Synopsis
From Introduction by Anuar Murrar: More than three and half decades have passed since the publication of the Economic Recovery Plan for the Benefit of the People, 1980. Much has happened since I first laid eyes on a small, somewhat official looking, blue paperback book that was meant for popular consumption by the almost illiterate masses of Nicaragua, an unassuming and dignified people just scarcely liberated months back from a half a century of brutal military dictatorship of the Somoza family dynasty. I participated in all three carefully planned insurrections carried out by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from 1977 to 1979, but in the end the uprisings exploded ahead of schedule, one per year, until our victorious revolutionary forces marched triumphantly into Managua.Now, suddenly, there was an immediate and urgent need to synthesize the sociopolitical and economic situation of Nicaragua as we prepared to initiate a new decade of revolutionary transformations while the reconstruction of our war-torn economy got underway.The Program that emerged assumed that we would have a peacetime economy, where socioeconomic objectives could be established, benchmarks set and implemented, and where evaluation, analysis and revision could take place. The counter-revolutionary war, also known as the Contra War in the US, changed all of that. Instead of analyzing indicators and formal economic variables, we had to deal with the destruction and how to make ends meet in the non-conflict zones.Achieving our economic goals took second place to the primary objective of surviving and defeating the Contras. That is what happened in Nicaragua during the decade of the 80s: the Contra War aborted the possibility of implementing the Program you are about to read. Nowadays, the Program is an historic document containing a clear statistical picture of what we faced at the moment of transformation from the Somoza dictatorship to a post insurrection economy.From the Program Introduction: This Program was not the fruit of some abstract, theoretical exercise, but the shared effort of some two hundred state technicians, consultants and representatives of people's organizations besides discussions with the private sector. What resulted was a new style of work and education on the State's part.We want to say that the Program covers all our country's and our people's economic topics, yet has a focus of attention: the masses historically exploited by Somocismo who involved themselves in a just war without quarter. Revolutionary goals, therefore, rest on the revolution's trust in the workers, generators of wealth and principal protagonists in reconstruction. There are parameters of duty that the workers are going to have to assume in their work, their norms and their salaries. We want to thank especially the members of the Cabinet and the two hundred state technicians who worked jointly on the Program for carrying through to the end the preparation of the Program of Economic Reactivation for the People's Benefit: 1980. We also thank the representatives of the people's organizations for their participation. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the collaboration by the representatives of private enterprise in this first experience of theirs with planning in Nicaragua.
Review
This is an important historical document that lays out the utopian economic plan proposed by the Nicaraguan government to address the centuries of inequality and oppression they had faced. This plan is a must read for students and scholars of Central America to understand what the Sandinista government intended to do in its first years before the U.S. support for the Contra insurgency forced them to follow another path.Program of Economic Reactivation for the Benefit of the People, 1980: Programa de Reactivacion Economica en Beneficio del Pueblo para 1980
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