Counter-revolutionary women: gender and reconciliation in post-war Nicaragua

Julie Cupples

In Nicaragua, gender ideologies – and, in particular, discourses of motherhood- have frequently been manipulated by political forces. In the early 1990s, at the end of the civil war, Sandinista and Contra women in Waslala united to form a group which aimed to end the political polarisation within their community and promote development. Aid agencies provided funds on the understanding that both sides would work together. Discourses of reconciliation were both powerful and pervasive, offering a way of overcoming the hatred caused by war, and bringing about a sustainable peace. These discourses draw on ideas of women as mothers and peacebuilders, which are appealing to many, including women themselves. Yet these simplistic characterisations of women are a flimsy basis on which to initiate reconciliation. This is because women's gender identities do not exist in isolation, but intersect with other identities, including those derived from political allegiances. Ultimately, this led to the failure of reconciliation in Waslala.

This paper explores the efforts made by women themselves, and other actors, including donor agencies, to bring about reconciliation between Sandinista and Contra women in the 1990s in Waslala, in Nicaragua's central northern highlands. Waslala is in the north-east of Nicaragua, about 250km from the capital, Managua, and is part of the Autonomous Region of the North Atlantic (RAAN). Its location in Nicaragua's interior and its proximity to Honduras (where many of the Contra bases were located) meant that it was a zone of intense conflict during the Contra war.

My research draws on qualitative research conducted in Waslala in 1999 and 2001. The article foregrounds the experience of Contra women, documented via a series of in-depth and unstructured interviews. The research focused on seven women, all of whom had fought or collaborated with the Contras. Two were combatants, while the others were collaborators. In addition, the majority were wives or mothers of men who fell fighting for the Contra forces. Some had also had close connections to the Somoza dictatorship, in the sense that family members were guardias (members of Somoza's National Guard).

The context

The war between the US-backed Contra force and the ruling Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) raged from the early 1980s. The Sandinista Front had been in power since 1979, when it had overthrown the brutal Somoza dictatorship after prolonged guerrilla struggle. The main aims of the revolution were to reverse the extreme concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a minority, through a process of revolutionary transformation.

Through the 1980s, the war seriously compromised the Sandinistas' attempts to bring about revolutionary change in Nicaragua. The government was forced, as the war intensified, to divert spending from social programmes and into defence. It implemented an increasingly unpopular military draft, forcibly recruiting young men to fight for the Popular Sandinista Army (EPS). Despite on-going US support, the Contras were never able to defeat the Sandinistas militarily. By the end of the decade, 30,000 Nicaraguans on both sides of the conflict had been killed, and the economy was devastated. The USA imposed a trade embargo, and this, along with Sandinista economic mismanagement and a stark contrast between the lifestyles of many party officials and the difficult living conditions of the majority of the population, undermined support for the FSLN. People were tired of the military draft, food shortages, hyperinflation, and austerity.

In 1990, the Nicaraguan population voted for a new government: a centre-right coalition, the National Opposition Union (UNO), led by Violeta Chamorro. The new government came to power on a platform of national reconciliation. Chamorro is the widow of the editor of the conservative daily newspaper La Prensa, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was assassinated by the National Guard in 1978 during the Somoza dictatorship. Like many families in Nicaragua, Chamorro's family was a politically divided one. Her four children became politically prominent in Nicaragua, but on opposing sides; two were Sandinistas, while the other two were anti-Sandinista. In her electoral campaign, Violeta Chamorro consciously manipulated her identity as a reconciling mother and widow, stressing how she had managed to unite her family in spite of their political differences. The implicit suggestion was that her brand of maternal politics could reconcile and heal the entire nation (Kampwirth 1996).

It is widely believed that the vote for the Chamorro government was an overwhelmingly female one. Many women voted against the FSLN in the elections, in the hope of bringing an end to the draft and the suffering associated with war (Metoyer 2000). Although the new government promised to promote more traditional gender identities for women, and called for women to return to the home to be good wives and mothers, it also promised to end the military draft, which was of course highly appealing to women who were mothers. Many had lost sons and daughters in the Somoza dictatorship and/or the Contra war, and were anxious to avoid the recruitment of younger children into fighting forces.

'Economic stabilisation' and social unrest

Within months of the Sandinista electoral defeat, the Chamorro government began negotiating with the IMF and the World Bank. This led to the formal implementation of a series of measures to stabilise the economy, followed by a formal structural adjustment programme (SAP) in 1991. As a result of these agreements, 300,000 State employees were laid off (Green 1995), at the same time as thousands of demobilised soldiers began to seek alternative forms of employment. In addition, floods of cheap imports, as a result of rapid trade liberalisation, led to the rapid demise of small businesses (Babb 2001). Studies have shown that SAPs have a distinctly gendered impact, and, in Nicaragua as elsewhere, reductions in social services and welfare provision, and declines in formal-sector...