Mario Firmenich, Agencia Paco Urondo, 1ero de julio 2021
https://radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias-generales/destacado/13-realidad…
Mario Firmenich
1) The electoral laws governing Nicaragua were made by the last right-wing government that ruled from 2001 to 2006.
Because the FSLN won the 2006 elections, now they don't suit them.
The latest amendments to these laws, on the basis of which the government is being accused of "orchestrating a fraud", refer to the fact that 50% of elective offices must be held by women (it seems that the opposition does not have enough women to complete the electoral lists!) and also the prohibition of political parties from being financed from abroad; the latter applies in any serious country and López Obrador suffers harassment from the USA for the same.
2) The Nicaraguan opposition is a "bag of cats" without any great social representation.
Their political parties do not maintain any organic existence outside of electoral periods.
The only party that exists with great organization on a permanent basis throughout the national territory is the FSLN.
There are 19 legally recognized political parties. One is the FSLN. Another 16 parties (including several indigenous parties) are allies of the FSLN. There are only 2 opposition parties legally registered and they also fight against each other.
The opposition participating in the elections does not intend to win the presidency from Daniel Ortega because it knows that´s impossible. They fight each other to see who is second, to access the advantages and prerogatives that the electoral law, made by the right, grants to the second place.
The most violent opposition attempted to overthrow the government by force in 2018 and then wanted the government to negotiate with them "democratic reforms" without even being political parties, but "NGO´s," referring to themselves as "civil society," and funded by the CIA and USAID.
3) The criminal cases against the Chamorro Foundation and its members are not an invention of "lawfare".
Money laundering exists because this foundation, which acted as an opposition force without being a political party, was explicitly funded by the United States. With the law prohibiting foreign funding of political activity, the foundation had to register as a "foreign agent" in order to be legally authorized to continue receiving such funding.
But they didn't want to do so because they were politically disqualified and then they went about laundering the money received from U.S. state agencies through their accounts. The documented evidence of money laundering is clear in their accounting records.
4) The recently imprisoned former Sandinistas are not "the internal dissidence that questions the power of the personality of Daniel Ortega".
They are the ones who left the FSLN 30 years ago when they lost the elections! They are being prosecuted in criminal cases for treason, because they illegally conspired with the United States to sabotage the elections and overthrow the government.
5) The political culture of the Nicaraguan people is not and has never been european-style demoliberalism.
Their culture has Indo-American peasant and ethnic roots, with afrodescendant minorities. 40% of Nicaragua's population is currently peasant and lives on land granted 40 years ago by the agrarian reform of the Sandinista revolution. Another 30% of the population are peasants or children of peasants who urbanized in small municipal capitals, in medium-sized capital cities of the departments and in some neighborhoods of Managua.
The great mass of this demographic sector has been Sandinista since the revolution of 1979 and lives in gratitude of the policies of President Ortega that since 2007 have allowed them to improve income levels and quality of life (health, education, electric light, paved roads, food for all, capitalization of the family economy, environmental sustainability and gender equity). This population does not care in the least that Mrs. Cristiana Chamorro and her associates are imprisoned.
There is a small percentage of the clearly white Spanish population, most of whom are remnants of the Somocista oligarchy and the former few middle sectors that were at its service. This sector is violently hostile to Sandinismo; their only way to regain power would be an American intervention to overthrow the government, and that is what they are trying to do.
The rest is a small urban middle class that emerged thanks to the economic and social progress of the administration presided over by Daniel Ortega between 2007 and 2018, when the failed attempt at a violent coup d'état interrupted the process of economic growth. An urban population, based on mestizo Creole ethnicity, dedicated to commerce and other services, has been incorporated into this middle class.
6) The socio-political reality is that Daniel Ortega and the FSLN will win the elections very comfortably and with well over 50% of the vote.
The imprisonment of opponents linked to American interference, self-titled "pre-candidates" (who are not registered as such, by any party legally qualified to participate in the elections), is not "totalitarian repression necessary to win the elections". Cristiana Chamorro, in the most favorable polls (assuming she was a candidate of a unified opposition), has only 21% of voters intention and in the most unfavorable polls (assuming that she was the only candidate of "her" party, for now non-existent), has only 5%.
Pre-trial detention for the laundering of money that finances American electoral interference, is in accordance with the law. For the dominant non-demoliberal political culture in Nicaragua, it is of no importance that they be stopped when the electoral process is beginning.
Obviously for culturally demoliberal countries such as Western Europeans (or quasi-demoliberal, such as Argentina and Mexico) this seems like a "dictatorial outrage that prevents fair electoral competition".
In Argentina, "the normal thing" would have been for the "judicial operators" (agents of the state intelligence services), following the president's instructions, to bypass the division of powers and determine the most electorally convenient date for the judicial arrest warrant.
In Nicaragua there is no such pseudo-demoliberal hypocrisy and that is why they are arrested at the procedural moment that corresponds, outside of the electoral campaign, because the elections will be won by the FSLN anyway, without having to pretend that they are democratic.
There is no social mobilization denouncing the arrests of the Chamorros and their associates.
7) The most conservative sectors of the Catholic Church openly promoted the 2018 coup from the pulpits, (much like the coup against Perón in 1955, identifying with "Christ Victorious"). Today the Catholic Church has assumed an "elliptical opposition" in homilies, but calling for peace.
Everything seems to indicate that Pope Francis intervened, with the usual Vatican discretion, removing the most violent priests and inducing this change of political discourse.
The figure and message of Pope Francis are publicly disseminated and praised by the government itself.
8) Nicaragua's Constitution and electoral legislation are legally democratic and pluralistic; in this context, the socio-political reality shows a pluralist system of party hegemony.
This is not the result of proscriptive maneuvers by Sandinismo, but is the natural political manifestation of a society with very little diversity of social classes.
There is an overwhelmingly poor peasant popular majority, historically exploited and postponed both by the neocolonial capitalism of Somocismo and by the neoliberal parties that ruled between 1991 and 2006.
There are no large masses of middle sectors that could give social basis to a system, for example, of 3 large parties that could alternate in power forming coalitions.
There is a social minority of rich (some very rich) who are antisandinistas and an overwhelmingly poor majority who are Sandinistas because they have enjoy a sustained improvement of their quality of life. The social fringe of "independents" or "apolitical" is not politically significant.
The hegemonic party arises because the FSLN is the only national party that represents and favors the socio-economic progress and national pride of the vast Majority of Indo-Americans and Afro-descendants, being able to build alliances with regional and indigenous parties.
9) The social peace observed with the naked eye in Nicaragua is much greater than that which exists in Argentina and Mexico (do not even compare with what is seen in Colombia, Ecuador or Chile).
There are no pickets that cut streets or routes; there are no union strikes and there are no lockouts to paralyze the country.
There is also no social/criminal violence of the type of Salvadoran maras or violence by large organized criminal gangs. There are no bank robberies, no kidnappings of businessmen, nor violent mafia drug traffickers as in Mexico or as in the city of Rosario in Argentina.
Popular markets, shoppings and malls of the middle and upper class exhibit normal socio-economic functioning, in peace and without visible tensions.
10) More than 80 television channels are freely watched in Nicaragua.
There are several independent private Nicaraguan TV channels (channels 10, 12, 14, 23) that express varying degrees of opposition aggressiveness. They enjoy freedom of expression that can even be considered excessive; channel 10 is the most violent and it is normal to hear them say on any given day that "the dictator Daniel Ortega is a criminal who is murdering peasants" without anyone telling them anything!
In addition, the Catholic Church has its own channel that transmits with total freedom whatever it comes up with, including the cardinal's homilies in all its live masses. On the other hand, you also see the Vatican's Spanish-language television channel, which enjoys identical freedom of expression.
You can also watch freely on TV CNN in Spanish and English, the Channel Euronews, the Spanish TVE, the Caracol network of Colombia, several Mexican channels, Telesur, RT and the Chinese channel CGTN in Spanish.
As pro-government television there are several TV channels, some of them are privately related to the government, and there is an official parliamentary channel.
The only TV channel that was shut down, committed serious crimes by explicitly instigating and giving real-time operational instructions for coup mobs to destroy and burn government buildings and the homes of Sandinistas during the failed 2018 coup.
11) The paper edition of the newspaper La Prensa is limited for the simple reason that there are no newspaper and magazine kiosks, nor the "canillitas" that sell the newspapers loudly in a corner. The newspaper is sold by subscription to the small middle and upper class. The vast majority of people in society do not read daily papers.The digital edition of the newspaper La Prensa is published daily without any problem.
12) Nicaragua is nothing like a communist country and its economic system is far from statist.
There is no commercial state bank, such as Banco Nación or Bancos Provincia or Banco Ciudad in Argentina. The law does not authorize the establishment of cooperative banks. All commercial banks are privately owned and of the opposition, which have the luxury of boycotting the day-to-day financial operations of the government, to the point that there are public employees who have to collect their salaries at the Central Bank.
There are no large state-owned enterprises. There is free monetary convertibility between the cordoba and the dollar, which can be paid with dollars in any trade and there is no price fixing by the government.
Economic planning is indicative and made from demand; it is executed by private protagonists of the family and cooperative economy. Government institutions provide technical and financial assistance to enable these popular socio-economic actors to implement national economic and social development plans.
The maximum income tax rate was 10% until 2019 and is currently 15% (in Spain it is 49%). On top of that, it is common for businessmen to obtain tax exemptions from the government.
The general VAT rate is 15% and fresh food is exempted (in Argentina the general VAT rate is 21%, it is 27% for electricity and 10.5% for fresh food).
There are large foreign companies operating without any inconvenience (including companies like Cargill or multinational hotel chains). The main foreign investments are within the Free Zone regime and therefore they do not pay any taxes.
13) How do you explain that this reality deserves the overwhelming and sudden worldwide media campaign to implement, as "post-truths", the fake news that a populist-communist dictatorship is suppressing the freedom of the press, imprisoning the opposition candidates who would win the elections and persecuting the Sandinista dissidents who would oppose within the ruling party the dictatorial personality of Daniel Ortega?
This fake news campaign of the oligopolistics media in neoliberal globalization, is nothing more than a "new kind" bombing of a sovereign state and people in the ongoing Third World War.
We live a war that is simultaneously a typical geopolitical dispute between powers (for now without strategic missiles) and also a genocidal civil world war, declared by the economic establishment of globalization against the poor of the world; with the aim of stripping poor peoples of their sovereignty over increasingly scarce natural resources and reducing the world's population.
What else than defending themselves with their own laws can sovereign states and peoples do when a foreign power tries to promote an internal civil war to overthrow the government and destroy its social system?