Fabrizio Casari, Vision Sandinista, March21st 2021
http://www.visionsandinista.net/2021/03/21/la-oposicion-de-su-majestad/
Fresh from their notorious webinar with Juan Guaidó, where looks and words suggested a self-awareness session for chronic depressives, the coup mongers have resumed their happy pilgrimage around the world.
They attend endless one-way meetings, in which they all say the same things, make the same promises and issue identical threats, only to end up all looking too clearly like an aimless herd.
The last of these webinar adventures took place with the European Parliament's Committee on Relations with Central America and the Caribbean, where the staged exchange with the Members of the European Paliament went like this:-
- the coup mongers complained about the absence of democracy : the MEPs said there was no democracy;
- the coup mongers called for sanctions : the MEPs threatened more sanctions;
- the coup mongers said the electoral process was not to their liking : the MEPs said they would not recognize it.
For the record, all of five MEPs took part, three of them Spanish: one from the extreme right (who know a lot about staging coups), another from the not-so-far right and one from the PSOE, who can't really know much about democracy, since her government founded the GAL death squads dedicated to murdering Euskadi militants.
Strasbourg offered a very undignified spectacle, very far from showing juridical neutrality, political depth or worthwhile corroboration enabling a dignified position. But, in the end, it seems to be in line with the authority of the European Parliament. So, according to the MEPs present at the meeting, the European Parliament thinks it should intervene in Nicaragua's internal affairs, just as it did with Venezuela.
In a fit of colonial nostalgia, the European Parliament, at the behest of the Spanish right wing, evidently believes that it can and should play a role beyond Europe's borders. MEP Katja Affeldt urged the coup mongers to present a united front, saying "we are here to support this process which, however, is a Nicaraguan process" (powerful intuition there...).
It is not clear from which branch of international law the European Parliament draws its inspiration to be able to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, even going so far as declaring its intention to actively participate in the formation of an electoral coalition. Nor is it clear on what authority the European Parliament is to participate in the Nicaraguan elections. And it is even less clear, given its inveterate chronic impotence, on the basis of what phantasmagorical insights it purports to warn, admonish and threaten.
Instead of worrying about supporting democracy in the electoral processes of some of its own EU countries, especially Hungary and Poland, which have clear authoritarian, anti-liberal profiles (not to mention Estonia and Lithuania, with their clear trademark fascist nostalgia) Brussels devotes itself to progressive countries. As if it were gaming a role-play, transporting itself back in time, the EU seems to think it is still living in the first half of the 19th century.
But the post-colonial dimension does not match today's reality, in which the EU is viewed as, politically, a totally irrelevant international body, which in the global context only serves support US foreign policy, in short, pretty much like Australia and Canada do. Unable to dictate the international political agenda, or even to lead internal reform processes in socio-economic terms, it is now reduced to a collection of 27 countries run by their banks. It will take more than a few self-harming sanctions to transform it into a continent with some political weight.
In the end, the EU is nothing more than its banks: 27 countries hemmed in by their debts and by the dramatic data of impoverishment and unemployment, all aggravated by mistaken decisions in the fight against the pandemic. It is not really clear in what way the EU thinks it can offer an example, or potential guidance or even serve simply as an significant interlocutor. Therefore, nor is it clear how the EU thinks it can influence Nicaraguan policy, given its previous failure with Venezuela. At this point, every decision the EU makes on Latin America provokes mirth and all the right-wing majority composition of the European Parliament has done is add nausea and diminished prestige to the body's already well established futility.
The wandering coup
Washington, Miami, Brussels. Everywhere, the coup is at home, welcomed and honored to such an extent that not even they themselves can understand their prominence. However, the problems are in Managua, where the number of aspiring presidential candidates fits comfortably into the living room of the Chamorro residence. And it is indeed in Nicaragua that the sometime coup mongers generate indifference, hilarity or irritation, never consensus, at least in numbers acceptable for an electoral political confrontation of national importance.
The presentations of the respective candidates turn into into ridiculous press conferences, in which the storyline offers three steps. The first step is to voice complaints against the brutal dictatorship which, however, with the utmost brutality, lets them bark at the moon without even a consoling police presence imparting to them some minimum importance. Next comes the aspiring candidate's presentation claiming an opposition leadership role along with seats for their loyalists in the legislature. In fact, the opposition candidate par excellence is never elected by grass roots nor appointed by any assembly, rather they are a kind of chieftain without a people. The third and final step sees threats and messages cutting across the other competing candidates as well as the endless, blatant panhandling to foreign patrons for enough money to see the candidate all right.
In step one, that of the "terrible dictatorship", all sorts of narrative fantasies are unleashed. Non-existent human rights violations get recounted, repression that is not even detailed, improbable acts of oppression and arrests that never took place. To give themselves a role to add to their surname, they assign themselves the role of politically persecuted victims. Obviously, in Nicaragua nobody considers the children of parasitic oligarchs as victims, but presenting themselves that way works in attracting funding from abroad.
Why? Because for US and European government institutions, the same ones that finance so-called NGOs, to be able to assign large sums of money to a country and local agents there, they have to follow political and administrative processes subject to mechanisms that only provide for intervention in cases of serious political crisis and continued violation of human rights. Therefore, if the European Parliament, for example, wants to fund Nicaragua's phantom political opposition, it can only do so after claiming to have found those conditions. Basically, if there is no repression or dictatorship, there is no money. So, if there is no repression or dictatorship, it is necessary to invent them, because otherwise the funding stays put. Thus, in order to make a buck, they make up stories of repression.
Furthermore, one has the excessive political heterogeneity which corresponds to different kinds of wallets. Thinking the Nicaraguan oligarchy would ever leave plundering the country to Medardo Mairena or Felix Maradiaga or Dora Maria Tellez means holding a late-Romantic ideological vision of Nicaraguan politics. Never, ever, will the white oligarchy accept submitting to any political authority other than the pure expression of their class interests or those of their gringo owners. Hence the internecine fighting among the coup mongers. On the one hand those who seek to place government at the disposal of the oligarchy, on the other hand those who think they can use the oligarchs so as to get control of the government. Ultimately, it is a matter of incompatibilities, of race and of class.
But the history of the coup mongers can also be summed up in the plainest terms of doing political business. You don't ask for dollars to fix policy, you fix policy to get dollars. This is the history of malinchismo applied to Nicaragua. To style oneself as political opposition, to place oneself hysterically as a leading anti-Sandinista, also reveals an anxiety to represent caste interests, interests aligned for centuries with the strategic interests of the United States.
For the US, overthrowing Nicaragua's Sandinista government means destroying its achievements in the domestic economy, in the growth of welfare and equality, in technological progress and in international alliances. It is not simply a matter of ideological hatred towards those who, from Sandino until the 1980's, defeated and humiliated US power, although this aspect should never be forgotten. The imperial project for the region is to remake the Central American jigsaw in a way more convenient for the United States to control it. That means defeating Sandinismo as an alternative social project, rolling back the partners of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and giving a green light to the multinational corporations.
To do so, the US and the EU are willing to lose face, to pay apparently exorbitant sums of money given Nicaragua's specific weight as a country, but, in the end, meager amounts given its importance from a political and corporate point of view. From a purely political point of view, destabilizing Nicaragua is a White House objective because Sandino's country, along with Venezuela and Cuba, as well as Bolivia, are the main obstacles preventing renewed total domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. The upcoming elections in Ecuador, with the predicted victory of Andres Arauz and the problematic elections in Honduras, as well as the return to the political scene of Lula da Silva in Brazil, paint a bleak prospect for Washington.
The idea is for Nicaragua to be one more important step in achieving colonial reconquest. But it is a far-fetched idea, because the votes are cast in Nicaragua, not in Washington nor in Brussels, under Nicaraguan electoral law not with the electoral antics prevalent in the US. In Nicaragua, votes get counted regardless of local power brokers. Those elected are members of local communities, not the representatives of the white and millionaire upper class caste, financed by the very corporations they will then be regulating. In Nicaragua, where decisions are made about big business not on behalf of big business, the voters decide.
The coup mongers and their European allies can dream on. Managua is an indigestible morsel for imperial projects and colonial nostalgia. Sandinismo has ideas, projects, identity, popular consensus, strength and sharp fingernails. Nicaragua may be impoverished but it is far from poor.
(*) Journalist, Political Analyst, Director of the Online Magazine www.altrenotizie.org and collaborator of the magazine Visión Sandinista.