Nicaragua providing free health care to all its people

In 1978 The revolutionary “Sandinista” leader Daniel Ortega overthrew the dictator Anastasia Somoza. The first acts of the “Socialist” regime was to introduce free education and Health care for 6,000,000 mostly poor people.

Yesterday I visited the first maternity unit which was opened in the city of Esteli in 1980. During the 80s a terrorist “Contra” war, (funded by the US government of Ronald Reagan), was waged against the Socialists. In 1990 using the democracy introduced by The Sandinistas, a coalition supported by the US won the election on the promise of an end to the Contra war and massive investment from the US. The investment never materialised and “austerity” programme meant all funding for “socialist” Public Services were cut, by the new government and subsequent right wing conservative governments. People attending this maternity unit had to pay, as a result infant and maternal mortality rates increased exponentially.

In 2006 Daniel Ortega was reelected and reintroduced free education and health care, to the dismay of the US and many “NGOs”; whose raison d’être is to cushion the blow of privatisation in developing countries and are heavily influenced by “values” in countries where their funds are sourced, which should bring their status as “NGO” into question.

Last April it was reported by our media, that political unrest in Nicaragua had resulted in 300 protesters being killed by the police. The first people killed in the protests were police and government officials. 243 people died in the riots, 129 of them police and officials on the government side.

The big guy standing beside me in the picture, is the mayor of Esteli. Him and his family were moved from their houses, to the town hall for their own safety, after a school was burned down in the riots. The mayors mother was in a wheel chair, they were terrified as Molotov cocktails were thrown at the town hall and owe their life’s to the police and firemen who risked their life’s to protect them. And the farmers from the local cooperative who cane out in support of the Sandinistas.

These stories were confirmed by other people we spoke to in our trip. Now life is returning to normal, however last years violence means there are hardly any tourists here which is greatly damaging the economy and making it hard to maintain these wonderful programmes the Ortega government has introduced.

Cuba or Nicaragua looks very different to a pregnant woman living in Haiti or Honduras or even many in the US, but they are rarely the ones interviewed by the journalists constantly criticising these counteries.