Nicaragua's History
Nicaragua's long history of U.S. military intervention has created a legacy of violence and social injustice. In the 1980s, the United States supplied massive aid, arms, and training to the Nicaraguan contras who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government (FSLN). The contras murdered small farmers, teachers, union members, and anyone that they considered associated with the Sandinista government. Over 30,000 people were killed. The war began winding down in the late 1980s as the FSLN and the contra forces reached a peace accord.
The post-Sandinista period in Nicaragua has been fraught with difficulties including continuing U.S. intervention in electoral affairs and endemic corruption at all levels of government. While Nicaragua has implemented important constitutional and institutional reforms, human rights abuses still persist in some areas of the country, particularly in the Atlantic Coast, home to indigenous communities.
Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in the Hemisphere.
The inequality, poverty, and low living standards that contributed to the 1979 Sandinista Revolution remain largely unresolved. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in the Hemisphere, with 67.4 percent of the population living below the poverty level.
Current Issues
A major positive component of recent U.S. assistance has been disaster relief. Following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the United States gave over $600 million to Central America for emergency aid and reconstruction. Recently, a massive decline in world coffee prices caused hunger and malnutrition to surge among Nicaraguan farm families and the United States provided $37 million in aid.However, other economic support has been more controversial. The U.S. assists Nicaragua through multilateral lending institutions like the IMF. In a number of cases, the lending process and loan requirements have seriously undermined poverty reduction goals with an increase in fees and penalties faced by poor families for basic services.
The financial burden on poor families in Nicaragua may increase as the privatization of water systems – a program encouraged by the Inter American Development Bank – raises rates or cuts off water subsidies to impoverished rural communities.
Serious questions have also been raised regarding the influence that lending institutions exert over democratic processes and policy decisions in recipient countries. In January 2003, for example, the IMF threatened to cut off Nicaragua's access to loans and assistance unless the Nicaraguan legislature passed a budget that prioritized debt repayment over social spending.
Health Care in Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the poorest country in Latin America and second in the hemisphere only to Haiti. Leading causes of death are highly preventable illnesses: pneumonia, diarrhea, gastroenteritis, and transport accidents.In 1996, the IMF and World Bank pressured the Nicaraguan government to cut government spending and strengthen its private sector. The government responded by slashing its health care budget, which resulted in the dismissal of 250 clinic doctors. This left the majority of Nicaraguans, two-thirds of whom lives in poverty, without health care.
The lack of affordable healthcare is especially debilitating to a country like Nicaragua in which the average woman gives birth to between four and five children in her lifetime. The country has the highest teen childbirth rate in Latin America. UNICEF estimates the infant mortality rate at 38 per 1,000 births – the highest in Central America. The maternal death rate is 160 per 100,000 births and twenty percent of mothers who die giving birth are younger than 19. In addition, with only a dozen mammography machines in the entire country, breast cancer is a major concern for Nicaragua's two million women. Due to the scattered nature of the Nicaraguan population, record-keeping is difficult, so these official statistics may not actually reflect the truly dire nature of the situation.
