Peasant leader Pascual Hernández Morán told the Managua-based El Nuevo Diario that the government has not implemented the Sept. 13, 2002, Las Tunas accords, in which it promised to carry out measures to alleviate the crisis in the countryside.

Some health-care centers were set up, Hernández Morán said, “but on the question of property, the lack of action is blinding.”

“We’re in the same place we were when we signed the accord,” Carlos José Blandón, a leader of the Association of Rural Workers (ATC), told La Prensa. “No land has been turned over from the land banks or has been given to the cooperatives,” continued Blandón, who is also a leader of the march.

In some cases, peasants and farm cooperatives have been unable to obtain credit because they never received official title to the land they work.

In July 1979 workers and peasants in Nicaragua took power out of the hands of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza through a popular insurrection led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). A land reform was among the first measures of the revolutionary government. Farms belonging to rich landowners who had supported the Somoza regime were confiscated and land was distributed to those without it.

This land reform, however, and other measures to combat the exploitation of rural producers unfolded in stages, with retreats, and was never completed. By the end of the 1980s, a large part of agricultural production remained in capitalist hands, which meant that previous government measures to provide cheap credit and farm supplies often boosted the profits of wealthy landowners while neither increasing agricultural investment and output nor substantially improving the peasants’ lot. Over time, the FSLN leadership retreated even from the partial early measures that benefited the rural toilers, which were along a revolutionary course.

Throughout much of the 1980s, the workers and farmers government that came to power in 1979 faced a counterrevolutionary war. The contras, as they became known, were a guerrilla army largely organized and financed by Washington, which recruited heavily in the countryside taking advantage of erroneous policies of the FSLN regime. Nicaragua’s working people militarily defeated the contras by 1987. But the seven-year-long war had a wearing impact on workers and farmers. The FSLN leadership used this as a justification for making more concessions to local capitalists and landlords and to U.S. imperialism. By the end of the 1980s, the FSLN leadership placed increasingly long-term reliance on the workings of the capitalist market. The FSLN had transformed itself into a radical bourgeois electoral party. In 1990 the FSLN lost the elections to a coalition of capitalist parties headed by Violeta Chamorro.

By that time, there were still 60,000 landless peasants. Those who had land often lacked credit, seeds, fertilizer, and tools, while capitalist landowners dominated agriculture in many parts of the country. Under the Chamorro regime and subsequent capitalist governments many state-owned farms were leased with an option to buy to form cooperatives or were returned to their former owners.

Matagalpa, the coffee-growing center of Nicaragua, has been especially hard hit in recent years. Wages for some workers have dropped to $1 a day. In the 1990s coffee prices were still relatively high. But after Brazil, the largest coffee producer in the world, increased its output and Vietnam entered the market with massive quantities, the price plummeted. Prices dropped to 50 cents a pound in 2001-2002, compared to an average of $1.20 in the 1980s

Agence France Presse reports that peasants started heading to Matagalpa a month and a half ago when their food reserves ran out. That’s where the 13-day-long march started. Unemployment and underemployment is estimated at 53 percent in this Central American nation.

There are currently 12 farms involved in land disputes, according to Alfonso Sandino, a government minister. Some farms have been occupied by landless peasants, while the owners are demanding their return. Farm workers took over the Las Golondrinas farm, which in turn has been claimed by a U.S. owner. In a compromise worked out between Managua and the U.S. State Department, those workers are being given other land.

Three groups have occupied the La Empresa farm: ex-contras, discharged soldiers of the army, and farm workers.

The march stopped outside Managua, at El Tuma-La Dalia, August 5 as peasant leaders and government officials began negotiations.

According to La Prensa, march leaders at first wanted plots of land distributed as part of an “agrarian reform” but agreed to a payment plan for some 7,500 manzanas (about 13,000 acres) of state-owned land.

The Spanish news agency EFE reported August 11 that peasants and farm workers declared their march over August 9. The same day, thousands of rural toilers occupying land in northern Nicaragua ended sit-down strikes. Peasant leaders and government representatives reportedly came to an agreement on several of the peasants’ demands. The accord includes the government giving land titles to some 2,500 rural families, selling them the land at 40 percent of its value recorded in the official registry, with payments extending over 20 years. These are largely lands that peasants already used, as part of cooperatives set up in the 1980s.  
 
 
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