Post-revolution Nicaragua: from popular democracy to neoliberal bourgeois autocracy

Abstract

The main concern of the text is to discuss the transition in Nicaragua with the rise of the government of Violeta Chamorro (1990-1997) after electorally defeating the FSLN. The aim is to discuss the period from a perspective that goes beyond the formal definitions of democracy and authoritarianism. Finally, in the last section, an analysis is proposed that seeks to understand the class content of the State and the social relations in dispute based on the concept of bourgeois autocracy. The central argument is that the transition undertaken by the Chamorro government did not mean the introduction of democracy where it did not exist, but rather the interruption of a revolutionary project of substantive democratization and the transfigured restoration of a bourgeois autocracy. We start from the official discourses of the Chamorro government and from analyses that focus on formal institutions, to contrast these views with interpretations that consider the transition as part of a long-term process of Nicaragua’s insertion into the transnational social formation of globalized capitalism. The fundamental character of capitalist domination is its class content, that is, the domination of the propertied classes over the structure of the State and the dictates of its content that unfold in the limitation of spaces for popular participation, that is, of the subaltern classes. Thus, this work seeks to discuss the complex and multifaceted character of the Nicaraguan transition, seeking to consider the internal dynamics with the structural pressures of capitalist globalization at a global level.