Political tension in
Nicaragua
Daniel
Ortega’s Slide to Autocracy
From The Economist print edition
Later this year Daniel Ortega will celebrate the 30th anniversary of
the revolution that toppled the notorious American-backed
dictatorship of the Somoza family and brought his left-wing
Sandinista movement to power.
Though Mr Ortega is once again president, as he was in the 1980s, in
other ways Nicaraguan politics have changed radically. Most of his
fellow revolutionary leaders have left the Sandinista Party and are
now in opposition. And Mr Ortega is well on the way to establishing
an autocracy, albeit a bankrupt one, in cahoots with former
somocistas.
The latest step came last month when the Sandinista-controlled
Supreme Court quashed a 20-year sentence for embezzlement against
Arnoldo Alemán, a former president (and once an official in the
Somoza dictatorship). Several years ago Mr Alemán forged an
unacknowledged alliance of convenience with Mr Ortega, which
Nicaraguans call “the pact”.
This wavered when Mr Ortega ignored the opposition’s complaints that
a pliant electoral authority allowed the Sandinistas to steal
municipal elections in November, which independent observers were
banned from scrutinising. But hours after Mr Alemán’s absolution his
Liberal Constitutional Party ended a filibuster in the National
Assembly and voted to let the Sandinistas run the legislature’s
affairs.
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The next step, opponents fear, will be to get the assembly to vote
for a constitutional reform that would allow Mr Ortega, like his
friend Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, to stand for re-election. Or it
might involve adopting a semi-parliamentary system in which Mr
Alemán would run for president but Mr Ortega would cling to power as
prime minister.
The result of November’s municipal elections, in which the
Sandinistas claimed to have won Managua, the capital, have still not
been published. That has not stopped Mr Ortega from holding a
floodlit ceremony to acclaim the new mayors. But if Nicaraguans have
had to swallow the results, foreigners have not. The United States
and the European Union have suspended much of their aid (some $200m
between them) pending an electoral review. Since there is no sign of
that, “There is a real risk that the [aid] programme will be
withdrawn,” a European spokesman says.
Until recently Mr Ortega could scoff at these threats, since he
enjoyed the largesse of Mr Chávez. But the fall in the oil price
means that this is drying up. Nicaragua is one of the poorest
countries in the Americas. The budget, already cut by 4% compared
with last year, is “unsustainable”, according to Bayardo Arce, a
Sandinista leader. Capital is fleeing and remittances are falling.
Mr Ortega is looking to Russia for support. (Nicaragua is the only
country other than Russia to grant diplomatic recognition to South
Ossetia, an enclave carved out of Georgia.)
Already unpopular, Mr Ortega seems to have miscalculated in
alienating aid donors. Since the municipal election he has deployed
gangs of uniformed thugs to break up opposition protests. So far
they are armed only with staves, stones and homemade mortars. His
regime is starting to resemble the dictatorship he once helped to
overthrow. One of the original Sandinista leaders now in opposition
says he feels obliged to meet contacts in secret, “as we used to do
under Somoza”. |
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Illustration by Claudio Munoz
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