The US Contracts Out Its Regime Change Operation in Nicaragua

John Perry

An extraordinary leaked document gives a glimpse of the breadth and complexity of the US government’s plan to interfere in Nicaragua’s internal affairs up to and after its presidential election in 2021.

The plan, a 14-page extract from a much longer document, dates from March-April this year and sets the terms for a contract to be awarded by USAID (a “Request for Task Order Proposal”). It was revealed by reporter William Grigsby from Nicaragua’s independent Radio La Primerisima and describes the task  of creating what the document calls “the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” The aim is to achieve “an orderly transition” from the current government of Daniel Ortega to “a government committed to the rule of law, civil liberties, and a free civil society.” The contractor will work with the “democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sub-sectors” which in reality is an agglomeration of NGOs, think tanks, media organizations and so-called human rights bodies that depend on US funding and which – while claiming to be independent – are in practice an integral part of the opposition to the Ortega government.

To justify such blatant interference, a considerable rewriting of history is needed. For example, the document claims that the ruling Sandinista party manipulated “successive” past elections so as to win “without a majority of the votes.” Then after “manipulating the 2016 presidential elections” to similar effect, it was warned by the Organization of American States (OAS) that there had been various “impediments to free and fair elections” as a result of which the OAS requested “technical electoral reforms.” What the document omits, however, are the overall conclusions of the OAS on the last elections. Although it identified “weaknesses typical of all electoral processes,” the OAS explicitly said that these had “not affected substantially the popular will expressed through the vote.” In other words, the nature of Daniel Ortega’s victory (he gained 72% of the popular vote) made any minor irregularities irrelevant to the result: he won by an enormous margin. The leaked document makes clear that the US is worried that the same might happen again and aims to stop it.

Not surprisingly, the document also rewrites recent history, saying that the “uprising” in 2018 (which had strong US backing) was answered by “the government’s brutal repression” of demonstrations, while it ignores the wave of violence and destruction that the opposition itself unleashed. The economic disruption it caused is still damaging the country, even though (pre-pandemic) there were strong signs of recovery. USAID, however, has to paint a picture of a country in crisis “…broadening into an economic debacle with the potential to become a humanitarian emergency, depending on the impact of the COVID-19 contagion on Nicaragua’s weak healthcare system.” Someone casually reading the document, unaware of the real situation, might get the impression that, in Nicaragua’s “crisis environment,” regime change is not only desirable but urgently required. The reality – that Nicaragua is at peace, has so far coped with the COVID-19 pandemic reasonably well, and hasn’t suffered the severe economic problems experienced by its neighbors El Salvador and Honduras – is of course incompatible with the picture the US administration needs to present, in order to give some semblance of justification for its intervention.

A long history of US intervention

Given the long history of US interference in Nicaragua, going back at least as far as William Walker’s assault on its capital and usurption of the presidency in 1856, the existence of a plan of this kind is hardly surprising. What’s unusual is that someone has made it publicly available and we can now see the plan in detail. Of course, the US has long developed a tool box of regime change methods short of direct military intervention, such as when it sent in the marines in the 1920s and 1930s or illegally funded and provided logistical support for  the “Contra” forces in the 1980s. It now has more sophisticated methods, using local proxies, which are deniable in the unlikely event that they will be exposed by the international media (which normally displays little interest, being much more interested in electoral interference by Russia than it is in Washington’s disruption of the democratic processes).

The latest escalation in intervention began under the Obama presidency and continued under Trump, although the motivation probably has more to do with the US administration’s ongoing concerns about the success of the Ortega government’s development model since it returned to power in 2007 and began a decade of renewed social investment. Oxfam summarized the problem in the memorable title it gave to a 1980s report about Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example. Between 2005 and 2016, poverty was reduced by almost half, from 48 percent to 25 percent according to World Bank data. Nicaragua had a low crime rate, limited drug-related violence, and community-based policing. Over the 11 years to 2017, Nicaragua’s per-capita GDP increased by 38 percent—more than for any of its neighbors. Its success contrasted sharply with the experience of the three “Northern Triangle” countries closely allied to the US. While Nicaragua became one of the safest countries in Latin America, neighboring Guatemala, El Salvador and particularly Honduras saw soaring crime levels, rampant corruption and rapid growth in the drug trade that prevented social progress and produced the “migrant caravans” that began to head north towards the US in 2017.

The US administration’s efforts in 2016 and 2017, building on long experience of manipulating Nicaraguan politics, appeared to produce results in April 2018. The first catalyst for action by US-funded groups was an out-of-control forest fire in a remote reserve, inaccessible by road. The tactics were clear: take an incident with potential to get young people onto the streets, blame the government for inaction (even though the fire was almost impossible to control), whip up people’s anger via social media, organize protests, generate critical stories in the local press, enlist support from neighboring allies (in this case, Costa Rica) and secure hostile coverage in the international media. All of these tactics worked, but before the next stage could be reached (protesters being repressed by the Ortega “regime”) the forest fire was extinguished by a rainstorm.

A week later, the opposition forces were unexpectedly given a second opportunity.  The government announced a package of modest social security reforms, and quickly faced new protests on the streets. The same tactics were deployed, this time with much greater success. Violence by protesters on April 19 (a police officer, a Sandinista supporter and a bystander were shot) brought inevitable attempts by the police to control the protests, leading to rapid escalation. Media messages proliferated about students being killed, many of them false. Only a few days later the government cancelled the social security reforms, but by now the protests had (as planned) moved on to demanding the government’s resignation. The full story of events in April-July 2018, and how the government eventually prevailed, is told in Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?

A section of the report.

Laying the groundwork for insurrection

How were the conditions for a coup created? The aims of US government funding in Nicaragua and the tactics they paid for in this period were made surprisingly clear in the online magazine Global Americans in 2018, which is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Arguing (in May 2018, at the height of the violence) that “Nicaragua is on the brink of a civic insurrection,” the author Ben Waddell, who was in Nicaragua at the time, pointed out that “US support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”

His article’s title, Laying the groundwork for insurrection, was starkly accurate in describing the ambitions behind the NED’s funding program, which had financed 54 projects in Nicaragua over the period 2014-17 and has continued to do so since then. What did the projects do? Like the recently leaked document, NED promotes ostensibly innocuous or even apparently beneficial activities like strengthening civil society, promoting democratic values, finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders” and identifying “advocacy opportunities.” To get behind the jargon and clarify the NED’s role, Waddell quotes the New York Times (referring to the uprisings in Egypt, where NED had also been active):

“…the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.”

In the case of Nicaragua, the NED’s funding of groups opposed to the Sandinista government began in 1984, giving the lie to their aim being to “promote democracy” since that was the year in which Nicaragua’s revolutionary government held the country’s first-ever democratic elections. Waddell makes it clear that the NED’s efforts continued, years later:

“… it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding.”

The NED is not the only non-covert source of US funding. Another is USAID, which describes its role in the 2018 uprising in similar terms to the NED. Not long before he exposed the new document, William Grigsby was able to publish lists of groups and projects in Nicaragua funded by USAID and by the National Democratic Institute (NDI). He showed that upwards of $30 million was being distributed to a wide range of groups opposed to the government and involved in the violence of 2018, and that in the case of the NDI at least this funding continued into 2020.

Last year, Yorlis Gabriela Luna recounted for COHA her own experiences of how US-funded groups trained young people, in particular, and influenced their political beliefs in the build-up to 2018. She explained how social networks and media outlets were “capable of fooling a significant portion of Nicaragua’s youth and general population.” She explained how the groups used scholarships to learn English, diploma programs, graduate studies, and courses with enticing names like “democracic values, social media activism, human rights and accountability” at private universities, “to attract and lure young people.” She went on to explain how exciting events were organised in expensive hotels or even involving trips abroad, so that young people who had never before been privileged in these ways developed a sense of “pride,” belonging, and “group identity,” and as a result “wound up aligning themselves with the foreign interests” of those who funded the courses and activities.

The new task during and after the pandemic

Two years after the failed coup attempt, what are the organizations that receive US funding now supposed to do? The new document is full of jargon, requiring the contractor (for example) to engage in “targeted short-term technical and analytical activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid response programming support until other funds, mechanisms, and actors can be mobilized.” The work also requires “longer-term programs, which will be determined as the crisis evolves.” Preparation is required for the possibility that “transition [to a new government] does not happen in an orderly and timely manner.” The contractor will have to prepare “a roster of subject matter experts in Nicaragua” to provide short term technical assistance, “regardless of the result of the 2021 election, even in the event of the Sandinistas ‘winning fairly’.” The document is full of requirements like being able to offer “a rapid response” and “seize new opportunities,” emphasizing the urgency of the task. In other words, a fresh attempt is underway to destabilize Daniel Ortega’s government and, in the event that this doesn’t work, and even should the Sandinistas win the next election fairly, as the document admits is a possibility, US attempts at regime change are stepping up a gear.

Who will carry this out? The document places much emphasis on “maintaining” and “strengthening” civil society and improving its leadership, which appears to refer to the numerous NGOs, think tanks and “human rights” bodies which receive US funding. At one point the document asks “what should donor coordination, the opposition, civil society, and media focus on?” – clearly implying that the contractor has a role in influencing not just these civil society groups but also the media and political parties.

Not surprisingly, the document has been interpreted as a new plan to destabilize the country. Writing in La Primerísima, Wiston López argues that the plan’s purpose is “to create the conditions for a coup d’état in Nicaragua.” Brian Willson, the VietNam veteran severely injured in the 1980s when attempting to stop a freight train carrying supplies to the “Contra,” and who lives in Nicaragua, concludes that the US now realizes that Ortega will win the coming election. In response, the “US has launched a brazen, criminal and arrogant plan to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.”

Supposing that there is a clear Sandinista victory in 2021, will the US nevertheless refuse to accept the result? Having implied that the OAS had serious criticisms of the last election when this was not the case, the document implies that it will be pressured to take a different attitude next time, saying that “whether the OAS decides to pick up the pressure on electoral reform again will be an important international pressure point.” No doubt the US will try to insist that the OAS must be election observers, and if this is refused it will allow the legitimacy of the election to be called into question, if the result is unfavorable to US interests. Many question whether the OAS is even qualified to have an observer role any longer, however, after the serious harm it did to Bolivian democracy in 2019 by casting doubts on what experts considered a fair election and, in effect,instigating a coup. This document creates legitimate concern that the US government would like to use the OAS to prevent another government that is not to its liking from winning an election, as it did so recently in Bolivia.

Not only must conditions be created to replace the current government, but once this is achieved the changes must extend to “rebuilding” the institutions of government, including the judicial system, police and armed forces. After the widespread persecution of government officials, state and municipal workers and Sandinista supporters that occurred in 2018, it is not surprising that this is interpreted as requiring a purge of all the institutions and personnel with Sandinista sympathies. As Willson says, “the new government must immediately submit to the policies and guidelines established by the United States, including persecution of Sandinistas, dissolving the National Police and the Army, among other institutions.”

USAID makes it clear that it is internal pressure in Nicaragua that might eventually provoke a coup d’état, so it calls on its agents to deepen the political, economic and also the health crisis, taking into account the context of COVID-19. The US State Department recently awarded an extra $750,000 to Nicaraguan non-government bodies as part of its global response to COVID-19, and this includes “support for targeted communication and community engagement activities.” As López points out in Popular Resistance, “Since March the US-directed opposition has focused 95% of their actions on attempting to discredit Nicaragua’s prevention, contention, and Covid treatment. However, this only had some success in the international media and is now backfiring since Nicaragua is the country with one of the lowest mortality rates in the continent.” The Johns Hopkins University’s world map of coronavirus cases currently shows Nicaragua with 3,672 cases compared with 17,448 in El Salvador, 42,685 in Honduras and 51,306 in Guatemala. Even though higher figures produced by Nicaragua’s so-called Citizens’ Observatory are regularly cited in the international media, they currently show just 9,044 “suspected” cases, still far below the numbers in the “Northern triangle” countries.

What will the opposition do next?

COHA has already documented the disinformation campaign taking place against Nicaragua during the pandemic and how this has been repeated in the international media. So far, however, warnings of the health system’s collapse have proved to be unfounded. If, as happened with the Indio Maíz fire and the social security protests in 2018, the opposition fails in its attempt to use the pandemic to destabilize the Ortega government, what will it do next? A recent incident shows that attempts to seize on events to spur a crisis will continue. On July 31, a fire occurred in Managua’s cathedral. The fire department responded quickly and put out the blaze within ten minutes, but a crucifix and the chapel where it stood were badly damaged. Within minutes opposition newspaper La Prensa reported that “an attack” had occurred involving a “Molotov cocktail” and that the government or its supporters were implicated. This was echoed by other local and international media, opposition parties, the Archbishop of Managua, and by one of the NGOs which received USAID funding. Despite the lack of any evidence to back up the media stories, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) also condemned the incident, obviously implying that it was an attack on human rights.

Yet a police investigation quickly established that there was no evidence at all of any foul play, or that petrol or explosive materials were involved. Their investigations pointed instead to a tragic accident involving lighted candles and the alcohol spray being used as a disinfectant as part of the cathedral’s anti-COVID-19 precautions. The Catholic Church has already announced that the damaged chapel will be restored to its former state. However, the damage that has been done to the government’s national and international reputation, and to its highly politicized relationship with the Catholic Church, will be more difficult to repair.

The Decrepit UK Political System

Kenneth Surin

The Covid-19 pandemic and the continuing Brexit crisis have cast an unforgiving light on the UK’s failed political system, the pivot of which lies with its “first past the post” (FTTP) election structure. It should be noted that in this respect the UK is similar to the US, and that the UK is the only country in Europe which uses FTTP.

This constitutively imbalanced voting structure, coupled with the machinations of a corrupt Establishment, has brought the UK’s political system to its knees.

To quote a report produced by the Electoral Reform Society on the 2019 general election: “In December 2019, over 22.6 million votes (70.8%) did not contribute to electing an MP”, meaning that over 70% of those who voted did not get the MP of their choice. In effect, the votes of this 70% were materially irrelevant to the outcome of the election, which was a resounding 80-seat majority for Boris “BoJo” Johnson’s Tory party.

The report shows that out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, 316 seats are safe seats, indicating that their incumbents just need to go through the barest motions of campaigning in order to be re-elected.

Before the 2019 elections, the average UK constituency had not changed hands for 42 years, with 192 seats (30% of the total) last changing party in 1945 or earlier, and 65 seats (10% of the total) being held by the same party for over a century.

Add to this the fact that the UK’s second legislative chamber (the House of Lords) is unelected, having members for life on the basis of heritage and political appointments. Moreover, 26 bishops sit in the Lords, making the UK rank alongside Iran with clerics exercising a legislative function.

The evidence shows that FPTP is highly expedient for parties which seek to rule the majority via what can only be described as a form of institutionalized fraudulence: guaranteed safe seats, gerrymandering (though not yet on the scale to be found in the US), arcane electoral franchise, and so on.

The problem is worsened by the fact that the 2 parties which have taken turns to be in government for the last century— the Tories for most of that time, and Labour— have not shown the slightest interest in changing a rotten system.

BoJo is a populist, but he rides on the back of a form of governance which denies the voting populace its real wishes.

But are there viable alternatives to this wretched state of affairs?

The above-mentioned Electoral Reform Society report provides an interesting scenario should proportional representation (PR) have taken the place of FPTP:

+ The Tories would have won 288 seats (-77 compare to FPTP. The Tories gained an extra 48 seats (7.4% increase in seats from 2017) on a 1.3% increase in vote share, providing a majority of 80 seats, the largest for the Conservatives since 1987. In the 2017 election the then Tory Prime Minister Theresa May lost her majority on a similar vote share!)

+ Labour would have won 216 seats (compared to 203 at present, their worst result since 1935)

+ The Lib-Dems 70 seats (+59)

+ The Green Party 12 seats (compared to 1 at present)

+ Nigel Farage’s far-right British Party 11 seats (compared to 0 at present)

+ The Scottish National Party (SNP) 28 seats (as opposed to 43 at present)

Under PR the biggest losers would have been the Tories and the SNP, with the Lib-Dems and the Green Party as the clear beneficiaries.

The argument is sometimes made that fringe political parties such as Farage’s Brexit Party having a voice in the parliament will enable marginal parties to exert a disproportionate influence on parliamentary business. The counter to this is that extremist groups exist within the main parties themselves. For instance, there is a clone of the Brexit party within the Conservative Party itself—the hardline Brexit Europe Reform Group (ERG) has 80-plus members, making Farage’s party with its putative 11 seats seem like small beer.

Under a hybrid voting system such as the Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP/AMP), the Conservatives would have lost 81 seats, making the Lib-Dems and the Green Party the clear gainers.

In MMP/AMS elections, voters choose a candidate in their constituency (elected under FPTP) and have a second vote for their preferred party. Each party declares a list of candidates in advance. Voters can cast both their votes for the same party or vote for different parties in their constituency and regional ballots. The listed seats are then allocated to parties on a proportional basis, usually employing some form of voting threshold (generally 5%).

Single Transfer Voting (STV) would have seen the Tories losing 53 seats and the SNP losing 18 seats.

A typical proportional system will give a Deviation from Proportionality (DV) score of 5–8%.
At present the UK’s DV score is 16%. The highest DV is in Scotland with 36.4%, followed by Northern Ireland with 30%, then England with 17.5%.

The skewing represented by these figures is reflected in how the parties turn their votes into parliamentary seats.

The FPTP system creates big differences between a party’s national vote share and its share of seats.

Since a general election effectively consists of 650 local elections (“districts” in the US), the final result depends not just on the total number of votes secured by each party, but just as importantly on where these votes happen to be cast.

In the 2019 election, the 2 biggest gainers of seats were the Conservatives and the SNP. Both parties were very successful in turning votes into seats. The Tories share of the UK national vote was 43.6%, but their share of seats was 56.2% (12.6% points higher). The SNP won 3.9% of the UK vote but 7.4% of the seats. Focusing on Scotland alone, the SNP won 45% of the vote but 81% of Scottish seats.

Labour’s vote share in the 2019 election (32.1%) tallied closely with its seat share (31.1%), even if not quite as closely aligned as in the 2017 general election (40.0% and 40.3% respectively).

This disproportionality between votes cast and seats gained can also be displayed in terms of votes-per-seat-won.

In the 2019 election the Tories got 1 seat for every 38,264 votes, while Labour got 1 seat for every 50,837 votes. It took many more votes to elect a Lib Dem (336,038) or Green MP (866,435), but far fewer to elect an SNP MP (25,883).

I experienced the vagaries of FPTP when I lived for over 2 decades in several parts of the UK (Staffordshire, Reading, a salubrious neighbourhood in Birmingham, Suffolk, Cambridge, and Cheltenham). Never in that time and in those places was my MP anyone but a Tory.

As a Labour supporter, I considered myself effectively to be disenfranchised.

Covid-19 and the Health Crisis in Latin America

Yanis Iqbal

Latin America has surpassed more than 5 million Covid-19 cases to overtake North America, with 4.8 million Covid-19 cases, as the region worst-hit by the Coronavirus pandemic. This astronomic increase in Covid-19 cases has been accompanied by a corresponding economic catastrophe of great magnitude. According to a United Nations Policy Brief entitled “The Impact of COVID-19 on Latin America and the Caribbean”, “Parts of Latin America and the Caribbean have become hotspots of the coronavirus (COVID19) pandemic, exacerbated by weak social protection, fragmented health systems and profound inequalities. COVID-19 will result in the worst recession in the region in a century, causing a 9.1% contraction in regional GDP in 2020…This could push the number of poor up by 45 million (to a total of 230 million) and the number of extremely poor by 28 million (to 96 million in total), putting them at risk of undernutrition.” The Policy Brief further states that “The sharp drop in economic activity is expected to lift the unemployment rate from 8.1% in 2019 to 13.5% in 2020. The poverty rate is expected to rise by 7.0 percentage points in 2020, to 37.2%, while extreme poverty is expected to rise by 4.5 percentage points, from 11.0% to 15.5%, which represents an increase of 28 million people.”

Structural Adjustment Programs and Public Health System

The present-day health catastrophe in Latin America, instead of being unprecedented and unexplainable, is deeply rooted in the neoliberalization of that entire continent’s economy. Beginning from the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America witnessed the advent of neoliberalism wherein capital accumulation and immiseration intensified. This neoliberal restructuring was done through the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that were composed of two phases. The first phase consisted of “stabilization” or the ostensible achievement of macroeconomic stability. In this case, stability was interpreted as an appropriate investment climate for the marauding operations of multinational corporations. Consequently, when this stability arrived, subsidies for transportation, food and other utilities got abolished; public employment perilously reduced; and austerity authoritarianism in the form of cuts in education and health expenditure delivered severe body blows to the social fabric of the Latin American continent. After the first phase of the stabilization, the second stage arrived, comprising of “(1) liberalization of trade and finances, which opens the economy to the world market; (2) deregulation, which removes the state from economic decision making and from mediating capital- labor relations; and (3) privatization of formerly public spheres that could hamper capital accumulation if criteria of public interest over private profit are left operative.”

As the innards of Latin America were laid open for the bandits of neoliberal capitalism, the continent soon witnessed the comprehensive destruction of its health infrastructure. With the implementation of SAPs under the watchful eye of International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the Latin American health sector underwent a painful process of defunding, disorganization, deregulation and privatization. The destabilization of the health system of an entire continent was discursively driven and informed by the World Bank document “Investing in Health”, a text which is single-minded in its promotion of private corporations. The World Bank document innocuously states that “Greater reliance on the private sector to deliver clinical services, both those that are included by a country in its essential package and those that are discretionary, can help raise efficiency. The private sector already serves a large and diverse clientele in developing countries and often delivers services of higher quality without the long lines and inadequate supplies frequently found in government facilities.” Here, World Bank innocently forgets to mention the fact that private health companies, being totally concerned with the unending accumulation of capital, are uninterested in providing accessible and cheap health services to impoverished people. The $3,000 Coronavirus care fee being demanded by private agencies in Peru corroborates the profit-oriented nature of private corporations. 

Through a maniacal boosterism of the privatization of healthcare, IFIs, with the help of their SAPs, were successful in instituting neoliberal reforms in the health sector of Latin America. Despite country-specific heterogeneity, “the basic elements of reform are strikingly similar and aim at constituting health insurance and services into a direct sphere of capital accumulation. However, since health care for poor people is usually not an attractive business, reforms tend to establish a dual health system with a market-driven subsystem for the insured and with an important private involvement and public assistance subsystem for the uninsured”. The definite dualisation of the health sector into a deregulated privatized section and an underfunded-overburdened public health system greatly increased the plight of the poor. Private corporations, embedded in a market matrix of government withdrawal and ever-shrinking administrative budgets, got access to new lucrative sites for surplus realization; the majority of the masses, on the other hand, experienced a degeneration in health services as austerity schemes reduced public health expenditure, economically weakened public health management and forced Latin American governments to adopt “selective poor relief”: a policy of scrapping universal health coverage and providing minimal services to the “poorest” and “neediest”. 

As various governments in Latin America progressively withdrew from the market and started promoting what World Bank had blithely called “greater diversity and competition in the financing and delivery of health services”, epidemiological regulation and disease surveillance in the sphere of public health suffered serious damage. A CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) report states, “Effective disease surveillance remains a challenge in the region. The emigration of health professionals, the limited placement of healthcare centers in rural and low-income areas, and the restricted devotion of resources to emergency preparedness hamper the efficacy of regional health systems.” The atrophy of disease surveillance is a by-product of the abysmally low public health expenditure of Latin American governments which is, on average, well below 6%. In 2018, for example, 16 Latin American countries dedicated less than 4% of their GDP to healthcare.

Low public health expenditure on the part of Latin American administrations has produced ripple effect in the adjacent domain of economy and in this way it has exacerbated the Coronavirus economic crisis. Due to the absence of universal coverage and adequate public health facilities, the lower income households are forced to substantially increase their out-of-pocket health expenditure. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these lower-income households are facing an acute existential crisis: to avert the fatal consequences of Coronavirus, these households are desperately trying to access healthcare; on accessing healthcare, they are incurring “out-of-pocket costs that will force them to go into debt or to sell their productive assets, plunging them into deeper poverty.” This situation is particularly pronounced in Latin America where it is estimated that “On average, households in the region cover more than one-third of health care costs through direct out-of-pocket payments (34%), while nearly 95 million people incur catastrophic health expenditures [financial contributions to the health system exceeding 40% of a household’s non-subsistence income]and nearly 12 million become poorer as a result of these expenditures.”

Informalization and Imperialism

The economic effects of low public health expenditure in Latin America have been amplified by two related economic features produced by the previous SAPs. Firstly, the SAPs initiated the informalization of the Latin American labor market through the trade liberalization and deregulation of industry, commercialization of agriculture and layoffs in public services. With the penetration of global capitalist dynamics into Latin American economy, “There has been an explosion of people who scratch out a living through the provision of whatever service they are able to market since the informal sector has been the only avenue of survival for millions of people thrown out of work by contraction of formal sector employment and by the uprooting of remaining peasant communities by the incursion of capitalist agriculture.” In the contemporary period, 55% of the Latin American working population is engaged in the informal economy. Informal activities, by avoiding social security contributions and payroll taxes, do not have access to unemployment benefits, health insurance schemes and injury insurances. Informal work, therefore, “is vulnerable, low-quality and precarious, and lacks access to legal protection, modern capital markets, formal training and official social security systems”. Consequently, the workers enrolled in these informal activities are more exposed to the risks of a massive health shock like Covid-19 given their occupational insecurities and economic precarity. 

Secondly, SAPs, by liberalizing trade flows, allowed for the unencumbered entry of foreign capital.  Through the entry of foreign capital, Latin America got imperialistically integrated into the unequal arrangements of global capitalism and became a peripheral continent structurally subordinated to the core nations of capitalism. With the opening of Latin American economies to the corporations of the Global North, the countries of that continent experienced enormous economic changes: Latin American countries got reduced to the mere exporters of specific commodities; and with the consolidation of that export-oriented commodity structure, a simultaneous process of domestic de-industrialization took place as foreign capital, concentrated in the trade of specific resources, exploited the country through low labor units costs and repatriated its large profits. Overall, the installation of an export-oriented economy in Latin America undermined domestic production capabilities and increased the continent’s external dependency on the Global North in the form of the necessity of imports. Therefore, “While Latin American countries exported primary goods like food products, lumber and minerals to the Global North, they tended to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities — typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier — generated profit for northern countries while maintaining Latin American countries in a perpetual trade deficit.”

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the destructive effects of imperialism and dependency are visible from the lack of medical supplies in Latin America. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC), “Latin America and the Caribbean is highly dependent on imports of medical products, as less than 4% of these are sourced within the region itself. To date, more than 70 countries —including four of the region’s top five suppliers, of which the first is the United States— have restricted their medical exports in response to COVID-19. Export restrictions are hampering the supply of products essential for fighting the pandemic in the region.” Through restrictions on medical exports, the countries of the Global North are disallowing the poorer nations of Latin America from accessing essential medical supplies such as surgical masks, gloves, N-95 respirators, mechanical ventilators, test kits, disinfectants and other personal protective equipments. The inability of Latin American nations to domestically procure medical equipments stems from their historical dependency on the Global North which has imperialistically pillaged and undermined the domestic production capabilities of that continent for decades. 

In Latin America, the catastrophic convergence of an economic and health crisis is deeply gendered. 86% of nurses in Latin America are female and due to this overrepresentation of women in the sectors most impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the female health workforce is experiencing increased pressure. As a result of a fragile and over-stretched public health system, women are being forced to cope with extreme working conditions, such as long working hours, increasing their risk to Coronavirus infection. Furthermore, the domestic confinement of female health worker’s families has aggravated the stress and insecurities of women’s lives by increasing the care-giving burden.  Despite all the risks and hardships being borne by the female health workforce, they are paid 28% less than male workers. This gender pay gap is a result of the SAPs which, by reducing public health expenditure, compelled the governments to segment the labor market on the basis of gender, allowing them to reduce the monetary stress induced by health austerity policies. 

USA’s Hostility to Socialized Medicine

With the unabated march of the Covid-19 pandemic, the need for a new healthcare system for Latin America is being accentuated. While the oppressed masses of Latin America agree on the necessity of improving their continent’s health infrastructure, USA, the world hegemon, has incessantly undermined any regional efforts to radically re-institute the regime of neoliberalism. Here, the examples of Venezuela and Cuba are appropriate for expressing the American empire’s hostility to socialist healthcare. In 1999 and 2000, the Bolivarian government of Hugo Chavez began the construction of a socialist medical administration comprising of misiones or missions, social programs parallel to the state and creatively managed by communal participation. 

These missions were successful in crafting a robust, participatory and communally managed system of public healthcare. The Barrio Adentro mission, for example, set up well-functioning community health centers, dedicated to the humanistic motive of treating patients for free: “Each community health center has a multidisciplinary health team consisting of at least one physician specialized in integrated family medicine, a community health worker, and a health promoter. Moreover, each center is stocked with centrally purchased medications to be distributed at no cost to patients, as required. The health team personnel live in the barrios themselves.”

Angered by the ideological opposition of Venezuela, USA unleashed an imperialist war of sanctions against the country, cruelly punishing it for providing free healthcare to its citizens. The aim of this imperialist war was the crippling of the state corporation PDVSA or Petroleum of Venezuela, a major revenue earner for an oil-dependent country. With the help of sanctions and its Arab ally Saudi Arabia (which deliberately depressed oil prices), USA has managed to significantly dent Venezuela’s economy and thus, dismantle the country’s socialist medical infrastructure. 

Cuba is another country which has been facing the wrath of imperialist USA for socializing the medical system through a revolution. Through an ever-lasting economic warfare beginning from 1959, USA has tried to undermine the socialist programs of Cuba and destroy its public health experiment. Despite continued US attempts at economically destabilizing the nation, Cuba has maintained its infrastructure of medical internationalism and socialist health system. The current health system of Cuba represents a unified and generalized medical administration, predicated on the moral economy of revolution. It is based on what Che Guevara poetically wrote in “Revolutionary Medicine” back then in 1960: “The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth … far more important than good remuneration is the pride of serving one’s neighbor. Much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people. And each doctor, within the circle of his activities, can and must accumulate that valuable treasure, the gratitude of the people”

As the Covid-19 pandemic intensifies, anti-imperialist opposition to USA is growing. The complete collapse of healthcare in USA, the concomitant crumbling of Latin America’s health system due to the continent’s neoliberalization and external dependency on the Global North, is forcefully foregrounding the prospects of a socialist health regime. Socialized medicine, which had until now seemed unimaginable, appears perfectly conceivable as the capitalist health system sacrifices millions of people at the altar of profit and collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. 

College football season in doubt after Big Ten and Pac-12 postpone fall sports

Andy Thompson

The Big Ten and Pac-12 announced Tuesday afternoon that they would cancel all fall 2020 games due to the coronavirus, in a major reversal which places this fall’s college football season in doubt.

Until this week all signals pointed to most major college football programs going forward with plans to play at least abbreviated schedules this season, in some cases in front of large audiences. While hundreds of smaller schools had already cancelled all fall sports, the University of Connecticut had been the only school at the sport’s highest level, the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, to cancel its season.

The Big Ten, which had already released its 2020 fall football schedule, said it would postpone to the spring when another attempt at the season will be made.

The immediate context for the decision to postpone the season were signs of rapidly growing opposition among college players. Significantly, this found its most organized expression among players in the Big Ten and Pac-12, indicating that this was likely a major, if not decisive, reason behind the conferences’ sudden reversals.

Players from both conferences have circulated a list of demands for the season. This includes the ability to opt-out without fear of losing their scholarships or other reprisals from coaches; regular testing, including before and after games; hazard pay; and the right to form a union, effectively ending their bogus “student-athlete” status, which has allowed universities to make billions of dollars through their uncompensated labor. Over the weekend, several of sport’s top stars met online to discuss a list of demands for the entire “Power Five,” which largely coincide with these demands.

The other three of the so-called Power Five conferences which dominate the sport have yet to announce if they will follow the Big Ten and Pac-12 and cancel their games. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) remains persistent in its plans to begin games in September.

On Tuesday Dr. Cameron Wolfe, the chair of the ACC medical advisory group, told reporters the conference believes it can “mitigate the risk of bringing COVID onto the football field or into the training room at a level that’s no different than living as a student on campus.”

This outrageous statement from an infectious disease researcher is hardly reassuring, given the high potential for infection in cramped university dormitories and shared living spaces. The risks associated with opening universities in the fall semester are immense.

Moreover, Dr. Wolfe’s impartiality is suspect. According to his Duke University bio page, Wolfe was the lead investigator in clinical trials of Remdesivir in COVID-19 patients, for which he received grant money from pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Remdesivir is the “miracle drug” falsely promoted by Trump in late April as a breakthrough as the president escalated his campaign against state lockdowns.

Duke has two current biochemistry professors who are Nobel Laureates, and the ACC contains several of the most prestigious medical schools in the country aside from Duke. The fact that Wolfe, a relatively young associate professor with ties to a drug promoted by Trump, chairs the ACC’s medical advisory group suggests the group has been engineered by the ACC to rubber-stamp the conference’s return to play this fall.

By Monday morning it was already being widely reported that the Big Ten and the Pac-12 would postpone their seasons. This sparked a wave of indignation from several politicians, including President Trump, who denounced it on Fox Sports Radio as a “tragic mistake.”

On Monday, Trump tweeted, “The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled. #WeWantToPlay” and later, “Play College Football!” Florida Governor Ron Desantis joined the president in calling for the season to continue, saying that if the Southeastern Conference decides to have a fall season that, “I’m happy to help out with the effort.”

One of the more despicable comments came from ESPN commentator and former Notre Dame head coach Lou Holtz, who implied in a Fox News interview that it was the players’ patriotic duty to risk infection and death by playing football: “Let’s move on with our life! When they stormed Normandy, they knew there were going to be casualties, [that] there were going to be risks.”

The move is a political blow to the back-to-school drive spearheaded by Trump but backed by both major parties. If major college football programs, which until last week were preparing to sacrifice the safety of players and students to preserve the billions of dollars of revenues generated by college football, now acknowledge that conditions are too dangerous to play, then clearly they are too dangerous to reopen universities and public schools.

After these statements and other high-profile opposition to canceling football were raised, the Big Ten and Pac-12 were quick to clarify that they had not yet officially canceled the season but only postponed it to the spring. There are doubtless financial considerations behind this, for example, the possibility that in-person attendance will be more viable early next year.

However, it remains to be seen what the conditions of the pandemic will be like in the spring. If there is no season at all, losses to the schools’ revenues will be in the billions of dollars.

Armed forces and fascist gangs mobilized against blockades in Bolivia

Tomas Castanheira

The blockades of main roads by Bolivian workers and peasants in protest against the postponement of presidential elections are now in their 10th day as the country’s political crisis and social conflicts steadily escalate.

The widespread opposition to Jeanine Áñez’s de facto government is expressed in the growth of the blockades, erected at more than 100 points around Bolivia, with new social sectors joining in the cities and in the countryside. The demand for the immediate fall of Áñez and the regime brought to power in a US-backed coup in November of last year is gaining increasing popular support.

The growing anger of the population is linked to the government’s response to the protests, on the one hand cynically exempting itself from all political responsibility, and, on the other, promoting an escalation of threats, provocations and orders for violent repression.

In an interview with CNN on Monday night, Government Minister Arturo Murillo threatened to drown the protests in blood and to persecute his political opponents.

Mass protest against postponement of Bolivian election (Credit: ANRed)

Responding to journalist Fernando Del Rincon, who asked why he didn’t carry out an immediate military intervention against the blockades, the minister said: “We are trying to avoid a civil war in the country ... You’re not just going to shoot everybody [although] that would be politically correct.”

“If we do not reach an agreement with all those who have created this national disaster in the next few hours, then there will be no other way than to strike with the strongest hand,” he concluded.

These threats are not rhetorical. Murillo lies only when he says he wants to avoid a civil war. The path being taken by the hated government in its attempt to remain in power is precisely that of violent repression against the population.

On Monday, the main Bolivian cities were militarized, with troops sent to the streets of the capital La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. According to the government they are “guarding public institutions of strategic infrastructure, like airports and gas plants” and waiting for orders for a direct intervention against the blockades.

An ostensive military operation was mobilized to escort trucks carrying medical oxygen by land to different points in Bolivia. A convoy of trucks escorted by soldiers and army helicopters left on Monday to provocatively cross various blockades, even as protesters said they wouldn’t block medical supplies.

However, the military is not acting alone. Since the weekend, the so-called “shock groups” organized by fascists, who intervened during the November coup, have been mobilized again in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz and La Paz to brutally attack the protesters.

In Cochabamba, a gang of the Cochala Youth Resistance (RJC) gathered in the neighborhood of Cala Cala and left riding motorcycles and armed with homemade firearms and sticks to clash with blockades at nine different points in the city. Fascists were joined in their actions by the police, who attacked the blockades simultaneously with tear gas grenades.

In Santa Cruz, the Crucenista Youth Union (UJC), linked to the extreme-right politician Luis Fernando Camacho, launched a brutal attack against protesters, leaving at least 23 wounded, three of them with serious gunshot wounds.

The Bolivian Public Defender’s Office issued a statement condemning “a kind of complicity and permissiveness on the part of the state with the violent actions of paramilitary groups that took place over the weekend.”

A report published in July by Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic, reporting human rights violations by the Bolivian state during and after the November coup, points to the role of such shock groups.

It states: “Resistencia Juvenil Cochala (RJC) and its motoqueros appear to be the most structured and capable of violent mobilization. The RJC self-defines as a policing and control entity ready to respond to ‘threats and vandalism.’ ... The RJC had roughly 150 members around the time of the October election, but by December 2020 they were believed to have over 20,000 members nationally ... They have reportedly armed themselves with clubs, homemade cannons, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, pellet guns, and firearms. Several interviewees perceived a ‘very clear link and coordination’ between the motoqueros and the police force.”

Over the weekend, Áñez farcically called for a “national dialogue” meeting to “ confirm the election calendar and suspend the blockades that are impinging on the passage of oxygen to COVID-19 patients [emphasis added].”

Absolving herself of responsibility for the successive postponements of the elections, in which she intervened actively and with the declared support of US President Donald Trump, Áñez refused to discuss the matter and hypocritically criticized the Electoral Court, saying, “Be serious and stop moving the date.”

Although the main political actors did not attend, including the presidential candidates of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, the party of ousted president Evo Morales) and Corriente Ciudadana (CC), which poll the highest support, Áñez succeeded in using the event as a means of promoting her violent preparations against social opposition, with the participation of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) as international overseers.

The OAS, which played a central role in preparing the November coup, is supporting the de facto government’s fraudulent campaign, accusing the blockades of causing a deadly crisis in relation to oxygen supplies in the hospitals.

The OAS General Secretariat charged that the demonstrators “block the passage of trucks with health supplies to combat COVID-19, at a time when the pandemic has reached its peak in the South American country.”

It also condemned the struggle of the Bolivian population against the hated regime that the OAS itself helped impose as a pursuit of “miserable and petty interests” that violate “human rights and public order.”

These hypocritical statements cover up the real criminals who should answer for the public health catastrophe in Bolivia: not the protesters, but the government itself.

So far, more than 90,000 Bolivians have tested positive for the coronavirus, with more than 3,700 having died from COVID-19. The country’s testing rate is, however, one of the lowest in the world.

The lack of testing not only makes these numbers a gross underestimate, it also prevents any real fight against the disease. This is exacerbated by the lack of the most basic supplies in hospitals.

The weak infrastructure is a result not only of the lack of resources in the poorest country in Latin America. The de facto government has been indicted for the fraudulent purchase of overpriced ventilators that were, moreover, useless for the treatment of COVID-19.

The precarious situation in the hospitals has been denounced by health professionals in protests that have erupted in different cities across Bolivia. They have denounced the government for not providing personal protection equipment (PPE), forcing them to buy it with their own money or to improvise with plastic bags.

These conditions have led to extremely high rates of contamination and death among health care workers, possibly the highest in the world. According to Health Minister Eidy Roca, at least 100 doctors and 100 other health care workers have died of COVID-19 in the past five months.

However, this shocking number was considered a serious underestimate by the president of the Medical Health Branches Union (Sirmes), Fernando Romero. “We believe that at least 400 doctors and 400 other health care workers died nationwide. In La Paz alone we lost 100 health professionals including doctors, nurses and others,” he said.

The widespread contamination of employees has led to temporary closures for decontamination of more than half of the country’s hospitals, accelerating the overcrowding of the health care system and causing incalculable numbers of deaths.

After months of a policy that allowed Bolivians to die in the middle of the streets without assistance, to be treated in precarious health centers with medicines that have no scientific validity for use against COVID-19 and to be forced to starve in the midst of inefficient lockdowns in the absence of necessary testing, the criminal government of Áñez, supported by US and European imperialism, blames the deaths on the social opposition that has emerged against these disastrous conditions.

On Monday, 12 people were indicted by the government as allegedly responsible for the blockades. Among the accused are Evo Morales and the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the MAS and Bolivian Workers Federation (COB) leader Carlos Huarachi. They are accused of crimes of “terrorism and genocide.”

These absurd accusations aim to criminalize all political opposition to the regime, strengthening its dictatorial power. The attack is particularly directed against the MAS with the aim of outlawing the party.

From Argentina, where he is in exile, Morales is intervening in the Bolivian political crisis in an attempt to sew up a new bourgeois alliance, which involves the actors in the November coup and their international sponsors.

Faced with the growing willingness of the masses of the population to directly confront the regime, Morales is urging the protesters to retreat and accept the terms imposed by the government and its Electoral Court.

Through Twitter, he has insistently rejected the popular demand for the fall of the regime, affirming: “The leaders and the mobilized social ranks must make a responsible choice between the resignation of Áñez, which will further delay our return to democracy, and early elections guaranteed by the United Nations.”

And he affirmed that the “only possible way to solve the tension in Bolivia” is a dialogue between “The Legislative Assembly, the Supreme Electoral Court and the social movements.”

The path suggested by Morales is the demoralization and disarmament of the masses in the face of the fascistic threat. It would pave the way for the consolidation of a dictatorship based on the repression of the growing class conflicts under the jackboots of the military.

Unlike Morales, the workers and peasants will not be able to escape by plane; they will be forced to live the consequences of state terror, paying the price with their own blood.

The struggle that the Bolivian workers and peasants are courageously waging can find a way forward only by drawing the necessary political conclusions from the process that led to the reactionary coup in November 2019.

While it is true that the right-wing forces triumphed with the decisive support of imperialism, their path to power was paved by the deep crisis of Morales’ bourgeois national policies, implementing unpopular measures and attacks against the working class.

Bolivian workers must fight for their political independence from the MAS, the COB and the unions that seek to subject them to factions of the bourgeoisie. They can count only on themselves and on the alliance with the rural masses to defend themselves from the state forces and fascist provocateurs.

Above all, it is necessary to build a revolutionary leadership based on unity with the working class in Latin America and around the world, and with a true socialist and internationalist perspective advanced today only by the International Committee of the Fourth International.