2014 wasn’t just any old year

These few notes about what 2014 brought us are but the tip of the many events and maneuvers that filled our lives in Nicaragua these past 12 months and could shape our future.

Envío team

The favorable elements that for the past seven years have so amply bankrolled President Daniel Ortega’s economic and political maneuvering room began to dissipate this year. Meanwhile, a substantially changed Constitution was approved and went into effect and the groundbreaking work on Nicaragua’s controversial interoceanic canal was promised for the end of the year. Those are only a few of the things that happened. 2014 wasn’t just any old year.

Venezuela and its oil

The hundreds of millions of dollars Nicaragua receives each year through the oil agreement with Venezuela and other expressions of its cooperation have been pivotal to Ortega’s economic and political success. That money has guaranteed his government the ability to both finance social programs and significantly expand the capitalist accumulation of the FSLN’s business group, whose growing fortunes are tied to the businesses of the oil-income-financed Albanisa consortium. At the same time that oil, sold to us under such favorable repayment terms, has guaranteed the country’s economic stability. What would Ortega—and Nicaragua—have done without the generosity of Vene¬zuela’s late President Hugo Chávez?

But that scenario began to change in 2014. Although the negative effects were already being felt in the first quarter of the year, the government didn’t acknowledge that the economy was decelerating until midyear. It rightly attributed it to the drop in international prices for Nicaragua’s chief export products, the world economy’s still sluggish recovery and the effects of Nicaragua’s worst drought in the past 50 years, which decimated crops planted in the first months of the rainy season. According to Central Bank data, food prices rose nearly 20% between January and July.

The year ended ratifying that trend. In August, barely two months before the end of the budgetary execution for 2014, the government had to cut over 3 billion córdobas (roughly US$115 million) from the budget in an adjustment operation it called Plan B.

But the worst worry this year wasn’t the drought or the fall in international prices; it was Venezuela’s economic and political crisis. The size of the student protests in that country at the beginning of the year clearly demonstrated the fragilities of a political model that responds with ideological rhetoric to problems generated by an economic model that has collapsed the country’s productive structure.

Venezuela’s situation has grown even more complicated by year’s end with the relentless drop in international oil prices. President Maduro’s proposal to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to decrease production in order to maintain prices found no backers so Venezuela has had to begin cutting its expenses. What happens next year to the price of oil, the very heart of Venezuela’s economy and its cooperation with Nicaragua, will determine how easy or difficult things get for Nicaragua’s government in its last full year before the next presidential elections.

Big capital

The generous flows of Venezuelan cooperation only explain the lion’s share of Ortega’s political success. His strategy of neutralizing what had been his three most die-hard enemies back in the eighties—Nicaragua’s big business sector, the Catholic Church hierarchy and the US government—account for much of the rest.
In 2014 the government’s alliance with the business elite remained firm based on mutual fear: both parties want at all cost to avoid repeating the profoundly erosive confrontation of the revolutionary decade. That does not mean, however, that the corporative government-big capital relationship is free of prickly tensions on the business side due to the government’s excessive red tape, which complicates any transaction; the frequent kickbacks required; the unnecessary regulations; the unfair competition in awarding public bids—on those occasions when juicy contracts even are put out to bid—and other forms of corruption.

The latest reform to the Tax Concertation Law, hammered out between the government and the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) over the past year and a half, as usual excluding any other social or productive sector, is a perfect example of the alliance’s give and take. Among other measures it indefinitely extends the tax exemptions and exonerations granted to the country’s big businesses while taxing small and medium-sized ones. There’s nothing like a huge tax break to take the edge off one’s irritation with the smaller bites inflicted by petty corruption.

This “neutralization” of the power of big business has produced results, but doesn’t hide the reality. The doubts the country’s business elite have about where Ortega is taking the country and his vision of the future were evidenced this year in a drop in national private investment. It makes one wonder where they’re putting all that tax money they’ve saved.

The Catholic hierarchy

The stellar moment for the Catholic hierarchy this year came on May 21, when it delivered a long and well-expressed document to President Ortega and the country titled “In search of new horizons for a better Nicaragua.” In it the bishops took a stance, expressed their concerns and offered interesting opinions on six major issues: the family, the social problematic, human rights, the situation on the Caribbean Coast, evangelism and government policies, and the political institutionality. Given its contents, tone and timing, the document, which envío described as a “road map,” was a watershed in the relations between the Episcopal Conference and the government.

The document concluded by offering the President two concrete proposals: “The holding of a ‘Great National Dialogue’ in which all sectors of the country will participate” and “a profound political reform of the country’s whole electoral system.” The bishops very respectfully asked for his “word of honor to ensure that the 2016 presidential electoral process in Nicaragua will be absolutely transparent and honest, with new and honorable members heading up a CSE [Supreme Electoral Council] in which there is no doubt that the will of the people is shining through.”

That document, to which Ortega has never responded, was an eloquent expression of the failure to “neutralize” Nicaragua’s Catholic Church hierarchy. That in turn explains the government’s increasingly generous assistance to the parishes to finance patron saint festivals and other religious activities. If at first neutralization doesn’t succeed, try, try again.

Will relations with the US
go from chilly to frozen?

The US midterm elections on November 4 this year brought a Republican victory. In these times of minimal bipartisanship in that country’s political decision-making, except when it comes to making war, both the United States and Nicaragua will be entering their remaining two pre-electoral years with a Washington government acri¬moniously split between a Democratic White House and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress.

Will “the empire” remain neutralized? These seven years with Daniel Ortega in power have been infinitely more pleasant than they would have been had we seen a rerun of the hardline Republican Washington’s resolve in the eighties not to let him govern.

In an interview for the digital publication Trinchera de la Noticia, Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States and now a Liberal political pundit who trades on knowing his way around US politics, described how he sees Managua-Washington relations: “I’ve always said that relations between the Obama administration and the government of Comandante Ortega is correct but not cordial. I’ve also said that Daniel has no friends in Washington in either party, because there is the perception that he’s anti-American due to his rhetoric, the way he votes in international forums such as the OAS and UN and his friends, such as Venezuela, Russia and Iran; and also because there is the perception that he is undermining democracy in Nicaragua. I believe the Latin American sub-continent is not a geopolitical priority for Washington and Nicaragua even less so, but I also believe the Republican victory in the elections could further chill relations with Nicaragua.”

It remains to be seen starting in January whether the more viscerally rightwing sector of the Republican majority will now promote much chillier relations with Nicaragua and the other member countries of the Boli¬varian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). For the moment, one proof that Ortega has few if any friends in Washington is that, despite strong lobbying, Nicaragua got no support from either party to extend the Tariff Preference Level import duty privilege. The TPL’s demise could mean the loss of some 7,000 jobs in the free trade zone textile plants starting next year.

Other signs of success

Although the Ortega government has prioritized the neutralizing all three of these three powers since it took office again in 2007, it has also used various control mechanisms to neutralize other sectors of Nicaragua’s society. And it has racked up major successes.

The opposition parties are more fragmented and weaker than ever; most of the population that doesn’t support the government is passive; the govern¬ment’s new sympathizers in the poorest sectors feel a strong dependence on it; and what is left of those who were always with the FSLN are as loyal as ever. Ortega is so certain that the political class is weak and buyable and so confident of the framework of laws passed by his parliamentary majority fabricated in the 2011 elections that he enthusiastically forecasted in June that “the FSLN will continue governing for decades.”

No to mining
in Rancho Grande

Nonetheless, some outbreaks of active resistance to his model have appeared this year. One is in the municipality of Rancho Grande, Matagalpa, where thousands of determined residents have organized what they call “The Guardians of Yaoska” to reject the Pavón open-pit gold mining project of the Canadian mining company B2Gold, which enjoys clear support by the Ortega government.

The alliance between the Ortega government and foreign corporations is reflected in the intimidation to which local leaders who oppose the B2Gold mining project are subjected by the mayor’s office, police and army. Guardians of Yaoska coordinator Carlos Siles told envío that “the mining company is tricking people. They come to the communities with medical brigades and in exchange for health services ask them for their signature and ID card number without saying why they want them. But it’s to then claim they’re backing the project.” Elorgio Dávila, another member of this grass¬roots movement, added that “they’re looking for social endorsement. They go around harassing people, but our position is that they won’t buy us off with candy or sweets or the 20,000 córdobas (some US$750) they’re offering us!”

On November 27, at an open-air Mass in the departmental capital to commemorate the diocese’s 90th anniversary, Matagalpa’s Bishop Rolando Álvarez rejected the mining project in a vibrant homily before some 10,000 people. He urged the holding of “an authentically democratic referendum, person by person, in which the whole Rancho Grande population and only that population participates.”

The prelate trusts that, despite the social endorsement of the mining project by one sector of Rancho Grande residents, whether in good faith or through trickery, a transparent consultation would reveal that the majority rejects it because of the significant environmental destruction it would cause in the municipality. Bishop Álvarez repeated the contents of a document he wrote on the subject in March 2013 and called on the mining company to “humbly desist” from continuing the project.

Yes to “Title Clearance”
on the Caribbean Coast

Restitution of the communal property rights of indigenous communities is established in Law 445, passed in 2003, which establishes a system for demarcating and titling their ancestral territories. The law defines compliance as involving five phases: submittal of demarcation and titling application by the community, settlement of any internal disputes in each defined territory, the measurement and demarcation of that territory, its titling, and lastly a proess that in English has been translated as “title clearance” (sanea-miento in Spanish, which is more akin to cleansing or sanitizing).

The process in the indigenous-doinant Caribbean Coast had completed the fourth phase by mid-2011. The fifth one, however, is the most complex because it involves what are called third parties—non-indigenous people, largely mestizo peasants—who have attempted to settle on those lands since 1987. By law, any who hold an agrarian title may continue living there, and if they decide to leave they may only sell the improvements and only to the indigenous community. Those who have titles with some defect (for example, false titles issued by unscrupulous lawyers over time) will be compensated but must return the lands to the community. Those who have no title must either leave with no compensation or may remain paying rent to the community. Any who stay must hammer out a harmonious and respectful cohabitation arrangement with the respective indigenous title holders and submit to the rule of their territorial government, which among other things means ceasing to clear-cut the forest in classic peasant fashion.

This stage is particularly complex for the governing party because these areas were very polarized, both between indigenous and non-indigenous people and between pro- and anti-Sandinistas, during the eighties and that has been exacerbated since then by the settling of significant numbers of new mestizo peasants. As a result, the “title clearance” is moving slowly in some places and is at a standstill in others, in some cases triggering violence. For example, impatient with the government’s foot-dragging and what some consider outright negligence in enforcing the law, the communities of Layasiksa burned down the houses of 38 mestizo families in September and called on other communities to follow suit. In November, 10 indigenous communities did exactly that, torching the houses of 50 settlers in Tungla and kidnapping some 70 mestizos, holding them for a week. After those actions, a delegation of 70 representatives of the Caribbean’s original peoples went to Managua hoping to meet with the central government to demand respect for indigenous property and backing for the sanea¬miento process. No one in the central government even received them.

“We can get along with families who have lived on indigenous lands for many years and can come to an agreement with them,” Ceferino Wilson, a Miskitu social worker and agronomist, told us. “The law grants them certain rights to live here. But big rich landowners and cattle ranchers from the Pacific also come to the coast, buy a lot of land and change the way the soil is used, turning forests into cattle pasture land. Many of these mestizos are just waiting for the indigenous communities to get their land titles so they can start doing business: buy the lands and forests and take over our natural resources. We certainly can’t come to an agreement with them…. Nobody can take away from us the right we won to the demarcation and titling of territories indigenous peoples on the coast have ancestrally and traditionally occupied. Now we have to be more intelligent and mentally mature as we enter into the sanitizing process, more open to negotiation and consensus to avoid armed confrontation.”

The armed groups

The presence of politically driven armed groups in different areas of the country is another reality the government was still bent on denying in 2014.

In a meeting with envío, sociologist Angélica Fauné recalled the resistance the revolutionary government triggered in the eighties when it clashed with the peasant culture. She noted that “times have changed a lot and while the State no longer confiscates or owns land, the businesses of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) have the same profile of monopolist privilege as the big traditional landowners in some rural zones. It’s a constant in peasant areas of the country that those with ties to the FSLN and its authorities enjoy clear advantages in the network of middlemen for the marketing of agricultural products and have acquired growing power in the commerce of basic grains, crops grown by thousands of families in the old contra corridor….

“Nor is there any lack of political elements to stir up the collective memory and channel the discontent, frustration and anger of the peasants into seeing arms as an enticing ‘solution.’ (...) The closing of the democratic spaces for free expression, mobilization, gathering and organizing is felt more keenly at the local and municipal level than the national one. Both fear and impunity are also greater at those levels.” She also argued that “the imposition of Sandinista hegemony is something that still perturbs the Nicaraguan peasant today.”

The government’s refusal to contemplate a political response, preferring an authoritarian military one that involves harassing and repressing any expressions of discontent, is reopening wounds never fully healed in Nicaragua. Despite the government’s lofty rhetoric, our society never underwent any reconciliation process, even so much as the “balm” of a truth commission that transitional justice could have provided after two wars—the insurrection that brought down the Somoza dictatorship followed immediately by the contra war led and financed by the US government.

Resistance to the canal law

The interoceanic canal has sparked the greatest outbreak of resistance in the last quarter of the year. The canal concession and its companion, Law 840, which protesters argue has effectively handed Nicaragua over to Chinese businessman Wang Jing, were signed within days of each other in 2013, but the reaction by all sectors other than the scientific community has been slow in coming.

Starting in July, after Wang visited the country to provide new data about the megaproject including the much-anticipated announcement of the chosen route, technicians from the Land Evaluation Institute of the People’s Republic of China showed up to measure the properties of hundreds of families in districts of Rivas, Nueva Guinea, Chontales, the Southern Caribbean, Río San Juan and Ometepe Island. They advised the owners, through interpreters, that they will have to leave because their land will be occupied either by the canal itself or by other projects granted to Wang’s company, HKND Group.

By the end of November, more than 20,000 people, including peasant farmers, housewives, merchants, ranchers, students and indigenous community members, some of them self-identified FSLN sympathizers, others linked to the Resistance of the eighties and yet others apolitical, held 15 demonstrations in those same municipalities, shouting out their refusal to leave. They reject the canal project, call Daniel Ortega a “sell-out” and say they will defend national sovereignty, evoking the memory of General Sandino: if yesterday he fought the Yankee invaders, it is now up to them to fight “the Chinese invaders.” A national demonstration has been called for December 10 in Managua, after the close of this edition.

The government hasn’t repressed any of these canal protest demonstrations, limiting itself instead to infiltrating them with security agents who take photos of those leading the march or addressing the crowd.

The canal project’s “advances”

Meanwhile, canal spokespeople had been announcing for weeks that HKND was imminently going to present the advances of the project’s feasibility studies and that ERM—the environmental consultant firm that HKND, in a clear conflict of interests, contracted to do the environmental studies—would do the same regarding its own advances. When the government, under pressure from the protest marches, announced an event billed as “informative” for November 20, it was assumed this was the big day for those long-awaited advances.

Laureano Ortega Murillo, son of the presidential couple and adviser to Pro-Nicaragua, the government’s official investment and export promotion agency, chaired the table of presenters. They spent eight hours reiterating general data and trivialities about the project, replete with fancy computerized images of sliding locks and huge ships gliding effortlessly along the canal. They not only presented no advances of any study, but continued sowing uncertainties, doubts and perplexities. The only ones who praised the event were some representatives of Nicaragua’s big capitalists, who dream of receiving juicy contracts from HKND.

While HKND admitted in passing that the “imminent” environmental studies will actually not be ready until April 2015, the government announced that the first works on the interoceanic canal would be inaugurated on December 22, as a “Christmas present” to the nation. They will start with the construction of port installations at Brito, on the Pacific Ocean side, so the heavy machinery needed to excavate the canal both on land and in the lake can be brought in.

The activity reinforced the impression many have had from the outset that the political will to forge ahead with this crazed project is overpowering any consideration of environmental feasibility or financial and commercial viability. It is a demonstration of boundless irresponsibility and lack of ethics.

Days after the event, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, the archbishop of Managua, put into words the dissatisfaction the event had left many feeling: “Here there should be nothing to hide; there should be transparency, because if the canal will bring benefits to everyone, everyone must be well informed.” He commented that the canal is a concern of all the bishops, in part because it directly affects the ecclesiastical territory of the apostolic vicariate of Blue¬fields and the dioceses of both Chon¬tales and Granada, adding that “it affects everyone, not only them. Every¬one’s concerns must be addressed. Questions or concerns mustn’t be disparaged, but answered.”

A far more valid and valuable
international scientific event

Ten days before the government’s event, which was clearly aimed at recovering the media initiative with positive coverage, Nicaragua’s Academy of Sciences held a historical event in Managua that was the antithesis of the HKND-ERM show. Scientists from the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS), which since 2004 has been the umbrella for 20 science academies of the Americas, including ours, and from the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the 80-year-old International Council for Science, which represents all the world’s countries, were invited to come debate the most important scientific and technical issues involved in the canal project.

Fifteen world experts in diverse disciplines related to the project were selected to engage in a multidisciplinary discussion with seven of their Nicaraguan colleagues. In this same issue of envío we offer their official conclusions after more than 40 hours of debate. They are formulated as questions, to which the country has yet to hear any answer from either the government or the concessionary company.

HKND, ERM and the government authorities involved in the canal project were invited to present in this scientific event, but they refused. They were then invited to attend as observers in the two sessions open to the public, but again they declined. Finally they were invited to private talks with the international experts, but they gave that offer a cold shoulder as well.

The participating scientists were fully aware that, if it actually is built, the canal will put Nicaragua’s destiny at stake for the next hundred years. Recognizing that it will be the largest engineering work in human history, one of enormous complexity and risks, they posed critical questions and identified important obstacles. Given the unavailability of any information that might have put their questions to rest, they did not take a position either endorsing or opposing the project, but rather urged the government to present evidence that it is viable, profitable and compatible with Nicaragua’s development and with maximum respect for its environment.

A serious security problem

Among the opinions that particularly riveted the attention of the sometimes overflowing crowd in the Central American University’s César Jerez lecture theater were those of Jamaica’s Anthony Clayton, an expert on sustainable development and adviser to important international agencies. Clay¬ton said Nicaragua’s canal project is either not mentioned at all or is presented as “making no sense” in 80% of all the recent information he was able to find about the world’s commercial traffic. He further suggested that the project’s dimensions and difficulties could raise its cost to US$120 billion, thus calling its profitability into question.

He also emphasized that Nica¬ragua’s location at the epicenter of one of the world’s most violent regions, where corruption and drug and arms trafficking are commonplace, means that this new commercial route could be taken advantage of by illegal businesses linked to organized crime, particularly as it is now known that links exist between the Latin American cartels and Chinese mafias. Clay¬ton warned that this makes the mega-project a serious security problem for Nicaragua, rendering it very vulnerable.

The massive dredging of Lake Cocibolca is one of the canal project’s most complex and risky challenges, particularly since HKND had announced several months ago that it would dynamite the lake bottom with 1.2 million tons of explosives to open the 30-meter-deep channel in the lake. To the relief of many, the company’s presenters announced in their November 20 presentation that they have decided not to use dynamite. Nicaraguan canal spokesperson Telémaco Talavera added only that “special dredging will be done with defined machinery,” offering no further details. Nicaragua has no bathymetric or any other study of the lake bottom, nor has HKND presented one, so it is impossible to have any real idea of the project’s viability. The lake’s volcanic islands suggest that the lake bed could be basalt and that excavating it could have unpredictably catastrophic consequences. Talavera assures that it is all being supervised by mainland China’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology. However, this month Robert Stallard, a hydrolic researcher for the US Geological Service, published a text in the Smithsonian Institute’s magazine warning of the “probability” of hurricanes and flooding threatening the canal and making it impassable.

Letting the world know
about the “rotten eggs”

At the end of the event, some members of the audience wanted to know what role the international scientific community plans to play from here on out with respect to the canal project. The coordinator of the discussions, prestigious Nicaraguan scientist Pedro José Álvarez, a doctor of environmental engineering, professor at various US universities and a member of China’s Academy of Sciences, responded that the mission of those who participated in the Managua event had been to identify the project’s most problematic aspects, what he called its “rotten eggs.”

Chile’s Hernán Chaimovich, a professor at the University of São Paulo, built on that by reaffirming that all of them were committed to disseminating what they have seen and heard among the scientists of the institutions they belong to. He clarified that “the scientists of these international unions do not interfere in the internal affairs of any country, including Nicaragua, but will make clear to the world where the rotten eggs are, what they smell like and what color they are.”

Interviewed by the national media, Álvarez, who knows the Chinese economy and its foreign projects very well, repeated yet again what he has reiterated since the canal law was first signed in 2013: “My main concern is that something is going to be started that doesn’t get finished. I’m worried they’re going to start dividing Nicaragua in two and then abandon it half way through, leaving the two sides disconnected.”

Despite opposition from so many of the affected residents and the fears awakened by the scientists’ questions about the canal project, the government is still presenting it as a “blessing.”

Promoting anxiety

After the Pacific side of the country was rattled by this year’s spate of earthquakes, first in April and again in October, with aftershocks that went on for days, the government seems to have decided on a strategy of promoting anxiety then presenting itself as God’s right hand in protecting the country.

The strategy is explicit in the messages to the population by First Lady Rosario Murillo, who among several other official roles is the government’s coordinator of communication and citizenry. Reporting several times a day on the government media, which are the majority in the country, she offers constant updates on the number of people stricken with chikungunya or dengue; reports on the ebola epidemic around the world; details even the unfelt tremors captured by the seismographs in a country where they are a regular occurrence; shares meteorological predictions about coming rains or storms; and issues yellow or red alerts about possible disasters.

She then counterpoises all these misfortunes lying in wait for us with religious references to the special blessing that protects Nicaragua because the country goes “hand in hand with God, in faith, family and community” and is “united in Mary’s arms.” This consolation to temper the anxiety and fear that her own information triggers is of course accompanied by the idea that those governing enjoy a certain divine connection, know what is good for us, take care of us, and are always on the lookout to assist us with any problem, however serious it might be.

The clientelism, populism and paternalism characterizing the govern¬ment’s relations with the poor majorities have been joined by this insistent fear-mongering since 2004, along with the infantilism and dependency it tends to engender. Rosario Murillo’s daily messages never include references to the country’s more serious—and resolvable problems. Instead they skew attention away from the scandalous economic and social inequalities that Ortega’s project has deepened even more and that are so contrary to the project Jesus called the “kingdom of God.”

Another game with other rules

2014, this unordinary year, is drawing to a close. As it unfolded, the importance of the electoral fraud in the November 2011 elections for Ortega’s political project became clearer than ever. The most important element here wasn’t his own unconstitutional reelection as President, perhaps obtained by hook, but rather the parliamentary majority, at least eight seats of which he has been accused of obtaining by crook.

On February 10, 2014, a new Constitution went into effect. Although called a “reform”—the ninth so far to the 1987 Constitution—it was much more than mere amendments to a few articles. It is in fact a “change in the rules of the democratic game,” as the Institute of Strategic and Public Policy Studies called it in a recent investigation. Indeed, many of the de facto cards the Ortega-Murillo government had previously played in its game are now constitutionally established as law. It was approved in a great rush by Ortega’s loyal followers in the National Assembly, who with those eight seats have enough of a majority to even change the Constitution without a single vote from the opposition.

The new Constitution concentrates even more power in the executive branch in what was already a traditionally presidentialist system. It also consecrates Ortega’s government-big capital corporatist model, which excludes the majority of the social sectors from any power or even a consultative role. In the Nicaraguan bishops’ words, the reforms favor the “establishment and perpetuation of a long-term absolute power exercised by one person or party in a dynastic manner or through a political and economic oligarchy.”

The next step was to attract the Army to its political project and thus align it to him. The new Military Code was reformed and approved in 2014 with the same kind of urgency used to approve the constitutional reforms. All these changes in the rules of the institutional game culminated in mid-2014 when the governing party’s parliamentary majority also approved the new National Police Law, with a speed and lack of debate that were by then all too familiar. By annulling the mediation role of civil institutions, specifically the ministries of defense and government, the President emerged from these reforms with strengthened links to the country’s armed institutions. “In my judgment it is the most dangerous and sensitive thing that has happened since Ortega took office,” former guerrilla comandante Mónica Baltodano told envío.

At the doors to 2015

With this we end this brief description of what this departing year brought us. What will 2015 offer? When the time comes to write the next sum-up of the unborn new year, what will we say about it? It’s hard to even imagine.

What we do know is that it will inexorably be laden with pre-electoral politics. In a country at risk of being split down the middle by a canal; in a society already extremely split by a political and economic model that has created gorges of inequality and promotes a single thinking to which we now tend to respond with only one thought; and in a country that has serious difficulty reaching consensus on virtually anything, one of the most widespread agreements is that the 2016 elections must be arbitrated transparently, fairly and honestly. It is an urgent need for our country.

Can they be honest and fair if the conditions we have lived through this year continue? We can only hope that 2015 will bring us something new and good.

Everything is ready?

On November 26, less than a week after the presentation of “advances,” HKND chief executive Wang Jing paid President Ortega a private visit, the concrete result of which was only a photo op of Wang with Ortega, his wife and his son Laureano. Murillo then regaled us with an extensive message in the government media that made up for in enthusiasm what it lacked in content: “Compañeros, compañeras, more good, great news! We are concluding a friendly, cordial, fraternal get together with compañero, brother Wang Jing, the president of HKND, who has come to our country to meet with our President, Comandante Daniel, to firm up details. Everything is ready to initiate the work of constructing the Grand Canal, the dream, the hope of our Nicaraguan families: the Grand Canal through Nicaragua! A very, very important, very cordial, very fraternal meeting, a meeting that marks this successful route that is leading Nicaragua by God’s hand…. At the conclusion of this meeting, upon initiating it, in the middle of the conversations and upon ending it, we raise our gratitude to God our Lord who has chosen to rain his blessings down upon this small country, permitting us to very soon initiate the works of the Grand Canal, which will bring so many benefits to the world, to Humanity, and of course to our blessed, sweet and always free Nicaragua!”

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