Capitalist globalization, new imperialism, and the neoliberal transition in Nicaragua

Abstract

This article analyzes the political-economic transition in Nicaragua during the 1990–1991 biennium, under the administration of Violeta Chamorro, investigating the power dynamics that enabled the imposition of the neoliberal agenda. Based on the concepts of capitalist globalization and the new imperialism (Wood, 2014; Harvey, 2005), this study demonstrates that the transition from the sandinista revolutionary decade to a market economy did not constitute a linear path toward democracy, but rather the forced interruption of a project of substantive democratization and the transfigured restoration of a bourgeois autocracy (Sá, 2025). In the face of the collapse of the Mayorga Plan and the strong resistance from trade union centers, the new ruling bloc utilized the conciliation space of the Concertación to co-opt social sectors, fragment the opposition, and isolate striking fronts. This short-term governability pact cleared the institutional terrain for the implementation of the Lacayo Plan and for the country’s formal submission to the autocratic directives of the IMF through the Stand-By Arrangement. It argues that the Nicaraguan State was actively reconfigured under a logic of sub-sovereignty (Osório, 2019), in which external autonomy was mitigated before transnational capital and US imperialism, while the internal coercive apparatus was hypertrophied to police the labor force, dismantle social rights, and secure the material conditions for capital accumulation by local and transnational owning classes.