament and other institutions are completely controlled by the ruling party, FSLN. As a result, since the two last mandates, the state has been able to implement most of its own policies.
This partly changed with the political crisis of April 2018.
Before the crisis, during the mandate 2007 to 2012, and to a lesser extent during the 2012 to 2017 mandate, the Ortega administration was able to implement most of its strategic policies with both the support of its politized institutions and with the financial support of ALBANISA, a private company owned by Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA (51%), and its counterpart in Nicaragua, Petronic (49%) that manages financial aid from Venezuela with complete discretion. The important petrodollar flows to Nicaragua as well as the existence of a FSLN’s local political structure, the Citizens’ Power Councils, facilitated the implementation of major social programs, such as housing for low-income families. In addition, the continuous growth of Nicaraguan economy since 2007 to the beginning of 2018 has facilitated the implementation of many strategic policies, such as the development of energy and road infrastructure, electrification, and management of natural disasters.
However, the reduction in Venezuelan aid as well as the excessive politicization of CPCs also had negative consequences on popular sectors and resulted in some difficulties regarding the implementation of social policies. The beginning of the new Ortega mandate in 2017 has created new social expectations in a context of limited financial resources. But it is essentially the political crisis of April 2018 that changed the government’s capacity to implement all its policies, as the economic situation of the country is now dramatic and the decrease of financial resources has limited its autonomy.
Implementation
5
After 12 years in power, Ortega has shown very little willingness to offer explanations and learn from past experiences. Since the crisis, Ortega has shown his determination to go against all the social groups organized in the protests or supporting them, showing an inability to listen and learn from the Nicaraguan’s demands. This determination has led him to unleash disproportionate state violence.
Even before the crisis, Ortega’s administration was characterized by no observation and knowledge exchanges, as the government wasn’t listening to international or even national advice from groups that weren’t aligned with FSLN’s discipline. In this context, the political elite have shown very little interest in strengthening the rule of law and constructing a professional and neutral public administration. While intellectuals and parts of the academic community, along with several international agencies have regularly addressed accountability issues in Nicaragua, politics in Nicaragua remains characterized by short-term, clientelistic, zero-sum and patrimonial practices.
Since 2011, Ortega has focused on controlling the country’s most important political institutions such as the legislature, the courts, the electoral authority, the controller general’s office (the nation’s auditor), the army and the police. This situation has created a very politicized administration, where Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo control, designate and change civil servants almost at will. Policy learning thus happens coincidentally if at all, as there are no institutionalized mechanisms that facilitate innovation and flexibility in policy-making.
Policy learning
2
15 | Resource Efficiency
The use of public resources in Nicaragua is not particularly efficient, and corruption remains a central problem in Nicaraguan administration. As a result of the crisis, the debt of the country is increasing and the macroeconomy of the country is no longer stable. For instance, in August 2018, the government cut its expenditure budget for 2018 by $186.3 million, 1.3% of its GDP. The amendment mainly affects public investment programs, health and education portfolios, and transfers to municipalities, according to the bill approved by the FSLN deputies. The budget cut was due to a lower collection of tax revenues of up to 9.2 %, and to a reduction in donations and disbursements of external loans. As a result, the new budget deficit has increased to
$48.8 million in 2018. Some of the most affected sectors are the Public Investment Program, sanitation, transfers to the municipalities and education. Furthermore, the centralized and highly politicized control of the state means that policies of strategic interest are implemented and monitored in secrecy and are made to exclusively benefit Ortega’s power interests. Although there is an audit body for public administration in the form of the Office of the Controller General, it is ineffective and has not issued its report since 2016.
Efficient use of assets
3
The low efficiency of the public administration is related to four main reasons. The first one relates directly to the consequences of the political, social and economic crisis since April 2018. In this context, the state has to cut its budget and could also be in the obligation to cut public jobs. The second reason is the politicized nature of the public administration and lack of career-oriented civil servants. The third reason is structural, This relates, on the one hand, to the minimal presence of the state in some areas of the country, for instance the Atlantic coast, and on the other hand, to the lack of coordination between ministries when implementing government policies in rural municipalities and communities. As a consequence, there is no “responsible”
decentralization. The fourth reason is related to Ortega’s administration, in which a cabinet led by the secretary of the presidency and its advisers is guided by decisions made by the president and his wife. The extreme centralization of decision-making means that policy is carried out very slowly, since it allows ministers very little autonomous decision-making power. Since the crisis, the dependence of the public administration has increased even more as the Ortega couple has strengthened control on all institutions using repression to silence any opposition inside the administration.
Policies designed by the government are coordinated by the presidency and, since 2017, together with the vice-president. As a result, Ortega and Murillo have total control over the government decisions. From 2007 onwards, there has been an attempt to centralize political power and decision-making power in the hands of the Ortega family. The price of centralization, however, has been inflexibility, a lack of autonomy and debate, and even, on occasion, paralysis. The purely personalist style of governing also means that there are no horizontal forms of coordination to mediate between different departments of state administration, leading to the further de-professionalization of administration. However, horizontal coordination is supposed to take place in the Ortega-Murillo kitchen cabinet.
Since the crisis, centralization has grown even more as the use of violence has created a situation of no return for the government. The importance of the repression and the dimension of the opposition inside the country obliged the Ortega’s government to concentrate its policies on security. The government accused the opposition of a coup and mobilized the police and paramilitaries to persecute opponents in all the country.
The CPCs are used to supply information (identification and localization) on protesters and serves the repression procedures.
Policy coordination
5
Corruption is an acute and endemic problem in Nicaragua, particularly within its political culture, and anti-corruption policies have never been very pronounced.
Though the single major anti-corruption campaign initiated by the Bolaños government in 2002 led to the successful prosecution of former President Arnoldo Alemán, a pact between Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán ended this campaign.
Since then and enhanced during the Ortega’s mandates, anti-corruption policies have been nonexistent, as the Ortega administration has had no interest in monitoring integrity mechanisms.
Anti-corruption policy
2
In theory, the state is supposed to enable administrative transparency and integrity and punish criminal conduct. A series of laws are in place to fight against the practice of bribery. Article 429 of the penal code published in May 2008 (Law 641) contains sanctions against bribery equal to those associated with crimes against freedom of expression. Article 449, titled “International bribery,” sanctions foreigners residing in Nicaragua who offer, promise, give, or concede money than authority, civil servant or public worker in order to carry out or omit to carry out functions inherent to their role. Article 475 holds that bribery (Article 476), bribing witnesses (Article 478) and making evasion easier (Article 482) carries the same sanctions as producing false testimony or reports. Article 5 of Decree No. 124-99 mandates that public servants referred to in Article 1 of the decree must refrain from receiving gifts, perks or payments in cash by any interest in the outcome of their decisions. Likewise, the public function should not be used for the benefit of any party.
However, since Ortega came to power in 2007, the FSLN has been tightly linked to public administration. For the last decade, being a Sandinista militant has been the principal way to enter the public administration. The politicization of public administration, perceived by many as a Sandinista administration, has developed bribery practices at different levels to a point that anti-corruption mechanisms completely lack effectiveness and credibility.
16 | Consensus-Building
The major political actors are in fierce conflict over the very meaning of democracy.
The Ortega regime uses the term democracy in a strategic sense to tighten a non-democratic regime. Consequently, the political actors are strongly divided in two groups, between support of the government and anti-regime forces. In the first group, political actors claim that democracy has been undermined by opponents that were organizing a coup against Ortega’s government. They also accuse opponents of anti-democratic practices. On the other, the second and major group is composed of opponents to the ruling party government. They accused the government of state violence against pacific protesters. They also claim for democracy, as they consider Ortega an illegitimately elected president and an authoritarian ruler. Already during the 2016 elections, the opposition parties have been campaigning for greater transparency and respect of free political competition. The massive use of force during spring 2018 consolidate their positions now supported all around the world by international organizations and countries asking for more democracy in the country.
Major political actors mostly agree on a market economy strategy, but disagree about its basic features. Opposition parties (PLI, PLC and Unidad Nacional Azul y Blanco) all claim to be in favor of a market-based economy. Before the crisis, the Ortega administration combined a market-based economy with monopoly sectors related to ALBANISA, favoring an economic group that is politically like-minded, and
Consensus on goals
4
uninterested in the laws of competition and free market. After the reduction in Venezuelan support, the Ortega administration has increasingly related to the COSEP and Sandinista economic group, as well as to big international firms. Different mechanisms (financial resources, authority, influence) have been implemented to favor faithful support. As a result, those that have held power since 1990, including during the Ortega administrations, have not hesitated in using privileged information, legal instruments and networks of favors to benefit themselves, either directly or via friends. Since the crisis, the COSEP and a significant number of companies have decided to support opposition.
The 2016 elections turned Nicaragua into an electoral autocracy, with anti-democratic actors holding government positions. The 2018 crisis has turned Nicaragua to an authoritarian regime, using violence through paramilitary forces to control its population.
Since 2007, the FSLN has become the hegemonic political power, and since then took control of administrative, executive, legislative and judicial powers. It has also changed the constitution in its favor, and co-opted the military and most influential economic actors. However, since the crisis, the equilibrium of Ortega’s government had been unsettled by the major protests. As a consequence, the Ortegas reacted by using the force of the national police but also of paramilitaries present before the crisis in a most discrete form in the country. According to Amnesty International, there is evidence dating back to 2011 of FSLN members giving weapons to civilians
“to use in aggressive acts against political opposition groups.” These paramilitaries are now the most important anti-democratic actors of the country. Their presence is widespread throughout the country, the use of violence is extreme, and they respond only to Ortega directives.
According to the GIEI’s 2018 report, as the protests unfolded, the Ortega government relied increasingly on paramilitary groups to attack demonstrators. The report concluded that these groups acted “in parallel and coordinated fashion with the National Police,” and that this coordination included “guarantees of impunity” for these groups. The paramilitary groups were made up of “unidentified persons” who often carried “military weapons,” including AK-47s, Dragunovs, PKM machine guns, and M16s. The report indicates that members of these groups included public employees, members of the youth wing of the ruling FSLN party, the Sandinista Youth, as well as current or former gang members.
Anti-democratic actors
2
Nicaragua is a polarized country, largely divided between Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas. The third consecutive term of Daniel Ortega has been characterized by a substantial increase in political conflict, resulting in the political crisis of 2018.
Even before the crisis, the political opposition experienced repression as the government harassed opposition street protests, retracted opposition parties’ legal status (in the case of MRS in 2008), or sabotaged and manipulated internal party conflicts (in the case of the PLI during the 2016 elections). Since the crisis, the main change is the use of force that is now extremely important as the repression includes the incarceration, torture or even killing of opponents. As a result, there is a strategy of terror against protesters but also the media, human rights activists and others conducted by the Ortega government to end the political conflict.
On the contrary, ethnicity, class, regional and religious conflicts are minor in the country. Only on the Atlantic coast has there recently been ethnic and regional conflicts, initiated by Ladino peasants invading Miskito lands, and resulting in armed confrontations and several deaths.
Cleavage / conflict management
2
Over the last decade, the Sandinista political leadership has not involved civil society actors in policy deliberation or decision-making. Agenda setting, policy formulation, implementation and performance monitoring has been exclusively controlled by the Sandinista government, leaving civil society without any way to intervene in public decisions. Since the political crisis of April 2018, the situation is even worse as civil society actors are mainly persecuted by the Ortega government, including prohibition and criminalization of civil society groups, such as CENIDH.
On the other hand, the Ortega administration introduced since 2007 the Councils of Citizen Power (CPC), which are tasked with implementing direct democracy functions, although primarily on behalf of Ortega’s own loyalists. CPCs are in fact para-state organizations organized in a hierarchical way and tightly controlled by Vice-President Rosario Murillo, with the objective of ensuring loyalty and distributing funds and resources associated with tightly focused social policies. This type of organization creates a top-down relationship rather than generating bottom-up participation and generates what are essentially patron-client political linkages.
Since the beginning of the crisis, some members of the CPCs have even been recruited by paramilitary groups to defend Ortega’s positions.
Civil society participation
1
Political leaders had little incentive to redress historical injustices of the revolutionary era (whether on the part of the Contras or Sandinistas) in any serious manner. The last experiment before the crisis was the launching of a platform of reconciliation during Ortega’s second and third election campaigns. The Commission of Verification, Reconciliation, Peace and Justice that was created was ruined by Cardinal Obando y Bravo and had no real activity and the cardinal was accused of partiality.
Concerning the 2018 human rights violations, reconciliation seems void. In May 2018, the Catholic Church organized a negotiation round between the Ortega government and different sectors of the opposition (students, representation of economic sectors as COSEP, peasant groups, feminist groups, political opposition, etc.). They all participated in the negotiation without any results, the government blocking any discussion and rejecting all opponents’ propositions, including the anticipated elections in March 2019. After several weeks of blocked negotiations, they were stopped as the state violence was increasing at the same time. As a result, there is no intention from the government to respond to recent injustices and recent state violence. In these conditions, the Ortega state is not willing to lead a political reconciliation process.
Reconciliation
4
17 | International Cooperation
Before the political crisis, the Ortega government had been successful in attracting international support from any side. The National Human Development Plan (PNDH) 2018-2021 is the best example of the government’s ability to attract international resources to finance its development policies, achieving the consensus of the majority of multilateral donors on its project of poverty reduction and human capacities improvement. But this plan hides much more disorganized public policies, no real long-term development strategy, or even a clear roadmap apart from strengthening the Ortega’s government power position. Since the crisis, the majority of donors have left the country and international aid has decreased in a dramatic way considering the extreme dependence of the country on aid, which has been a vital element of the country’s economy since the 1980s.
This latest development is at the end of a downward spiral that has been taking shape for some time under the Ortega governments, which has paid less attention to international cooperation, knowledge exchange and consultancy, and increasingly objected to the interference of donor support in the area of democratic governance.
As a result, official development assistance gradually decreased as the Ortega administration alienated many donors. The Ortega administration has also had a difficult relationship with international organizations. In 2016, the Nicaraguan government accused UNDP of political interference, financing political parties and misrepresentation of data on the country’s development. As a result, UNDP activities have been reduced to its lowest level after cutting 86% of the programs operating in the country.
Effective use of support
3
After the outbreak of violence in Nicaragua, the Ortega’s government has lost further credibility and is no longer considered a reliable partner by the international community that had progressively acted since the crisis denouncing the use of violence since spring 2018.
Although the international rejection is broad, the Ortega government has not stopped making regular use of international spaces that he continues to consider as legitimate.
Still, in the international arena, the Ortega regime only finds support in the government of Bolivia and mostly Venezuela, which in the framework of the Organization of American States openly supported the Nicaraguan government.
Apart from Venezuela and Bolivia, criticism against Ortega’s regime have been unanimous. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report indicating that the Nicaraguan state was responsible for violating the human rights of its citizens. The Security Council of the United Nations also denounced the violation of human rights and has stated that it cannot remain a mere observer in the face of the possibility of Nicaragua becoming a failed state, considering the possibility of a greater escalation of the crisis and its probable impact in Central America.
In May 2018, the IACHR issued a report that documented a pattern of massive repression. Since the beginning of June 2018, the permanent council of the Organization of American States began addressing the crisis in Nicaragua and declared that the Nicaragua was given a term of nine to 14 months to hold general, municipal and parliamentary elections in which the popular will is respected. The 21 countries, with the exception of Venezuela and Nicaragua, supported the final report of the IACHR condemning the excessive use of armed force against the protests. In July 2018, the OAS approved a resolution that aims to create a special commission for Nicaragua that contributes to the search for peaceful solutions to the crisis, including support and accompaniment measures of the OAS and other regional actors, such as SICA, UNHCR and the European Union. On August 20, a working group formed by twelve countries of the region (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, United States, Guyana, Mexico, Panama and Peru) was created. However, this group has not been able to play a real role in resolving the conflict in the country given that the Ortega government has rejected all collaboration.
In addition to international organizations such as the UN, OAS and IACHR, various human rights organizations have condemned violence and repression, such as the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization against Torture (OMCT), Amnesty International, WOLA, Front Line Defender and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Credibility