Oh, we already know that won’t happen,” my friend Katya said. Katya and I were in Moscow’s sister city, Villa El Carmen, Nicaragua, in February 2020, and she was answering my question about whether that country would have free elections on Nov. 7, 2021.
How should a sister city relate to its partner city sitting in the middle of a dictatorship that has been entrenching its power steadily over years and is hostile toward any kind of foreign support not controlled by the government itself? The short answer: Avoid the government and help individuals.
The situation was different back in the 1980s when Moscow Sister City Association was created through the efforts of Mary Voxman, Mardi Baron and the Moscow City Council. Nicaragua was governed by a leftist government that saw Cuba as its model and had Daniel Ortega as its president. But the government was open to foreign connections, and the goal of Moscow Sister City Association — as that of any sister city — was to help people without any reference to politics.
Still, politics is always part of the equation. The MSCA was created in part because many Moscow residents in the ’80s opposed the Reagan administration’s funding of the “Contras,” rebels trying to overthrow Ortega’s Sandinista government through civil war. This struggle ended when in 1990 Ortega was ousted in an election which suggested that Nicaragua was becoming a democracy. When Violeta Chamorro was elected president, democracies like the U.S. sighed in relief and pretty much forgot about Nicaragua.
The Moscow Sister City Association tried briefly to work with the local government of Villa El Carmen, but when funds we had sent disappeared (used, it was rumored, to repair the mayor’s house), we turned our attention entirely to the area’s schools and students. Avoiding politicians always seemed wise.
Fortunately, after 1998, we had reliable liaisons in Ana Julia Castillo, who had spent half a year in Moscow, sponsored by MSCA, and her husband Mario Mendoza. We sent visitors to the town: MSCA members, high school students, and nearly 50 local people in three trips organized by group president Elisabeth Berlinger. We paid for school repairs of roofs and bathrooms, a few computers, a water tower. We sent writing supplies from Moscow schools gathered by teachers, until that became too expensive. Eventually our focus shifted from school improvements to student support, and we began awarding scholarships.
Nicaraguan democracy continued to struggle. In 2006 Daniel Ortega was reelected president with 38 percent of the vote. He had sought reelection in 1996 and 2001 but failed. The mayor of Villa El Carmen, when I first visited the town in 2007, did not support Ortega; the conservative rural community was not then a Sandinista stronghold, but it has become so over time. The Sandinistas, to be fair, have made a lot of progress in Nicaragua, reducing malnutrition and poverty, increasing literacy and improving health care and the economy. Nicaragua was the second poorest country in Latin America, but its economy was stable and improving.
But all progress stopped in 2018. By then, Ortega’s consolidation of power was evident. He had been working to return to power as soon as he lost it in 1990. He won election in 2006 and 2011. In 2014 the Nicaraguan assembly and its supreme court invalidated the term limits of the Nicaragua Constitution, so Ortega was allowed to run again in 2016. Over the years Ortega and the Sandinista party increased control of the legislature, the judiciary, the national police, and the army. But widespread opposition became evident when in March 2018 student protests against the government led to a national revolt, which the government brutally suppressed.
In 2018, the Moscow Sister City Association was supporting 12 university students from Villa El Carmen, all of whom attended university in the capital city Managua, one center of the revolt. I knew through contacts on Facebook, WhatsApp and email, that most of them were strongly opposed to the government, which was arresting and killing protesters, many of whom were students. At this time the board of directors of the MSCA were considering closing down our organization, but the unrest in Nicaragua, and the widespread oppression of university students, influenced us to continue operating. We did not want to abandon our scholarship students.
Those students have all now graduated. We have six more currently studying medicine, geology, finance and English. We don’t talk politics with them because governmental spying is rumored to be widespread. Democracy is dying in Nicaragua, or at least going into a long sleep. But individuals still are developing their lives as best they can, and the Moscow Sister City Association continues to play a role. This is not easy, since the government is trying to eliminate foreign influence, including money, that it imagines may reduce its power. In 2020, a law was passed to limit foreign funds entering the country, so that the MSCA can no longer, as an organization, send scholarship money to our students. We have to do it through a back door, sending it informally from individual to individual through Western Union. So far this is working.
Katya was correct that there would be no free elections. What she believed in 2020 became obvious to everyone this past summer when President Ortega sent the seven leading opposition candidates for president to prison. They and more than a hundred other political prisoners are still in jail. The erosion of Nicaraguan democracy has greatly accelerated this year. But Nicaraguan universities are still functioning, and the young people of our sister city continue to need education. We can help them improve their lives, and we do. Readers who want to learn about and support these efforts of the Moscow Sister City Association are invited to contact us at david.barber70@gmail.com
Barber is professor emeritus of English at the University of Idaho. Since 2018 he’s been president of the Moscow Sister City Association. You can learn more about the association at this shortened web link — bit.ly/2Je5jJq — and on the group’s page on Facebook.
