Greens and the 2006 Nicaraguan Elections
By Steve Herrick
Wisconsin representative to the International Committee of the Green Party of the United States

It's hard to put a definite date on the beginning of the Green Party of Nicaragua. Founder Edward Salazar learned of the German Greens in the late 1990s and tried to organize a Nicar­aguan version, but was unsuccessful at first. 

Then in 2002, he made a renewed effort, and registered the party with the government as El Partido Verde Ecologista de Nicaragua (PVEN) or in English, the Ecol­ogist Green Party of Nicaragua. The "ecol­ogist" qualifier was necessary because the Conservative Party has used green as its color for over a century, and is sometimes colloquially referred to as the "green party."

The Nicaraguan Greens raise ecological concerns that few others do, especially in an organized fashion, primarily around issues of deforestation and water quality. They also emphasize gender equity, a topic not as common as it needs to be. How­ever, it's not possible to discuss social or ecological justice in Nicaragua without bumping into the country's top-down, caudillista culture and the galloping corruption that is synonymous with it. Confronting this is a long-term task facing Greens and others.

Complicating this challenge is that the PVEN, like many other Green Parties outside of Western Europe, is plagued by a general shortage of funds. Not a single party member owns a car, and meetings are often sparsely attended because members can't afford the bus fare to attend. Still, with international Green support, Nicaragua has been represented at the meetings of the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas held in the Dominican Republic and Peru, and even hosted a meeting of the Federation in Managua in 2003.

Where does a Green Party fit in a country like Nicaragua, that less than three decades ago, experienced a popular revolution in overthrowing the U.S.-backed Samoza regime, led by Daniel Ortega and the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN)?

In 2006, the PVEN joined an electoral alliance formed by the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista or Movement for Sandinista Renewal (MRS), a splinter group of Sandinistas, thrown out or driven out of the FSLN (depending upon one's perspective), by the FSLN's "fossilized hierarchy and authoritarianism", as many Greens and others have come to describe it. 

The alliance also consisted of other ex-Sandinista groups, as well as the Movi­miento Indigena IKILAN. Negotiated in part by Salazar, the alliance posits a 'third way' for Nicaragua and aligns an indigenous movement that used to be armed by the CIA in the civil war with Greens who operate on the principle of nonviolence.

Both the Greens and the MRS hold the analysis that "since the end of the Revolution, Ortega and his ever-shrinking inner circle have devolved into an amoral clique. They have little in the way of moral or ideological grounding, and their primary guiding star is power." This opinion is also shared by both the right-wing and left-wing newspapers, which refer to the FSLN and their biggest competitor on the right, the PLC, as "mafias."

But despite this perception, the MRS found little traction among the Sandi­nista grassroots until the popular ex-mayor of Managua, Herty Lewites, became its Pres­idential candidate. Dissident Sandinistas suddenly had a hero to rally around, and Lewites was polling a close third (to Ortega and conservative candidate Eduardo Montealegre) until Lewites died unexpectedly in July of a heart attack. His replacement, Edmundo Jarquin, was never able to match Lewites' popularity, and finished fourth with only 6.3 percent of the vote.

The Greens also contested legislative seats in the November 5th election, run­ning under Nicaragua's 'party-list' system of proportional representation, where people vote for parties, not candidates. Salazar ran for the 70-member National Assembly. He held the ninth place on the MRS list, but did not win a seat, as the MRS received only 8.7 percent of the vote, meaning only the top five candidates on the list were elected. For the Central American Parliament (Parla­mento CentroAmericano or Parlacen), Dr. Justo Samuel Vasquez Rodriguez was the Green candidate. He was similarly also not elected, holding the eighth place on the MRS list for one of only twenty seats nationwide.

While Nicaraguan Greens carried little weight among the general Nicaraguan populace, they did garner attention from European Greens, as well as progressives living in Nicaragua who communicated with their peers back home. Having Greens allied with the MRS was another reason for the European and Latin American left to think twice about backing Daniel Ortega.

With this year's elections behind them, the next step is not yet clear for the PVEN. The MRS spent hundreds of thousands of dollars - and the other parties millions - but none went to the Greens, leaving them as poor as ever. They have however, established themselves as a small but highly-principled actor on the political stage. As Salazar likes to say, "Poor though we may be, the Greens are here to stay."

Steve Herrick spent five years in Nicaragua between 1997 and 2005, and blogs about the Green Party in Nicaragua and the United States at www.chlorophyll.us/ 

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