Posted on 10/28/2006 12:30:36 AM PDT by MadIvan
Alliances and enmities have been reshaped in a magically realist way for the presidential election
LIKE most places in the ramshackle Nicaraguan capital, the street corner has no name. You are merely told to go to the baseball field in the “America Uno” slum and find your way from there.
It is not hard to locate because hundreds of people from the surrounding shanties, many wearing football shirts emblazoned with the name Daniel, have been waiting into the night to cheer the man they hope will deliver them from poverty.
Fireworks crackle overhead and speakers blare out his campaign song — the Spanish version of John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance — as he approaches, standing up and waving almost Pope-like through the sunroof of a silver Mercedes 4x4.
The last time that Daniel Ortega took power in Nicaragua, it was down the barrel of a gun. Now “El Comandante” is trying to return the democratic way by shaking hands, kissing babies and making deals.
It might seem an improbable quest for a man who last led his country at a time of war — with 30,000 dead, rationing and hyperinflation of more than 13,000 per cent.
But the moustachioed former Sandinista strongman and Cold War foe of America is well ahead in the polls in his third attempt at a comeback since he relinquished power in 1990 after more than a decade in control.
For a reporter who was last in Nicaragua 21 years ago at the height of the war, the campaign has a magical-realist quality of topsy-turvy alliances among old enemies and bitter splits among old friends. Señor Ortega’s running-mate is a former spokesman for the US-backed Contra rebels, in whose confiscated mansion the Sandinista leader still lives.
Famous Sandinistas such as Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-priest and former Culture Minister, and Sergio Ramírez, the novelist who served as vice- president, have broken with El Comandante.
They are supporting the son-in-law of Violeta de Chamorro, the former conservative President, whose 1990 election win ended Sandinista rule — yet who is running as the “Sandinista renewal” candidate. But Señor Ortega has the apparent backing of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, once one of his harshest critics.
Meanwhile Oliver North, who earned official disgrace but hero status on the Right for orchestrating secret arms sales to Iran to finance the Contra rebels, and almost brought down President Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal, has reappeared.
With the Right divided between two candidates, Señor Ortega is close to the 35 per cent of the vote that he needs to win back power in the first round of balloting on November 5. Far from the uncompromising Marxist in military uniform that he was in the 1980s, the now-balding former guerrilla has reinvented himself as a charismatic retail politician who tours the country in blue jeans.
Buoyed by the success of other Latin American leftists, Señor Ortega is trying to turn the election into a referendum on the fracaso, or fiasco, of Nicaragua’s “savage capitalism”.
“Those in government have already had 16 years to deliver what they promised,” he tells the crowd. “They promised work. They promised health. They promised education. They promised culture. They promised sport. They promised finance. They promised there would be no hunger in Nicaragua. And they did not deliver.”
The Sandinista comeback is welcomed by residents of this impoverished and crime-ridden barrio.
Managua, devastated by an earthquake in 1972, has sprouted luxury shopping centres since the Sandinista years and its once-deserted streets are busy with cars from the Far East. But the drivers are besieged by urchins. The nation of five million is the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere, after Haiti.
“We had the Sandinistas in the 1980s but then they disappeared. I was an adolescent. I have good memories of that time,” Roland Rodríguez, a local lawyer who is wheelchair-bound, said. “We did not have thieves. We did not have drugs. Nothing. Life is more dangerous now. You cannot go out on the streets.”
Señor Ortega’s lead, however, has alarmed human rights advocates such as Bianca Jagger, the former wife of the Rolling Stone. “I do not think the Daniel of today is the same Daniel of the past. However, although this is not the Daniel of the past, it’s a Daniel who has made some unpardonable deals with corrupt politicians on the Right,” she said on a visit to her homeland. “While it’s true that he may not have the same radical views as he had in the past, other things will be at stake — issues of governance and accountability.”
An iconic figure of the Left, Señor Ortega spent seven years in jail for robbing a bank to raise money for weapons before being released in a prisoner exchange when guerrillas took ambassadors and officials hostage in a spectacular raid on a fancy-dress party in 1974.
After training in Cuba he led the Tercerista guerrilla faction, which pushed for a rapid insurrection against the Somoza dynasty, rulers of Nicaragua since 1936.
When the Sandinistas toppled Anastasio Somoza in 1979, Señor Ortega became a member of the nine-person ruling junta and was elected President in 1984. His brother, Humberto, headed the Sandinista military against the Contras.
Left-wing artists, writers and so-called sandal-istas flocked to the country — among them Salman Rushdie, then a sympathiser, who wrote a somewhat conflicted account of his 1986 visit in The Jaguar Smile. Señor Ortega eventually agreed to step down after losing the 1990 election, but not before a last-minute asset grab known locally as “La Piñata”. He has run in every presidential election since, along the way denying highly publicised allegations by a step-daughter that he sexually abused her from the time she was 11.
Former colleagues voice anger at Señor Ortega’s continued thirst for power and his domination of the rump of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. Many blame the influence of his wife, Rosario Murillo, a poet who is also his campaign manager, constantly at his side in her colourful, hippy clothes and jewellery.
“He changed. He wants to be the jefe, the only one in the party, because of his ambition for power,” Señor Cardenal said. “The party has been corrupted. I left the party. All the good people left the party.”
In a sign of how much things have changed, the previously pro-choice Señor Ortega supports a blanket ban on abortion passed this week under pressure from the Church.
Last month Señor Ortega signed a peace accord with a Contra group. His running-mate is Jaime Morales Carazo, a former Contra spokesman, who says that Señor Ortega paid him compensation several years ago for his expropriated six-bedroom home.
“The times are different. The mentality of the people has changed,” said Carlos Enrique Ortega Murillo, one of Señor Ortega’s sons, who works at a Sandinista-dominated television station. “The only people who continue to promote confrontation and hate are the Right.”
The latest poll gives Señor Ortega 33 per cent of the vote — just short of the threshold he needs for a first-round win.
Trailing him are the two main right-wing candidates: Eduardo Montealegre, a Harvard-educated banker, who broke away from Señor Alemán’s ruling party, with 22 per cent; and José Rizo, a former vice-president from the ruling party, with 17 per cent. Edmundo Jarquín, Señora Chamorro’s son-in-law, running as a “Sandinista renewal” candidate, has 13 per cent.
The poll suggests that if Señor Ortega fails to win outright in the first round, he is likely to lose to a united right-wing vote in the run-off.
Inevitably the election has become a tussle for influence between the United States and Hugo Chávez, the firebrand President of Venezuela, who is selling subsidised heating oil and fertiliser to Señor Ortega’s supporters.
The Bush Administration was accused of meddling when the Commerce Secretary predicted that an Ortega victory would scare off foreign investors and jeopardise a regional free trade accord.
President Chávez, for his part, invited Señor Ortega on to his weekly television show and told him: “I shouldn’t say I hope you win, because they will accuse me of sticking my nose into Nicaraguan internal affairs. But I hope you win.”
If Señor Ortega succeeds in becoming the “Comeback Comandante”, Nicaragua will attract international fascination and concern in a way that it has not since he was last in power.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Where's the "Aw, Jeez..." graphic?
(Sigh)...back to the future, again. Thanks, Jimmah.
):^(
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