Formulating a Plan of Attack

This past week has been a whirlwind of interviews with primary and secondary school principals and teachers, Citizen Power Council (CPC) representatives, and academics and activists. I have many more such interviews lined up for next week. Although my approach is not systematic yet, it's been very illuminating to hear the different perspectives of the people here.

Overall, the political scene is extremely polarized. There really isn't anyone in the center except maybe my host family and my fellow academics. All the newspapers are owned by the Chamorro family, the family of former conservative President Violeta Chamorro, so all the news is heavily slanted against the current government, headed by Sandinista or FSLN President Daniel Ortega. Every time he makes a move, the opposition pounces on it. It's hard to say what is true in the news because it is so subjective. The opposition parties say that Ortega is a dictator and is centralizing power all over the place, including in the CPC.

When I talk to individual CPC members, I have actually seem them drop what they are doing to take care of a problem occuring in the neighborhood. CPC representatives are in charge of different community needs, including education, health, housing, crime, etc. They are not paid, but many argue that only Sandinista supporters actually receive the benefits of policies that the local CPC requests of the central government. I will be attending meetings next week to see how the CPC actually functions. These are very interesting times indeed.

My colleagues at CIASES are working on getting me access to a more recent database of schools in Managua so that I can make a systematic comparison regarding where school autonomy functioned well and where it didn't and why. (The Autonomous School Program, in which parents had a lot of power of school curriculum, hiring and firing principals, charging school fees, etc., was ended last year with Ortega's election because he said that school fees were keeping the poorest children out of school.) Again, very interesting times...