Fabrizio Casari, Altrenotizie, September 28th 2021
https://www.altrenotizie.org/spalla/9415-nicaragua-verso-le-urne.html
The electoral campaign has formally opened in Nicaragua. The civic right-wing has lined up its best candidates, while the coup promoting right wing cries to the four winds that the elections should not be recognized by the international community. They claim that the investigation by Nicaragua's judiciary, which has undone the coup organizers who has been obeying U.S. diktats since 2018 to overthrow the Sandinista government, would make it impossible to participate in the vote. This is completely false.
That there is no connection between the judicial investigation and the electoral campaign is self-evident from the fact that long before this investigation, in fact ever since the elections in 2011, the right wing oligarchy's coup promoters have been calling for the non-recognition of the government and its institutions, preferring to invite economic sanctions, invasions and aggression.
The investigation that dismantled the coup promoting network has nothing to do with elections, because, except in their imaginations, none of the people arrested were candidates for anything. None of them were entitled to run for office since they had no party, no electoral bloc, none of the requirements necessary by law to present a list of candidates, nor had any of the party coalitions agreed to offer them candidacies or seats in Parliament. To claim that those arrested are the candidates is therefore a colossal lie.
To better understand the outline of the investigation for money laundering, corruption and clandestine organization of a violent regime change operation against Nicaragua's legitimate government, it should be noted that the arrests and indictments involve various people, not just coup promoting political operators. Along with some representatives of the land owning oligarcy there are bank executives, officials of private companies, administrative staff and others who have never engaged in politics. So who would be the inhibited candidates? What would be the electoral conditions likely to be affected by the investigation? The answer to those questions is easy: none and none.
The detainees awaiting trial are in jail for disregarding the principle of non-repetition of crimes included in the 2018 amnesty, actively working on a new coup attempt scheduled for late 2021, funded by USAID and known as Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN). They are accused of money laundering, of receiving money from abroad but never reporting on it, instead using it both for their own personal enrichment and for organizing political-military and media-driven subversion; of repeatedly and loudly calling for sanctions against their own country, as well as military invasions and measures of international economic and political isolation: for acting in a way contrary to national interests and associating with hostile foreign powers as collaborators. These are crimes which anywhere in the world would lead anyone to prison for a long time, especially in the USA, where these same crimes are also punished with the death penalty.
The latifundia and the ecclesiastical hierarchy rage about irregular elections, where fraud is guaranteed. History, however, teaches a different lesson, namely that since popular democracy came into existence, it is the elites who have tried to overthrow it. Since the voting process exists, there are also those who try to alter it. But there is no doubt that only those who think they will lose elections set out to manipulate them, certainly not those who know they will win. There is no need to have attended a leading school of political science to understand this.
Furthermore, what coups has the Left promoted in history? in Latin America as everywhere else, the Left has won everywhere either with revolutions or elections, never with coups, which were and are a weapon of the fascist right.
Interference by the external enemy
The non-recognition of the legitimacy of the electoral process is a political position that reflects both the hostility and, at the same time, the impotence of the US and the international bodies that serve it. Anyone seeking to specify when US hostility against the government Managua escalated, should recall that the US has denied legitimacy to Nicaragua's elections since 2011, while the OAS and the EU, which although expressing partial criticism had recognized the correctness of Nicaragua's elections up until 2017, have now adopted the US line. But neither the U.S. nor the OAS nor the EU have a record of respect for the rules of democracy on the continent, given that, while they repudiate fair and transparent elections in Venezuela and Nicaragua, they have recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's president and also the murderous coup government of Señora Añez in Bolivia.
And what right can those who recognize such coup leaders and self-appointed presidents, never elected by anyone to anything, have to appoint themselves as protectors of democracy and free and fair elections? Can supporters of coups d'etat really speak knowledgeably about fair elections? Their real calling card seems to reflect support for coups over democratic processes.
Nicaragua does not need electoral observation certifying the legitimacy and normality of the vote, much less that offered by organizations from countries that have caused international scandal with their own domestic elections, above all the USA. But even if one admits the legitimacy of international observation (which can only occur if the electoral supervising body invites it), one must recognize that the unavoidable presupposition of electoral observation is due distance from the political forces of the country being observed. However, what objective, third party view of Nicaragua's political scene can be shown by organizations whose embassies are not only at the disposal of groups promoting a coup, but that also finance right-wing media and political parties, as well as diplomatically and politically attacking Nicaragua, to the point of imposing illegitimate sanctions?
It is not surprising that the great regime-change conspiracy does not like the elections, because the election will confirm that Sandinismo is the overwhelming majority in the country, as election results over the last 14 years show. Those results have been the formal, official demonstration of the will of the people, expressing with a pencil stroke the degree of consensus or dissent with the socio-political reality they live. The vote serves to identify oneself ideologically and programmatically, of course, but it also contains within itself people's hopes, expectations and dreams, just as it can express their dissatisfaction, protest and unease.
The vote, in short, is the affirmation of the will of the people and, as such, is ignored, bypassed and crushed only by those who cannot tolerate accepting the will of the people. And who does not tolerate accepting the will of the people? The elites, the ruling classes, accustomed to controlling everything for themselves on account of their surname, their skin color, the dominant heredity and their loyalty to empire. It is no coincidence that, historically, elections mark democracy, which in turn was born from the overthrow of monarchies, wherein political power was assigned by descent, not consensus.
Here the affinity between monarchies and the ruling families of the landowning oligarcy emerges: the glue of heredity in class rule holds the two together. They are cruel, useless castes, dedicated to plundering public resources so as to turn them into private property, and they rule by proxy from their foreign masters to whom they pay strategic royalties in exchange for protection. They are internally dominant but externally dominated.
Whoever has the votes will win
Sandinista Nicaragua has given ample and profound demonstrations of democracy and will continue to do so. Indifferent to the maneuvers of base political elites, either internal or international, the November 7th election date will be a milestone in the country's institutionality. It marks a limit that cannot be overstepped by any domestic coup conspiracy or any foreign interference, not even ones exercised "in good faith".
It will be impossible to turn the vote from a civic celebration of the popular will into a political-military operation subverting the result. No geopolitical presumption, no regional strategic illusion, no drunken continental political egocentrism will prevail. Let everyone, including the new prophets of the US model expounded in elegant Spanish, get used to it and calm down. Nicaraguans will vote and vote for Nicaragua, regardless of any interference and resistant to any meddling.
The elections of the last 14 years have allowed Nicaragua to take important steps in its modernization and it won't be imperial wishes to impose submission and obedience that will sharpen the pencils of those who already know which party's box they need to tick in order to continue the country's growth, to be able to feel the identity between their country and their own destiny, to see both become even more successful than they ever imagined. Sandinismo allows thought to take flight and dreams to become reality.