By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
Some Latin American countries have again come under the rule of autocrats in recent years. Nicaragua’s ruler, Daniel Ortega, was re-elected to a fourth term as president in the Nov. 7 election.
Once the leader of Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista revolution, Ortega, who held the top job from 1979 to 1990 and then again since 2007, has morphed into an autocrat, turning his back on his revolutionary ideals and coming to resemble Anastasio Somoza, the dictator he deposed.
Most of his political opponents have been thrown in jail, and human rights groups and newspapers have also been shut down. Ortega quashed protests in 2018 that left 328 dead.
U.S. President Joe Biden described the vote as a sham. What Ortega orchestrated “was a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic,” Biden said.
Latin American dictators like Ortega have learned to adapt. They’ve realized that they must transform themselves and, above all, do so without army revolts. They no longer wear military garb or seize power by wielding rifles.
They have resorted to elections which they can manipulate to their advantage. Ortega can point at the results of national polls.
Ortega used state institutions to purge the electoral lists and remove from the race those who would have taken power from him in a true democracy. He used the judiciary to jail his political opponents, prosecute inconvenient journalists, and ban civil society organizations that denounced his transgressions.
Ortega proved it is possible to become a dictator without a coup d’état. He used what dictators who in the past overthrew revolutionaries like him once feared: elections.
“Ortega is more willing to sell out the national patrimony than even Somoza was,” remarked Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born human rights and social justice activist. “When we talk about what people think of this idea of a leftist revolution, they better think twice. If anyone betrayed the principles that inspired this revolution, it was Daniel Ortega. The left needs to come to terms that their utopian dreams of what these revolutions have brought to these countries are completely and totally fictitious.”
Ortega is not alone. The death of Hugh Chavez in 2013 offered new hope for Venezuela. But his successor, Nicolas Maduro, has instead continued the economic follies of Chavismo to the point that Venezuelans were reduced to scavenging for food. Political violence has been unleashed upon opponents of the regime. A few years ago, voices were raised in the international community on behalf of democracy in Venezuela, but now the world has mostly reconciled itself to Maduro’s ongoing tyranny.
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 5.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, many living in extremely precarious conditions in neighboring countries such as Brazil and Colombia. The 2020-21 Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida (National Survey of Living Conditions) from the Universidad Catolica Andrés Bello in Caracas found that 76.6 per cent of Venezuela’s 28 million residents live in extreme poverty.
Yet Maduro portrays himself and the country’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) as vanguards of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist nexus of regional powers including Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia.
Bolivia was rocked by nationwide demonstrations after socialist leader Evo Morales won his fourth election in October 2019. Protesters claimed that he had committed election fraud, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets.
The accusation was corroborated by a report issued by the Organization of American States. Morales resigned and went into exile, first to Mexico and later to Argentina.
After Morales fled the country, his party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) opposed the selection by the country’s parliament of a conservative, Jeanine Anez, as interim president.
Bolivian elections held in October 2020 saw Luis Arce, Morales’ handpicked MAS candidate, win the presidency. Morales then returned to Bolivia and was granted a pardon.
On the other hand, Anez was arrested on charges of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy last March. “They are sending me to detention for four months to await a trial for a ‘coup’ that never happened,” she protested. In August 2021, she attempted suicide while in prison. It seems Bolivia has come full circle.
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