Nicaragua POLITICAL DYNAMICS
Office of the former Ministry of Interior in Managua
Courtesy James Rudolph
Casa del Gobierno in Managua
Courtesy James Rudolph
Conflict Between the Executive and Legislative Branches
Almost from the day it took power, the Chamorro
government
was a stepchild. All groups recognized the necessity of a
relationship with the Chamorro government, but even though
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro personified the Nicaraguan
people's
desire for peace, neither the UNO nor the FSLN recognized
the
government as the legitimate representative of its
political,
social, and economic aspirations for Nicaragua. The strong
constitutional powers of the executive branch
theoretically
should have given the president adequate control over the
political and economic systems, but the transition
agreements
left the Sandinistas with control over the military and
the
police, thus curtailing the executive branch's power of
coercion.
The Sandinistas also continued to control the strongest
labor
unions, which became a powerful political bloc on the
issue of
economic reforms. Although increasingly divided, the
Sandinistas
provided, as Daniel Ortega had warned in his concession
speech, a
critical opposition that limited the government's range of
action.
The president was further weakened by her estrangement
from
the political and economic coalition that had supported
her
during the election. Distrust initially was sparked by the
transition agreements, which much of the UNO viewed as too
accommodating to a political movement that had lost an
election
and would lose further support when no longer in power.
The
political parties composing the UNO coalition were quick
to
establish their own bases of support within the
legislature and
the municipalities. Although few of the parties reached
for
grassroots support, whatever was developed was done so by
legislators and municipal officials to enhance their
personal
power bases or for their own parties, not for the central
government or the UNO coalition. From the beginning of the
Chamorro administration, UNO leaders were critical of the
tight
family networks that controlled the executive branch they
began
to accuse the president of nepotism and criticize the
government
for using its prerogatives for private gain.
Other influential voices on all sides also opposed the
Chamorro government. Most of the media and the university
leadership were joined with opposition forces of either
the UNO
coalition or the Sandinistas. The hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic
Church, which had forcefully contested the Sandinista
government,
also began strongly criticizing the Chamorro
administration.
Groups of businesspeople and farmers, the unemployed
(including
former Contras and dismissed Sandinista soldiers), and the
unions
all entered, sometimes violently, the contest over the
future
shape of the economy, property ownership, and the
redistribution
of wealth and land.
Although in stable, democratic countries the panorama
would
appear to be no more than the normal cacophony of
competing
voices, in Nicaragua the stakes were high. At issue was
the
government's ability to stimulate a war-torn, depressed
economy
in which nearly half of the population of 4 million was
unemployed or underemployed by early 1992. Also at issue
was the
government's capacity to institutionalize democratic
attitudes
and procedures. Different political parties, interest
groups, and
other influential voices all had their own visions of what
form
the economy and a democratic government should take and
what each
group's share and role in both should be. Rather than
leading the
country, the Chamorro government was compelled to act as a
broker
among competing interests in resolving the two central
issues of
her early administration: the resolution of property
issues and
the establishment of peace through the demobilization and
resettlement of the Contras and the Sandinista military.
Data as of December 1993
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