Word: nicaragua
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There is another kind of mobilization in Nicaragua: a daily muster to find food. Men, women and children line up outside government-run "supermarkets of the people" in Managua and other cities. Their hope is to be first for whatever minimal, unpredictable rations of meat and chicken may be available that day. Even the early risers are frequently disappointed. At a typical scramble, housewives confront a butcher who tells them that the meat locker is empty and he has "no idea" when more supplies will arrive. Milk and fish are scarce, fresh eggs are the rarest of treats, and produce...
...some lush corners of Nicaragua, food shortages are not a problem. At a doctor's ranch-style home in a tree-lined southern suburb of Managua, thick churrasco steaks wait beside an outdoor barbecue grill as some 20 weekend guests sip cocktails and pick at turtle egg and black conch appetizers. Half a dozen children race through the garden to the swimming pool. Most of the guests are middle-aged relatives. They talk little of politics but much of their kin who have left for the U.S. There is only a brief flare-up of political emotion...
That sense of political separation is common among members of the rapidly dwindling middle and upper classes in Nicaragua (pop. 2.9 million). Their feeling of disquiet about the country's future is loudly echoed by the Reagan Administration. In Washington's view, Nicaragua and its four-year-old Sandinista government have emerged as a new and threatening variety of Marxist-Leninist rule on the mainland of the Americas. The Reagan Administration has not hesitated to signal its concern by military means: a fleet of U.S. warships has been conducting "readiness exercises" off Nicaraguan shores, while...
Four years after the popular uprising that overthrew the bloody and grasping dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua is still lurching through an erratic political and social transformation, in which many of the ultimate goals of the regime are, at best, haphazardly defined. Consequently, Nicaragua abounds in paradox and ambiguity as its leadership claims to be launched upon a new experiment: an attempt to align Marxism-Leninism with the principles of political pluralism and democracy. Says a sympathetic American observer: "The Sandinistas really like to believe they have invented a new way, a laissez-faire, nonstructured Marxism in which people...
While this may have been the intention of the Sandinistas, the reality is different. No one could deny that drastic social change of some kind was inevitable in Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution. Under Somoza, the country had an illiteracy rate (50%) and a health-care record (infant mortality: 46 per 1,000 live births) high even in a region notorious for its backwardness and poverty. The Sandinistas can claim with justification to have addressed at least some of Nicaragua's crying social needs...