Institutionalized Precarity in Postwar Nicaragua

On the eve of Nicaragua’s historic 1990 election, Pablo Antonio Cuadra lamented that the degradation of his country’s natural environment was an “invisible cancer” threatening to deform the nation’s “spiritual ecology.”¹ The degradation of the country’s lakes and forests boded catastrophe worse than that brought by the destruction of Managua’s “syntax” in the 1972 earthquake. The Sandinista government, he argued, had failed in part because it attempted to replace one alien syntax, a corrupt vision of modernization that had created a grotesque Managua, with another, socialism inspired by Marxism and Leninism. In contrast, Sandinista authors like Sergio Ramírez argued that