Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

the US-backed UNO government won the February 1990 election, rural poverty has “drastically increased” because of the acceleration of neoliberal policies, which has “wreaked havoc on Nicaragua’s small and medium-sized farmers,” CAR reports. In much of the countryside, people are “becoming more desperate each day, with more than 70 percent of the children in these areas suffering malnutrition and between 65 percent to 89 percent of the population unemployed.” In the Atlantic Coast region, “not only are farmers suffering, but fishermen are losing 80 percent of their livelihood to foreign companies which the UNO government has authorized to fish in the Atlantic Coast waters.” Serious diseases that were eradicated under the Sandinistas are now common in the region, where 90 percent of residents are unable to satisfy basic needs. A representative of the National Union of Farmers and Cattle Ranchers (UNAG) says that the stringent credit requirements for peasant farmers “are killing us”: “Large nontraditional farms get all the funding they need, but a subsistence farmer growing beans or com to feed his family is allowed to go bankrupt and starve.” Thirty-two-thousand families are surviving on “roots and empty tortillas with salt,” UNAG reports. Opening of the economy, reeling under the impact of the US embargo and the terrorist war, has “forced Nicaragua’s homegrown industries to compete with giant multinational companies,” John Otis observes. As the country is flooded with foreign products, small industries have declined from 3800 when Chamorro took office to 2500 two years later; Nicaragua even imports its own national beer from Wisconsin, under a Nicaraguan label. Importers, middlemen, luxury goods shops, and the local wealthy are doing fine, along with the foreigners for whom the policies are designed. The rest can wait for “trickle down,” including the 50 percent or more unemployed. 46
    Per capita income has fallen to the level of 1945; real wages amount to 13 percent of their 1980 value, still falling. Infant mortality and low birth weight are increasing, reversing earlier progress. The reduction of the health care budget by 40 percent in March 1991 has seriously affected the already insufficient supply of medicines. Hospitals for the general public barely function, though the rich can have what they need as the country returns to the “Central American mode.” “The right to health care no longer exists in post-war Nicaragua,” apart from those rich enough to pay, the Evangelical Church (CEPAD) reports. A survey of prostitutes found that 80 percent had taken up the trade in the last year, many of them teenagers.
    In May 1992, the US Congress suspended over $100 million of already approved aid, objecting to alleged government assistance to Sandinista organizations and failure to return property to former owners. “Extraofficially, it was learned that the government will give priority to United States citizens, to prominent Nicaraguan business people and to leaders of the former contras,” the Mexican press reported, notably the North American Rosario Mining Co., which claims the gold mining installations in the northeast. The central issue is “whether the more than 100,000 peasant families who received land or title to land which they were already working under the Sandinista Administration will be able to keep their lands,” as had been promised in the UNO program, Lisa Haugaard of the Central American Historical Institute observes.
    Another issue is the independence of the security forces. In accord with longstanding policy, Washington insists that they be under US control—that Sandinista officials be dismissed, to use the code words preferred by government-media propaganda. Other industrial countries, not having the traditional interest in running “our little region over here,”