|upright=1.1 Immediately following the fall of the Somoza regime, Nicaragua lay largely in ruins. The country had suffered both a bloody war and the
1972 Nicaragua earthquake just 6 years earlier. In 1979, approximately 600,000 Nicaraguans were homeless and 150,000 more were either refugees or in exile, out of a total population of 2.8 million. In response, a state of emergency was declared. The US sent US$99 million in aid. Land and businesses of the Somoza regime were expropriated, the courts were abolished, and workers were organized into Civil Defense Committees. The new regime declared that "elections are unnecessary", which led to criticism from the Catholic Church and others. The Nicaraguan Revolution brought immense restructuring to all three sectors of the economy, directing it towards a
mixed economy. The biggest economic impact was on agriculture, in the form of
agrarian reform, which was proposed as a process that would develop pragmatically along with other changes (economic, political, etc.). Economic reforms overall needed to restart the economy. As a developing country, Nicaragua had an agriculture-based economy, susceptible to
commodity market prices. The rural economy was far behind in technology and devastated by the guerrilla warfare. Article 1 of the Agrarian Reform Law says that property is guaranteed if it is used efficiently and described different forms of property: • state property (confiscated land from Somocistas) • cooperative property (confiscated land, but without individual certificates of ownership, to be used efficiently) • communal property (for people and communities from
Miskito regions in the
Atlantic) • individual property (as long as it was efficiently used and integrated to national development plans)
Cultural revolution rose to over 10,000% in 1988,
leading to rationing The Revolution brought many cultural developments. The
Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign (Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización) focused on high school and university students drafting teachers as volunteer teachers. Within five months they claimed to have reduced the overall
illiteracy rate from 50.3% to 12.9%. In September 1980,
UNESCO awarded Nicaragua the "
Nadezhda K. Krupskaya" award. This was followed by literacy campaigns of 1982, 1986, 1987, 1995 and 2000, each of which was also awarded by UNESCO. The Sandinistas established a Ministry of Culture, one of only three in
Latin America at the time, and established a new editorial brand, called
Editorial Nueva Nicaragua and, based on it, started to print cheap editions of basic books rarely seen by Nicaraguans. It founded an
Instituto de Estudios del Sandinismo (Institute for Studies of
Sandinismo) where it printed the work and papers of
Augusto C. Sandino and those that reflected the ideologies of the FSLN, such as
Carlos Fonseca and Ricardo Morales Avilés. Such programs received international recognition for improving
literacy,
health care,
education,
childcare,
unions, and
land reform.
Human rights controversies Amnesty International noted numerous human rights violations by the Sandinista government. They contended that civilians "disappeared" after their arrest, that "civil and political rights" were suspended, due process was denied detainees, detainees were tortured, and "reports of the killing by government forces of those suspected of supporting the contras". The Sandinistas were accused of committing mass executions. The
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated abuses by Sandinista forces, including an execution of 35 to 40
Miskitos in December 1981, charged the Sandinista government with human rights violations, including press censorship. It charged that the government censored the independent newspaper
La Prensa. French journalist Viktor Dedaj, who lived in Managua in the 1980s, contended that
La Prensa was generally sold freely and that the majority of radio stations were anti-Sandinista. The Heritage Foundation claimed that the Sandinistas instituted a "spy on your neighbor" system that encouraged citizens to report any activity deemed counter-revolutionary, with those reported facing harassment from security representatives, including the destruction of property. The
United Nations, the
Organization of American States and
Pax Christi disputed Heritage's allegations of anti-Semitism. According to them, individual Nicaraguan Jews had their property expropriated due to their connections with the
Somoza regime, rather than because they were Jewish. They cited the fact that there were prominent Sandinista officials of Jewish descent. In contrast to these organizations, the
Anti-Defamation League supported allegations of Sandinista
antisemitism. It worked closely with Nicaraguan Jewish exiles to reclaim a synagogue that had been firebombed by Sandinista militants in 1978 and expropriated in 1979. ==Contra war==