Favores, ayuda y robo: Peasants’ Views of Continuity in Systemic Change in Nicaragua

Since the times of Somoza, Nicaraguan peasants have been the objects of sweeping changes in governmentality. During the Sandinista period government officials attempted to forge a worker peasant alliance by convincing the peasants that they should enter into a relationship of mutual help with the workers in the city with whom they shared a common identity as revolutionary subjects. When the Sandinistas lost the elections in 1990 to the Chamorro government the peasants were to become independent entrepreneurs acquiring individual land titles and playing by the rules of the free market. After 1996, the corrupt government of Arnoldo Aleman relegated the peasants to the role of non-entities, the poor, absent from government programs and subjected to humanitarian aid from NGOs that flooded the country after the hurricane Mitch. When the innumerable foreign projects and programs to alleviate rural poverty failed, donor governments and the World Bank decreed in 2002 the consolidation of rural community structures, the empowerment of peasants and their participation in integrated regional rural development programs.