Wheelock Román, Jaime (1947–1994)

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Wheelock Román, Jaime (1947–1994)

Jaime Wheelock Román (b. 30 May 1947), Nicaraguan leader and member of the Sandinista National Directorate. Jaime Wheelock was born in Managua. His family owned a large coffee farm in the fertile region of Carazo, near the town of Jinotepe. Wheelock gained firsthand knowledge of large agro-export operations that would influence his politics later in life. He attended the best schools in Managua and traveled abroad frequently.

Wheelock met several Sandinista leaders in the 1960s but did not join the movement until 1969. In 1970 he was accused of killing a National Guardsman and fled to Chile, where he studied politics, sociology, and agricultural law. Considered brilliant by his professors, he has been described by both friends and enemies as vain, materialistic, and intellectually arrogant. During his studies in Germany in 1972 and 1973, Wheelock applied Marxist-Leninist thought to Nicaraguan politics and society. This resulted in his Imperialismo y dictadura (1975), a historical survey of coffee farming and agroexport industrialization since the nineteenth century.

Wheelock published the book in Nicaragua and injected his ideological and theoretical perspective into the Sandinista debate over tactics and strategy. A clash between Wheelock's "Proletarian Tendency" and the prevailing doctrine of prolonged popular war was inevitable. The Proletarians considered the Maoist, voluntarist approach of Carlos Fonseca, Henry Ruíz, and Tomás Borge to be a waste of time. The internecine struggle of the Sandinista leadership reached a pinnacle with bitter exchanges. Borge threatened Wheelock with physical harm, which caused him to take refuge in the house of a priest. The Proletarians were purged from the guerrilla organization in October 1975.

However, Wheelock pressed forward with his notion of how revolution would come about in Nicaragua. He organized labor strikes among poor barrio dwellers as the national crisis worsened in 1977 and 1978. Wheelock, Luis Carrión, and Carlos Núñez focused their attention on the vast settlements on the outskirts of Managua, where they gained a substantial following. This contributed to the reunification of the Proletarians with the Sandinista directorate in March 1979.

Wheelock became minister of agriculture and agrarian reform after the insurrection. He directed the redistribution of land confiscated from Somoza and his associates to peasants. However, Wheelock was an exponent of pragmatic, gradualist policies that were reflected in the 1981 agrarian reform law.

By 1983 the Sandinista agrarian program was threatened by the influence of counterrevolutionary forces in rural areas. Many peasants in the northeast had not benefited from the government's strategy, and they began to join the contras. Wheelock therefore decided to increase the pace of land distribution. He oversaw the creation of an extensive cooperative system known as the Area of People's Property, which gave more control over planting and harvesting to individual farmers. A new agrarian reform law was passed in January 1986. Wheelock used some of its provisions to expropriate the property of several large exporters of coffee and cotton, accusing them of sending bank credit out of the country instead of using it for production. The objective was to demonstrate Sandinista resolve to support small private farmers and peasant cooperatives. Nevertheless, the general failure of agrarian reform was one of the contributing factors to the electoral defeat of the regime in February 1990. The Nicaragua Opposition Union and Violeta Barrios De Chamorro received majorities in most rural areas. Wheelock has written several articles in the postelection period justifying the actions of the Ministry of Agriculture. He blames aggression from the Reagan administration and decapitalization of the banking system by "unpatriotic" producers for the Sandinistas' inability to secure property rights and, thus, the loyalty of peasants.

At the party congress in July 1991, the debate over agrarian reform intensified and Wheelock was the target of much criticism. Several social scientists and political figures opened a public dialogue about the plight of the peasant in the Nicaraguan revolution. Wheelock responded in the newspaper Barricada, explaining his views about agricultural policy in the 1980s. He also denied the rumor that he controls several properties confiscated from Somocistas.