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by William Blum
Captain Ahab had his Moby Dick. Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean. The United States has its Fidel Castro. Washington also has its Daniel Ortega. For 27 years, the most powerful nation in the world has found it impossible to share the Western Hemisphere with one of its poorest and weakest neighbors, Nicaragua, if the country's leader was not in love with capitalism.
From the moment the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the US-supported Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Washington was concerned about the rising up of that long-dreaded beast -- "another Cuba". This was war. On the battlefield and in the voting booths. For almost 10 years, the American proxy army, the Contras, carried out a particularly brutal insurgency against the Sandinista government and its supporters. In 1984, Washington tried its best to sabotage the elections, but failed to keep Sandinista leader Ortega from becoming president. And the war continued.
In 1990, Washington's electoral tactic was to hammer home the simple and clear message to the people of Nicaragua: If you re-elect Ortega all the horrors of the civil war and America's economic hostility will continue. Just two months before the election, in December 1989, the United States invaded Panama for no apparent reason acceptable to international law, morality, or common sense (The United States naturally called it "Operation Just Cause"); one likely reason it was carried out was to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua that this is what they could expect, that the US/Contra war would continue and even escalate, if they re-elected the Sandinistas.
It worked; one cannot overestimate the power of fear, of murder, rape, and your house being burned down. Ortega lost, and Nicaragua returned to the rule of the free market, striving to roll back the progressive social and economic programs that had been undertaken by the Sandinistas. Within a few years widespread malnutrition, wholly inadequate access to health care and education, and other social ills, had once again become a widespread daily fact of life for the people of Nicaragua.
Each presidential election since then has pitted
perennial candidate Ortega against Washington's interference in the
process in shamelessly blatant ways. Pressure has been regularly
exerted on certain political parties to withdraw their candidates so as
to avoid splitting the conservative vote against the Sandinistas. US
ambassadors and visiting State Department officials publicly and
explicitly campaign for anti-Sandinista candidates, threatening all
kinds of economic and diplomatic punishment if Ortega wins, including
difficulties with exports, visas, and vital family remittances by
Nicaraguans living in the United States.
In the 2001 election, shortly after the September 11 attacks, American
officials tried their best to tie Ortega to terrorism, placing a
full-page ad in the leading newspaper which declared, among other
things, that: "Ortega has a relationship of more than thirty years with
states and individuals who shelter and condone international
terrorism." That same year a senior analyst in Nicaragua for the
international pollsters Gallup was moved to declare: "Never in my whole
life have I seen a sitting ambassador get publicly involved in a
sovereign country's electoral process, nor have I ever heard of it."
Additionally, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) -- which would
like the world to believe that it's a private non-governmental
organization, when it's actually a creation and an agency of the US
government -- regularly furnishes large amounts of money and other aid
to organizations in Nicaragua which are opposed to the Sandinistas. The
International Republican Institute (IRI), a long-time wing of NED,
whose chairman is Arizona Senator John McCain, has also been active in
Nicaragua creating the Movement for Nicaragua, which has helped
organize marches against the Sandinistas. An IRI official in Nicaragua,
speaking to a visiting American delegation in June of this year,
equated the relationship between Nicaragua and the United States to
that of a son to a father. "Children should not argue with their
parents." she said.
With the 2006 presidential election in mind, one senior US official
wrote in a Nicaraguan newspaper last year that should Ortega be
elected, "Nicaragua would sink like a stone". In March, Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN under Reagan and a prime
supporter of the Contras, came to visit. She met with members of all
the major Sandinista opposition parties and declared her belief that
democracy in Nicaragua "is in danger" but that she had no doubt that
the "Sandinista dictatorship" would not return to power. The following
month, the American ambassador in Managua, Paul Trivelli, who openly
speaks of his disapproval of Ortega and the Sandinista party, sent a
letter to the presidential candidates of conservative parties offering
financial and technical help to unite them for the general election of
November 5. The ambassador stated that he was responding to requests by
Nicaraguan "democratic parties" for US support in their mission to keep
Daniel Ortega from a presidential victory. The visiting American
delegation reported: "In a somewhat opaque statement Trivelli said that
if Ortega were to win, the concept of governments recognizing
governments wouldn't exist anymore and it was a 19th century concept
anyway. The relationship would depend on what his government put in
place." One of the fears of the ambassador likely has to do with Ortega
talking of renegotiating CAFTA, the trade agreement between the US and
Central America, so dear to the hearts of corporate globalizationists.
Then, in June, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said it was
necessary for the Organization of American States (OAS) to send a
mission of Electoral Observation to Nicaragua "as soon as possible" so
as to "prevent the old leaders of corruption and communism from
attempting to remain in power" (though the Sandinistas have not
occupied the presidency, only lower offices, since 1990).
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