Ortega of Nicaragua decides to become official dictator
The idea is to save democracy, or some such blah blah blah, by ending elections in that country:
[Ortego said] There won’t be any more elections here. There won’t be any more elections for them [the opposition factions] to try to seize the government, to seize power.
And we are going to work with the national assemblies and the corresponding organizations on the laws because laws need to be made.
Let them build a wall, a blockade against the coup plotters, the traitors and no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t be able to.
The polls must not have been looking so good.
If you’re wondering how long Ortega has been around, he’s 80 years old now and was the country’s head from 1979 to 1990, was voted out, won again in the 2006 election and has been in power ever since:
In June 2018, organizations such as Amnesty International and the Organization of American States reported that Ortega had engaged in a violent oppression campaign against anti-government protests. The violent crackdown and subsequent constriction of civil liberties have led to waves of emigration to neighboring Costa Rica, with more than 30,000 Nicaraguans filing for asylum in that country.
His government jailed many potential rival candidates in the 2021 general election, including Cristiana Chamorro Barrios. Ortega’s government also imprisoned other opponents, such as former allies Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres Jiménez. In August 2021, Nicaragua cancelled the operating permits of six US and European NGOs. Many critics of the Ortega government, including opposition leaders, journalists and members of civil society, fled the country in mid-2021. In his fourth term, Ortega ordered the closure of several NGOs, universities, and newspapers, and resumed his repression of the Catholic Church after a brief rapprochement, imprisoning prelate Rolando José Álvarez Lagos.
Nice guy.
Now he wants the Nicaraguan legislature to abolish elections. Apparently, they have the power to do that. It’s not quite the Enabling Act in Nazi Germany – by which the Reichstag effectively dissolved itself. But the Nicaraguan legislature has been cooperative with Ortega’s accumulation of more and more power, and it will continue down that path:
Ortega and [his wife] Murillo expanded their authority through sweeping constitutional changes that took effect in 2025. The reforms included extending the presidential term from five years to six and placing the legislative, judicial and electoral institutions under the authority of the presidency.
The pair now exercise control over nearly every branch of government, including the armed forces, police and judiciary.
Ortega, Nicaragua’s longest-serving leader, is scheduled to remain in office until early 2028, although his statement on Sunday effectively canceled Nicaragua’s next elections, which had been scheduled for November 2027.
Critics say Ortega had already effectively eliminated meaningful electoral competition during elections in 2011, 2016 and 2021.
As Rubio says:
“Daniel Ortega’s declaration that, under his family’s dictatorship, Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have abandoned even the pretense of popular consent,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday.
The US had already imposed some sanctions and visa restrictions on government officials. The international community has been condemning Ortega for quite some time. But they are powerless to do anything. I doubt Trump will pull another Maduro caper, although I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
As Turkey’s Erdogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” Ortega stepped off a long time ago, but now he’s telling the world in no uncertain terms. And, in the usual way of Newspeak, he says he’s doing it in order to save democracy.
Many US political personalities are outraged at this. An equal number — probably more — are envious, and wondering how they could pull this off. California’s politicians are Exhibit A.
Trump should use that to troll the Dems and claim he wants to “save democracy” in America by eliminating future elections…hey, the left once loved Daniel Ortega.
How sad if Mr President Ortega and Mrs Vice President Ortega woke up blown up.
And that boob Jimmy Carter (and plenty of other Democrats) thought the Somozas were bad. I think it was FDR who said about the first Somoza, “he may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”
F: Many US political personalities are outraged at this.
Be that as it may, my bandwidth is all filled up.
He’s only making formal what has been clear for years. But has he eliminated local crime, as El Salvador has?
I’m amazed that it took this long.
I was in in Nicaragua a little while after Somoza fell. When I talked to people there about the revolution, I admitted that Somoza was terrible, that there was no middle ground at the time, and that I’d be a Sandinista if I were Nicaraguan. I also always said that I was worried about the future. All the bookshops and stationery stores were full of crude Marxist propaganda, and it was obvious that the country was headed for a Cuban-style disaster. That’s what happened. I’m old now, and even more surprised by how slowly history works.
Postscript:
Nicaragua has beautiful beaches. Back then, it was so cheap that I could hang out with journalists on expense accounts. That was, by far, the low point of the trip. What I remember most is one day swimming in the ocean and being dive-bombed by a flock of pelicans. Years later, I told that story to some Catholic friends. They gave it a religious spin and cited the relevant Biblical passages. For better or worse, I’m still an anti-communist atheist.
Nicaruaga is a beautiful place. It is a human tragedy that rotten people like Ortega can ascend to control. See Cuba. Self-enriching vermin.
I’m surprised that Ortega has decided to have no more elections, is he tired of the prospect of 100% approval in perpetuity? (sarc)
Having overthrown Somoza, the Sandinistas considered themselves to be the very model of the modern anti-Somocista. However, the Sandinistas, practically from the get-go, copied certain practices of the Somozas. The Sandinistas had “turbas divinas”—-divine mobs—-to attack peaceful anti-Sandinista demonstrators. Turns out the “turbas divinas” were inspired by Somoza’s Nicolasa, mobs that attacked peaceful anti-Somocista demonstrators.
NICARAGUA: Call All Trulls (Time Magazine_1944)
This may have been the first mob attack that Nicolasa Sevilla led, but it was far from the last.
I am reminded of such savants of the left like Bernie Sanders or the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes lecturing us that Reagan was driving the Sandinistas into the arms of the Soviets. The only problem with that lecture was that the Sandinistas voluntarily jumped into the arms of the Soviets well before Reagan got elected.
In the summer of 1981,Thomas Enders, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, went to Managua in an attempt to strike a deal with the Sandinistas.
The sine qua non was assistance to the FMLN. Other points could be negotiated, Enders said. As committed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, the Sandinistas could not consider stopping assistance to the FMLN.
I am reminded of Trump’s attempts to negotiate with Iran. Get rid of the nuclear stuff, Trump tells Iran, and we can live with each other. The Iranian government cannot consider getting rid of the nuclear stuff as it strikes at their identity.
(Enders info from Shirley Christian’s Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family.)
Back in the 80s I was at my personal Peak Left. I found myself at a benefit for Nicaragua, being shilled to go to Nicaragua as part of an American delegation.
Well, my Peak Left wasn’t that strong and by then I had been through enough recruitment spiels to Just Say No.
Paul Kantner, a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane, did join one of those Nicaragua trips, along with Marlon Brando no less, and he wrote a party song about how much fun he had there.
______________________________
And then my whole world turned kind of crazy
My whole world came apart
I found my way to Madeleine Street
I found my lover and I found my heart
Found my lover and I found my heart
Down in Nicaragua in a little music bar
Where all the people were dancin’
All the people’re so right
All the people makin’ love
Long into the wartime night
–Jefferson Airplane, “Madeline Street” (1989)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcLCUjzRWwk
______________________________
It’s still pretty cool to be a leftist American going to Nicaragua. A few years ago Medea Benjamin and her Code Pink crowd went and it was all air-conditioned hotel rooms, grilled steaks and cold beer.
Nice!
Quite nice of him to say straight.out.
Back in the day, the libs supported the communists in Nicaragua, opposed the elected government of El Salvador, supported the communist attempt to shoot their way into the elected government of El Salvador, and opposed the US’ effort to support the elected goverrnment of El Salvador.
Back in the day, the libs supported the communists in Nicaragua, opposed the elected government of El Salvador, supported the communist attempt to shoot their way into the elected government of El Salvador, and opposed the US’ effort to support the elected government of El Salvador.
Includes most liberal protestant denoms.
I don’t entirely regret my time on the left.
The “elected government” of El Salvador ran death squads that imprisoned, tortured and/or killed thousands of Salvadorans as well as murdering American nuns and Archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying mass. They did so with money from American taxpayers.
Maybe that’s a worthwhile trade-off. Here’s a poem written by a liberal American who went to El Salvador:
_____________________________________
The Colonel
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
–Carolyn Forché, “The Country Between Us” (1978)
_____________________________________
It’s not actually a poem. It was just notes Forché took when she visited a Salvadoran military officer who commanded death squads.
The notes got mixed into poems that she was showing to Salvadoran victims of that “elected government.” The victims said, This one, this is the real poem about our lives.
Huxley. Among other things, the sanctuary thing was a hoax,known to be such by TPTB. See Roy Beck. Sometime later, the Arena party won elections, showing that the peasants weren’t listening to you. But it was refreshing to find at least one place where the left disapproval of much things..
The sanctuary thing was a hoax…
Richard Aubrey:
As part of a church group in San Francisco in those days I worked with Salvadoran refugees.
Do you deny, ignore or accept the abuses I listed? Was kidnapping, imprisonment, torture and murder OK with you as long as it was against the left or those so suspected?
I’m not blind to all the issues.
My father’s best childhood friend became a priest, Fr. Miguel Baca, who was well-known in Santa Fe and on the liberal side. He went to El Salvador in those terrible days.
I met him not long after. He damned all sides in El Salvador. He had had enough. There were no good guys in his opinion.
Including the “elected government” of El Salvador.
Yup.
There were thugs on both sides. The FMLN had a penchant for choosing their leaders, not by the ballot, but by the gun. Dr. Mélida Anaya Montes, who went by the nom-de-guerre of Ana María, was killed in Managua in an FMLN power struggle. She and the majority of the FMLN were in support of negotiations with the government. Salvador Cayetano Carpio opposed any negotiation. The Sandinista investigation of the murder concluded that her murderers did so at the command of Salvador Cayetano Carpio. After being exposed, he committed suicide.
Roque Dalton, also known as a poet and author, was another Salvadorean guerrilla leader who lost his life in a power struggle. At the time he was killed in 1975, word went out that he was killed for being a CIA agent. Decades later it was revealed that he was killed by others in the ERP because they disagreed w Dalton’s advocacy of more contact with civil society and less military action.
Wikipedia does not mention that Winnall Dalton, Roque Dalton’s father, was a first cousin of Linda Ronstadt.
In 1981 I made friends with a family I had met on the bus, and stayed at their home near the Biotopo del Quetzel in Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. At their home I met Mario Dary Rivera, who was the driving force behind the founding of the Biotopo. Several months after I met him, guerrillas killed him.
I worked on a rig in the Guatemalan jungle that was in the middle of the war. After I left Guatemala, the airstrip we used to get to the rig was hit with mortars. The rig hands were from Raxruja. Their take on the conflict: leave us alone. They would talk about the conflict only if no other peer was with us. One told me that the generals had been grabbing land in the area, which I later confirmed from an article in NACLA. He also told me that the guerrillas had killed some neighbors who were suspected of being orejas/informants. It is quite possible that the army had done the killing. However, the fact that I had also heard about the generals’ land grab leads me to suspect that in this instance it was the guerrillas that had done the killing.
From my experience with current or former guerilla conflicts in Guatemala, Argentina, and Bolivia, I concluded that the FMLN had little support in El Salvador. I was mistaken. In my defense, I had never been to El Salvador, so my opinion did not come from first-hand observation.
Gringo:
I always appreciate hearing of your knowledge and experiences southward.
It’s a complicated world.
‘And do you still beat your wife?’
To clarify, IMO, Huxley’s question to Richard is of the same emotional thuggery as the wife beating question,
There are a lot of what-ifs. Had the FMLN been able to shoot its way to power, would the bloodbath have continued after they took power? What would have happened if the US had not given aid to the El Salvador government? Did the US aid increase or temper the bloodbath?
Had the FMLN been able to shoot its way to power, would the bloodbath have continued after they took power? My take is that as the guerrillas had a tendency to elect their leaders by the bullet instead of the ballot, the bloodbath would have continued. There was also a bloodbath in the 1930s, well before US aid.
Did the US aid increase or temper the bloodbath? My take is that US aid reduced the bloodbath. I correlated US aid in constant dollars, and killings.
From Demographic Research, VOLUME 41, ARTICLE 27, PAGES 781–814
PUBLISHED 1 OCTOBER 2019 ,Civilian killings and disappearances during
civil war in El Salvador (1980–1992)
US Foreign Aid to El Salvador
Correlating US aid and killings: -0.701 for known killings, and -0.496 for estimated killings. Which supports the hypothesis that US aid tempered the killings.
Regarding the what-if of no US aid after the failed Jan 1981 Final Offensive, my take is increased bloodbath and FMLN in power.
https://foreignassistance.gov/data?country=El%20Salvador&fiscal_year=2024&transaction_type_name=obligations
http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol41/27/
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2019.41.27
huxley. It’s a long story in the sense that the examples go on forever, so I will pass over the repetitive dozens:
As you acknowledge, Sanctuary was a hoax. Challenged a couple of reporters on it, got blank looks. Beck, in United Methodist Reporter, laid it all out. Couple of issues later was a perfectly predictable letter to the editor saying, in effect, well, okay, but how can you take this issue away from us? IOW you NEEDED that stuff to such an extent that….there was no reason to believe you about the time of day, much less anything of interest.
went there in 87 with a church group under the Center For Global Education and did the dog-and-pony show for the peace freak trade. Our guide, a reasonable woman in the context which was to say lefty, was on to me and we would occasionally share an eye roll. In San Salvador, we were treated to the horrors of what happened when somebody recorded a church service. So, off we go to Mass. There’s a Swedish news team there. Their equipment, as of forty years ago, was bulky, camera the size of a briefcase and boom mike about twelve feet long (seemed like it but maybe only eight). In fussing around getting set up, they almost knocked over some Eucharistic fixture of some kind. Not ….any fuss from our local guides and dispensers of terrorizing fear of recording church services.
Once told with bated breath about a Famous Labor Leader injured at a demo. THREE TIMES the cops tried to stop him on the way to the hospital. THREE TIMES!! Maybe yelled something about his mother at hi as he went by. Best they had. The participatory homily in the church service in El Salvador impressed me. I asked the guide if there were words in Spanish for “Uh” and “you know”. Another eye roll.
Women in our group weren’t allowed to go out without a guy escorting them. The Just AND Righteous (just ask them) men in the group declined the honor so it was up to chump Aubrey. On the way back from an expedition to the statue in Managua harbor of a peasant brandishing an AK, the woman was running out of gas. Smoked like a chimney and the physical condition of a tapeworm. Our route was up a slight grade. From one shady wall or bench to another. Waved currency at cabbies. Got flipped off. They knew who we were; the Sandalistas, there to schmooze with their oppressors.
Our local guide in El Salvador was found, shortly after we returned to the States, to have a half ton of Warsaw Pact munitions buried in her back yard. I don’t deny atrocities. Hell, I did civil rights in Mississippi in the Sixties. Atrocities happen. I deny the left’s insistence that they are dispositive only if an ally of the US commits them. The Sandinista regime made some “mistakes”, according to some guy, lanky, blonde and well spoken faking it as a farmer (US Marines had been in the courtry some generations earlier) in the countryside, accompanied by a short, dark guy who was, presumably, a real farmer along for local color but who said nothing.
My wife and daughter went to Costa Rica on a couple of mission trips. The ordinary people there, including some we know from AFS exchange student program (one of whom had been my kids’ all-time favorite babysitter), really don’t like having Nicaragua’s government n the neighborhood.
Point is, the left did, as always, support any enemy of the US, no matter how they have to lie. And they don’t care how obvious they are. …..don’t take this issue away from us….
And see Roy Becks’s “On Thin Ice” .
My immediate reaction was—sounds like Lori Berenson. Lori Berenson, a US faculty brat and former MIT student, spent 15-20 years in Peruvian prisons for assisting a terrorist group. Before going to Peru, she had also assisted the FMLN in El Salvador. But a cursory Internet search did not tie Lori Berenson to the munitions buried in a back yard.
Here is a review of Roy Beck’s book. Review: On Thin Ice.
My initial exposure to Sandalistas was from a meeting featured a Sandalista recently returned: “I have seen the truth in Nicaragua.” You know the drill. The meeting was sponsored by an openly admitted Communist. I asked the Sandalista a question about tortillas, as I had sampled different kinds in different countries. She didn’t know from nothing. She didn’t speak Spanish.
I attended a rally where a speaker misrepresented what the WSJ had said about the Reagan and Carter administration 1980-1 discoveries that the Sandinistas were sending arms to the FMLN.
What decided me was reading Robert Czarkowski’s De Polonia a Nicaragua, a Pole’s story about his visit to Nicaragua. He got a visa in Honduras, but was still arrested upon entering Nicaragua—on suspicion of belonging to Solidarity. After five months in Nicaraguan prisons, he was let go.
Richard, I imagine that you were in the minority for responding with skepticism to the Sandalista tour. Good for you.
I am reminded of the reaction of the Mayor of Burlington to his Cuba tour in the 1980s. Bernie Sanders enthused that the Cuban people had an “almost religious reverence” for Fidel. Yes Bernie, what did you expect them to say, knowing that anything they said to your translator could be reported to government authorities?
Bernie knows. He thinks it’s a good idea. Fools the chumps, who go there intending to be fooled. Makes you feel righteous and holy. Can’t recall the name of our El Salvador local guide who was busted. Don’t think it was Berenson. So we’re out in Matagalpa, getting The Tour about how things are. Big shot had a high-end bouffant, top-end Raytheons, AK 50 carefully casually leaning in the corner. Time for the local militia to go for a run. Off go maybe twenty guys with three or four cadre with pistols. At Benning, we’d been trained to run either side of the guerilla/insurgent hill. Thirty young guys out in the weeds with three or four pistol-armed cadre…… So, on the way back, in the dark, flash-thump. Flash-thump. Flash…one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand…thump. Eye contact with the guide. “Central American thunderstorms aren’t like what we have at home.” Flash…thump. Mortars within a mile, but…thirty unarmed guys running down a country road just in time for the peace freak contingent. Nope. Must have gone out maybe a quarter mile and waited for us to leave
What you’re seeing from Ortega is the same pattern we’ve watched emerge across the ideological left for years: repeat the talking points, ignore the realities, and treat “truth” as something flexible — something that can be sacrificed whenever it becomes inconvenient to the narrative. It’s not accidental; it’s baked into the ideology.
Ortega canceling elections “to save democracy” is the purest expression of that mindset. It’s the same rhetorical trick used elsewhere: redefine democracy so that it means permanent rule by the correct people, and redefine dissent as a threat to the system. Once you accept that framing, anything becomes justified — censorship, repression, eliminating elections entirely, possibly killing your opponents — all in the name of “protecting democracy.”
This is how authoritarianism now presents itself: not with tanks in the streets, but with press releases claiming moral necessity. The language still speaks of democracy, but the actions betray it — the sort of doublespeak Orwell warned about. Ortega was always a thug. He understands exactly what he’s doing. He is using soft democratic language to disguise the hard, coercive force beneath it.
In Ortega’s case, the mask simply slipped. He’s saying the quiet part out loud.
The left, US-based or otherwise will not give a hoot. IT’s the way things should work.
Ortega has been kept in power for 15 years by vote fraud. The Obama people have done nothing much in response. (They and certain attentive publics were most distressed when the sketchy President of Honduras was arrested by military officers and put on a plane out of the country, even though he was replaced by an elected successor within months).
Back in the day, the libs supported the communists in Nicaragua, opposed the elected government of El Salvador, supported the communist attempt to shoot their way into the elected government of El Salvador, and opposed the US’ effort to support the elected goverrnment of El Salvador.
==
True of a considerable swath of opinion journalists and faculty. However, the usual response was less forthright – contrived and twee complaints about how the Reagan administration was implementing policy. They had no constructive alternatives, to be sure.
Roy Beck reported in On Thin Ice on the veracity of the claims of Sanctuary supporters that “up to 40%” of deported Salvadoreans met “death or persecution” back in El Salvador. From the book:
@ Gringo > “They were a thought and action soon scorned.”
As with the fraud (so much fraud!) in American “welfare” organizations and their recipients (not their designated official beneficiaries): if you acknowledge the truth, the gravy train stops running.
The agenda of the Left is always power — and money — and nothing else.
At least Conservatives (especially religious) and Liberals (old-style) include some genuinely concerned and effective people & organizations who deliver the aid they promise (e.g. “35-year-old, Geneva-based refugee organization”).
I do not think I have ever heard of a Leftist “aid” organization that was not a fraud, delivering at most pennies of help on the dollars collected. That now seems to include most, if not all, American government agencies (all, or most, founded by nascent leftists and currently run by them as well).
Spent 2 hours this morning assisting a real, grass-roots, food bank ministry. Helped put the grocery-store donations on the tables in an assisted care facility, and watched the elderly residents “shop” (probably 50 of them). The ministry delivers to different places every day of the week on a rotating schedule.
All volunteers, including the head organizer.
If American retirees (many church-sponsored) quit working, the entire welfare system would fall apart: they are delivering the goods, where the Agencies embezzle the funds and then credit themselves for “alleviating poverty” (well, padding the bank rolls of NGO executives and Somali warlords does alleviate THEIR poverty).
/rant
Some time after 1975, I called on a number of “peace” organizations and asked about the massacre at Hue during Tet 68, and the Cambodian killing fields. Pretty much blank or briskly dismissed. All depends. I’m not sure if they know how visible they are in their flexible standards. But if they do wonder, which I doubt, they certainly don’t care.
Beginning in 1968, when the Tet Offensive resulted in the smashing of the VC, it became obvious that what was going on was an invasion of South Viet Nam, a sovereign nation, by North Viet Nam, an entirely separate entity. This sort of thing is considered a bad idea, when we do it, anyway.
By 1975, the South was holding its own, their military in good shape due to training and experience. No US combat troops were in action and few others were in country. We said we’d provide the resources. But the war continued. None of the left who yelled about “peace” ever suggested the North quit trying to conquer the South. If they’d stopped, there would have been peace.
But the dems cut off the South without a penny. Not a gallon of fuel, a box of cartridges….nothing. All the guys who’d signed up to stand up on our promise to support them were now naked to the enemy. The South collapsed. The democrat party and liberals consider this betrayal and the victory by a communist country as a “win”. For them it was. Not likely to forget their idea of such things when they talk about foreign policy.
It’s the Our Democracy!
Richard Aubrey:
Some time after 1975, I called on a number of “peace” organizations and asked about the massacre at Hue during Tet 68, and the Cambodian killing fields. Pretty much blank or briskly dismissed.
Consider this article on the origins of Amnesty International.Claudio Veliz: “The True Genesis of Amnesty International,”Quadrant Magazine_2007.
Origins: to get Commies out of Franco’s prisons. Added Freemasons to get out of Franco’s prisons, to mask the Commie orientation.
Many leftist professors fled Chile after the 1973 coup. Claudio Veliz was a Chilean professor who left Chile for Australia in 1972, after leftist students occupied his office for his having written an article about Allende that did not praise him sufficiently.