Fred Morris, November 12th 2011
In 2003, Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, appealed to the Constitutional Court (Sala IV) in that country, claiming that the article in the Constitution that prohibited the re-election of a president and vice-president was in violation of basic human rights guaranteed by the same Constitution, which declares that all laws must apply equally to every citizen. The Constitutional Court ruled 5-2 in favor of Arias, who was subsequently re-elected.
In 2009, Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, appealed to the Supreme Court of Nicaragua, asking it to revoke the article that prohibited his re-election, using the same arguments Arias had used in neighboring Costa Rica. After studying the case, the Nicaraguan Supreme Court followed the example of Costa Rica and declared the article unconstitutional, thereby opening the way for Ortega to be a candidate for re-election in 2011.
The opposition parties in Nicaragua immediately decried that decision and claimed that it was a “Sandinista trick”, pointing out that the non-Sandinista members of the Court did not participate in the decision, (not mentioning that several of them had left the country deliberately, leaving a legal quorum of Sandinistas, in order to claim they were not part of the decision). Since that time, the US Embassy and all of the opposition groups in Nicaragua have not tired of proclaiming that Ortega’s candidacy was/is illegal and that his re-election would be fraudulent. Interestingly enough, the US Embassy never commented on Oscar Arias’ candidacy and re-election, as he was, and is, “their man” in Costa Rica. (Also interesting to note that as of this moment, he is under investigation in Costa Rica for massive fraud during his last presidency and it is expected that he will soon be indicted and probably will join the past three presidents of that country with jail sentences).
In February of this year (2011) the US Embassy began proclaiming that the November elections would be fraudulent.
As the campaign progressed throughout the year, the opposition parties, Liberals and Conservatives, never stopped attacking each other, as well as the Sandinistas. Former president (and convicted embezzler) Arnoldo Alemán, became the candidate for the Conservatives (PLC), while the owner of a radio chain in Nicaragua, Fabio Gadea, became the candidate for the Liberals (PLI). The MRS (Movimento para la Renovación del Sandinismo), made up of ex-Sandinista dissidents, doesn’t have enough numbers to be able to field a candidate, so it allied itself with the PLI. Enrique Quiñones, former contra leader, launched his own candidacy. (He eventually got something like 0.33% of the vote.)
There was a lot of controversy about international observers of the elections. In 1996, Ortega lost to Alemán in elections that were flagrantly fraudulent, with boxes of ballots being found in rivers all over the country. However, groups like the Carter Center and the OAS validated the elections, leading the Sandinistas to lose confidence in international observers. The US Embassy kept hammering at the need for observers to avoid fraud, never responding to Ortega’s question about international observers in the US, which never permits international observers and where the fraud in 2000 and in 2004 was flagrantly visible to the whole world.
Eventually, Ortega’s government allowed the European Union (EU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) to send observers, plus a group of highly-respected Latin American Election Observers. The Embassy insisted that it should be allowed to have “official observers” but this favor was not granted.
Public opinion polls showed throughout the year that Ortega was widening his lead against all the opposition, to the point that two weeks before the November 6 elections, Cid-Gallup (the Gallup Institute affiliate in Central America) declared that Ortega would get nearly 53% of the vote and that Gadea would get around 19%, and Alemán, 3%, with the rest undeclared. They said the margin of error was 2.5 to 3.0%, which is pretty much what all such polls produce.
On November 6, more than 70% of the registered went to the polls in elections that were marked by a near-total absence of violence and conflicts. (In Tule, San Juan Province, a group of PLI supporters attacked a voting place and one person was killed.) When the votes were counted, the FSLN (Ortega and the Sandinistas) got 62.66% of the votes; PLC got 5.67%; PLI received 31.13%.
Cid-Gallup announced on Thursday, November 10, that these results were almost exactly what they had predicted, the differences being from the “undeclareds” at the time of their last polling. (Cid-Gallup also proudly announced that they have never failed to call the winner in the Central American elections they have been asked to study).
The OAS observers complained about a “lack of transparency” without ever defining what that term means, though they added that they saw no irregularities that would have changed the final results. The EU made the same complaint, but also agreed that any anomalies that they observed would not have changed the results.
None of the opposition groups have presented any evidence of fraud to the Supreme Electoral Council, as required by law. Nothing. Just public and very loud denunciations of “fraud.”
A well-known group called Ethics and Transparency (ET) also decried a “lack of transparency”, but also neglected to say what that meant in concrete terms. (The spokesperson for ET, Carlos Tunnerman, was an active Sandinista during the 1980s, serving as Minister of Education for a period and as the Sandinista ambassador in Washington. However, when the Sandinistas lost the elections in 1990, he lost his ministerial positions and soon appeared as an anti-Sandinista—to the present day. ET does not disclose its sources of funding, but it is well-known that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (funded totally by the US Congress) are principal sources of financial support for ET. So much for “transparency.”
In the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administrations spent several billion dollars training and arming the contras, killing more than 30,000 Nicaraguans in the process. After the illegal invasion of Panama in December 1989, in January of 1990, just three weeks before the elections in Nicaragua, President George Bush held a press conference in Washington to glorify the “return of democracy” to Panama (after an unprovoked invasion that killed more than 4,000 Panamanians in a 24-hour shock-and-awe attack) during which he said at one point, “I hope the people of Nicaragua are paying attention.” The US Embassy in Managua also fed more than $10 million into the campaign chests of Violeta, in violation of both US and Nicaraguan law. The people of Nicaragua got the message and voted for an end to the war and elected the US candidate, Violeta Chamorro. The Sandinistas, clearly not getting the votes, stepped aside without any violence at all, and let Chamorro take office.
In 1996, losing to Arnoldo Alemán in an openly fraudulent election, the Sandinistas did not resort to violence.
The opposition forces, and the US Embassy, never tire of claiming that the Sandinistas have “rigged the process”. They never mention that the electoral laws in place today were put in place during the government of Enrique Bolaños, 2001-2006. It was under those laws that the Sandinistas won the elections in 2006, and again in 2011. Any “rigging of the system” was done before they came to power and by today’s losers.
The Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), a rabid anti-Castro Cuban-American, denounced this years elections before the final results were in, declaring them fraudulent and calling for the US not to recognize Ortega’s election.
In the past few days, there have been increasing confrontations between the losing opposition groups and the National Police. Some of these have resulted in serious injuries on both sides and several fatalities. Today, Saturday, November 12, the PLI has convoked its followers to a mass protest in Managua, demanding that the government annul the elections and hold new ones. There is a clear effort under way to provoke confrontations that would require significant repression by the Police. To date the Police have behaved very professionally and not risen to the bait being offered.
The USIS (United States Information Service) has been feeding the “fraud line” throughout the hemisphere and the largely-conservative media have been denouncing the elections since last Monday. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba praised both the electoral process and the results.
It would appear that, once more, the US is defining democracy as it sees fit. It doesn’t like Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, therefore the massive electoral victory last Sunday must have been fraudulent. The simple fact that Ortega’s government has done more for the poor majority of the country in the past four years and ten months than any government in the history of the country is irrelevant to the US. The fact that the people, including many in the countryside who have been “Liberals” for decades, voted for the Sandinistas is clearly impossible.
But the Sandinista government has built more than 1,800 kilometers of paved roads in the countryside; provided schools for all the children (who were unable to study under the previous governments); built hundreds of free health clinics throughout the country; provided a pregnant cow or sow to some 100,000 head-of-household women in the countryside; made interest-free loans available to the same group; given nearly a million roofing sheets to poor families; and, at the same time, enabled the business class to be more profitable than at any time in the country’s history.
As Bill Clinton said in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The losers, including the US Embassy, need to just suck it up.
Fred Morris was resident correspondent for ABC-News in Costa Rica from 1977 to 1989. He also was the founder and editor of Mesoamerica, a monthly newsletter that he published in Costa Rica (in English) from 1982 to 1989. He is now retired and has been living in Nicaragua for the past three years. In 1974, while living in Brazil and working as a missionary for the United Methodist Church, he was kidnapped and tortured by the Brazilian military because of his close associations with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Camara.