After Wiping Out Non-Profits, What’s Next for Ortega

his recipe for controlled “partnership”

The dictatorship’s “Partnership Alliance” model means going from non-government organizations to para-state agencies.

By Silvio Prado (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – Examining the Ortega regime’s “Partnership Alliance” in the light of the latest massive wave of NGO cancellations, yields an underlying message about the Ortega government’s recipe for relations between government and civil society. They propose a return to the old model of corporate doctrine, the system of representation of outside interests that was used in the eighties, when vertical organizations for each separate sector predominated. In order to make this return possible, they first had to demolish all vestiges of the collective action that sprouted autonomously after 1990.

According to the theory, collective action implies at least three conditions: a group of people with common interests or objectives; the possibility for each one to decide freely whether to participate in the action; and resulting benefits that are felt beyond the group propelling them. In other words: voluntary association, free election and solidarity.

These elements were present in large part, if not always, in the more than 5,000 social organizations that the dictatorship has shuttered since 2018 by cancelling their legal status. In passing, they’ve also confiscated their properties and assets and looted their bank accounts. However, the political motivations for this plunder have been less evident. Now, though, they’ve been revealed through the government orders for Partnership Alliances.

What they want is to pull up by the roots all forms and sizes of self-organization, and any embryonic form of collective action that names, diagnoses, attempts to solve, or revindicates a social problem that questions, or could contradict the regime, outside the margins of the official organizations or company unions. In other words, the old corporate doctrine, also known as corporativism.

Since saying “collective action” is the same as the term “civil society,” it’s easy to trace the hate the regime displays towards any organized expression of society. Since their return to power in 2007, the heads of Ortega’s machine unleashed a fierce campaign against the organizations and movements that flourished since 1990. It’s also impossible to overlook the fact that the attacks were joined by certain well-known ex-ideologues of civil society, who folded up their sails with Ortega’s return and preferred to spew their bitterness in the sewers of the official party.

The assaults were the effects of the regime’s frustrated expectations: the Ortega followers and their spokespersons believed that since the majority of the new social organizations – especially the NGOs – were composed of former Sandinistas or leftists, these would return to the fold and meekly accept the orders of the reborn leader and his priests. But this never came to pass; the response they received was a resounding opposition to the first measures with which Ortega and company inaugurated their new path.

Between 1990 and 2003, over 3,000 NGOs registered their non-profit status with the Ministry of the Interior. They represented a broad spectrum of different types that were obligated by Law 147, Non-profit Status for Organizations, to register as NGOs, even if they didn’t precisely meet the qualifications for this category. Of that universe, approximately 84% listed “political advocacy” as their line of work; 50%s offered some form of social services; and an equal percentage did community outreach. Nearly 37% held citizenship trainings, meaning the norms that regulated the municipal arena.

As far as internal governance, the majority of the organizations had their own internal management and held periodic assemblies to approve their working strategies and to elect their Boards of Directors. That is, they had advanced in their political autonomy, although the predominant organizational model for the NGOs was strongly dependent on financing from international organizations.

With this state of affairs, it was impossible to think that friction wouldn’t arise (in financial matters, in interfacing with social interests and in political mobilization) between a budding authoritarian regime and a civil society that had been gaining muscle in the preceding years. The new offspring of verticality, whether they were called CPCs or family cabinets, were unable to counter the territorial and social insertion of the NGOs, as well as their accumulated experience with different forms of collective action.

The assaults against civil society since 2007 finally became open warfare at the end of 2018, not because of the Abril explosion, but as a consequence of the paranoia that the protests left in the dictatorship. With no one in particular to blame for the origins of the rebellion, the regime decided to opportunistically move against their old enemies: the organizations of Nicaraguan civil society.

The horizon couldn’t be more bleak – extermination or subjection. The numbers indicate that of the 7,227 non-governmental organizations that existed in 2018, 5,158 have been outlawed. This means that some 2,000 are still left standing. However, none of these can be sure that any day, by someone’s whim, the Interior Ministry will suddenly refuse to receive their reports. and the guillotine will fall on them as they become yet another name on the black list.

The other option is to submit to the Partnership Alliance model and go from a non-government organization to a para-state agent, handing over the last remains of autonomy and accepting that the regime decides what topics or projects to work on, where to work, and who to contract with. The next step will be the appointment of directive boards “by instructions from above,” and – why not? – placing in their offices an altar to glorify the Comandante and the “thousand times faithful Compañera.”

Hence, the return to the mass organizations of the old corporativism will have been consummated – the the State corporatism (Schmitter) with its vertical structures that exclude representation of particular interests. Nonetheless, as has occurred in the past, within and outside Nicaragua, the regime’s institutional arrangements are one thing, while the community dynamics are something very different. These will move as they’ve always done: to resolve their own necessities, grouping themselves according to the modality that suits them best. Even in a regime as arbitrary as Ortega’s, no one needs permission to organize themselves, be it a fundraising carnival or a committee for community tasks. They may even recur to the figure of the associations of inhabitants that are still legally established under Chapter IV of the Law of Citizen Participation.

Recent studies in the municipal arena reveal that the tremendous demolishing of the civil society field has not exterminated the seeds of collective action. Memory, the willingness to associate, the skill and social expertise all remain, and that’s just what the tyrants fear. The disposition to find ways out of the community’s problems points toward a better future and is stronger than the bureaucratic impositions of a regime anchored in the past.

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First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

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