Venezuela to
Help
Nicaragua After U.S. Rebuff
(CNN) -- Venezuela has promised to give
Nicaragua $50 million to replace money that
the United States said this week it would
withhold from the Central American country,
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra
said Saturday.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised
the aid after Ortega learned that the United
States was canceling $62 million of aid that
was to have come from the Millennium
Challenge Corporation, a
U.S.-government-funded anti-poverty fund set
up by former President George W. Bush.
Ortega expressed disappointment in President
Barack Obama for the decision. "He expresses
good will, but in practice, he has the same
policies as President Reagan," Ortega told a
crowd of supporters in Managua's Plaza of
the Revolution.
In 1982, then-President Reagan supported
funding the contras, the forces opposed to
Ortega and his socialist Sandinista Party,
which had come to power after overthrowing
the U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Ortega called this week's decision not to
follow through on the payment
"disrespectful."
"The United States had given its word to the
people of Nicaragua and in particular to the
people of the cities involved in the
program," he said.
Wednesday's decision to cut the funds
altogether came after the United States
announced last November that it was
suspending aid to Managua in the wake of
what it said were fraudulent municipal
elections.
Ortega, whose party members won most of the
mayoralties, disputed that.
And he warned his U.S. counterpart that the
world has changed since the United States
funded the contras. "He is the first to know
that the United States of today is not the
United States of 20, 30, 40 years ago,"
Ortega said. "Today, the United States
cannot do whatever it wants in the world. It
doesn't have the moral force, even though it
may have the material force to do it. They
have even lost the support of the U.S.
people."
Still chafing over his loss to Violeta
Chamorro, who replaced him as president in
1990, Ortega said those were the elections
that were fraudulent. He said President
George H. W. Bush affected the outcome by
telling the Nicaraguans, "If you vote for
the [Sandinista] front, the war is going to
continue; if you vote for the enemies of the
front, go in peace.' That was the promise
that Bush made."
He described that pact as "a big lie, since
the peace was already coming. We, the
Nicaraguans, were making peace."
What Bush then wanted, Ortega said, was war
throughout Central America. "He fed the war
in Guatemala, he fed the war in El Salvador,
he fed the war in Nicaragua," Ortega said.
Ortega described the three U.S.-backed
governments that ruled Nicaragua from 1990
until 2007 -- when he reclaimed power -- as
anti-democratic. "They robbed the people of
the right to health, the right to education,
the right to decent housing," he said.
"They privatized energy industry, the
telecommunications industry, the businesses
of the workers -- those were nothing more
than acts of corruption."
And he said that the $62 million would have
been used to build 12 highways, not to
support his government.
But work that has begun on two of the roads
will be completed, said Rodney Bent, deputy
CEO for the Millennium Challenge Corporation
in an interview Friday with CNN en Espanol.
He denied any suggestion that the money was
being used for political ends rather than
simply to alleviate poverty.
"That's totally false," Bent said, adding
that his corporation's funds are doled out
regardless of a government's leftist,
centrist or conservative policies.
"We want a clean government," he said,
adding that because the elections were not
clean, "we had to act." |
