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Coffee accounts for more than one-third of Nicaragua's foreign income. So, as coffee goes, so goes the fortune of the political leaders on whose watch its prices go up or down.
Down, deep down is where world coffee prices have gone in recent years, its market devastated by cheap Asian coffee flooding world markets. This and a killer drought in the region have driven Nicaragua into one of its worst economic crises in years. President Arnold Aleman is suffering as a result of it, but he has only a few months more in office. The real hit is being taken by Daniel Bolaños, from Aleman's center-right Constitutionalist Liberal Party, who was hoping to succeed him by winning the November 4 election.
With hunger, malnutrition and misery rampant, many Nicaraguan voters are flocking to the opposition candidate, none other than Daniel Ortega, the Marxist Sandinista leader who became de facto president in 1979 and as a result of tainted elections in 1984 continued in office until 1990. He was then defeated in internationally supervised elections by a democratic alliance headed by Violeta Chamorro, and again in 1996.
"Another Vietnam" was the specter that haunted U.S. intervention in the 1980s, when it supported the contras in their fight against de Marxist Sandinistas. Paradoxically, it is today's Vietnam that is helping Ortega in its run for the presidency: a tenfold increase in coffee production in Vietnam has been a major factor in bringing down the price of a 100-pound bag of coffee from Nicaragua's highlands that sold for $160 two years ago to just $50 today.
For more than a century the lush green mountains of Nicaragua, one of the most fertile coffee-growing regions in the world, provided food and a home for thousands of workers. The days were long and the pay low, but the farmers and their families ate. But this year, because of a global crash in the value of coffee, more than a quarter of a million Nicaraguans — five percent of its population — are suffering, many of them children, because their family income has been slashed or has disappeared. Many of the workers once housed, fed and paid on Nicaragua's 30,000 coffee farms-like their mothers and fathers before them-are now sleeping in soccer fields and city parks. In addition, the drought has wiped out the corn and bean fields for tens of thousands of small farmers, who are now forced to survive on a single meal a day.
"It's the worst economic crisis since the '60s," Ortega said. "A lot of it has to do with corruption and this government's failure to meet people's needs," adding that the government failed to protect small coffee growers from the growing foreign competition and that he would do better.
It's not clear what President Aleman's government — or, for that matter, any government — could have done to help in this crisis, but it suffered from the perception that it didn't care to do anything. Only recently he has offered some jobless coffee workers $2 a day for sweeping streets and requested international loans, but he previously appeared to dismiss the problems saying that they were arising mainly in towns controlled by mayors from Ortega's Sandinista Party. Aleman's well-fed appearance — he tips the scales at over 300 pounds — has not helped.
Ortega had been slightly ahead in public opinion polls, but the race is now considered too close to call, and one poll in August showed a dip in his support. Indeed, his comeback is not easy.
He said the world has changed since he marched into Managua in 1979 when he was 32 years old with a machine gun. In a move meant to symbolize the new direction of his politics now that he is 55, Ortega signed a pledge to implement autonomy on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, an issue he fought a bloody war to prevent as president.
"We have to admit it. You were not wrong," Ortega said in a rally attended by thousands of the Caribbean coast Miskito Indians. "We ask forgiveness from our Miskito brothers . . from everyone who fell victim to the misguided politics we had in those days."
Ortega says that, while he remains a socialist, he now realizes that the Sandinistas erred in overly closing the economy during their rule, instituting enormous public subsidies and expropriating private businesses. In an attempt to assuage market fears he said he is prepared to grant independence to Nicaragua's central bank.
Economic analysts, however, say his candidacy is worsening the economic crisis. The image of the Sandinista leader who had been supported by the former Soviet Union and Cuba returning to power has scared foreign investors and banks, and the flow of credit has virtually stopped.
A November victory for Ortega in what is expected to be a fair election would land the Bush administration in a quandary. Oliver Garza, U.S. ambassador to Managua, said a couple of weeks ago that an eventual understanding between an Ortega government and the United States will depend upon resolving the issue of properties confiscated from Americans by the Sandinistas, as well as other bilateral matters, but the prognosis is not good.
A recent manifesto of the Sandinista National Liberation Front said that it would respect the rights of those "beneficiaries of the revolution" who received property confiscated from the Somoza regime and other landowners who are "prostrated by an exclusive and archaic system" — a statement that does not bode well for U.S. citizens who lost property in the revolution and are trying to reclaim it.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com