By Neville Spencer
An insight into living conditions in Nicaragua after more than a year of the right-wing UNO government was provided at a recent forum in Sydney by Cathy Anderton and George Chambers, who have been living in Nicaragua since the FSLN's election defeat.
Cathy Anderton, who worked with Witness for Peace, told of a farm cooperative, Las Colinas, in Jinotega where she had spent some time. "It was in a dangerous area during the war. It was attacked three times. The first two times the wooden houses were burned down, so after that they built houses out of concrete and it survived a third attack.
"This place doesn't exist any more because, around October of last year, a group of disbanded contras came into the cooperative and told everyone that they had 24 hours to dismantle their houses and that they were taking over.
"We went up there and found out what was going on. We talked to a lot of people in the government who knew what was going on, and nothing was done, which is really typical of the actions of the new government.
"So the people took their houses down, they left, and now the land is in the hands of the Contras.
"The contras who came to get it were the ex-tenant farmers of the landowner who was expropriated during the revolution. The landlord went to Miami and told the contra soldiers that when they won the war, he would reward them with the land. They took him at his word."
Although an agreement was signed by the FSLN and the UNO government after the elections on such issues as the protection of land titles for land distributed by the FSLN, UNO's right wing has consistently exerted pressure on President Violeta Chamorro to break the agreements.
One of the main demands of this faction is the repeal of laws 85 and 86, which gave official ownership to those who were given land and housing by the revolution.
On the economic front, UNO has had little success. In the last years of the Sandinista government, after Hurricane Joan, inflation reached figures of tens of thousands per cent, only in the last few months before the elections dropping to more respectable figures.
When UNO gained power and the multi-billion dollar burdens of the US-backed contra war and economic blockade were lifted, few people doubted that there would be major economic improvements. However, the inflation rate has once again soared to the same astronomical levels.
According to George Chambers, who was a teacher in Bluefields on the Atlantic coast, the government's repeated currency devaluations — which were occurring "every Monday" — are extremely unpopular.
Hopes of improved living conditions in Bluefields were dashed by the new government when it abandoned a Cuban-sponsored project to build concrete houses. "Late in '88, just after Hurricane Joan devastated Bluefields, the Cubans came, and they were going to build 1000 houses." Only 150 of these were built, and running water had not been connected, when the new government sent the Cubans home.
"They were going to go on and build 1000 houses, which might have some chance against a hurricane. Four families could live in each of those two-storey houses. They were always up on the hill to remind you that maybe there could have been a bit of better housing in Bluefields."