Fabrizio Casari, Altrenotizie, December 24th 2020
http://www.altrenotizie.org/primo-piano/9120-nicaragua-l-anno-che-verra…
Protocol procedures for Biden's entry into the White House are slow; Trump's refusal to leave the comfortable, friendly walls suggests he seriously fears investigations that will affect him, and this makes the big business magnate's exit from the scene one of the most unseemly spectacles in U.S. institutional history. The accusations of electoral fraud he made have not even been taken up by the Republican Party, but they betray the crossing of a political threshold previously considered unthinkable: the sale to the world of the US electoral model as some kind of absolute certification of voting reliability - and therefore of US democracy - is dead and buried.
Trump will leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and, with him, the blackguards and low life that thrived under him: this remains the biggest and best news. Biden, on the other hand, does not inspire anyone and in himself does not represent a particular novelty for the US establishment, in which he is a well known player; rather it is the departure of Trump's criminal advisors that is newsworthy. In his relations with the Latin American continent, Biden will change his stance (altough not his political line). This is not just a matter of good manners but also of reducing the fascist ideological vehemence that has characterized the US relationship with progressive forces in Latin America over the past four years.
One only has to remember the speech of the recently elected Trump against Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua made not by chance in Miami, at the headquarters of Alpha 66, one of the worst terrorist organizations of the Cuban-American mafia lobby. He cannot be accused of incoherence: he declared war on the socialist countries and he did so, with a series of measures aimed at burying their possibilities of economic development, of trade and of receiving inputs, as well as with the coup d'état in Bolivia and the attempted coups d'état in Nicaragua and Venezuela, and too with the disgusting, criminal encirclement of Cuba.
The substantial novelty in the change of administration will reside, therefore, in ending the delegation of US Latin America policy to Miami and, with it, the end of the Nazi, terrorist baggage that came from Miami and will return to Miami. After the departure of John Bolton, the White House will be abandoned by Mike Pence, one of the worst Nazi-Evangelicals, who via Twitter named Juan Guaidò as president of Venezuela; by Elliot Abrams, a war criminal already condemned for the massacres in Guatemala and Iran-gate in the 1980s; by Mike Pompeo - a convinced Nazi, who inspired the assassination of the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and is an overt supporter of Israeli state terrorism; by Ted Cruz, who was the political reference for them; by the segregationist and supremacist groups of the Ku-Klux-Klan and the businessmen linked to the Cuban-American mafia lobby in Florida. In short, with Biden's arrival at the White House, he may not necessarily bring much new but certainly clean fresh air. There will be no political turning points in the relationship between the empire and its backyard but, at least, we will not see the deadbeats frustrated at every revolution, really authentic US trash, developing US policy towards the continent.
The Lima Group and the OAS, the two bodies active within the continent that supported the project of the "reconquest" of Latin America by the US, are in a state of coma. The Lima Group as such can no longer sign a single document, since Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia are opposed to any resolution. The OAS, for its part, cannot recover from the obscene image it has after being found out participating in the Bolivian coup d'état.
Evidence of a possibly different attitude by the new administration will become clear in the coming months, when Nicaragua's electoral campaign will be launched and then towards the end of 2021, when the country will return to the polls. Sandinismo sees its approval rates growing and, in the current presidential formula, already has its next candidates, while the right wing continues to be scattered and dispersed in a thousand acronyms. This is not a matter of ideological and cultural richness, but merely an articulation of interests ruled by personal ambitions, of families and diverse rumps that stake out, each one for itself, entitlement, political direction and, above all, outside funding. On this they live very well, and none of them want to give it up: it is not that they get money because they have been in opposition, rather they join the opposition in order to receive money.
The right wing manifests itself in permanent internecine dispute, without leadership, without strategy, without policies and have only a limited consensus from which to challenge a Sandinismo more alive and strong than ever under the extraordinary leadership President Comandante Daniel Ortega. The perception of certain defeat is clear to them. So they eiter face the challenge or give up on the pretext that the conditions do not exist to do so?
The idea of retracing the path of an electoral boycott seems unlikely, for several reasons. First, the decision not to participate would not be shared by Liberal party politicians and others, who have no intention whatsoever leaving the national political scene by the back door. In addition, previous tries at non-participation have not worked, because the expected break between Nicaragua and the international community has not occurred. So why abstain? Trading electoral absence and consequent political nullity for some illegal coercive measures that have more ideological value than concrete effects does not seem a good deal.
Maybe the European Union, the biggest nonentity on the international scene, will suggest abstention. But abstaining from an election is not a great idea. It is internationally recognized that the validity of an electoral process depends its constitutional implementation, on popular participation and on the institutional certification of the result of the vote, not on the willingness of each political party to participate or not, which remains a voluntary political choice and not an obligation. Whether or not one presents oneself for election does not determine its legitimacy, since while actually voting is a civic duty, presenting oneself as an electoral candidate is not at all. In any case, the elections will be held as scheduled in November 2021 and will determine the winners and losers based on the votes cast, not on foreign audiences or the approval of the OAS, of the Lima Group or the European Union. They they do not live in Nicaragua and do not vote so they do not count.
Unless unforgiving opinion polls indicate infinitesimal levels of support, the right will try to run. Participating in the vote, however, does not mean making good the bad image it as. Silent and immobile in the face of the climatic disasters that have hit the country in recent months (or even, in some cases, showing poorly concealed satisfaction at the economic damage suffered), it is an opposition that is neither seen nor heard within the country, except for the continuous threats that each ringleader throws at their other potential allies. Attacking others to form an alliance may be a difficult path to understand, agreed, but, after all, they ave been schizophrenic since 2018.
In recent times, assailed by a crisis of invisibility, they insist on being able to play a role, whatever it may be. They appeal to the government which they do not recognize, something difficult to understand in principle from the start. They are asking for dialogue after having rejected it when they had the chance; they are proposing efforts on the economy after having tried to boycott it; they are dismissing employees indiscriminately so that they can complain about an employment crisis; they are protesting against repression after torturing, killing, burning and destroying throughout 2018; they are denouncing corruption after themselves stealing watever they could; they are asking for help for Catholic churches after abusing them them as weapons depots for criminals and murderous coup mongers.
Fighting cocks
The question of bringing forward the elections, if it ever really existed, vanished after crashing into the wall of the Constitution. The coup monger remnants continue squabbling among themselves seeking some kind of alliance; that is, fixing who can be part of it and who cannot. The real question, however, is not who may participate in their coup monger crusade, but who will lead it.
Mairena, Maradiaga, Chamorro, Mora and a dozen other deplorables wake up every morning like tigers dreaming fiercely of being the sole opposition candidate, and every night they go to sleep frustrated like lonely melancholic cats. The choices are different because their faces are different as are their appetites, so Madam Defeat turns up in a different outfit for every date these losers make with her.
The question of legal personality also plays a role; it determines the possibility avoiding a scramble for eligibility to participate in the elections and also being able to take part in any discussion of possible technical reform of the electoral law, should there be one. If the uniting everyone under one banner is not achieved, it will be very difficult for the myriad of opposition parties and NGOs to form an electoral front and the only opposition party to the Frente Sandinista will continue to be the Liberal Party, historically always present in Nicaragua but also divided in two and and subject to internal purges covered widely by the media.
The various groupings are divided into different currents and their imagination in the search for acronyms tests even seasoned puzzle solvers. Not a day goes by without a new division, a different acronym and a new leader, invariably disqualified by the previous one. As a result, the acronyms are multiplying so as to claim a place at the national negotiating table, which essentially means having a stake in the division of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the United States and the European Union will inject into the election campaign.
The technique is well tried: first, each party turns into more organizations, then each one demands its seats as a candidate and its share of the money. The total amount of money and candidates from the different parties will always be greater than what the original party would have gotten on its own. However, the failure of that operation this time around seems to have been announced already, which is why every party and NGO is making bellicose statements that only serve to remind us all of their absolute irrelevance.
Why? Because the economic and media strength of each party is what carries weight at the negotiating table, or electoral weight as certified by the opinion polls, or the recognized credibility of personalities, the links with criminal organizations which, since one is dealing with Nicaragua, the international media magically transform into courageous exiles, the consensus among the Catholic bishops and, of course, the views of the U.S. Embassy in Managua. Counting oneself in is not enough, everyone has to be weighed and everyone has a different weight.
The United States
The final decision on the applications to be a candidate and the organizational model to be used is in the hands of the United States and the already significant delay in this regard seems to indicate uncertainty due to the changing of the guard in the United States. Taking advantage of the support of the European Union and the United States, which see in this group of clowns from the Barnum Circus the possibility of offering neocolonial recipes under the Sandinista government. Cheap parties, bought for two cents each.
They will support any candidacy that can unify all anti-Sandinista currents, which - they believe in Washington and Miami - could challenge the FSLN. A harmless illusion for a thankless job. From 1979 until today, the US interest in Nicaragua has always been to wrest it from the hands of its people and hand it over to the oligarchy and the comprador bourgeoisie. All the more so after 2006, since when attempts to unify the opposition by proposing a unified ticket like the one in 1990 have been repeated, but without success.
This is because with respect to Nicaragua, as in the rest of Latin America, there are two US lines: one that refers directly to the national oligarchic structure answering to Washington, the other that is based more on military and terrorist destabilization and has a direct line to Miami. The differences in the evaluation of the electoral players and the formulas, obviously, at the moment of the vote will be unified in search of the common objective which, in the case of Nicaragua, more than the victory of Liberalism, is the defeat of Sandinismo. They dream of repeating the glories of 1990 but they know that history is completely different, impossible to repeat. No way. Those who live on hope die in despair.
The Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua
The church hierarchy will assume a preponderant role in the formation of the right-wing cartel. Now non-existent from a pastoral point of view and deaf and dumb in the face of recent social emergencies, the Catholic Church sees its influence diminish with each passing day. It cannot afford to go on without public funding and the public role it was given supposedly on behalf of the whole population. The money used for its propaganda came from abroad and was destined to relaunch the Bishops' Conference in the framework of opposition to the government. But it was not enough: thanks to the ambitions of its cardinals and the financing of their vices, the Conference would not last another four years aligned with the opposition without state funding.
What weight does the Bishops' Conference have now? Exploiting the strong religiosity of the Nicaraguans no longer has the value it had up until a few years ago. Trying to use Christianity politically is useful to a certain extent when underneath the cassock there is a demonic dimension and not one of charity; more than the message of Christ, the Bishops' Conference relaunches the message of the ultra-right directing it more to the oligarchy than to the poor.
Without prestige or credibility, both because of its faithless participation in the attempted coup d'état and also because of its lies and its indifference to the needs of the country, the Bishops' Conference has carved out a purely political niche for itself and believes that it can act as a unifying force for the various opposition forces. To this end, between March and April, it will almost certainly propose to assume the political leadership of the opposition with the candidacy of one of its prelates (Silvio Báez, probably) as a deus ex machina. The attempt will be to overcome many politically weak candidates with a single politically strong candidacy. To achieve this objective, Baez proposes exerting all the bishops' residual weight among the faithful as well as in Washington, Brussels and Rome, although they know they cannot count at all on the support of Pope Francis, against whom, by the way, the bishops of almost the whole world have constantly but uselessly conspired since the very first day of his pontificate. The stakes are very high: Baez will lose and with his defeat the definitive crisis of the Bishops' Conference will occur.
The Sandinista Front for National Liberation
Last year three extraordinary results can be credited to Sandinismo: the early exit from the worst part of the economic crisis induced by the 2018 coup attempt, which caused more than US$1.8bn in direct and indirect damages; the excellent management of the Covid-19 pandemic through an extraordinary public health model, together with a lucid assessment that prevented panic. No effort was spared to equip it as a modern country. Then the contrast with the two frightening hurricanes that hit the Caribbean Coast was striking: a wise and prudent management in rescuing and bringing populations to safety before and then afterwards, timely and decisive speed in assistance and the effective restoration and improvement of the territory destroyed. Nicaragua, also affected like every other country by the economic slowdown caused by the pandemic, which followed the drop in economic growth due to the damage caused by the failed coup attempt, has faced and overcome climatic adversity, demonstrating meticulous organization, iron discipline and absolute confidence in the leadership of Commander Ortega. The results are excellent, it would be good to doff your hat to such political and management quality of which much more powerful countries can only dream.
These are some of the elements that explain the broad consensus over the management of the government headed by President Comandante Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, which has been repeatedly confirmed in recent opinion polls whose results leave no doubt for Sandinismo and no hope for anti-Sandinismo. The right wing continues to build its hate campaigns, Sandinismo builds hospitals, roads, schools, defends the physical integrity of its people and its national territory, and designs development projects even against all kinds of adversity.
2021 will be a year in which the pressure on Nicaragua to surrender its political and electoral sovereignty to the OAS will be strong. Managua obviously does not believe that it should submit its political decisions to the judgment of the OAS and the US. The definitive disqualification of the organization led by Luis Almagro, who put his hand to the shameful Bolivian operation, adds to the lack of political credibility of the United States in electoral matters and forms an indigestible ideological mix that has insurmountable obstacles in the form of sovereignty, self-determination and even in terms of political hygiene. Even more ridiculous seems the undue pressure from the EU, which, in terms of volume of trade and its political autonomy from the US, is, by comparison, a bit player in Nicaragua's political-diplomatic relations.
Since Managua is used to respecting agreements made, the technical contribution that the OAS wants to offer in terms of technical electoral matters will be heard and taken into account, as has been established practice for years, and possible cooperation will be measured in terms of the respect that the organization shows towards Nicaragua. Between collaboration and imposition there is all the difference in the world. It is all about independence and sovereignty.
Like it or not, as President Comandante Ortega has repeated many times, in Nicaragua the Nicaraguan people decide, no one can change that. Is there anyone out there who has still not understood this?