Mike Phipps reviews To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, by Courtney Desiree Morris, published by Rutgers University Press

Five years ago this month, a wave of popular protest against the Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo was met with fierce state repression which left over 40 people dead in the first week. The regime claimed the protestors were part of a US-sponsored coup, imposed sweeping anti-terror laws and made mass arrests. By year’s end, an estimated 40,000 people had fled the country. Since then, the level of repression has intensified considerably.

This scholarly book by US academic Courtney Desiree Morris looks at recent events from the standpoint of the marginalised communities of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast – very different from the rest of the country from which, when I lived there in the 1980s, it was completely cut off by road. The people are different too – a largely Black and indigenous population whose first language is not Spanish and whose rights were only really recognised in 1987 when the Sandinista government approved the creation of autonomous regions that redefined Nicaragua as a pluri-ethnic state.

Despite these gains, today’s Nicaraguan state continues to undermine the region’s autonomy and local communities have had to fight the granting of concessions to multinational corporations to exploit the area’s fishing, mining and lumber resources – and the construction through their communal lands of a controversial interoceanic canal.

The situation has worsened since the government’s ‘authoritarian turn’. Out of power for many years, Ortega’s return to the presidency opened the way for the systematic consolidation of his – and his family’s – control over all branches of the state, including the judiciary and the Supreme Electoral Council, as well as much of the media, buttressed by close links with business and a strong network of clientelist patronage. Increasingly ranged against this was an opposition of former Sandinistas, feminists, opposed to the total ban on abortion, environmentalists – and Indigenous activists from the Coast.

The Nicaraguan government has long had an uneasy relationship with its Caribbean Coast and community activists there were among the first to notice the growing authoritarianism of Ortega’s Administration. But within the new anti-Ortega Civic Alliance, their voices have repeatedly been excluded, which underlines not only the heterogenous nature of that Alliance but also the more deep-rooted discrimination that Atlantic Coast communities have faced.  This book explores the history of racialised state violence against these communities and the resistance to it of Black women activists in particular.

Morris unearths the participation of Black women in the revolutionary struggle against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s which brough the Sandinistas to power, and in the fight for a new society through the revolutionary government’s literacy campaign and other activities. Personally, I would have liked to learn more about this neglected aspect of the Revolution.

But other local activists were alienated by the Sandinistas’ parachuting in of non-Coast, Spanish-speaking cadres into position of power locally and their heavy-handed suppression of dissent. Later, the Sandinista leadership would admit it made many mistakes on the Coast – if the execution of 30 civilians during the US-financed contra war, which Comandante Tomás Borge had to fly in to apologise in person for, can be called a ‘mistake’.

The Sandinistas lost office in 1990. The “bridge of trust” between the government and the population of the Coast that had been established by the 1987 Autonomy Law soon withered under successive neoliberal governments.

Life on the Coast was hard: only 26% of households had access to an electricity grid and only 29% to drinking water. The dismantling of Sandinista social programmes and the strictures imposed on the new regional governments by central government, which refused to provide them with operating budgets, exacerbated the extreme poverty. This was further intensified by privatisation and free market reforms, introduced as a condition for receiving international aid, desperately needed in a country devastated by a decade-long US proxy war. In such conditions, getting a family member to migrate north, work and send remittances home was often the key to survival.

“By the early 2000s,” suggests Morris, “the optimism of the autonomy project had dissipated and been replaced by a profound cynicism.” This deepened even after the return to power of the Sandinistas, who continued to undermine the autonomy principle through a strategy of underfunding, clientelism, co-optation and the imposition of centralised projects.

By then, the Sandinistas were a shadow of their former selves. “The Sandinista Front has become the type of party it always criticized,” former Barricada [the Sandinista newspaper] editor Juan Ramón Huerta lamented. “The lights of a revolutionary party have gone out.”

There’s a lot of excellent primary research here – on land occupations, the drugs trade and  sexual violence. The successful battle by Nicaraguan feminists to get the Comprehensive Law on Violence Against Women enacted in 2012 provoked the wrath of the Catholic Church, which successfully pressured the government to reinstate family mediation for gender violence. Morris explores how the new law interacted with cultural practices on the Coast and how the lack of state support for Black women’s efforts to access justice required the development of more grassroots approaches to tackle sexual violence.

Increasingly Ortega’s government relied on violence and forced dispossession as a tool of policy on the Coast. Protests against the proposal to build an interoceanic canal through community lands were fiercely repressed in 2014. When the main city on the Coast, Bluefields, elected a local administration led by critics of the central government, Ortega’s regime responded by creating a parallel administration to which it diverted all funds.

So when the popular uprising against the regime five years ago was brutally suppressed, many community activists on the Caribbean Coast were not surprised. They had long been aware of the growing authoritarianism of the Ortega regime, which came as a shock to so many, not least on the international left.

That same left has had five years to reflect on Ortega’s authoritarianism which has only worsened since the 2018 repression. Gregory Randall, a professor at the Universidad de Montevideo and son of Margaret Randall, a prominent feminist supporter of the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980s, is one of a number who understand what is at stake. He said recently that if the left does not denounce President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo’s government, it will lead to a “moral catastrophe, like not condemning the crimes of Stalinism at the time meant a disaster for communism that still affects us today.”

Internationally the regime finds itself increasingly isolated – even on the Latin American left. Chilean President Gabriel Boric called recently for political prisoners to be freed and human rights abuses prosecuted “regardless of the political affiliation of who is governing.” When Ortega and Murillo stripped over 300 Nicaraguans of their citizenship in February, several progressive governments in the region offered them citizenship, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia. Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs said its government considered Ortega a dictator and would keep its distance.

Meanwhile Ortega maintains his grip on the country. However Nicaragua’s ongoing political crisis is resolved, the communities on the country’s Caribbean Coast are likely to continue to face marginalisation. Long experience suggests that they must rely on their own self-organisation to defend their interests.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.