A political tactic has to be sought from an analysis of the situation, otherwise it is not a tactic, it is a permanent strategy. Studying the correlation of forces requires political lucidity. When reality changes, we have to change tactics, the situation changed after 2019, we must change tactics to defeat the dictatorship. Since 2018, the formal opposition has managed to find the disease but has failed to find the remedy.
The strategy of implementing the same wrong tactics implies rigidity and sacrifices political intelligence. The analysis of the context of 2022 indicates that the real opposition is still in a defensive situation. Opposition members who do not take into account the new correlation of forces are victims of self-deception.
Since May 2021, every time the crisis of the dictatorship increases, Ortega escalates the repression to another more destructive level. As the repression is no longer enough to ensure their indefinite permanence in power, the repressive scale is increased to keep the ruling classes in their place of privilege. Strictly speaking, we should no longer speak of repression, nor of the crisis of the dictatorship because the mutations in progress go beyond these concepts.
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In the first place, because the dictatorship had never been challenged by self-convened citizen movements and the November 2021 elections have not solved anything, Ortega did not achieve any legitimacy. For that reason, Ortega continues to seek ways to further paralyze and undermine the organizations and political leadership of civil society by making use of unbridled repression.
Secondly, because the dictatorship is placed at the limit of its sustainability due to the lack of legitimacy and its greater international isolation. The country is doing badly, but it is getting worse. That is why Ortega attacks with paramilitaries, repressive laws and spurious trials creating a “police state”, transforming himself into a right-wing government that tries to recompose the unity of all internal tendencies under his strict command.
The third is the consequence of the combination of the first two. We are facing a process of decomposition of the rentier mercantilist corporate model, which is much more than the simple crisis of the dictatorship understood as a mere sociopolitical crisis. At the same time, Ortega has an important challenge of how to deal with his domestic currents, the palace intrigues, the fights and internal quarrels. Phenomenon that is not new, until now the control is carried by the radical and coercive tendency.
Broadly speaking, the situation created as of 2018 can be resolved either with the installation of a “new arrangement” for Ortega with the US plus Big Capital or the implosion of the regime, which would threaten the interests of the class. dominant as a whole. As of 2019, the rules of profits, low wages and the mercantilist, rentier, extractivist model that guarantees the privileges of Big Capital and the new ruling class were consolidated again.
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The mercantilist corporate system did not emerge from the outside or under US influence. It was conceived from above and with the complicity of the old bourgeoisie. At the same time, the nomenclature was transformed into an oligarchy through a simple change of dress. It is the mutation of the “standard bearers of orthodox socialism” to exalters of crony capitalism, unstable, rentier and extractivist.
The dynamics of the internal market faces obstacles from an economy of low productivity, inefficiency, bureaucracy, lack of transparency, corruption, banking structure dependent on foreign countries, very low development of the internal credit circuit and business practices at odds with the manuals of economic liberalism. The country has a lower GDP than all Central American countries and the productivity of its workforce is also in last place in Central America. The weight of the oligarchies (old and new) is as dominant as the existence of mafias in the section of the state, in a scheme identified with the capitalism of “cronies”.
The development of the accumulation of crony capitalism is marked by the omnipresence of clans and their consequent forms of personal dependence on the dictator. There is a close link between the beneficiaries who profit from informal appropriation mechanisms, based on state coercion. Crony capitalism works in the shadow of the dictator, in favor of an elite that expands its assets with limited investment, productive take-off or expansion of consumption.
In the current conditions and correlation of forces, Ortega has managed to desensitize and anesthetize a sector of society, by subjecting it to living in a state of “hybrid war” (repression, rigged trials, repressive laws, etc.), controlling the factual subordinate powers (unions, comparsa parties, evangelical church, etc.) which allows us to think that the political solution that has the greatest possibility is the “new arrangement” with Big Capital, given the lack of unity, of strategy of the real opposition . The opposition groups of civil society have little capacity to influence politically in the current situation that would prevent the “new arrangement” from taking place.
Big Capital, the US and Ortega fear, for different reasons, that the internal implosion of the regime will translate into a collapse of the current rentier mercantilist corporate system, and due to the lack of a unitary opposition political alternative, the implosion of the system could be anarchic and disastrous. for the elites.
The problem is that the real opposition has no strategy to deal with this period. It is not easy, but you have to work at it to avoid being targeted by the powerful. Nor has knowledge and ways of resisting been built in the current militarized society, in which “those from above” bet on violence to continue dominating.
While they, the nomenclature and Big Capital, hijack the economy and enrich themselves to obscenity, they offer themselves as the only possible future, with the power of money as the only reasonable answer. They impose the idea that they can clean up politics and that any concept of organized people is synonymous with failure. That the best development plan is to trust in the alliance of the dictatorship with the businessmen, because only in this way are there possibilities of wealth and well-being that one day will trickle down.
The dictatorship rehearses all kinds of ideological tricks to disorganize the different expressions of the real opposition, discourage all its transforming forces and disfigure its democratic proposals. His tactic is to intimidate the opposition with skepticism and deception by taking advantage of the control of the media. The establishment of the alliance with Big Capital is the precondition for the dictatorship to have the possibility of overcoming the current crisis.
Every word that the spokesmen of the dictatorship articulate is an ideological ambush. They whimper about the social hardships of the popular sectors that they themselves are the cause and beneficiary. They condemn the political leadership of the opposition for the dirty tricks they themselves carry out while seeking the support of their victims. It is the ideological war that disguises the ideology of the executioners as popular clamor. It is the very old perverse tradition incubated in the very soul of traditional political culture.
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With inflation skyrocketing, social tension on the rise, without a strategy against the economic crisis, the gap between the population and the leadership in power is widening. Inflation is mixed with insecurity, the actions of the paramilitaries, the fight within the regime; there is no calm, there is tension, everything is given for a “black swan” to occur.
The background swell is the deterioration of the standard of living of 80 percent of the population. The macroeconomic statistics do not have an impact, due to the burden of inflation, unemployment, low wages and social inequality. These people feel that members of the leadership in power are far from reality and that fuels the process of implosion of the dictatorship. In other words, the deterioration of the regime is permanent.
The country has become a gigantic Sisyphus rock: it climbs the slope for a few years only to fall off the cliff later. Each new comeback starts from a lower step, people are tired. The street says it. The abyss between the political agenda and the needs of the people is widening. The greatest fear of the dictatorship is not that the “arrangement” with Big Capital will not take place, but that the street will “break”.
What is Ortega looking for with the onslaught against society? Will the possibility of a new “arrangement” with Big Capital be broken? I believe that a definitive rupture is ruled out since it would have a very high cost for both and Ortega cannot afford greater isolation. Even within the Great Capital there are important members who would not allow it, because it is not convenient for either of them. Therefore, the objective of the dictatorship is to have more strength in the ongoing negotiation.
In this sociopolitical situation, the verb that I like to conjugate is add, add and add. Add diversities, add different projects, add to build a counterpower that further weakens the dictatorship. Of course, what I would like is for the real opposition of the self-convened not to stand with their backs to the sign of the times, but to look forward and towards the sum. Together we are majority, together we are stronger.
NB. Tomorrow, May 10, our friend Carlos Tünnermann Bernheim turns 89 years old, happy anniversary. I appreciate his fight for freedom of thought, education, democracy and human rights. Hugs.
