Nicaragua: Why Ortega does not want to let go. The non-negotiable interests of the regime…

In the run-up to the November 2021 presidential and National Assembly election in Nicaragua, the government has arrested five opposition candidates who are trying to challenge President Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). We reprint, in translation, the noted radical Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi, who discusses how Ortega and the FSLN, once the focal point of a generation on the left in Latin America and the world, have become corrupt authoritarians. We also include an excerpt from longtime Sandinista militant Mónica Baltodano, documenting the Ortega government’s sellout to neoliberal capitalism.

In the last few days, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega arrested five presidential candidates and several former guerrilla commanders. That added to the 1,600 detainees and more than 103,000 who went into exile since 2018. The causes of the intransigence according to the Sandinista dissidents.

On May 17, I completed a month of uninterrupted siege in my house by the National Police. Between six and eight policemen, sometimes in plain clothes and sometimes in uniform, arrive every day from 6 a.m. until noon or late afternoon. The order is not to let me leave the house, to interrogate everyone who arrives and to report my movements”, says political scientist Guillermo Incer Medina, member of the opposition National Blue and White Unity front, in the latest issue of Revista Envío (V-21).

The latest repressive measure of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is that of “turning your house into a prison”, a situation that at least 600 people identified with the opposition are experiencing. “Those of us who live under police house arrest suffer psychological, economic and social damage,” Medina reflects in his article.

This form of siege generates serious unseen damage, since “the fact of not knowing how long this situation will last and how far they are willing to go causes a lot of mental stress”. And it also strongly damages the Nicaraguan social fabric because it deepens the differences between neighbors. According to Medina, “the regime’s sympathizers make sure to stigmatize you as a ‘coup plotter and terrorist’, they make sure to note that those who ‘disturbed the peace’ are now under control and that the regime will not permit another ‘loosening up’ at the hands of the empire and the right”, he says, in reference to the massive popular protests of 2018.

Those who continue to support Sandinismo, who according to the Gallup Poll today represent around 20 percent of the population, “collaborate with the police by bringing them food and drink and letting them use their bathrooms in front of the eyes and patience of the other neighbors.” After the protests and repression of 2018 (see “Nicaragua, el parteaguas de la izquierda latinoamericana”, Brecha, 27-VII-18) that left 328 dead, more than 1,600 people have been detained for political reasons and complaints of torture are multiplying. The exodus of Nicaraguans to neighboring countries continues (see “Sin salida aparente”, Brecha, 26-IV-19), which by February of this year already amounted to 103,000, according to data from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Meanwhile, state violence has been escalating in recent weeks with the arrest of five opposition presidential hopefuls—Cristiana Chamorro, Arturo Cruz, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Félix Maradiaga and Miguel Mora—and of a good number of leaders of Unamos, a party where former Sandinista commanders, such as Hugo Torres, Dora María Téllez and Víctor Tinoco, are organized.

The FSLN and Nicaraguan political culture

Strictly speaking, there is no single reason that explains this behavior of the regime—which continues to claim to be Sandinista—but rather a set of attitudes that have been superimposed throughout recent history. The former commanders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), turned critics of the governing party, are some of the most profound analysts of its current reality, perhaps because they know the organization from the inside and drank from the same source of the political culture they now reject.

Luis Carrión, former FLSN commander, former deputy minister of the Interior (1979-1988) and former minister of Economy (1988-1990), reviews in a 2019 essay the single-party logic that was underlying even when elections were called and the results were respected, after the triumph of the revolution in 1979: “Under that logic we began the construction not of a national state, but of a Sandinista state. All institutions were Sandinized. The Army was Sandinista, the police were Sandinista, all institutions were under the aegis, influence and control of the Sandinista Front.” He recalls that, following in the Soviet tradition, the social organizations were becoming “transmission belts” for the party in power, to the point that “the hegemony of the Sandinista Front ended up being dominant” and non-Sandinistas “were being left on the sidelines of the organizations or had little capacity to influence within them.” Worse still, “they were considered contras, enemies of the revolution” (Revista Envío, VI-19).

Dora María Téllez was the legendary Comandante Dos, who led the takeover of the National Assembly in Managua in 1978, with which the Nicaraguan guerrillas managed to free 60 Sandinistas from prison. On Sunday, June 13, this historian and former Minister of Health (1979-1990) was arrested and beaten by order of the Ortega government along with four other FSLN dissidents. In 2019, in an interview with journalist Fabián Medina, Téllez maintained that “it is not unusual for revolutionary leaders to become what their opponent was”, in reference to Daniel Ortega and dictator Anastasio Somoza. The commander who Gabriel García Márquez described as “shy and absorbed” reflected: “It is the same phenomenon that happens with children of violent parents. There are people who complain that their father bullied them and end up bullying their children. It is the phenomenon of the reproduction of models. Daniel Ortega chose the path of reproducing the model of the Somoza dictatorship, which is a model of deals, of perks, of political clientelism, of corruption, of institutional alignment and a model of subordination of the Army and the Police” (Infobae, 10-VII-19).

At first glance, it may sound excessive or exaggerated, but former members of the FSLN unpack their reasons. Sociologist Oscar-René Vargas considers that a new “parasitic oligarchy” has formed, which in order to stay in power, “has allowed the emergence of a social sector: the paramilitary and police gang that steals, represses and murders with impunity” (Sinpermiso, 20-VII-19). In the same vein, Tellez argues that the FSLN “is today a mafia” and although Ortega “was the most messianic figure of all,” considering himself the incarnation of the revolution, the underlying problem is not character, but the Nicaraguan political culture. “We came from a dictatorship of 50 years, that of the Somozas. And before that it was Zelaya, and the other and the other… The authoritarian matrix is rooted in our country. The authoritarian tendencies of the Sandinista Front do not come only from ideological factors, they come from our history. And if we do not know our history, we will repeat it again”.

Red-black bourgeoisie

Years ago, Monica Baltodano, guerrilla commander, former member of the FSLN National Directorate and founder of the Movement for the Rescue of Sandinismo, reflected on several of the mutations experienced by the original FSLN. The new Ortega government, installed after his electoral triumph with 38 percent of the votes in 2006, is for Baltodano, as she wrote in a 2014 article, “What regime is this?”, one “in which the poor are condemned to eke out a living in informal, precarious, self-employed jobs or to work for miserable wages and long hours, condemned to emigrate to other countries in search of work, condemned to precarious retirement pensions. It is a regime of social inequity with a growing process of concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group”.

The multiple meetings from 2006 onwards between Ortega and Nicaraguan businessmen speak of “a fusion of interests that has long-lasting pretensions”, argued the former minister. Far from completing bilateral arrangements with some big capitalists, it is about “a symbiosis of interests”, which led to the creation of “a red-black bourgeoisie” [Note: red and black are the Sandinista Front’s colors]. In her opinion, Ortega and a group of some 200 faithful are now “an important capitalist group, and the government represents that community of interests that the new Sandinista oligarchy shares with the traditional oligarchy and big transnational capital” (Revista Envío, I-14).

In fact, according to successive investigations by the independent weekly Confidencial starting in 2011 and based on leaks of internal documents of state-owned companies, Ortega and his family manage funds exceeding 2.5 billion dollars, thanks to different links with the firm Alba de Nicaragua SA (Albanisa) and its subsidiary Banco Corporativo (Bancorp). Both companies are involved in the importation of Venezuelan oil and, through them, the appropriation of Venezuelan cooperation funds by the Nicaraguan government elite would have been executed. “Albanisa was constituted as a fraudulent company to privatize, to Ortega’s benefit, the oil cooperation funds”, concluded the Confidencial reports (April 9, 2016). The Venezuelan funds were channeled through these private companies, despite the fact that the money originated in an international agreement ratified by the legislatures of Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Albanisa is a joint venture of two partners: Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA, with 51 percent of the shares, and Petróleos de Nicaragua, with 49 percent. “The total amount of credits Albanisa collected, by June 2018, is close to $4 billion. In good times, they averaged $500 million annually, free and clear. It is liquid capital that Ortega managed at his discretion, as private capital”, calculate the authors of the investigations based on data from the Central Bank of Nicaragua (Confidencial, 13-II-19).

Under the government’s protection, Albanisa ventured into a wide range of businesses: Albageneración, which soon became the main electric energy generating company in the country; Albadepósitos, dedicated to the importation, storage and distribution of petroleum and derivatives; Albaforestal, whose business is lumber; Albaequipos, dedicated to services and construction. According to the investigators, the jewel in Ortega’s crown was Bancorp, which was in charge of managing the group of “Alba companies”. In April 2019, after becoming a target of U.S. sanctions, Bancorp requested permission from the national finance authority to shut down, but journalists and oppositionists argue that the regime has improvised new business schemes to maintain its private access to public funds.

There are multiple allegations that the business interests of the Ortega-Murillo family are distributed among its various members. “Eight of the nine children of the Nicaraguan presidential couple are presidential advisers, control the oil distribution business and run most of the television channels and advertising companies, which benefit from state contracts,” reported the Madrid-based El Pais (April 18, 2021). But sons and daughters are subject to the dictates of Rosario Murillo, who has already excommunicated the eldest for denouncing her stepfather, Daniel Ortega, for sexual abuse in 1998. Persecuted by her mother, Zoilamérica Narváez had to go into exile in Costa Rica in 2013.

No margin for democracy

Oscar-René Vargas asserts that “the regime has definitely entered a stage of decomposition and decadence”. However, the Ortega-Murillo clan is not willing to give in. “The current political structure of the dictatorial regime is not going to give up its power. That has to be taken away,” he says. He believes that to avoid a social and economic catastrophe greater than the current one “the regime must be politically strangled”: “Any other method will be a fiction, an illusion, a lie”.

For Baltodano, Murillo directs the real power to mobilize pro-government forces with “a fanatical and religious way of thinking that she translates into political militancy”. During the pandemic, she was the one who decided that the members of the government should visit some working-class houses to “pray and ask God” to heal them. She is a strange character for the left. She combines constant allusions to Christ and the “Almighty” with an adherence to millenarian sects, such as that of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. It’s worth remembering that, in 2006, the FLSN supported banning abortion, and allied itself in subsequent years with the ultra-conservative Cardinal Obando y Bravo, a former enemy of the Sandinistas. “In the Nicaragua of love, we do not have a culture of death,” Murillo maintained in her networks last December 30, the day Argentina legalized abortion. Carambolas, in order to stay within the powers that be, such as the repression against candidates and former Sandinista comrades. “Most of the popular leaders who were at the forefront of the 2018 rebellion have been forced into exile, are in jail, in hiding or dead. This explains why the regime has managed—through violence and terror—to maintain control in neighborhoods and communities”, Baltodano recently pointed out (Desinformémonos, 17-VI-21). Something which, in her opinion, is allowing the Nicaraguan people to reach “the worst possible scenario” for the general elections of November 7: elections completely controlled by the government to guarantee the continuation in power of the Ortega-Murillo clan, “with the acquiescence of a sector of big business, which does not care about building up institutions of democracy.”

Mónica Baltodano was a Sandinista commander and leader in the 1979 revolution that toppled the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Under the FSLN government, she led the secretariat of “mass organizations,” that linked the government to organizations of women, Blacks, youth and other constituencies. In 2005, she and other leading Sandinistas, rejecting the corruption and authoritarianism of the leading party, launched the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (El rescate) in protest. She has become a leading left critic of the FSLN and its trajectory under the Ortega-Murillo regime. Below we reprint an excerpt from “¿Qué régimen es este? ¿Qué mutaciones ha experimentado el FSLN hasta llegar a lo que es hoy?”, published in Revista Envío, No. 382, January 2014).

Ortega and the multinationals

It is not that Ortega wants to promote the Nicaraguan business class to strengthen a national bourgeoisie capable of developing the country from our own possibilities or creating a nationalist capitalism, an objective that never ended up being fulfilled in Nicaragua. No, it is not about that. It is a symbiosis in the service of the logic of big transnational capital […].

Such deep levels of subordination to the logic of capital were not found in the government of Violeta Barrios (1990-1997) nor in that of Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002), nor even in the government of Enrique Bolaños (2002-2007), which was closest to business. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that when these governments were in power, labor and union forces served as a counterweight to these governments. A grassroots Sandinismo resisted […]. Let us look, for example, at Nicaragua’s relationship with the Spanish transnational Unión Fenosa […]. The relations of the government of Enrique Bolaños with Unión Fenosa were tense. In 2006, when Daniel Ortega came to power, Bolaños had 12 lawsuits against Unión Fenosa, state claims and fines filed in the courts against the multinational.

All this was resolved with the Ortega government. In November 2007, while Daniel Ortega was making a virulent speech against the transnationals at the Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile [the economic advisor to the Presidency] Bayardo Arce was meeting in Madrid, at the Moncloa Palace, with the management of Unión Fenosa. Starting with the Protocol of Understanding between the Government of Nicaragua and Unión Fenosa, which was given the status of law in the National Assembly on February 12, 2009, legislation included guarantees of all kinds for the company. All of the past conflict was erased with the stroke of a pen. All the lawsuits, all the pending lawsuits, and fines were erased. Afterwards, other laws were passed, but they were always to the benefit of the transnational.

Never have relations with the Spanish energy transnational been as fluid as they have been with the Ortega government. And what about alternative energy generation? It is increasingly in private hands, even when the bases of power generation are the country’s natural resources, such as wind, water, volcanoes. All new wind, hydroelectric or geothermal energy projects have been contracted out to transnational companies, in which Ortega and his group own shares.