I am not nor have I ever been a fan of Daniel Ortega. For the most part, he is an incompetent and inept ruler. He is also a political scoundrel. He would make a deal with the devil, if it suited him. Most recently, he drew my ire when he was the only foreign leader to offer condolences to the FARC upon the death of its leader, Manuel Marulanda. For the tens of thousands of victims of the FARC, not a word.
His return to power for a second run as Nicaragua’s President has been an abject failure. Instead of focusing on Nicaragua’s development needs, he chose to re-embroil himself in a territorial dispute with Colombia over the sovereignty of San Andrés y Providencia and was again rebuffed by the International Court of Justice in Den Haag. Meanwhile, Nicargua has sputtered. Having reached a growth rate of 7% in 1999, it is now under 2%.
The high level of poverty, around 50% of the population, is a serious obstacle to sustainable development and to the consolidation of the country’s fragile democracy and the emerging rule of law. The weakest and most vulnerable group are those people, especially women and children, living in rural areas, in a fragile physical environment, characterized by less education, less access to basic social services, higher fertility and maternal and infant mortality rates, and with fewer options and opportunities. But it is the foolishness of Daniel Ortega that is the most serious of obstacles. For a month this year, Nicaragua crawled to a standstill in the midst of a transportation strike. 1.5 million people in a country of 5 million went on strike protesting rising fuel costs and the lack of government impetus to do anything about it. With road blockades in several places in Managua and almost no public intercity transport allowed whatsoever, Nicaragua was at an effective standstill. Containers full of goods sit stalled on the sides of highways, and even sports teams have canceled games. When baseball is put on hold in Nicaragua, you know it is serious.
Now Ortega has another gambit: ban small political parties. This brings me to Dora María Téllez, a heroine of the rights conscience.
Dora María Téllez, 52, started a hunger strike this week, plopping down in downtown Managua to ‘’sound the alarm bell” against what she says are President Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian intentions.
The former rebel leader and ex-minister of health under the first Sandinista government in the 1980s says her protest is a continuation of the revolutionary struggle she started three decades ago against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.
Téllez, who is on a water and salt diet, says that Ortega and incarcerated former President Arnoldo Alemán — who is still considered the ”maximum leader” of the opposition Liberal Constitutional Party — are in the process of reworking their infamous power-sharing pact to redivide state institutions and cut out minority parties.
Political analysts have speculated that the final negotiation point of the new pact will be freedom for Alemán in exchange for constitutional reforms to allow Ortega to remain in power indefinitely.
Also upsetting to Téllez is a recent ruling by the Supreme Electoral Council, which Ortega’s party controls, to eliminate four minority parties — including Téllez’s Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) — from the ballot in municipal elections scheduled for Nov. 2. Téllez says that is further proof that the so-called pacto is still alive and well.
Daniel Ortega and Barack Obama now have something in common–they have both striken others from the ballot.
The story in the Miami Herald.