National Post (National Edition)
Descent into thuggery
DANIEL ORTEGA DIGS IN WHILE NICARAGUA IMPLODES
After more than three months of violence and state terror, Nicaraguans are now fleeing their country, showing up by the thousands in neighbouring Costa Rica and Honduras. They’re filing refugee claims in Panama, Mexico, and even the United States. Nearly 25,000 Nicaraguans have applied for asylum in Costa Rica since April, when Daniel Ortega’s paramilitaries started shooting student protesters. Costa Rican immigration officials say they can’t keep up — they’re getting about 200 refugee claims every day. The Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights is calling for the international community’s help.
Only 195 people have been killed, Ortega says — Nicaraguan human rights groups put the death toll at around 450 — but at least Ortega has stopped pretending it isn’t happening. All along, he’s been denying that his paramilitaries have been involved in the repression. In an interview broadcast by CNN on Monday, Ortega said again, no, there are no paramilitaries — they’re just volunteer police officers.
This will strike any dispassionate observer as propaganda of the lowest kind, as will Ortega’s claims that the student-led protests are the work of a satanic cult, that the protesters are terrorists, and that the Roman Catholic clergy that had supported him, then retreated into neutrality, and then mostly turned against him, are agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
But across the spectrum of left-wing or formerly leftwing solidarity groups that have long supported Comandante Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, the capacity for wishful thinking, narrative-mongering and make-believe is apparently fathomless. When it’s not that kind of thing, it’s an embarrassed silence.
In the United States, the anti-globalization Alliance For Global Justice proposes some kind of conspiracy against Ortega involving the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. In the United Kingdom, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action chalks up Ortega’s problems to fake news and a misinformation campaign aided and abetted by Amnesty International. In Canada, the labour and church groups that have been backing the Sandinistas since the glory days of their 1979 revolution, which handily and usefully overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, have lately gone strangely silent.
There’s also the usual gibberish produced by Venezuela’s Telesur network, and lately the slavishly pro-ortega interventions of the creepy anti-zionist pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal, whose sundry “anti-imperialist” followers drink it all down, vomit it back up and circulate it all over the place via the convenience of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
But the steady stream of Orteguista propaganda isn’t gaining much traction, owing mainly to credible reports from inside Nicaragua, the testimony of several of the Sandinista’s own founding champions, and the denunciations that are piling up against the corruptions of Sandinismo coming from liberation theologians and the aging Tupamaro guerrilla veteran Jose Mujica from Uruguay, and even New Left archdruid Noam Chomsky hasn’t managed to circum-locute a defence of Ortega’s crude brutalities.
Writing in the reliably progressive journal New Internationalist, the Nicaraguan journalist Carmen Herrera Vallejos sums up the Nicaraguan tragedy this way: “Today, Sandinismo has become a despotic regime, like the one it fought against.”
The Sandinistas’ descent into kleptocratic authoritarianism wasn’t inevitable, but the revolutionary movement’s vulnerabilities to strongman politics were evident from the earliest days.
After Somoza’s overthrow in 1979, the amateurish, idealistic FSLN government pushed a surprisingly moderate politics. U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s support for the counter-revolutionary “Contras” certainly didn’t help, but by the time of the 1984 elections, which the Sandinistas won, the dominant faction was turning to Warsaw Pact countries for support.
In the 1990 elections, Ortega’s FSLN was turfed, and the party leaders retrenched within the resources they’d looted from the properties once owned by the Somoza regime. During the 1990s, the FSLN was at its own throat. Broken into factions and rocked by the allegations of Ortega’s stepdaughter that the comandante had raped her as a child, party leaders who defended the young woman were purged. With an eye on returning to power at any cost, Ortega entered into a kind of powersharing pact with the ruling Constitutional Liberal Party.
By the time Ortega won the 2006 presidential elections, much of the Sandinista old guard had been driven out, or had left in disgust, and Ortega formed a new government with the aid of former Contra leaders and the cunning manipulations of Rosario Murillo, his wife and now vice-president.
Following the pattern set by Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Ortega finagled his way around presidential term limits, allowing him to win the presidency in 2011 and again in 2014. Ortega’s majority in the National Assembly ended up agreeing to scrap term limits entirely, allowing him to serve as president for life, so long as he submits to pro-forma elections.
Ortega’s long and ugly descent into police-state thuggery continued largely unencumbered until April this year, when the paramilitary groups he’d established to bully grassroots opposition activists murdered 40 people involved in a studentled protest campaign against changes to the country’s pension laws. The public erupted in disgust.
The protests grew larger, and the protesters sometimes resorted to violence. The villages and towns that were once revolutionary Sandinista strongholds threw themselves into the insurrection.
In the New Internationalist, Carmen Herrera Vallejos asks: “Isn’t this the process that sociologists call ‘implosion’?”
It is. Nicaragua is imploding, and it’s anyone’s guess whether anything short of some sort of neo-sandinista revolution will effectively dislodge the new Somoza now occupying the president’s office in Managua.