REGISTER: bit.ly/NicaAug23

3pm ET, 1pm Nicaragua, noon Pacific, 8pm UK

Spanish and English interpretation available. Q&A period following the speaker. 

Webinar focus:  Following the loss of the elections in 1990, Nicaragua’s Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) vowed to “govern from below.” Over the next 17 years, three US-backed neoliberal governments privatized health care and education.

Thousands of people went to the cemetery before their time. Under IMF programs the poor got poorer and the rich got richer. During this same period, the FSLN worked closely with its grassroots base through unions, student groups and social movements to help people survive, organize, influence, and eventually return to power.

The FSLN’s experiences in opposition to neoliberal governance provide important lessons for activists around the world working to effect change today.

Featured Speaker: Valdrack Jaentschke, Co-foreign minister of Nicaragua, will give us an overview of these difficult years and how the revolution survived. He is from Corn Island on the Caribbean Coast and has held a number of government posts.

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Despite U.S. Hybrid Warfare and Sanctions, Nicaragua’s Socialist Government is

Building Infrastructure and Providing Services at Impressive Rate

PART ONE

By Ben Grosscup

[Ben Grosscup is a traveling folksinger who uses songs for political education in the anti-imperialist movement. This article was first published in Covert Action Magazine on July 8, 2026.]

Upon landing in Miami, a TSA agent asked me where I had just come from. “Nicaragua,” I said. “Aren’t the people there poor?” he asked. His inquisitiveness surprised me, but I went with it. “Yes, there is poverty in Nicaragua. But even families living in small homes with tin roofs know they can receive quality health care as well as education up to the university level. All of it is entirely free.” The young man checking my passport sighed. He lamented that he himself had been avoiding routine doctor visits, because they lead to expensive bills. He agreed a change is needed in the United States.

I had just spent three weeks traveling in Nicaragua, most of that time with a delegation organized by Casa Ben Linder, a Managua-based organization dedicated to building the international solidarity movement with Nicaragua. Members of the Black Alliance for Peace, which promotes the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical Black movement, were also essential in making the trip possible.

Nicaragua is not a wealthy country. It has been battered by U.S.-sponsored hybrid warfare, including punishing economic sanctions, military interventions, and more. Despite this, since the Sandinista Front returned to power in 2007, the Nicaraguan state is building public infrastructure and providing services for poor people who had been neglected for hundreds of years. This includes new water systems, affordable public transit, free university education, and rural electrification. Meanwhile, in the United States, our own public systems are crumbling or being sold off to private corporations.

Participating in this delegation gave me a new perspective on the critical importance of the state in providing the basic services people need. Progressive forces in the United States have much to learn by comparing the role the Nicaraguan state plays in bringing about social change and what the U.S. state does.

Political Transformation in Nicaragua

Nicaragua was late to start developing modern infrastructure. While looking out on Managua from a tall perch, our guides explained that, for example, before the Sandinista Revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the city’s sewage was simply poured into Lake Managua, creating a major public health danger.

The revolution immediately led to a mass literacy campaign and free universal health care. During the first 11 years, the U.S.-sponsored Contra War killed 42,000 Nicaraguans. Washington’s death squads targeted literacy educators, healthcare workers, and Ben Linder himself, whose namesake organization arranged my trip. Linder was a circus artist and engineer who moved from the U.S. to Nicaragua in the 1980s to share his diverse skills with the country’s young revolution. He was widely beloved by children in the countryside for his juggling unicycle act, designed to encourage them to get the measles vaccine. He was working on a small-scale hydro-electric plant in a remote community in northern Nicaragua when the Contras—armed with U.S. weapons—murdered him in 1987. The Contra War significantly slowed, but did not stop, Nicaragua’s progress.

However, in the 1990 election, Nicaragua’s right-wing neo-liberal elite defeated the Sandinista Front, whose traditional supporters had grown weary from years of brutal war. The new government, which ruled for the next 16 years, was ideologically committed to supporting U.S. domination in Latin America—not building public infrastructure for people’s needs. They privatized public services and set back the progress of the 1979 revolution.

But in the past 19 years, since 2007, when the Sandinista Front returned to power, Nicaragua has seen slow but steady progress toward infrastructure systems that serve the whole country. One of the first steps was building a wastewater treatment plant for Managua, which has dramatically improved the lake. I observed a new public water system completed within the past five years that provides running water to people living on a mountain on the outskirts of Ciudad Sandino, near Managua. Previously, families on that mountain had to pay for an ox cart to pull water up the hill. With the new system, they pay a fraction of what they used to pay for water.  Now water comes to their homes with the ease of gravity. The supply has also become more generous, leading one family to start a small tree nursery. The young trees are now helping to re-forest the surrounding hillsides.

In Managua, there are new reinforced concrete highways, which are more durable than the asphalt roads one typically finds in the U.S. They are also more expensive to build in the short term. A dedicated bus lane with covered bus stops is included. The state heavily subsidizes the bus fare to the point that one ride costs the equivalent of seven U.S. cents, quite affordable for Managua’s working-class population. The government is also building transit routes between regions of the country that were never previously connected.

For instance, throughout the 1934-1979 Somoza dictatorship, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua was economically and culturally cut off from major cities like Managua on the Pacific coast. I learned that people used to joke about the Caribbean region being “a different country” than Nicaragua, even though it was officially incorporated into the national territory in 1894. The region has six major ethnic groups, including Indigenous and Afro-descended groups. They lacked legal recognition by the state until 1987 when Nicaragua adopted a new constitution that defined the nation as multi-ethnic. The Somoza dictatorship’s neglect in providing necessary infrastructure for the Caribbean coast cast a long shadow from which the region is only recently starting to escape. Our delegation spent two weeks in the Caribbean town of Bluefields.

We drove there on a road the government had completed just five years ago.  Before then, travel between the two coasts required an expensive airplane flight or a slow bus ride followed by a long riverboat trip. The new road allows Bluefields and other Caribbean coastal communities to be economically integrated with the rest of the country, providing educational and economic opportunities that did not previously exist.

We visited three universities in Bluefields where young people are able to study and gain professional credentials, completely free of charge. Dr. Ilenia García, the Rector of URACCAN University (the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast) told us that, when it began in the mid-1990s, state support for public higher education was scarce because the right-wing neo-liberal government refused to abide by the 1987 constitutional mandate that 6% of the nation’s budget be allocated to higher education. She said that, in those early days, it would have been impossible for her to even imagine that her institution would grow to serve the 5,800 students it serves today. Since the Sandinista Front returned to power, the campus has grown with the enthusiastic support of the state. In addition to educating students at her own vibrant campus, URACCAN also sends professors to more remote communities on the Caribbean coast, providing college-level classes for students who would have a hard time moving to Bluefields to pursue on-campus study. The university leaders we met told us their curriculum is integrated as part of a larger development plan for the region and the country. They are preparing their youth for a different Nicaragua. They see poverty as the enemy. They are coordinating their educational curriculum with economic planning processes at the national and regional level.

Nicaragua’s recovery from its long period of state neglect has also played out with electricity.  Before 2007, only 25% of the 20 municipalities on the Caribbean coast had functioning electrical service.  The region as a whole has a low population density compared to the Pacific coast. Nonetheless, electrification today is close to 95% on the Caribbean side, although certain small remote communities like Orinoco, which we visited, turn off the generator for a few hours every night. Orinoco was founded in 1898 by John Sambola, a leader in the Garifuna community, an Afro-descended ethnic group present in Nicaragua as well as other Caribbean countries. The geography makes the town accessible only by boat.  But even there, the government has provided solar panels plus a small diesel generator to support the community’s electrical needs.

While the community has already seen a great improvement in electrical service since the neo-liberal period, our local guide, Humberto, said they would like to get 24-hour electrical service soon. We stayed in Orinoco on a hot night, and some in our group were awakened when the fans pointed toward our sweltering bodies suddenly stopped in the middle of the night.

On our way to Orinoco, our boat had to slow down while passing the construction site for a bridge set to cross a river on the way to a new deep-water port that the Nicaraguan government is planning to build with financial support from China. Currently, Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast has no deep-water port, limiting possibilities for economic development in the region.

During our stay, Bluefields itself was in the midst of an enormous project to add sewage pipes beneath the town’s old streets. Over the course of a week, I witnessed the steady work of men digging up a one block-long section of street adjacent to our hotel.

They laid down sewage pipes and then covered up the holes with cement. Numerous walks around town revealed mended cuts in the old concrete, which were visible everywhere—evidence that this massive city-wide project had been under way for some time. I asked a few people living in Bluefields about the project. They told me that, without a modern wastewater treatment system, the norm has been that sewage from each home goes into an on-site septic system which, when crowded together with many other nearby systems, contaminates the ground water. This expensive project will dramatically improve ground water quality in the future.

To be continued….

Briefs:

By Nan McCurdy

2,221 Homes Built So Far in 2026

The Institute for Urban and Rural Housing (INVUR) reported on August 12 that, to date in 2026, 2,221 affordable housing units have been built, representing 48% of the annual target. Regarding the target set for 2026, Gabriela Palacios, head of the institute, explained that the goal is to reach 6,744 homes. Palacios highlighted the positive impact of housing programs in the country, noting that from 2007 to the present, the construction and renovation of 154,621 homes nationwide have been promoted in coordination with local municipalities.

To begin the application process for affordable housing projects, families need only present their national ID card; supplementary documentation will be required in later phases following socioeconomic evaluations. General eligibility requirements include: being a Nicaraguan citizen; demonstrating income (as a salaried employee, self-employed individual, or professional service provider); not having previously received a housing subsidy; and submitting a certificate of no assets confirming that the applicant does not own a home or a plot of land. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/2026/08/11/suman-2221-viviendas-construidas-este-ano/

(La Primerisima, 11 August 2026)

First Major Sea Turtle Arrival Protected

In a breathtaking display of wildlife, 3,785 sea turtles arrived on the shores of the La Flor sanctuary in Rivas and the Río Escalante Chacocente sanctuary in Carazo during the first three days of August. This event marks the first major nesting event of the 2026 cycle in the country. The massive nesting event represents a milestone in national conservation efforts. The phenomenon took place under the strict protection and supervision of Nicaraguan Army personnel, ensuring the protection of the nests on the beaches of San Juan del Sur and Santa Teresa. These actions are part of the national campaign entitled “Together We Conserve Our Sea Turtles,” which seeks to protect the five species that choose Nicaragua as their nesting ground. Authorities noted that these mass arrivals occur periodically between July and January, making Nicaragua’s Pacific coast a key natural sanctuary for the survival of these reptiles. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/2026/08/07/protegen-la-primera-gran-arribada-de-tortugas-a-costas-del-pacifico/ (La Primerisima, 7 August 2026)

“Dismantling of the Hegemonic Imposition of the West”

In a recent interview, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke, said that while progress was made in dismantling the western colonial model after World War II, the struggle now is to bury it definitively, as some of its elements persist, including “psychological and economic” elements. He insisted, “It is clear that a new world must emerge that recognizes multilateralism, that recognizes the billions of people who live in what we call the global south.”

‍”We have always faced foreign intervention; we have always faced interference in our internal affairs. And there is another actor that must also be highlighted, and that is the internal oligarchy. I think it exemplifies in a way what Commander Daniel [Ortega] said in the Plaza” on July 19th. Jaentschke explained, “In every country in Latin America, this oligarchy, which believes it has the right to maintain its hegemony and its imposition on our people, is allied with this foreign interventionist position. And we will not allow that either. We have always fought to defend our sovereignty, to maintain our self-determination, to defend peace.” (Sputnik News, 24 July 2026)

International Reserves Exceed US$9.9 Billion

Nicaragua’s gross international reserves (GIR) stood at $9.9 billion in July 2026, a figure that represents an unprecedented level in the country’s economic history. According to the Central Bank’s Monetary Indicators report, released on August 7, GIR increased by $78.9 million in July, driven primarily by the institution’s net foreign currency purchases in its foreign exchange operations, an increase in foreign currency reserve requirements, and the net absorption of foreign currency monetary deposits. This reserve level is consistent with coverage of 4.5 times the monetary base, reflecting a solid external position and support for the stability of the national currency. The Central Bank (BCN) noted that gross international reserves continued their upward trend in July.

(La Primerisima, 7 August 2026)

Nicaragua Maintains Sustainable Public Debt

A Bloomberg analysis, based on data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), reveals that the public debt gap is widening in Latin America and that at least three countries in the region rank among the 30 economies with the highest public debt-to-GDP ratios in the world. Nicaragua does not appear on that list. On the contrary, it has sustainable and declining debt levels. According to the report, Bolivia, Brazil, and Suriname are among the most indebted economies globally. Within this regional context, Nicaragua is not mentioned among the highest-risk countries or those with high debt levels. According to the Nicaragua Central Bank’s 2025 Annual Report, total public debt stood at 48.1% of GDP at the end of 2025, down from the 51.7% recorded in 2024. This reduction is attributed to sustained economic growth, improvements in tax administration, prudent public spending, and effective debt management. (Informe Pastran 11 August 2026)

700 University Students Graduate

Co-President Rosario Murillo announced on August 7 the graduation of more professionals from the country’s leading institutions of higher education. She explained that the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN-León and UNAN-Managua), along with the Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro National University (UNCSM), held graduation ceremonies in which 700 young people successfully completed their studies. The graduates now hold degrees in Business Administration, Accounting, Economics, Communication, Nursing, Psychology, and Law.

In other areas Murillo said that 2,000 students are currently participating in practical training focused on crop management to strengthen rural development. She noted that some 84,000 students enrolled in rural distance-learning high school programs are participating in math challenge tournaments, an initiative aimed at strengthening their problem-solving and logical reasoning skills. (La Primerisima, 7 August 2026)

“Minguito” Returns to His Shrine in Las Sierritas of Managua

After spending 10 days in Managua at the Santo Domingo Church, the tiny statue of Managua’s patron saint, Santo Domingo de Guzmán (Saint Dominic of Guzman) returned on August 10 to its shrine at the old Santo Domingo Las Sierritas Church in the hills south of Managua. Before 7:00 a.m. the statue left the church that bears the saint’s name, located in the 19 de Julio neighborhood in Managua, accompanied by devotees and parishioners dancing to the sound of marimbas and chicheros. “Minguito,” as the saint is known, was placed on a traditional boat and carried through the Mercado Oriental on the way to the Arco del Gancho de Camino, an iconic spot where the statue was lowered from the boat and carried on the shoulders of traditional bearers. This transition, held every August 10, brings together thousands of devotees to bid farewell to the patron saint of Managua as the statue returns home. Other devotees, painted as little red or black devils, fulfill vows for a miracle granted by the Saint. Children and adults dance the traditional “vaquita” while some dress up as Cacique, an important traditional figure. [Historians note the August festival blends Catholic faith with old Indigenous celebrations tied to the corn harvest. It also coincides with the canicula when there is little rain between July 15 and August 15. This editor thinks that the ritual was to bring back the rains.] See pictures: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/2026/08/10/minguito-regresa-a-su-morada/ (La Primerisima, 10 August 2026)