November 10, 2009

Elections and reconciliation

While many people in the United States are either celebrating or bemoaning the election of Barack Obama as President, Nicaragua is going through election problems of a different kind.

Political grafito of one party defaced by another party.

The mayors of all of the municipalities in Nicaragua are all elected at the same time, and Sunday, November 9 was the day. These mayors are actually part of the national government even though they are elected locally. They have no local taxing authority, so their entire budget has to come through a portion of the national budget. This makes the mid-term mayoral election very important as a measure of the popularity and effectiveness of the current national administration, much like the mid-term congressional elections in the United States.

The campaigns, especially the one here in Managua have been marked by intense anger and growing violence. Whenever two groups attempted to have a rally at the same rotunda (the traffic circles are very popular locations for rallies or protests), the encounters have been marked by shouting, fistfights, rock-throwing, car-burning, and even a couple of stabbings. In some cases the police have tried to separate the different sides, but in other cases, they have stood by and let the violence get out of hand. Last Tuesday, the wife of one of the candidates for mayor of Managua, a former presidential candidate, was hit in the face and cut by a flying rock. Neither party made any kind of a convincing call to their followers to stop this kind of violence.

Election day, yesterday, passed pretty calmly here in Managua, although it was marred by some violence in other cities. The problems arose when it came time to count the votes. As in the United States, every polling place has workers from the two major parties, but here the votes for the entire city were taken to a central location to be counted. Only those representatives from the FSLN (the currently governing party) were allowed in to participate in the vote count. This morning’s headlines screamed of vote fraud, and thousands of people believe that their votes were stolen.

Our CEPAD office is near one of the rotundas that is a popular spot for protests. Late in the morning we could hear loud shouting and horns blowing, but that isn’t too uncommon. Then about noon my wife called to tell us that this rotunda was on television news. As a large caravan of people from the opposition party (PLC) were coming down the street protesting what they felt was a fraudulent election, they were set upon by members of the other party. Rocks were thrown, vehicle windows were broken, and we could hear the shouting all the way to our office. (One delegation that was getting ready to leave our center was quickly rerouted to bypass this rotunda.)

I find myself greatly saddened by this violence, because it is not the face of all of Nicaragua. Last week in a small rural community I spoke with a man who told me about having been in the United States in the 1980s. He was a “contra” soldier, armed and trained by the United States at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to fight against the new government in Nicaragua. Another person, a member of the same local committee working to develop their community, commented that he had been in the Nicaraguan army at the same time, fighting on the other side. These two men had even participated in opposite sides of some of the same battles, but now work together for the betterment of their community; although they continue to vote on opposite sides. We had a long conversation about the meaning of words like reconciliation and peace.

I recounted to them a story that my Nicaraguan supervisor has told about a time when she was in a meeting of former combatants and she said something about, “now that there is peace….“  One of the men slammed his fist on the table and said, “There is no peace!” He said that there were no schools for their children, no tools or seeds to work the land on which they had been placed, no health center, no police to come when there was trouble, etc. He concluded that this was not peace.

My new friends agreed. They told me that the national government has been talking about reconciliation ever since the end of the Contra War, 18 years ago, and it has come to nothing. The only reconciliation these two could see was that, as former enemies, they were now working together to improve the schools, health care, water supply, etc. for their community.

Peace and reconciliation seems to happen at the local level. In several of the communities where CEPAD works I’ve met people who fought on opposite sides of the Contra War who are now working together to improve their community. At a national level, however, there is too much money and power involved, and party leaders continue to stir up their members to violence rather than risk losing a piece of that money and power.

It saddens me to see what is happening in this country that I have grown to love. It saddens me that political leaders who could be in a position to bring beneficial change to their country instead stir up trouble and foment violence to try to maintain their power. It saddens me that some people are working so hard to build a society of true reconciliation and peace, while others are working so hard to maintain and build their own positions of power.

No, I don't feel in any danger from political violence, but some of my Nicaraguan friends do. And I believe that every rock thrown and every episode of violence cuts deeply into the society that so many people at the grassroots level are struggling to build.

I am overjoyed by the reconciliation of centuries of racial division that is symbolized by the election of Barack Obama. I am saddened by the division and violence that mark the elections here in Nicaragua.

Doug

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 263