radicalpolitics.org
## Overview:
European political culture's emphasis on compromise and long-term planning often clashes with the uncompromising, winner-takes-all approach seen in parts of Latin America, where opposition groups may prefer foreign intervention over constructive dialogue.
I remember my time in León, Nicaragua around 2007-2009. For a long time, I was hanging around the headquarters of a leftist-intellectual opposition movement, the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS). Historically, they had belonged to the same overall Sandinista movement as Daniel Ortega, the person who once before had been Sandinista president in the 1980s had returned to the presidency, and his mainly working-class base had just come to power with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN).
The government’s support for anti-abortion policies had made me think that instead of supporting the FSLN, I should probably associate with this other Sandinista group. They were not formally part of the government and could therefore criticize what was happening. Given my experience with politics from countries in North-western Europe, I assumed their approach would be a mix of criticism of the FSLN’s more conservative views while simultaneously supporting the progressive social programs the government was rolling out: a mix of trying to push the government further left while simultaneously competing in the electoral arena.
I had simply taken the FSLN to be something like a slightly more orthodox social-democratic party and the MRS to be something like one of the more fashionable parties one can find on the European left that try to define a space to the left of social democracy, including activism, while simultaneously cooperating whenever needed to gain a majority against more conservative forces.
It was during the 2008 municipal election campaign that I discovered things were quite different. They would criticize abortion policies outside Nicaragua as being too harsh, while within Nicaragua they would do the opposite: claim that the FSLN still allowed abortions, just under another name. Instead of trying to discuss what would be the best policy from a leftist viewpoint, the focus was mostly on how to defeat the FSLN and particularly Daniel Ortega. For example, one thing I observed during that time, some of them would spray paint their own campaign headquarters only to claim it was an attack by Daniel Ortega’s forces.
In these first few years, the FSLN did not hold a majority in parliament but was time and again able to play out the opposition parties against one another. The print media, dominated by the two main daily newspapers1, called Daniel Ortega a “dictator” on a daily basis. The leaders of the MRS did not spend any time trying to cooperate with the FSLN to promote progressive policies. Instead, they promoted the idea right from the start that this was a dictatorship.
Over time, I realized that these opposition Sandinistas of the MRS were mostly interested in talking to me and other Europeans and North Americans in order to promote a particular view of Nicaraguan politics. Claims that their own candidate in the elections had more than 50% support in opinion polls in León would easily have been dismissed by any Nicaraguan as propaganda, since it would be highly unlikely that this party, representing a small fraction of the upper middle class, would gain that kind of support among the poorer segments of the population. But a European who had only been in Nicaragua for a few days or weeks with rudimentary knowledge of Spanish might believe it.
### The Longing for External Coup d’État
But why conduct an information campaign targeting foreigners (and foreign newspapers like The Guardian) in relation to elections that only Nicaraguans could vote in? I soon learned that there would always be a sense that another way of regaining power would be for a foreign power to intervene in Nicaraguan politics and hand over power to someone else. Some politicians seemed to think this would be the best way forward for them to regain power. So telling me certain things was meant for me to relay to other Europeans back home, and then for European parties to possibly support a US-led military intervention that would end with an MRS candidate in the presidency.
In European politics, this would seem far-fetched: who guarantees that it is their side that will end up with the presidency in the end and not someone else, as seems to be the case now in Venezuela where former vice-president Delcy Rodríguez has taken over instead of one of the opposition candidates? Or what if the US takes control directly or seizes all the natural resources? The outcome of a coup d’état is not certain, and so for Europeans who like to plan things for many years ahead, it doesn’t seem to make sense or be a meaningful strategy at all. But in some certain Latin American peripheral countries, such as Venezuela or Nicaragua, some opposition politicians come to other conclusions.
It is this situation I am reminded of when I now hear in the news that certain groups of Venezuelans celebrate that Maduro is gone and even call for full-scale US intervention to replace Rodríguez rather than trying to see whether it might be possible to find a compromise within the Venezuelan political discussion on certain policies.
### Who Betrayed Us? The Social Democrats!2
The conflict in Nicaragua was never resolved. The FSLN took more and more control over the state in the coming years, with solid majorities in parliament. The opposition continued to freely voice their fundamentalist opposition views until around 2018, when a very violent series of protests and crackdowns left many dead. The FSLN government survived, but the almost absolute freedom of press that existed before no longer exists. Leading opposition leaders have been detained and many of them have been expelled from Nicaragua and had their citizenship revoked. The trust was gone – on both sides, and there seems to have been no room left for compromise.
It’s easy to make generalizations and paint international contrasts starker than they really are. The European Social Democrats have also not been too happy with the left-wing junior parties they have had to deal with. In countries like Germany and Sweden, the main party to the left of the government has never officially been part of the government, and collaboration is, in most cases, something initiated from the junior party rather than the other way round.
It would also make sense to analyze what these larger parties have done to try to keep the smaller intellectual parties near them and prevent them from turning into pure opposition parties that seek to overthrow the government by any means possible. Could they not try to be the ones initiating compromise more often?
I am not here trying to exclusively blame one side or the other or say that everything in Latin America is entirely different from Europe. But I think Europeans need to understand that there is a tendency of completely uncompromising politics in certain Latin American peripheral countries, which means that some people don’t mind using any trick if it might result in foreign intervention in a way that would not make sense in many North-western European countries.
### It is not for the West to fix
It is for the above reason that I would be very critical of European or North American military intervention in peripheral countries.
“There is this evil dictator and the only thing that can get him removed is a a military intervention”, is an argument that may seem persuasive for western supporters of democracy at first3.
However, one intervention now can mean that for the next 50 or 100 years, there will be a fraction of the population calling for the next military intervention, hoping that they will end up in power.
If we want a democratic world where imperialist powers do not play a major role, the time to stop intervening militarily is always right now.
A functioning democracy requires at least two willing parties/groups that represent different factions of society and accept to work together constructively, even when they fundamentally disagree on many issues. Without this basic willingness to compromise and cooperate, democratic institutions cannot survive, and the door opens for authoritarian solutions or foreign interventions that further undermine democratic development. Under some circumstances, in some places those two parts just aren’t there, and western bombs will not make them appear either.
1. The printed press consisted of the conservative La Prensa and the MRS Sandinista-friendly El Nuevo Diario at the time. ↩︎
2. German political saying after the Social Democrats votes for war credits after World War One. ↩︎
3. Ignoring for the moment that there are other, more powerful groups in western countries with a material interest in looting the countries of the periphery ↩︎
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