Political Report 1464 - Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold

by LAP Editor, William I. Robinson

Posted by NACLA

With seven opposition presidential candidates imprisoned and held incommunicado in the months leading up to the vote and all the remaining contenders but one from miniscule parties closely allied with President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the results of Nicaragua’s November 7 presidential elections were a foregone conclusion. The government declared after polls closed that Ortega won 75 percent of the vote and that 65 percent of voters cast ballots. The independent voting rights organization Urnas Abiertas, meanwhile, reported an abstention rate of approximately 80 percent and widespread irregularities at polling stations around the country.

The vote was carried out in a climate of fear and intimidation, with a total absence of safeguards against fraud.The vote was carried out in a climate of fear and intimidation, with a total absence of safeguards against fraud. In a complete breakdown of the rule of law, Ortega carried out a wave of repression from May to October, leading the opposition to issue a joint statement on October 7 calling for a boycott of the election. Several dozen opposition figures—among them, presidential candidates, peasant, labor, and student leaders, journalists, and environmentalists—were arrested and detained without trial, while several hundred others were forced into exile or underground.

Among those exiled were celebrated novelist Sergio Ramirez, who served as Ortega’s vice president during the 1980s revolution. While the government charged Ramirez with “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” his crime was provoking the ire of the regime by publishing his latest novel, Tongolele No Sabía Bailar, a fictionalized account of the 2018 mass protests that marked the onset of the current political crisis and the degeneration of the regime into dictatorship. The book was promptly banned in the country, with customs authorities ordered to block shipments at ports of entry.

Virtual Forum - The Nicaraguan Crisis: A Left Perspectives

hosted by NACLA and WGNC

with introductory remarks from William I. Robinson, LAP Editor and editor of LAP's latest issue The Nicaraguan Crisis and the Challenge to the International Left.

The crisis in Nicaragua has divided the Left in the United States and throughout the Americas. Significant sectors of this international Left claim that President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo represents a leftist project for Nicaragua that should be defended, and that the United States is trying to overthrow the government. This event aims to address those claims from an explicitly leftist perspective. As well, as a reminder, the latest issue of LAP features a symposium/debate on the Nicaraguan crisis.

WHEN: October 7, 2021, 8:00pm-9:30pm EDT

Please click on this link to register. Registration is free:

https://nacla.salsalabs.org/thenicaraguancrisis/index.html

Abstract, The Perils of Reconciliation: Achievements and Challenges of Daniel Ortega and the Modern FSLN

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Perils of Reconciliation: Achievements and Challenges of Daniel Ortega and the Modern FSLN

by Héctor Cruz Feliciano

Against the background of unprecedented levels of support and popularity since recovering power, the experience of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) shows that alliances unorthodox for a leftist party have rendered electoral results at the cost of putting more profound structural transformations on hold. Ten years after its electoral comeback, the FSLN has a lot to show for itself, largely because of the stable climate attributable to its decision to make peace with its historical foes. At the same time, its efforts at empowering the citizenry have been limited at best. Entrenched in the wealth of political capital it has accumulated, it is in a good position to take calculated risks in favor of bold redistributive policies. Not taking more daring steps toward the socialist transformation of society at this juncture could in due time cost it its role as articulator of the leftist agenda in Nicaragua.

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Political Report # 1370 Complicating the Narrative on Nicaragua

by James Phillips, NACLA

Recent news coverage of the crisis in Nicaragua has sought to simplify a complex reality. The prevailing coverage lays the blame for the conflict on Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and presents a politically narrow and historically shallow context. As a result, the message implicit and sometimes explicit in the coverage-that Ortega is the villain and his departure from office would end the conflict or solve the problems underlying the crisis-is distorted and misleading. This rhetoric, furthered by penalizing measures taken by the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress, targets Ortega and by extension Nicaragua as a brutal dictatorship and human rights disaster. Meanwhile, Washington applauds and offers moral and material support for the government of Nicaragua’s neighbor, Honduras, where there is indeed a brutal dictatorship and a human rights disaster. Unlike President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras, Ortega is not seen as a faithful ally of the U.S. and thus faces strong scrutiny and condemnation. This hypocritical double standard highlights the fact that for a long time Ortega himself and Nicaragua, in company with Cuba and Venezuela, have represented a largely symbolic challenge to U.S. hegemony. The anger of U.S. administrations toward Nicaragua, Ortega, and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) goes back to the revolution that in 1979 succeeded in toppling the 43-year-long dictatorship of the Somoza family-Washington’s faithful and corrupt ally through successive Democratic and Republican administrations from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter. The current crisis is not simply the story of a brave opposition and a brutal Ortega. It is a long-simmering conflict among different groups within Nicaragua that has been carefully manipulated over the years to put Nicaragua firmly and securely back under U.S. hegemony.

Political Report # 1340 Capitalist Development in Nicaragua and the Mirage of the Left

By William I. Robinson, Truthout

The image carefully cultivated by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his supporters as the standard-bearers of the popular revolutionary process led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the 1980s has all but crumbled in the wake of the mass protests that broke out last month against pension reform that left dozens of people dead, and hundreds injured and jailed. For some, the protests were a plot organized by the United States to destabilize a revolutionary government. For others, it was an explosion of mass discontent against a corrupt and authoritarian regime. While the United States and the traditional Nicaraguan oligarchy would certainly like to have a more pliant regime in place, they have accommodated themselves to the Ortega government. The Sandinista inner circle has hacked its way into the ranks of the country's elite in a process dating back to the aftermath of the 1980s revolution, proving capable of overseeing a new round of capitalist development since coming back to power in 2007. Ortega and the FSLN have dressed in a leftist discourse their attempt to establish a populist multiclass political alliance around this project of capitalist development under the firm hegemony of capital and Sandinista state elites. While the FSLN retains a mass, if dwindling, base among the country's peasantry and urban poor, the FSLN leadership has made pacts with the traditional oligarchy; suppressed dissent; enriched itself through plunder of state resources and an alliance with transnational capital; and deployed the army, police and paramilitary forces to violently repress peasants, workers and social movements opposing its policies. Now capitalist development is entering into crisis in Nicaragua. The government's announcement that it would cut pension payments to retirees and increase the contribution required by workers and businesses into the pension was the spark that ignited the April uprising. But political tension and social conflict has been building up for years, and it is this crisis of capitalism that forms the larger backdrop to the recent events.

Political Report # 1059 Nicaragua is Not for Sale: The Culmination of President Ortega’s Inconsistent Presidency By Amalia Perez, Research Associate at COHA

Featured Photo: March Against The Nicaragua Canal                  From: Jorge Mejia Peralta

"¡Nicaragua no se vende!" protesters in the central city of Juigalpa exclaimed during the most recent demonstration opposing the proposed Nicaraguan Canal.[1] This rallying cry, Nicaragua is not for sale, reverberates throughout the country in momentous opposition to the construction of the canal-a $50 billion USD project spearheaded by Chinese venture capitalist billionaire, Wang Jing, and enthusiastically approved by the Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega.[2] The pair intend to slice Central America's largest country in half with a canal three times the size of Panama's, displaced communities and environmental degradation be damned. A SECRET DEAL; A PUBLIC OUTCRY In a characteristically clandestine arrangement, the Ortega administration approved the operation during a seven-day Congressional session in 2013, without parliamentary debate, public consultation, or prior feasibility/environmental impact studies.[3] The approval granted a 100-year concession to Wang Jing's Cayman Island-based firm, the Hong Kong Nicaraguan Canal Development Investment Company (HKND). The parameters expropriated land rights to the 172 miles long by an average 1,000 feet wide stretch of Nicaraguan land on which the proposed project will be built, giving HKND carte blanche authority, without having to pay taxes, for the ensuing century.[4] Subsequently, the concession goes so far as to grant HKND the unqualified rights to construct "two deep sea ports, a free trade zone, an airport, cement and explosive factories, an electricity plant and upmarket hotels," the Daily Beast reports, at the expense of land-owning Nicaraguans.[5]