Come
On, CounterPunchers
Yes, the GOP Has Fallen, But Now We Must Fight the Democrats! Annual
Fundraising Appeal
We interrupt your regular reading
habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch
needs your financial support!
We're not in the habit of making
idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising
goal of $60,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced
to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near
the end of our year and the wolves are gathering at the door.
CounterPunch's website is supported
almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter.
We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried
getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't
on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations.
George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets
on cruiseliners.
The continued existence of
CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of
our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. We get thousands
of emails from you every day. Our website receives nearly 100,000
visits each day-and those numbers grow by the month. Of course,
all these readers chew up a lot of bandwidth and that costs money.
Through the Iraq war, the daily
traumas of the Bush administration, hurricanes, earthquakes and
the disappearance of the Democrats, many of you have found a
refuge at CounterPunch and made us your homepage. You tell us
that you love CounterPunch because the quality of writing you
find here every day and because we never flinch under fire. We
appreciate the support and are prepared for the fierce battles
to come as the Bush administration expands its wars abroad and
at home.
To contribute by phone you
can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
or mail contribution to:
CounterPunch
PO Box 228
Petrolia, CA 95558
Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November 13, 2006
Nicaragua Redux
The
Strange Return of Daniel Ortega
By JOE DeRAYMOND
On November 5, the United States held
an election in Nicaragua, and the candidate of El Frente Sandinista
de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), Daniel Ortega, became the
President of Nicaragua. It was the fifth consecutive time Ortega
was the Sandinista candidate, from the 1984 slam dunk victory
of the revolution when no Sandinista candidate could lose, through
the electoral defeats of 1990, 1996, and 2001. This year, in
a five party race, Ortega won the Presidency with 38% of the
vote, despite the best efforts of the United States.
I observed the final week of
the election with the Witness for Peace election delegation.
Our 20 accredited observers in 8 municipalities joined over
11,000 Nicaraguan observers, and hundreds of international observers
who were all certified by the Nicaraguan Supreme Electoral Council
(Consejo Supemo Electoral, or CSE) to watch the voting on election
day. The Carter Center, the Organization of American States,
the Procuraduria de Derechos Humanos (PDDH, a Nicaraguan human
rights ombudsman group) all were watching. Rodrigo Boneto, the
Chief of Staff of the CSE, estimated that there were, on average,
1.7 observers at each of the 11,243 voting stations (Juntas Receptoras
de Votos or JRV's) in Nicaragua.
The United States financed
the vast majority of these observers to guard against electoral
fraud by the FSLN, through the Nicaraguan organization Ética
y Transparencia, which placed over 11,000 Nicaraguans at the
polling places. Ética y Transparencia did a "quick
count" of results, in order to have a check on any possible
fraud during the counting. All of this observation proved unnecessary.
65% of registered voters turned out in a peaceful and orderly
fashion to make their choice. The Sandinistas had no need to
try any illegal maneuvers. The US observer effort would be better
directed to Ohio and Florida, where results are much more suspect
than in a process where each political party watches every vote
as it is hand counted.
Further, the United States
trained the Nicaraguan CSE in the voting process. They also
trained 48,000 poll officials from two political parties who
were challenging Ortega in this race, the Movimiento Renovador
Sandinisata (MRS) and the Alianza Liberal Nicarag_ense (ALN)
after they requested assistance. In total, the United States
Agency for International Develoopment (USAID), through the National
Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute,
and the International Foundation for Elections Systems spent
about $15 million on this election. The US promoted the vote,
published the lists of registered voters, paid for OAS observation,
coordinated donors, and assisted the CSE. To place this spending
in perspective, our group estimated that the Nicaraguan political
parties spent, in total, $17 million on the campaign.
Before the election, United
States officials and political players also intervened energetically
in the campaign. Otto Reich, Jean Kirkpatrick, Jeb Bush, Oliver
North, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs
Tom Shannon, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick,
and US Ambassador to Nicaragua Paul Trivelli weighed in publicly
on the elections. Trivelli offered to fund a primary among the
right parties in order to identify one candidate to oppose Ortega,
and thereby not split the vote. Congressmen Dan Burton and Dana
Rohrabacher threatened to embargo the over $500 million a year
in remittances that Nicaraguans send back to Nicaragua from the
US. The US Embassy spokesperson, Kristin Stewart, linked Ortega
and the Sandinistas to international terrorism. USAID official
Adolfo Franco and US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez threatened
a loss of jobs and aid if Nicaraguans chose Ortega.
On Thursday, November 2, our
delegation visited the US Embassy in Managua for an off-the-record
"Election Briefing for American Citizens in Nicaragua".
(Of course, they meant "United States Citizens".)
We passed into the gated compound, through a construction site
that will soon be a series of concrete walls. The Embassy is
a mansion on a hill overlooking Managua. To our surprise, Paul
Trivelli and a group of State Department and USAID decision-makers
were present. Trivelli's short talk was instantly forgettable.
The USAID official present,
however, laid it all out for us: the money spent, the groups
used, the regrets. At one point he stated"If we had wanted
to throw the elections, we could have invested about $2 million
and probably done that." The fact that Nicaragua was totally
dependent on the United States for this election process did
not seem the least bit objectionable to him. When I tried to
reach him with my "Red Dawn" analogy, which runs along
the lines of "How would you like it if your country were
invaded for the purposes of establishing a political system that
suited someone else?" The official responded, "We would
never allow that."
Nicaraguans do not have a choice.
The United States owns the store, owns the customers, and all
serve the needs of the Empire. When the OAS filed a complaint
that the US should "respect the decision of Nicaraguans",
it was simply shrugged off. As our election delegation coordinator,
Brynne Keith-Jennings, noted, "the very least Trivelli could
do is to demonstrate due respect for the Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic Relations, which states that 'it is the duty of all
persons enjoying such privileges and immunities not to interfere
in the internal affairs of that State'."
So it is no surprise that when
Ortega accepted the concession of his closest rival, Eduardo
Montealegre, on November 7, he was not smiling. He had returned
to the Presidency after 16 years, but the challenge ahead is
daunting. His party is compromised by the deals necessary to
attain the office, and his nation has immense and immediate needs.
Nicaragua today is the second
poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. Three
fourths of the population of 5.6 million receive less than the
minimum level of nutrition, and half receive "critically
deficient" nutrition. One million school-aged children
do not attend school. 55% do not have access to basic medicine.
45% live on less than $1 a day. Literacy has decreased 20%
from 1990, to 67.5%. An increasing number are emigrating to
Costa Rica and the United States to work. The United States
waged the Contra War that claimed 50,000 Nicaraguan lives in
the 1980's in order to defeat the Sandinistas, and in the years
of our influence, the country has declined with disastrous effects
on the population.
Not that the country was in
good condition in 1990, when Nicaragua was enduring a huge inflation
rate, an 11 billion dollar debt, an infrastructure damaged by
the contra, the shock of the war, a hated compulsory military
service program, and the United States government. The United
States not only kept the Contra War active throughout the 80's,
but also held out a well-publicized carrot during the 1989
1990 election period. They offered the candidacy of Violeta
Chamorro to run against Daniel Ortega of the FSLN. She was the
wife of the newspaper publisher Pedro Chamorro, whose assasssination
in 1979 united Nicaragua against Somoza. In a well-funded billboard
and newpaper campaign, the voters were told the war would end
with the election of Violeta. The Nicaraguan voters rejected
Ortega and achieved a dearly bought "peace". After
the election, Ortega and the Sandinistas accepted the results,
but carried out a desperate pillaging of assets for personal
gain, known in Nicaragua as the "piñata".
Violeta promptly placed Nicaragua
squarely under the neoliberal thumb of the US and the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, and The Interamerican Development
Bank. She released the US from the 17 billion dollar judgment
levied in favor of Nicaragua by the World Court. The assets
and people of Nicaragua were literally sold at bargain prices.
Since 1990, Nicaragua has gone through various "structural
adjustment" fire sales of public assets and constrictions
of public services at the insistence of the international predators.
In 1996, the US tilted, again,
toward a unity candidate of the right, Arnoldo Alemán
of the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC), who defeated
Daniel Ortega of the FSLN. Arnoldo raised the art of political
corruption to new heights, and increased the family fortunes
to over $250,000,000, of which an estimated $100,000,000 came
directly from government coffers. While Arnoldo was enriching
himself at the expense of an impoverished population, Daniel
was fighting off accusations that he had been sexually abusing
his stepdaughter for years. The two men found common interest
in uniting their parties, not in ideology, but in political control
of the government and treasury. Thus was born a pact between
the PLC of the right and the FSLN of the revolutionary left,
known in Nicaragua as "El Pacto". It divided the spoils
of government, and also provided both Ortega and Aleman automatic
Assembly seats, which carry with them immunity from criminal
prosecution.
In 2001, the candidate of the
united right under the banner of the PLC was Enrique Bolaños,
Aleman's Vice-President. Daniel Ortega, again, gained the nomination
of the FSLN. By now, both parties had developed factions that
opposed the leadership. Sandinistas such as Doña Maria
Tellez, Sergio Ramirez and Ernesto Cardenal had been falling
away from the Ortega-led party for years. They formed a party
reform movement called Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS).
However, the power of patronage and El Pacto were used by both
Alemán and Ortega, and the dissident factions were marginalized.
Daniel had real chances to win in 2001, which were dashed with
the attack on the Twin Towers. After 9/11, the US financed a
campaign in Nicaragua that linked the Sandinistas to international
terror, and Bolaños won.
After the 2001 elections, the
US position began to twist back in a knot of contradiction, as
both the US and Nicaragua brought criminal charges against Alemán
and officials in his government. Bolaños was forced to
strip Alemán of immunity, and oppose his own party in
order to do so. Alemán was convicted of stealing government
funds, and sentenced to prison. He continued to maintain his
control over the PLC, however, even from prison. He is currently
under "house arrest", allowed to travel within the
large area of the Department of Managua. His PLC candidate this
year is José Rizo, and his daughter, Maria Dolores Alemán,
is an Assembly candidate who figures prominently on campaign
billboards around Managua.
The PLC had developed a faction
that wanted to end the grip of Alemán. A group of rightwing
parties formed under the banner of the Alianza Liberación
Nicarag_ense (ALN), and presented a slate of candidates led by
Presidential candidate Eduardo Montealegre. This candidate and
party gained the favor of the US, which was clearly embarassed
by the continued presence of Alemán in a position of political
power. Our delegation met with ALN campaign leaders Commandante
Henry Zelaya and Javier Llanes, ex-contra fighters. According
to Commandante Henry, "We lost democracy 26 years ago."
He went on to extoll the virtues of life under Somoza, when
the debt was less and the country, in general, better off than
during the Sandinista years. These fervent anti-communists are
reliving the cold war, and were the political darlings of the
US government in this election.
In 2005, the popular FSLN ex-mayor
of Managua, Herty Lewites, made a bid to become the presidential
candidate of the Frente in 2006. Ortega would not allow a primary,
and, when Herty would not back down, Ortega and the FSLN leadership
expelled him from the party, along with other longtime Sandinistas
such as Hugo Tinoco. This dispute led, finally, to the split
of the MRS from the FSLN, with a ticket led by Herty as a Presidential
candidate, Edmundo Jarquin, a banker and economist, Vice-President.
In July, Herty died of a heart attack, and Edmundo became the
MRS Presidential candidate, joined on the ticket by Carlos Mejía
Godoy, the poet, musician and singer.
Thus it came to be that the
Nicaraguan voter had four serious choices for President and Assembly,
the established PLC of the right, its breakoff the ALN, and the
FSLN of the former revolutionary left, with its breakoff MRS.
It was analogous to a United States election in which the Republicans
and Democrats each developed rump factions that ran candidates
to return the parties to their roots, against the fattened-at-the-trough
corporate parties.
There was a fifth choice as
well, another blast from the past, Eden Pastora, the candidate
for Alternativa por el Cambio (AC, or Alternative for Change).
He was Commandante Zero in the FSLN during the years of the revolution,
and became a popular hero for such exploits as the taking of
the National Assembly. When I was in Nicaragua in 1983, he was
sardonically referred to as "Commandante Kodak", for
his propensity for jumping in front of any camera. His inability
to achieve leadership status within the Sandinista government
led him to form his own counter-revolutionary force in Costa
Rica, from which he would attack. He was back this year as a
Presidential Candidate, with his chiseled features on billboards,
for Zero Corruption, Zero Pact, etc: alas, also a zero vote,
a quarter of a percent.
As the election aproached,
it became clear that the FSLN and Daniel Ortega were running
in the lead. Daniel could count on a base 40% vote in this five
candidate race. He would never get more than that base, however,
as his history of corruption since 1990, and bad memories of
a 1980's war give him high negatives. He would never win a runoff,
in a one on one race, which was what the Constitution demanded
through the 2001 election if no one gained a majority on the
first ballot. The solution for Ortega had been to mobilize El
Pacto to change the constitution, to allow a President to win
with 35% of the vote, as long as he was 5% ahead of the next
challenger. As long as both a PLC and ALN candidate remained
in the race, he had a good chance to reach the Presidency. Indeed,
Ortega's 38% was just enough compared to 29% for the ALN, 26%
for the PLC and 6% for the MRS.
Daniel and the Sandinistas
also made concessions to the right. On a personal level, Daniel
"confessed" publicly of his sins of the 80's to the
conservative cleric Obando y Bravo. The Sandinista Party allied
itself with the conservative Catholic Church to outlaw all abortion,
in the weeks before the election. Nicaragua has had a law on
the books for a century that allowed a woman to obtain an abortion
in cases of rape, incest, or when her life was in danger. The
law passed by the Nicaraguan Assembly in October, 52-0, outlaws
all abortion. Already, a well-publicized case of a woman who
died while attempting to receive care for a dangerous pregnancy
has hit the papers, which ran a photo of her in her casket, with
her dead fetus on her stomach. It was difficult to listen to
Sandinista militants trying to justify their party's support
for this law.
The Sandinistas support an
environmentally disastrous canal that would run in the San Juan
River and through Lake Nicaragua. The Sandinista Vice-President,
Jaime Morales Carazo, was a contra spokesperson during the war,
and is a close associate of Alemán, godfather to his children.
One of the leading forces in the FSLN is Rosario Murillo, Daniel
Ortega's wife and campaign manager. (They were married after
years of co'habitation during the campaign by Obando y Bravo.)
She fashioned a campaign that included John Lennon's song "Give
Peace a Chance" (in Spanish, "Lo que queremos, paz
y amor, queremos la paz"), and a change in the FSLN colors
to a hideous shocking pink and yellow, instead of the traditional
red and black.
All of which is to highlight
the clumsiness, the hypocrisy and inutility of US foreign policy
in Nicaragua. The heavy-handed opposition to Ortega is simply
not necessary. Luis Carrión, the chief of the MRS campaign,
noted that it seems to be the policy makers of the Reagan years
that still control the US government have an irrational hatred
of Ortega it is an impulse, not a policy. Ortega is not
an ideologically driven foe, but a leader of a highly impoverished,
small nation, just trying to survive. In his brief and sombre
acceptance speech, Daniel spoke of opening up the country for
investment, not of opening the country to the South. The Assembly
will make him a weak President, as the seats will break down
to 37 for the Sandinistas, 30 for the ALN, 18 for the PLC and
6 for the MRS, giving a clear majority to the rightwing parties.
One factor raised often by
US leaders is the spectre of Chavez. In the war of words, Chavez
is never a "democratic" force. He is accused of intervening
in the elections. The Venezuelan oil and fertilizer aid was
used to justify US intervention by USAID officials. There is
no substance to this argument, or in the charges that the FSLN
has links to terror groups. Venezuela, Cuba, the FSLN, a Hamas
government in Palestine, are attacked by US policy makers because
they have a capacity for sovereignty, which cannot be tolerated
in the ever-expanding sphere of influence of the Empire.
Our delegation heard the hopes
of people working among the poor and in civil society, perhaps
to get a Cuban doctor in their community, to have real solidarity
aid from Chavez and Venezuela. They have no illusions about any
quick fixes. They expressed to our delegation their understanding
that the Nicaraguan government, including Daniel Ortega and the
Sandinistas, has abandoned them for 16 years. They will continue
their work, and do not look for big changes with any election.
Ortega's seemingly impossible task is to balance the demands
of the US, the bankers and the polarized domestic political landscape
with the need of his people for a change.
Joe DeRaymond lives in Freemansburg, PA. He can
be reached at: jderaymond@enter.net
What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
A Special Investigation:
China's Mass Murder for Body Parts
CounterPunch
outlines the terrible evidence that thousands of Falun Gong members
have been killed to supply China's body parts trade with the
West. Larry Lack reviews
the evidence and explains why the US government is keeping its
mouth shut. CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month But remember, we are
funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch.
Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
