Word: sandinista
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Duilio Baltodano, Nicaragua's Attorney General, faces the daunting task of trying to return to the original owners millions of dollars' worth of property confiscated by the Sandinistas. Baltodano has logged more than 6,000 restitution claims, but one particular petition has caught his attention: a large house occupied since 1979 by former Sandinista President Daniel Ortega. The motion to evict Ortega will probably be decided in June, and Baltodano seems confident of success. There's just one catch. If the former President refuses to move, the task of evicting him ultimately falls to the army. And Ortega's brother...
...picture was rosy in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua. Although there may have been a relatively more stable economy and a higher per-capita income, wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Somozistas and the ruling elite that backed Somoza's corrupt and repressive regime. But the ten years of Sandinista rule undeniably increased the overall poverty of the country. This was what Chamorro--in Washington this week to plead for more aid--has pledged to reverse. This is what she has failed...
...platform pledged to scale down the bloated, Sandinista-controlled military, limit the sphere of government, reinvigorate respect for private property, proceed apace with privatization of Sandinista-nationalized corporations, decrease the influence of Sandinista unions and give those peasants who had been working on cooperative farms title to the land...
...Sandinista unions have fought the privatization of state-owned companies and the downsizing of the public sector at every turn. They held two bloody and disruptive strikes last year and another strike last month, just after a new austerity program was announced. They have also blackmailed the government into giving them huge pay increases when the nation owes more than $360 million to international banks...
Chamorro's plan to allow the creation of private banks, illegal since the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, could help provide needed startup capital for emerging small firms. Many foreign banks, including several from Mexico, have expressed interest in entering the Nicaraguan lending market...