To think about politics is to theorize connection. Or, to put the same point another way, every account of political possibility is also an account of the relational basis of political life. To the extent that our analyses of politics rely on images, then, the relational forms suggested by images themselves condition the kinds of connection we imagine to lie at the heart of politics. This article will explore two images—those of the revolutionary circle and the political machine—that have been particularly prominent in the way Nicaraguan politics has been theorized in recent decades. I understand the revolutionary circle here to be any practical or theoretical claim that radical social transformation can be provoked by the activities of a small group of committed activists. With a focus on intimacy and sociality, an implied scale that tends toward the face-to-face, and the suggestion of a mutualistic absence of hierarchy, the circle image produces a distinctive set of claims about what revolutionary relations look like. The idea of a political machine, in turn, refers to a depiction of politics as depending upon expansive, hierarchical integration, positing the transmission of governmental force through an “organized” popular constituency. These images, we shall see, have informed the strategies of revolutionaries and politicians, and the analyses of scholars and commentators, but they also play a key role in the everyday politics of ordinary Nicaraguans. Each model generates a set of answers to the question of what kinds of relationship might be required for political effects to be generated. When effects fail to materialize, they also give shape to disappointment, and suggest the form of remedial political action.
I explore these themes from the perspective of Gualiqueme, a formerly collectivized agricultural cooperative in Nicaragua's Segovian mountains. Gualiqueme is a community whose very existence was brought about by relations sustained—dangerously, it turned out—with early members of the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional); the clandestine revolutionary organization, known as the Sandinistas, which ultimately succeeded in seizing power in the country. In the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, clandestine camps in what became known as “the Mountain” played a formative role both in the emerging mythology of the revolutionary movement and in the experience of numerous militants who actually spent time in rural camps, and the Segovias were the location of numerous such encampments. But while many in the FSLN agreed that the Mountain could play an integral role in the revolutionary process, the image of the circle was pushed in different directions as the question of how this would actually happen was sketched out. For some, we shall see, the intimate domain of the circle itself would be a crucible for the radical transformation of the individuals “within” it, who would subsequently disseminate the new consciousness more broadly. For others, the problem was how to make the circle capable of containing within itself an oppressed People beyond.
The guerrilla camps have long since gone. The FSLN took power, then lost it, then won it again. While much of the scholarship narrating the FSLN's successful insurgency draws on the circle image when describing the run-up to the revolution, the transition of the Sandinistas to a “powerholding” political party prompted a dramatic shift in the way its capacities have been theorized. A party in government had at its disposal all the mechanisms of the state, the apparatus of power. These fairly standard images of governmental agency—mechanisms, apparatuses—capture the physical model of connection by which the FSLN's rule when in power has been theorized. Though the image of an “inner circle” has continued to inform understandings of the way party leaders operate, the political effects produced by the FSLN began to be viewed with reference to the mechanistic notions of “power” and attempted “control,” with the model of a “political machine” ultimately coming to be the central image guiding analyses of the party's hold on Nicaragua's political life. This machine imagery carries relational connotations—focused upon impact, transmission, force, and large-scale, systemic integration—that differ dramatically from the implications of intimacy and personal contact suggested by the revolutionary circle.
My aim is to bring these divergent imageries of political relationship into dialogue with the way Sandinista politics has been lived within a community of FSLN supporters in a formerly collectivized agricultural cooperative—a community that once stood as a focal point of political hope in the project of revolutionary transformation (Montoya 2007), but which has since been marked by neglect, political disconnection, and fragmentation. For my interlocutors in the Nicaraguan countryside, each model—the circle and the machine—has played a role in their efforts to remain involved with the Sandinista party and state. Each has shaped the expectations and aspirations that have underpinned their own commitment to the revolution and to the party, and has conditioned their attempts to make good on the promise of social transformation. But the ethnography presented below suggests that notions of “involvement” and “participation” need to be deployed here with caution, depending, as they do, upon just the kind of connective imagery under consideration here. While the circle and the machine offer blueprints of participation that have given form to political expectations and aspirations among rural Sandinistas, everyday politics in this formerly collectivized cooperative also push back against the relational suppositions of either image. As once-collective land has been privately claimed (Broegaard 2009; Cooper 2018), as formerly state-supported institutions have been overwhelmed by debt and difficulty (Enríquez 2010; Martí i Puig and Baumeister 2017), and as a once-interventionist state has withdrawn from rural communities with the nation's shift toward neoliberal modes of government (Alvey 2014; Babb 2002; Horton 2013; Kay 2009; Rodgers 2006, 2011), any sense of “participation” in a broader project has become increasingly tenuous, having to contend with an abiding sense of abjection (Ferguson 1999), abandonment, and sheer disconnection from the political world beyond. For these would-be-participants in the FSLN's ongoing project, images of both circle and machine have come to resonate as much for the basic suggestion of relationship, as for the specific form of political involvement they imply. At the same time, however, the formal properties of these images have become integral to the strategies people have pursued as they have sought to contest their exclusion.
This investigation of the relational affordances of political images in a context of political disconnection and fragmentation allows an interrogation of the theoretical utility of notions of “frustration” and “disappointment” in the increasing body of anthropological literature concerned with the theme of abandonment. This concept of abandonment has been influentially addressed by anthropologists interested in “necropolitics”: the capacities of states and societies to extend or withhold care and support for life itself. A central concern here has been to challenge a commonsense notion of abandonment as simply the negative absence of provision (Biehl 2013; Povinelli 2011; see also Ferguson 1999). We might be tempted to view a lack of support as the accidental result of attention being focused elsewhere, priorities having shifted, or “forces” beyond anyone's control rendering certain zones, communities, or individuals peripheral. This view has been contested with the argument that it is not simply that some people, unfortunately, die, but that they are made to die through, for example, forms of governmental discourse that deem some populations expendable or beyond the remit of care (Povinelli 2011), or through the ways in which individuals are framed by the stigmatizing discourse of mental illness and thereby pushed into a system that effectively guarantees their decline and death (Biehl 2013).
Overlapping with these studies, however, has been a growing body of research interested in “abandonment” insofar as it emerges in contexts of political and economic withdrawal; such research explores political life in communities once closely integrated with state-backed or market-driven developmental processes, but which find themselves cut off from former flows of economic or political investment (Ferguson 1999; Vaccaro et al. 2015), or in situations where infrastructural provision is sorely lacking (Harvey and Knox 2015). In this body of work, notions of frustration and disappointment have played a central role, often through the sense that political expectations and aspirations that were previously viable, and which developed during times of former abundance, have remained in place in subsequent periods of decline, becoming incongruent and impossible to fulfil, and leading hope to fade into cynical pragmatism (Hermez 2015). As Vaccaro et al. (2015: 11) argue, “the reconfiguration of economic structures seems to occur at a faster pace than the equivalent redefinition of local collective and individual identities” (see also Rajković 2018). This gives rise to a concern with analyzing the political role played by disappointment, with this putative source of affective political force seen to emerge from a mismatch between (hopeful) political aspiration and (disappointing) reality.
The central argument that emerges in the case explored below is that attending to form—to the morphological implications of political images (Holbraad 2017; Murawski 2018a, 2018b)—allows us to refine this generalized notion of “disappointment” as a key factor in the struggle of rural Sandinistas to participate in a government project that often seems to barely touch their lives. Disappointment, it becomes clear, comes in different forms. It does not simply arise in relation to generic aspirations for betterment or development, but gains purchase through the way that specific political images with distinctive formal properties rub up against the practices thought to offer an avenue of potential political realization. The implication of this is that the anthropology of abandonment can gain by attending to the shape of separation—to the specific forms through which disconnections, and the inverse possibility of relationship, are conceived.
The Mountain and the people
Up in the mountains near Gualiqueme, less than an hour's walk uphill across small coffee farms, over barbed-wire fences, and into an area of forest now designated as a nature reserve, is a small area of uncultivated woodland, much like the uncultivated woodland that surrounds it. A rain-worn sign has been placed here, part of an unsuccessful NGO project to attract tourists to the area. But it is now barely legible, and the paths that were cleared to allow easier access to the site have grown over. The density of the forest has returned, and vines, leaves, and spiders are everywhere. This was where the revolutionaries lived.
During the years prior to the FSLN's ultimately successful effort to overthrow the regime of Anastasio Somoza DeBayle—the third President Somoza in a family dynasty that controlled Nicaragua's government for over 50 years—rural training camps located in relatively remote mountain areas were a central part of the clandestine organization's activities. Hundreds of recruits committed to living in these camps, away from friends and family, abandoning the relative comforts, in many cases, of their urban homes. Why? What kinds of political effects was life in the Mountain understood to be capable of bringing about? The absolute numbers of individuals directly involved in the camps were small. Much of the time and energy of the individuals who populated them was dedicated to an arduous struggle to meet the basic necessities of life. Acquiring food and water, washing clothes, obtaining the goods needed for bare survival, communicating with other members of their organization—these simple tasks became an exhausting struggle dominating every waking moment. Scarcity and illness were constants. How, exactly, was this going to bring about revolutionary change?
One way of theorizing the effects these revolutionary circles might exercise upon the society they aimed to transform relied on a mechanistic imagery of power, and on the notion of efficient integration of individual components in a powerful organization. The revolutionary organization was understood as a military force that might, ultimately, come to overpower the forces of the Somoza regime. The strength of the circle, from this perspective, depended on the quality of its organizational integration, and the responsiveness of its component parts to the directives of a leadership. For this reason, building the force required to overpower an enemy depended on forging recruits into a honed, responsive organizational machine, with individual interests absolutely subordinated to the collectivity. And it required working out ways to overcome the weaknesses introduced into this vision of an integrated military machine by individual needs, desires, and vulnerabilities.
Life in the Mountain, on this model, was about hardening, toughening, and imparting strength to individual recruits, and providing an intensive venue for the cultivation of the organizational and military skills that would bind militants into a singular force. Most centrally, it was about producing the superhuman discipline required for a revolutionary circle to be an effective fighting machine capable of confronting a powerful enemy. In the pamphlet coauthored with FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca, “What is a Sandinista?”, the commander Oscar Turcios focused on this idea of “discipline” in the very first points of his numbered list of ideal attributes. Political consciousness, he claimed, prompts the rebel to subordinate individual interests absolutely to the interests of the organization;
A Sandinista knows that our Organization must be built upon centralized command and severe discipline, and precisely for that reason knows that absolute obedience to orders and the rigorous maintenance of discipline are the foundations for victory. (Turcios 1980, my translation)
The metaphor of a machine, then, resolves the question of political connection with reference to the idea of physical power. The revolutionary circle conceived of itself as a force that would, ultimately, impact upon elements of the society that surrounded it. At that stage, the mechanistic model was deployed in an aspirational mode, framed in the future tense; this is what the circle needed to achieve if it was eventually going to achieve its goal.
Running alongside this model of organizational and military force, however, were two additional perspectives on the question of what life in the Mountain might achieve. For the sake of clarity I will attribute these to the student leader Omar Cabezas on the one hand, and FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca on the other.1 Each perspective made different assumptions about relations between the circle itself—the face-to-face group of committed clandestine activists—and the society that encompassed it, giving rise to divergent views of the role a vanguard could play in precipitating the new revolutionary society to come. Cabezas saw life in the Mountain as a radically transformative ethical experience, which would facilitate the accelerated emergence of a new political subject: the New Man envisaged by Che Guevara, in whose footsteps the Sandinistas explicitly sought to tread. The potential for revolution would be generated within the moral life of the circle, and the revolutionary project therefore revolved around the question of how to impart beyond the circle the kind of consciousness achieved inside it. The subject forged in the Mountain needed to be made available to the People. The contrasting perspective voiced by Carlos Fonseca emerged from the premise that insurgent potential lay primarily beyond the confines of the revolutionary circle, within the People themselves. The question here, then, was how to bring the People to the Mountain, and how to achieve a relation of identity between the revolutionary circle and the People as a whole.
The prospect that a new kind of consciousness might emerge in the Mountain at accelerated pace was directly related to the mundane difficulties of surviving away from home in conditions of scarcity. For many recruits, the Nicaraguan countryside was a completely unknown, unfamiliar place. They did not have a foothold in the social or economic life of the mountains. As they grappled with the practical difficulties that this shock of unfamiliarity and incapability produced, the young revolutionaries came to perceive a clear contrast between the “individualism” and “selfishness” taken to be characteristic of the existing society, and the collectively oriented solidarity of the world to come. Zimmerman (2000: 195–196) provides us with the following quotation from Dora Maria Tellez, a well-known guerrilla commander: “It got so that it was a serious problem if somebody would eat a half teaspoon more sugar than someone else … and a crime of enormous proportions if someone took two extra swallows of water from a canteen that had to do for a whole squad. … Every little weakness you have comes out under these circumstances: either you think about the collective good, or else you eat that half-teaspoon of sugar. The montaña [Mountain] forces you to overcome your personal weaknesses, or else you leave.”
If an ordeal of scarcity was thought by Sandinista leaders, in part, to toughen well-to-do radicals into the kind of highly disciplined militant envisaged by Turcios, the ways in which it played into a project of subjective transformation is captured clearly in Omar Cabezas's famous account of guerrilla life, Fire From the Mountain.2 His book, dictated in the first-person testimonio style, recalls his own early experiences of life as a young FSLN recruit, and his time spent in a series of rural encampments (during which time he passed through the camp above Gualiqueme):
There was no selfishness among us. [/] As if the mountain and the mud, the mud, and also the rain and the loneliness, as if all these things were cleansing us of a bunch of bourgeois defects, a whole series of vices; we learned to be humble, because you alone are not worth shit up there. You learn to be simple, you learn to value principles. You learn to appreciate the strictly human values that of necessity emerge in that environment. And little by little all our faults faded out. [/] That was why we said that the genesis of the new man was in the FSLN. The new man began to be born with fungus infections and with his feet oozing worms; the new man began to be born with loneliness and eaten alive by mosquitos [sic]; he began to be born stinking. That's the outer part, because inside, by dint of violent shocks day after day, the new man was being born with the freshness of the mountains. A man—it might seem incredible—but an open, unegotistical man, no longer petty—a tender man who sacrifices himself for others, a man who gives everything for others, who suffers when others suffer and who also laughs when others laugh. (Cabezas 1985: 86–87)
The guerrillas depended on relations of support with the small farmers living near their encampments, relying on sympathetic households for food, occasional shelter, and for relaying messages. But these relations of practical support were not at the heart of the possibilities attributed to the circle in Cabezas's account. The core relational models precipitated by these ideas of ethical transformation, rather, involved prefiguration and pedagogy. Prefiguration: the revolutionaries would, through their hardships, cleanse themselves of the sins of the old society, and begin to embody the political subject of the future. Pedagogy: the revolutionary process would, as a result, involve the transmission of this new form of political subjectivity to ordinary Nicaraguans, educating them, and allowing them, too, to progress beyond the selfishness of the past. This pedagogical premise has been shown by scholars to have been at the heart of the way that the revolutionary government, during the 1980s, conceived of its relation with its rural constituencies within Spanish-speaking Nicaragua (Langley 2004; Montoya 2012; Saldaña-Portillo 1997, 2003).
The formal problems of scale and connection posed by the circle were resolved in different ways by FSLN founder and leader Carlos Fonseca. If the idea of the New Man located the possibility for revolutionary change within the ethical transformation of militants, Fonseca, in several overlapping ways, sought to tap into a reservoir of potential for resistance that was located beyond the FSLN as an organization, in the People themselves. By the 1960s, Fonseca had become convinced that armed insurrection was the only viable way forward for Nicaragua (Zimmermann 2000: 69–87). But he was also convinced that highly committed, organized revolutionaries were only going to be able to overthrow the Somoza regime by tapping into the potential for rebellion of the Nicaraguan “People.” The insurrection he envisaged would only succeed, he argued, if the vanguard was capable of giving form to the rebellious potential of popular experiences of exploitation.
Crucially, while rural people represented, for Fonseca, the moral purity of a way of life uncorrupted by the degeneracy of capitalist society—his writing frequently celebrated the Nicaraguan campesino as a paragon of virtue—the peasantry would not, he thought, be capable of turning political resentment into political action alone. The role of the FSLN as a revolutionary force was to give form and shape to the inchoate dissatisfaction and untutored resistance of Nicaragua's rural poor. But Fonseca also wanted the FSLN to draw on the experiences of oppressed Nicaraguans as a central strategic resource. Doing so depended upon incorporating recruits from modest backgrounds into positions of influence and power within the organization, and Fonseca often wrote to his fellow leaders complaining that the potential this offered for gaining insight into conditions on the ground was insufficiently grasped (Zimmermann 2000: 179–181). The difficulties presented by these objectives were all too apparent to Fonseca, who was keenly aware of the social and cultural distance that stood between many ordinary Nicaraguans and the FSLN's young recruits, many of whom came from relatively privileged backgrounds. While the historic role of the revolutionary vanguard, for Fonseca, would be taken by the “proletariat”—and it was radicalized representatives of the proletariat who would be capable of organizing the peasants—this category was as much a moral and ethical one as it had to do with individual history. For a radical organization that had developed within Nicaragua's student movement, and continued to draw much of its support from radicalized students, the subject position of being a “worker” was one that needed to be cultivated. Middle and upper-class radicals could “proletarianize” themselves:
Fonseca believed there was a class character to moral qualities. “Proletarianization,” he told other FSLN leaders in 1972, “isn't just a question of ideological identification with the interests of the proletariat, but also of the membership adopting a proletarian spirit: industriousness, humility, self-sacrifice, honesty.” Sandino's selflessness, loyalty, discipline, and modesty were all related, in Fonseca's mind, to the fact he was a “proletarian.” A middle-class upbringing, Fonseca thought, tended to produce selfish behavior, a lack of self-discipline, arrogance, an attachment to property and consumer goods, and even sexual promiscuity. He pointed to the middle-class leaders of Latin American revolutionary movements who had ended up compromising with reactionary regimes or with imperialism to save their own lives and property. On several occasions, Fonseca recommended that certain leaders of the Proletarian Tendency, who came from some of the wealthiest families in Nicaragua, find ways to “proletarianize” their daily lives. Although he was opposed to assigning militants to the rural guerrilla operation against their will, Fonseca agreed with leaders of the GPP such as Henry Ruiz that the montaña could be a proletarianizing experience in a moral sense. (Zimmermann 2000: 180–181)
This kind of possibility of moral transformation—turning student recruits into the “workers” required by history—was a central part of what the Mountain offered. The grueling difficulties of survival in mountain camps, then, were understood to be capable of forging relationships between the FSLN and the oppressed “People” in whose name they were undertaking their struggle by allowing recruits to properly embody the class position demanded of them by history.
For the prominent Sandinista leaders whose ideas have been captured in written texts, then, the political possibilities offered by clandestine revolutionary groups in the mountains were viewed through three distinct relational models. Firstly, a physical model of force, which saw the revolutionary circle as a fighting machine whose success would depend upon overwhelming opposing forces. Secondly, a view of prefigurative ethical overhaul, whereby a new political subject would be born in the Mountain, and would later be imparted to the People. Thirdly, a process of identification between revolutionaries and the People, with revolutionaries cultivating both the class position of the worker and the uncorrupted moral purity of the peasant.3
The machine in power
These ideas, about how a small, face-to-face, clandestine group might precipitate social transformation, were formed at a time when the prospect of revolution was in the future, at times seeming a vanishingly distant possibility. The years since saw the FSLN lead the successful overthrow of the Somoza regime, govern the country for a decade that was plagued by civil war and Cold War geopolitics, and subsequently lose an election to a US-backed opposition coalition (Walker and Wade 2016). After 16 years as Nicaragua's major opposition party, during which time the party split—amid persistent accusations that its leader, Daniel Ortega, was centralizing power in the presidency (Feinberg and Kurtz-Phelan 2006)—the FSLN won an election and returned to power in 2007. By the time I was conducting fieldwork, between 2010 and 2015, the FSLN's position relative to Nicaraguan society was often analyzed, by both its supporters (Nuñez Soto 2015a, 2015c) and by a steadily increasing number of critical voices, in terms that closely reflect the ideas of mechanistic “power” discussed above. The FSLN had become, on this view, a “political machine” whose power derived from tight connections to popular constituencies.
This analysis of power has framed the relationship of the FSLN government to Nicaraguan society as if the “mechanistic” model of force, described above, has been carried forward from the period of insurgency into a subsequent scenario of democratic politics and, most recently, of the return to political dominance of the FSLN. This has been a recurring line of analysis regarding the performance of the Sandinistas during the decade of the revolution. Numerous appraisals of problems of government during the revolutionary decade have drawn on the idea that the FSLN leadership, whose organizational style was forged during the clandestine years of military struggle, never quite managed to adapt successfully to the demands of democratic and civilian government (e.g., Close and Martí i Puig 2012). In appraisals of Nicaragua's political trajectory since 2007, as the FSLN's electoral opposition splintered and the party increasingly came to dominate the political system, the model of mechanistic power has condensed in two key perspectives. For Sandinista loyalists, the government's relation to “the People” has come to be one in which organized popular classes are tightly woven into a system of direct democracy that, by hooking popular demand directly into governmental power, legitimizes and democratizes the state. The writings of Orlando Nuñez Soto provide some of the clearest scholarly formulations of these ideas (Nuñez Soto 2015a), which also permeate Sandinista political discourse and media rhetoric (I discuss these ideas in more detail in Cooper 2018). Since the FSLN's return to power, a series of legal and institutional initiatives have been enacted in an effort to realize this vision of citizenship under the government's project of Citizen Power (Poder Ciudadano) (Close 2016; Cruz Feliciano 2009; Francis 2018; Spalding 2012). Claiming to be implementing a thoroughgoing system of “direct democracy,” the FSLN has, by presidential decree, enacted legal provisions allowing for the creation of new organs of local governance, initially known as Citizen's Power Councils (CPCs), which are intended to administer the allocation of a series of government welfare and development initiatives.4 For critics of the FSLN, the legitimating ideas accompanying these initiatives are little more than rhetoric, and the reality of the project of Citizen Power is one of authoritarian “control” of a population by an undemocratic government, a relation shored up by means such as the clientelistic distribution of state support and welfare and the direct application of repressive force (La Botz 2016). These arguments have been reinforced by the wave of state repression and pro-government paramilitary violence that emerged in the wake of widespread protests in April 2018. I sketch these apparently antithetical perspectives here, however, in order to draw attention to what they share: namely, the notion that the FSLN's position relative to Nicaraguan society is defined by contact. Whether viewed as desirable “hegemony” or dictatorial “control,” the government is depicted as efficacious by virtue of its capacity to incorporate popular constituencies, and implement its agenda by means of the mechanisms by which those constituencies are brought into the government project.
My intention is to explore the machine imagery surrounding the FSLN's claim to be governing by means of an “Organized People” from the perspective of Gualiqueme, a community of around seven hundred people in Nicaragua's Segovian mountains. The village was created as Rigoberto Cruz Cooperative—a militarized, fully collectivized agrarian cooperative—during a period of civil war, when the governing FSLN sought to defend their revolutionary project against CIA-funded armed insurgents (often known as the “Contras”). Founding cooperative members were individuals who had been displaced during the civil war as a result of Contra attacks upon villagers known for their Sandinista sympathies. The hardship of living in a warzone—and, indeed, being subject to direct attack by Contra groups seeking to terrorize and undermine agrarian cooperatives (Brody 1985)—heavily marked life in the community during the 1980s. Nevertheless, during its early years, the cooperative was at the receiving end of a steady flow of government credit, technical assistance, and farm machinery. This generous level of state support dried up by the end of the 1980s, as the Sandinista government began to cut back spending in an attempt to combat soaring inflation (Enríquez 2000: 51). Residents describe the years of “Liberal” government that followed until 2007—when structural adjustment policies were implemented in a much more thoroughgoing way, and when all support for cooperatives was withdrawn—as a period of utter abandonment by the state. During those years, most of the bankrupt cooperative's once-collective land and assets had been informally divided among members, but Rigoberto Cruz continues to exist as an institution. Residents of the community uniformly consider themselves to be lifelong Sandinista supporters. Indeed, they might easily be depicted as just the kind of “client” community of longtime loyalists that populate critical accounts of the FSLN's political machine.
Despite their thoroughgoing identification with the FSLN, however, which led residents to celebrate the latter's return to power as ushering in a time of tremendous renewed support for the poor, the community's broadly positive evaluation of Sandinista governance during my fieldwork coexisted with strong critique of the local implementation and delivery of FSLN social programs. It was the sense of frustration with their capacity to access and take part in the benefits supposedly accruing to an Organized People that comprised the core of many Gualiqueme residents’ political lives. The political images of the machine and the circle—with their very different claims regarding the nature of political relations—came to carry new implications for Gualiqueme residents amid this sense of disconnection. Both images suggest just the kind of involvement that this community of government supporters felt was lacking, and each provoked a very different set of suggestions for how involvement might practically be secured.
They don't let us know
Being part of the Organized People, as we have seen, required involvement—it required participation. Popular constituencies—both the FSLN and its critics suppose—are assumed to have been incorporated into a government apparatus that runs from the grassroots up to the heights of presidential power. Gualiqueme residents constantly encountered the idea that, thanks to the FSLN's 2007 return to power, they were, should be, and needed to be closely incorporated into a governmental apparatus. Political news broadcasts, speeches, FSLN pamphlets, and officials in political meetings constantly asserted that Nicaragua's popular constituencies comprised an “Organized People” tightly integrated with a national government. Through their involvement with local cooperatives and local government institutions, residents were supposed to become members of a popular constituency whose needs would be closely attended to by a responsive central government. As a result, the everyday practicalities of being involved in meetings and assemblies within cooperatives, community organizations, or bodies of local government became a central aspect of what the ideal of “living organized” meant for Gualiqueme residents. In turn, central to the everyday organizational requirements of making meetings happen was the spread of information. How did people know, for example, that a meeting was coming up? How was it known when a planned meeting had been delayed due to some unforeseen circumstances? Frequently, the answer was that many potential participants simply didn't know. But for those who did—and congruent with the implications of the imagery of the machine—everything depended upon the handling of a flow of messages. Contrary to the already-achieved integration implied by machine imagery, however, signal flow depended upon the mundane work of information circulation and communication. There was, in Gualiqueme, no communicative equivalent of a notice board, a postal service, an email list; no centralized system of handling the transfer of signals between individuals or households. Messages needed to pass from person to person, or to be shared among small face-to-face audiences. At the same time, any sense of the saturation of informal news through the uniform substance of a singular “community” would be entirely inappropriate (cf. Fisher 2012). Along some lines of potential communication, information spread slowly or not at all, while messages moved swiftly and easily on others. Moreover, information didn't just flow. It had to be carried.
Being Organized, then, required information to spread, and the spread of information required work. The effort needed to keep people informed was recognized in the formal responsibilities assigned within local organizations. Cooperatives and community associations—both official local councils and informal campaign groups, such as the veterans associations we will encounter below—always took care to assign responsibilities formally. In addition to nominating a “President” and a “Treasurer,” each organization chose somebody to stand as the “Spokesperson” (vocal), whose primary responsibility was to let members know about upcoming meetings. In theory, this role required doing a round of visits when necessary, knocking on the door of every member, and leaving messages with relatives if they weren't at home. The job could be arduous if the organization was large, and the task was undertaken exhaustively. To walk a full loop of the residential area of Gualiqueme could easily occupy hours. Many organizations included members who lived in neighboring villages, or in isolated homesteads away from the larger conurbations. Depending on the time in the agricultural cycle, houses might not have anyone home at a given time. To repeat the circuit multiple times in order to ensure full communicative inclusion would be a serious burden.
Given these difficulties, vocales tasked with keeping others informed rarely undertook their task with the thoroughness required for comprehensive coverage. They were hardly expected to. In practice, informative visits undertaken in the capacity of vocal would be combined with other visits, and would follow lines of kinship and friendship, with messages passed much more easily along established lines of visiting and hospitality. Personal enmities or inter-household disputes had an effect on the paths trodden through the space of the village, and could easily become near-impenetrable barriers. Children were frequently recruited to carry messages for this reason, since they were able to traverse social space in a way that adults often didn't feel able to, crossing barriers of unfamiliarity, awkwardness, and even hostility. But blockages were not always overcome, meaning that messages were interrupted, information remained undelivered, and some individuals were left out of the loop.
Information flow was related to work in a second sense. Messages moved much more easily along the paths followed by laboring bodies, though these trajectories also gave rise to their own implicit barriers. A message carried by a vocal whose lands lay in one zone of the mountains might “flow” smoothly to those encountered on journeys to and from a coffee parcel in the days prior to a planned meeting. But those whose lands lay elsewhere, or whose annual cycle of farming tasks meant that their daily journeys didn't take them alongside those carrying the message, might never receive it. In this way, the geography of Gualiqueme's arterial network of pathways from residences to fields—with a smaller number of major tracks and paths branching out into countless smaller routes at higher and lower altitudes—came to play a role in the work of “living organized.” Shared paths leading up to the mountains or the fields concentrated encounters at particular points, especially on those major paths lying near Gualiqueme's residential area, where many routes overlapped and conjoined. Common knowledge among those with farms in one sector of the cooperative's territory might remain unknown to others, whose land led them on a different route away from home. And the journeys required to tend crops or livestock, or to collect firewood, came to play their part in the dynamics of information flow that being organized depended on.
Over the years, as cooperative land had been both divided out and “grabbed” by individuals, there had been many informal transactions among members, swapping or selling parcels of land. People described their motivation for this kind of transaction in different ways; often individuals had preferences for particular kinds of agriculture, and had arranged to exchange parcels of coffee land, for example, in order to concentrate on bean production or livestock. But proximity to the land of kin was a frequent factor. Given the forms of mutuality and labor-sharing and exchange that prevailed within extended family networks, it made sense for the various parcels owned by kin to be located near each other. And when individual parcels had been “grabbed” in the first place, the children of founding cooperative members often claimed areas relatively near to land already allocated to parents. There was a degree of overlap, then, between the way messages moved through ties of kinship and visiting, and the flow of information facilitated by the journeys of a household's daily labors. Many families had arranged matters so that their daily journeys were shared with kin, and some paths were shared entirely by kin. But the larger arteries among Gualiqueme's well-trodden paths allowed messages to cross social boundaries that household visits alone never could.
Information flow, then, was closely related to the everyday sustenance of social life, and to the efforts required to sustain the material basis of the rural household. Messages would spread rapidly among segments of the population, while remaining inaccessible to others. As if traveling through an overlapping but unconnected set of layered arterial networks, information spread through social space unevenly, carried easily between certain nodes while failing ever to reach others. The result, however, was a keen sense among some of Gualiqueme's residents of systematic exclusion and intentional withholding of crucial information. Participation in meetings was known to be integral to the Sandinista ideal of organized life, and it was broadly understood that gaining access to state-provided services and welfare depended upon being “organized,” but the ability to participate often seemed not to be available to all Gualiqueme residents equally. To the extent that an ideal of being organized depended upon involvement in meetings, it depended upon this uneven flow of information. And for many who felt that their ability to gain from the government's project had been limited, this flow of information consequently came to appear to be an integral component of their exclusion. “They don't let us know” was a complaint I heard time and again. It was very common for people to find out about important meetings only after they had taken place, and many had the sense that without their personal presence at meetings, they would never be taken into account when allocative decisions were made with regard to the government's social programs.
The political machine, as an image, depends upon the idea of a tight incorporation of constituencies into “mechanisms” of government and thoroughgoing participatory involvement in the apparatus of the state. It depends, in other words, upon a sense of fairly smooth organizational integration between government and population. The machine requires parts to interrelate and interact; it requires the transmission of signals between components. Whether theorized (as by critics of the FSLN) as a one-way relation of control, or (as by those loyal to the government) as a bidirectional, feedback-driven participatory process, the relation of the “People” to the state is seen as just that: a relation. The sense of maliciously interrupted signals captured in the complaint that “they don't let us know” makes clear that this sense of integration was, for many Gualiqueme residents, profoundly lacking.
As they struggled to stay in the loop regarding the meetings of local community organizations, then, the relational premises suggested by machine imagery sometimes stood out as a problem for Gualiqueme residents. The sense of integrated transmission between components stood in tension with the everyday difficulties of communication and participation in local community institutions. Machine imagery offered a tantalizing sense of connection that stood in sharp contrast to the experience of missing meetings. But as we shall see, the relational form suggested by machine imagery also opened up ways of attempting to re-establish connection to the government.
The struggle to secure a military pension
One evening during my fieldwork, my hosts in Gualiqueme gathered in their kitchen. A dim electric bulb barely lit the adobe room, and embers glowed in the stove as we ate our evening meal. A pleading dog was chased from the room for the third time. Conversation turned to the question of whether Erwin, the senior man of the house, would undertake a long walk the following day in order to claim a “pension” from government offices in the town of Telpaneca. The pension—which in fact amounted to a monthly parcel of basic provisions such as rice and cooking oil—had recently been awarded to Erwin in recognition of his status within the FSLN as a “Historic Collaborator” with the party. But the walk to Telpaneca took hours, involving an arduous crossing of a river valley. To walk there and back in a day might not even be possible, at least not for Erwin, whose age and lingering wartime injuries slowed him down.
Esperanza, Erwin's wife, hinted that I might lend the bus fare for the trip. I wondered aloud how it compared to the value of the pension, and we began trying to work it out. The first parcel Erwin had collected had been quite generous, he recalled; he had been forced to take the bus home, unable to carry it all on foot. But last month the assembled veterans received only “dregs” (chingastes): a liter of oil, maybe four pounds of rice, a few pounds of salt, and a packet of spaghetti. Against this had to be set the bus fares and the cost of getting your ID card photocopied for the municipal government's records. The total value might equate to about 155 córdobas, we eventually concluded.5 Getting the bus all the way and back would cost 144 córdobas. But then it was possible to walk most of the way, and then catch a bus from the river for just 20 córdobas each way.
The reason for the shriveling allocation was obvious, Erwin's son insisted. Hadn't a group in a neighboring village recently been awarded pensions too? The mayor, he surmised, was siphoning off part of the payment for them. His father shouldn't go, he argued, since the bus fare cost almost as much as the goods were worth, and on top of that he would lose a whole day's work to the travel. But Esperanza didn't want to give up on Erwin's entitlements so easily. Don Ramon—an elderly man who scraped a bare living selling vegetables from door to door—arrived in the kitchen while we were speaking. He too had been awarded a pension in Telpaneca, and wanted to know whether Erwin was planning to make the trip. Perhaps he could collect both their paquetes, Esperanza suggested? But Don Ramon, exhausted enough from a day trudging round the village, was soon persuaded that it wasn't worth it. In the end, neither man made the trip.
If the difficulties of staying in the loop about local meetings gave rise to a sense of troubling disconnection from the “mechanisms” of Citizen Power that supposedly underpinned the Sandinista project, attempts to gain access to social services and state welfare provision reinforced, for many Gualiqueme residents, a profound sense of distance from the imagined apparatus of government. The pensions awarded to Erwin and Don Ramon—though hardly what they had hoped for—had come as the result of a long campaign by a group of Gualiqueme residents to gain access to retirement support on the basis of their status as veterans of the civil conflict of the 1980s. Ever since the early 1990s, a strong relationship has existed in Nicaragua between access to certain state entitlements and the status of being a former combatant. When Violetta Chamorro defeated the FSLN in 1990's elections on the basis of a promise to end the war, a central plank of the incoming government's demobilization plans were offers of economic support for soon-to-be-ex-combatants from either side of the conflict. While scholars have documented a serious mismatch between the expectations generated by these promises and what was ultimately delivered (Abu-Lughod 2000; Close 1999), and postwar Nicaragua has seen numerous protests motivated by discontent with the treatment of veterans on both sides of the conflict—as well as the long-running campaign of the “Mothers of heroes and martyrs” to secure government support (de Volo 2001)—Gualiqueme itself had witnessed some of the more tangible effects of demobilization payouts. An area of mountainous land adjoining the Rigoberto Cruz Cooperative's collective territory had, during the 1980s, been formally part of a state-run enterprise, but had lain abandoned as a result of the high levels of Contra activity in the area. In the 1990s, the area had been awarded to members of a group of EPS (Sandinista Popular Army) veterans who had been directly involved in protests. While some of the group granted land in this area had immediately sold their allotted parcels, being uninterested in farming, several of the recipients had developed active coffee farms, setting up a cooperative and establishing independent relationships with international buyers. Compared to the founding families of Rigoberto Cruz Cooperative, who were all from rural backgrounds and mostly from small hamlets in the mountains, the newcomers were from urban backgrounds, several having held leadership roles in the FSLN and the Sandinista Army. They were able to invest in their new farms in a way that was unaffordable for Rigoberto Cruz members. During the coffee harvest, these individuals had become some of the local farmers with the greatest need to recruit labor, employing many who had, over the years, lost lands acquired through the division of the Sandinista cooperatives, or who wanted to gain additional income at the one time of year when paid employment was reliably available close to home.
The land reform associated with the demobilization of the 1990s was a thing of the past, but the idea that former military service might render an individual eligible for state support seemed of pressing contemporary relevance for many of the cooperative's founding members, who were reaching an age when continued agricultural labor was becoming difficult. Their campaign to be awarded a pension, however, gave rise to a problem: how to demonstrate a past relationship? How could a claim to longstanding involvement with the FSLN, or with the Army, be made visible? In their efforts to insist that historic relationships be recognized, one strategy pursued by the individuals I knew was to adopt the model of being “organized,” replicating the organizational structures of state institutions in autonomous groupings aiming to press demands upon the FSLN. They had elected representatives in the manner familiar from cooperatives and CPCs, nominating individuals to stand as President, Treasurer, and Spokesperson. And this small local group had been involved in campaigns led by other veterans organizations across the region. During the period of my research, protests organized by such groups achieved prominence in national media, staging disruptive shutdowns of major roads in efforts to secure their demands. These protests secured a response from the FSLN, leading to a process whereby the claims of veterans came to be formally assessed, with the possibility held open that a state pension might indeed be awarded to those deemed eligible.
As part of this process of assessment and verification, veterans were required to establish both the fact of their past military participation and the veracity of any claim to wartime injury. For Gualiqueme veterans, this was not necessarily a simple matter, and the resulting process of evidence-gathering and documentation could be challenging for individuals unaccustomed to having to produce paperwork. Indeed, paperwork did not necessarily exist. Former commanders were, in some cases, no longer alive, and in any case Gualiqueme veterans often had no idea how to contact those they served with. In this context, photographs, wartime mementos, documents indicating party membership, personal testimonials, bodily marks, and lingering medical conditions all became resources that might potentially verify former service and military involvement (see Figures 1–3).
As veterans hoping to secure military pensions attempted to demonstrate past relationships with the FSLN and the Sandinista Army, documents kept as mementoes assumed a new significance as evidence, and personal relationships needed to be given documentary form. The images show letters written by party officials to vouch for individuals’ honor and former army membership, badges given to “historic collaborators” with the FSLN, and a handwritten note from an officer giving permission for leave during the war. Images have been edited to remove personal names. All photos by author.
Citation: focaal 2021, 91; 10.3167/fcl.2021.910103
The investment required to try and produce the documents demanded by both the campaign organizations with which veterans affiliated and the assessments eventually undertaken by the FSLN was considerable. Regional campaign groups required local affiliates to make a financial contribution to sustain their activities, and there was a constant need to provide photocopies to these groups, so that they could demonstrate their membership in the documentary format demanded by officials. This, in turn, opened up a need for local groups to fund regular bus trips of representatives to and from nearby towns, both to get hold of the paperwork—carrying the ID cards of all the members of a local group to internet cafes that could provide photocopying services—and to attend the meetings where paperwork was collected. Once a formal commitment to assess veterans’ claims to wartime injury was secured, the burdens intensified. Veterans had to arrange for their own travel to attend collective medical examinations held by the FSLN in the city of Estelí, and those I knew were involved in an ongoing series of trips in their efforts to obtain the medical verification they needed.
The veterans’ efforts to assert past participation and to secure the entitlements they assumed it conferred also came at a time when the FSLN was explicitly downplaying the idea of a connection between past relationships with the party and state entitlements. In the face of opposition accusations that state services were distributed along partisan lines—part of the machinery of clientelistic “control”—and in a context where the FSLN understood itself to be securing an ever-increasing “hegemony” over political life in the country (Nuñez Soto 2015a), officials frequently stated in public meetings attended by Gualiqueme residents that access to government projects would have nothing to do with political identity, and that claims to entitlement on the basis of past Sandinista loyalty were irrelevant and a thing of the past. The Organized People was meant to include the whole category of “the poor,” not just longtime Sandinistas. But if these images of clientelistic machines or the hegemony of a party-state imply a kind of close integration of popular sectors with the state, for the veterans themselves, their efforts revolved around the problem of how to demonstrate and produce relationship despite distance.
On the one hand, then, the veterans’ response to their sense of distance was to adopt the form of the “machine”—assuming the organizational form attributed to the Sandinista party apparatus—despite lacking the close integration implied by machine imagery. But it was also the case that as they attempted to elicit recognition for their service from distant officials, they aimed to secure acknowledgment of past political relationships that followed the form taken by the images of the revolutionary circle explored previously. As they negotiated the expense and effort of producing bus fares and photocopies, and presented themselves for inspection by government medics, they were pushing a vision of their status as Sandinista citizens as being the product of co-participation in a face-to-face network of allies in shared struggle. Veterans sustained the hope that specific past relationships, face-to-face and imagined—with military commanders and comrades, with the party, or even with Daniel Ortega himself—could provide an underpinning of mutuality that would guarantee an ongoing relationship of basic economic support that would allow them to retire. But the need to make those past relationships tangible to medics and officials through bodily evidence and testimony, the sense of difficulty in gaining an audience for their claims, and the burdensome need to travel to a seemingly endless series of meetings and medical assessments produced the sense that this desired relation of reciprocity still had to overcome a profound separation. Far from an “apparatus” that penetrated local society, the FSLN's presence in the lives of Gualiqueme residents continued to seem tenuous, state support was scarce, and the prospect of government “handouts,” far from flowing readily within a clientelistic machine, frequently seemed a distant dream. Either image, then—circle or machine—both stood for Gualiqueme veterans as an alluring ideal and gave form to efforts to press their demands for inclusion and recognition.
Shape and separation in the anthropology of abandonment
These observations bring us back to the way that notions of disappointment and frustration have figured in the anthropology of abandonment. As noted above, anthropologists have frequently drawn upon depictions of disappointment as having to do with a mismatch between aspiration and actuality. Consideration of the way images like the revolutionary circle or the political machine give form to hope allows specificity in our analysis of the way that disappointment can shape political practice. For Gualiqueme residents, the image of a political machine was constantly encountered in the idea that being “Organized” was the foundation of Sandinista citizenship. The putative centrality of tightly integrated organization to the abundance and care promised in government rhetoric encouraged people to place heavy emphasis on the everyday specifics of involvement with local government organizations, and to view their political fortunes as depending upon the micropolitics of interpersonal interaction within the meetings and activities constitutive of these groups. When the possibility of abundance failed to materialize, the issue was seen not as a matter of scarcity as such, or even as a matter of broken governmental promises, but a problem of organization and integration—a technical matter of achieving proper insertion into the mechanisms of Citizen Power. Partly as a result, the possibility of becoming “organized” autonomously, in self-created groups that mimicked the formal structures of state-mandated institutions (Nielsen 2011), seemed to hold open the prospect that a proper place in the polity might be achieved.
Similar observations hold for the imagery of the revolutionary circle. For rural Sandinistas, the idea that intimacy, interpersonal solidarity, and loyalties forged through shared struggle were the underpinnings of membership in the polity retained its force during a time when government officials were explicitly rejecting these ideas in favor of non-partisan, universal models of citizenship. And those models of relational possibility, too, shaped local frustrations at the failure of the Sandinista project to deliver on its promises. Political disappointments were framed as a matter of failed reciprocity: the result of having been forgotten by old allies, or the consequence of being insufficiently vocal in communicating past contributions and present needs to powerholders.
As previously noted, political abandonment has frequently been theorized as, effectively, an objective state of affairs, a matter of a political economy marked by the withdrawal of the state or of capital. Decline in such formulations is a result of the de facto cutting of economic and political ties that once underpinned a now-lost prosperity—or, at the least, a former promise of development. Local hopes for betterment are set against this actual state of economic or political collapse or withdrawal, and the force of disappointment comes to be theorized as emerging from the stark contrast between the two. The analysis developed above suggests that we need to complement this broad account of the force of disappointment with close attention to the relational imageries that inform political practice in a given context. Political disappointment and its everyday effects in Gualiqueme, we have seen, cannot be disentangled from the images that made political inclusion and involvement seem viable in the first place. Hope and disappointment were both given form by core, yet contrasting, images, each with a particular history in Sandinista politics, and each of which, in different ways, bound a local sense of political possibility into a distinctive vision of political relationship. It is here that attending to form and shape in political life carries rich analytical potential for anthropological attempts to theorize a politics marked by governmental withdrawal or incapacity, institutional fragmentation, and economic neglect.
Acknowledgments
This article emerged from a workshop held at UCL in 2019 to discuss Caroline Humphrey's article included in this issue, and benefited from later comments from participants in an online discussion group hosted by Martin Holbraad during the UK's first Covid-19 lockdown. I would like to thank participants in both sessions, along with Focaal's anonymous reviewers, for helping to shape the final piece.
Notes
My account of Fonseca's thinking here relies heavily on Zimmerman's (2000) study, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution.
Cabezas’ book, originally titled La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde, was quickly translated into English and received a wide international audience, coming to be considered a seminal example of the “testimonio” genre of Latin American literature (Beverley 1989). I quote here from the translated text.
The romantic celebration of the peasantry found in Fonseca's writings, it should be noted, stood in tension with more critical views of the political proclivities of rural smallholders. The FSLN's long-standing split into three factions revolved around disagreements regarding the question of whether rural Nicaraguans would join a revolutionary struggle. After the FSLN took power, and counter-revolutionary activity began to gather force, the idea that “Contra” support largely derived from individualistic investment in private property among smallholders cemented a critical view of the peasantry among some Sandinista thinkers.
These institutions were later formally abolished and replaced in some of their functions by “Cabinets of Family, Health, and Life” (Gabinetes de la Familia, Salud y Vida), but Gualiqueme residents—along with many scholars—presumed a basic continuity, continuing to refer to these new institutions as CPCs. I follow their lead here, and use the term “CPC” throughout this article.
To put this into perspective, the going rate for a day laborer in Gualiqueme at the time of research was 80–100 córdobas, though this could drop to 50–60 córdobas when meals were provided by the employer, while some employers paid as much as 120 a day.
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