The Dangerous Job of Being a Mayor Under a Dictatorship
The Mayors’ dilemma: toe the line or to stick your hand in – a scenario that leaves them permanently on the verge of disgrace or imprisonment.
By Silvio Prado (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The continuous dismissal of mayors in Nicaragua confirms that the job of local authorities is at odds with dictatorships, which are centralist and vertical. Autocracies do not admit any division of power, neither horizontally as in independent powers, nor vertically, in autonomous governments. The Ortega regime confirms this every day. Whoever accepts the office of Mayor risks ending their days stained by accusations of corruption or incapacitated by alleged health problems. To be Mayor is to be burdened with the future label of thief, or suddenly become an invalid.
When the municipal authorities who emerged from the 2022 electoral pantomime assumed their positions, there was room for at least three hypotheses derived from three existing dimensions of a municipality: population, territory, and authorities. Three additional variables are associated with these dimensions: self-government, local policies, and citizen reaction. From the intersection of these variables come the following three hypothetical scenarios.
Scenario A: The worst case
The municipal authorities would act with no measure of autonomy with respect to the central government and be completely tied to the FSLN. This would be reflected in the issuance of homogeneous orientations for all of the country’s municipalities, which in turn would translate into programs that weren’t locally decided on, and that didn’t take into account the characteristics, problems or demands of each particular municipality. Despite this level of control, there’d be cases of corruption due to the discretionary actions or “ties” between the local, central and FSLN functionaries. The population “would leave them to it,” wouldn’t get involved in anything, nor react to the actions of the local governments, which would end up very inefficient for lack of initiative, dominated by the central government.
Scenario B: Intermediate case
There would be some local governments that resisted toeing the line and wanted to make some of their own decisions. The central government would react by firing them, forcing them to resign, or throwing them in jail under accusations of corruption, embezzling, or mismanagement. The Ministries would then assume the direct operation of all the programs in those municipalities, especially those that clearly correspond to the Mayor’s offices, such as streets, parks, markets, housing and local fairs. Cases would arise where the population complained or protested the poor management by the authorities. That relative empowerment of the population would make possible some level of accountability and citizen denunciation.
Scenario C: The best case
The model of control over the country’s 153 Mayoralties would fracture, because neither the central government nor the FSLN had the capacity to make everyone follow the line passed down from Managua. Some of the Mayor’s offices, especially those in the department heads, would maintain their alignment with the central government, but others (the medium and small-sized municipalities and the most remote) would rebel, and there’d be cases of the military occupation of government buildings by the central government, the paramilitary or the FSLN. The inefficiency in government services would increase, feeding the population’s discontent, which in turn would serve as a breeding ground for protests in some municipalities, especially where there’d been greater electoral abstention due to the population’s rejection of the FSLN and the dictatorship.
After 22 months on the job, the snapshots from the imposed governments present features of both Scenario A and B. As was expected, the central government has imposed obligatory programs on all 153 municipalities, converting the city halls into merely agencies that implement decisions made outside of the territory. However, the lack of local controls, due to the weakening of the norms in favor of partisan bribes, has facilitated a boom in discretionary actions on the part of the mayors, which has opened the door to corrupt practices that don’t enjoy the approval of the central government leaders. It’s not for nothing that of over half of the 18 mayors dismissed up until now, the causes mentioned are corruption, embezzlement and misuse of funds.
But other cases are also mentioned – of destitutions for political pressures, disobeying superior orders and internal battles in the FSLN. That is, elements of scenario B have also presented themselves, in the sense that there are political factors involved, although it’s unknown if they can be attributed to a certain resistance of the local authorities to obeying the orders from above. This even raises suspicions whether behind some of these accusations of corruption there are political battles for the real exercise of power in the localities.
As far as the population’s behavior goes, although you can’t speak of protests over the poor management of the authorities, you can’t speak either of a general attitude of, “Just looking out for number 1,” given the reports that organizations such as Urnas Abiertas and the Central American Association for Development and Democracy have been carrying out with the support of sectors of the population that act as sources of information from within the towns. The same could be said of the frequent articles in Confidencial giving voice to the denunciations of a population that refuses to be silent or cover up the open thievery in their municipalities.
We can find one symptom of the seriousness of the uncontrolled corruption in the Mayor’s offices over these 22 months in two decisions of the regime: the creation of the Public Prosecutor’s Offices of the Municipalities as a branch within the Attorney General’s Office, and the closure of INIFOM [Nicaraguan Institute for Municipal Promotion] in favor of passing its sphere of competencies to the former.
The first measure was unnecessary, because the Prosecutor’s Office was already auditing the local governments; the second is a proposal so hugely erroneous that it can only be likened to a huge band-aid to cover up a grand lack of control in the workings of the municipal governments that were elected for no other merit other than their canine loyalty to the “beloved leader.” The fact that INIFOM, a government agency established to advise and strengthen the performance of the Mayor’s offices has been absorbed by another entity, whose sole function was the supervision of the financial administration in these same bodies, only reveals that the local finances, public contracting, and municipal investments in general have become a vulture’s banquet, and that the patch applied by Law 1208 is a desperate effort to cover up the hemorrhaging of corruption.
Can anyone in their right mind believe that the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Municipality can assume the new functions of “strengthening of municipal administration related to municipal finances, legal advice and investments; and advice, accompaniment and planning, monitoring and evaluation of municipal strategies” as the aforementioned law passed on July 12 stipulates? It’s not only an administrative lunacy, it also preemptively condemns the new public organism to inefficiency.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there’ll continue to be new dismissals. The corruption and the fights to impose political control over the Mayor’s offices aren’t the causes – instead, they’re the result of a political ecosystem that is governed by the order and command that the dictatorship, in order to maintain itself, must create fiefdoms to which it must turn over quotas of power for everything except political initiatives: power to exploit the natural resources – especially the forests – to expel the original Miskitu and Mayangna populations to control the exploitation of gold, and of course to administer the trafficking of people, of migrants and of drugs.
Under this situation, the local governments are at the end of a predatory chain, where at times they can only take advantage of the carrion left them by the larger predators. With no power of decision, the power that is the substantive business of governing, they find themselves condemned to the quandary of obeying or disappointing, toeing the line or sticking their hands in – a scenario that leaves them permanently on the edge of dishonor or jail.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.