The
Return Of Daniel Ortega
By Mark Engler
11 November, 2006
The Nation
If
you listen to right-wing pundits and Republican officials, the return
to power of former revolutionary Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is not evidence
of democracy in action but rather an invitation to Communist tyranny,
terrorism and even nuclear holocaust. It appears that on November 5
Nicaraguans went to the polls and committed the sin of selecting a leader
not in favor with the White House. With more than 60 percent of the
votes now counted, Ortega has won 39 percent, while his nearest rival,
right-wing banker Eduardo Montealegre of the of the Nicaraguan Liberal
Alliance, holds only 31 percent. In the five-way race for the presidency,
this margin is enough to hand a victory to Ortega's Sandinista-led coalition,
giving the political party control of the executive for the first time
since 1990.
A statistical sample of polling
places suggests that Ortega's lead will hold, and this likelihood has
prodded US conservatives into some fits of fantastically overblown rhetoric.
At National Review, former Reagan and George H.W. Bush speechwriter
Mark Klugmann writes, "a Nicaragua that opens its arms to murderous
radicalism poses a threat for America and the world.... A nuclear North
Korea and a nuclear Iran could be in position, with an ally so close
to our porous frontier, to wreak the havoc we once thought only the
Soviet Union could ever bring home."
Of course, the fantasy that
a small, poor and geopolitically marginal Central American nation could
be a major threat to US national security is a throwback to cold war-era
propaganda films like Red Dawn. It reflects the current foreign policy
mindset of Washington conservatives but does not resemble anything like
reality.
The return of Daniel Ortega
to Nicaragua's presidency hardly portends a menacing new danger for
the US heartland. It does, however, mark two important developments
in the rise of an increasingly independent Latin America. First, given
concerted efforts on the part of the Bush Administration to influence
the outcome of the election, it signals that US threats of retaliation
may no longer be sufficient to keep Central American citizens from voting
for leaders willing to buck Washington's economic program. Second, in
spite of Ortega's standing as a deeply compromised political figure,
his election provides a modest opening for hope that a new Nicaraguan
administration might do a better job of addressing the country's endemic
poverty than have the past sixteen years of neoliberal rule.
The scare stories spun by
conservative pundits like Klugmann echo the only somewhat more subtle
alarmism voiced by Republican lawmakers in the lead-up to the Nicaraguan
elections. In recent years, the White House has chosen to remain silent
during many electoral contests in Latin America. This does not reflect
a newfound respect for democratic self-determination; it is pragmatic.
Washington learned the hard way that its admonitions can backfire when
delivered to Latin America voters fed up with having economic policy
dictated from the North--as was the case in Bolivia in 2002, when US
attacks on Evo Morales helped him gain the stature that would ultimately
propel him to the presidency this year. However, the United States has
maintained an overt involvement in some elections, especially in cold-war
hot spots Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Bush Administration efforts
over the past year to prevent the Nicaraguan electorate from choosing
Ortega were particularly heavy-handed. Violating diplomatic protocol,
US Ambassador Paul Trivelli expressed an open preference for Ortega's
opponents, and he made repeated efforts to unite the Nicaraguan right
around a single candidate. (He failed, and the divide among Nicaraguan
conservatives helped pave the way for the Sandinistas' victory.) Adding
to Trivelli's meddling, US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez suggested
that more than $220 million in aid and hundreds of millions more in
investments could be jeopardized if voters picked the wrong candidate.
In the last week of the campaign,
several Republican members of Congress stepped up the threats. Most
radically, they proposed to block the stream of money sent from Nicaraguan
immigrants in the United States to impoverished family members back
home in Central America. In an October 30 letter to Nicaraguan Ambassador
Salvador Stadthagen, Representative Tom Tancredo wrote, "if the
FSLN takes control of the government in Nicaragua, it may be necessary
for the United States authorities to examine closely and possibly apply
special controls to the flow of $850 million in remittances from the
United States to Nicaragua--unfortunately to the detriment of many people
living in Nicaragua." In a public letter addressed to Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, Representatives Ed Royce and Peter Hoekstra
added, "We share US Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli's assessment
that an Ortega victory would force the United States to fully 're-evaluate'
relations with Nicaragua."
With the memory of the United
States' debilitating economic embargo of the 1980s still fresh, Nicaraguan
voters do not take suggestions of retaliation from Washington lightly.
In 1990 the United States made clear that its embargo, as well as funding
for terrorist contra forces, would continue if Ortega were re-elected.
This blackmail played a decisive role in pushing the Sandinistas from
office.
Ironically, even as the White
House portrays Ortega as a committed and unrepentant leftist, the real
concern is whether he has fully compromised the progressive ideals he
once espoused as a leader in the movement that overthrew Nicaragua's
longstanding Somoza dictatorship. Ortega has been criticized by former
partisans for keeping a tight hold on the leadership of the Sandinistas,
quashing efforts to democratize the party and expelling members like
former Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, who announced intentions to challenge
Ortega's power. In the 1990s, many of the most prominent cultural and
intellectual figures in the Sandinista movement, including liberation
theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal, poet and novelist Gioconda Belli
and Ortega's former Vice President Sergio Ramirez, broke ranks to form
a dissident party, the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In the first
half of this year, Lewites made a strong showing as that party's presidential
candidate, but he suffered a massive heart attack and died in July,
crippling the Renovation Movement's efforts for the election cycle.
Beyond internal strife within
the Sandinistas, Ortega's record has been marred by public scandals.
In 1998 a grown stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez, accused Ortega of
sexually abusing her for years, starting when she was an adolescent.
The following year, Ortega brokered a pact with then-president Arnoldo
Aleman, who was facing charges of corruption. El pacto, as the shady
deal is ominously known in Nicaragua, allowed both men to avoid prosecution
by granting them parliamentary immunity. It also made Ortega into one
of the country's most weighty power brokers by giving him control over
many governmental appointments. While el pacto remains in place, Aleman
was later stripped of his immunity and is now under house arrest, having
been convicted of embezzling approximately $100 million from the government.
Despite Ortega's many flaws,
the return of the Sandinistas to power creates the possibility of change
that can genuinely benefit Nicaragua's poor. Ortega campaigned on a
platform criticizing the "savage capitalism" implemented by
the successive conservative governments that have ruled the country
over the past sixteen years. In the decade and a half since the end
of the contra war, neoliberal economic policies like privatizing public
industries and creating "free trade" zones have failed to
launch an economic recovery. Today Nicaragua ranks with Haiti and Bolivia
among the poorest nations in the hemisphere. It remains to be seen what
Ortega's political program will look like during his new term as president:
whether he can be held accountable to the impoverished populations he
claims to represent and whether his party can reverse trends of deepening
hardship and desperation. But this is no reason not to applaud Nicaraguan
voters who stood up to Republican threats, rejected a continuation of
neoliberalism and demanded better of their government.
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