The march followed last week’s decision by the Supreme Electoral Council to cancel the legal status of two opposition parties, the centre-right Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS) and the Conservative Party. The electoral body, a power independent of the executive, the judiciary and the legislature under Nicaragua’s political constitution,judged that both those parties had failed to comply with the relevant electoral legislation. The MRS had been given almost 15 months to comply with its legal obligations, but did not do so.

Article 173 of Nicaragua’s political constitution authorises the Supreme Electoral Council to cancel or suspend the legal status of political parties that fail to comply with relevant electoral law. The electoral authority found that, with duly constituted departmental authorities in only 10 of the country’s 16 departments and two autonomous regions, the MRS left itself in non-compliance with Nicaragua’s electoral law and the party’s own statutes.

Nicaraguan opposition — dependent on foreign support

The opposition and its supporters accused the electoral body of acting under orders of the leaders of the two main political parties in Nicaragua, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista. Among the opposition’s supporters are the representatives of foreign development cooperation programmes in Nicaragua, the US government and foreign intellectuals. The day after the electoral tribunal’s decision was made, the foreign development cooperation programme representatives published a pronouncement in the country’s two main daily newspapers questioning the electoral authority’s ruling.

The pronouncement alleged that the ruling was open to question because it was based on an electoral law they thought left too much to the discretion of the CSE magistrates. The statement argued that this called into question the development of democratic governance in Nicaragua. This, it noted, suggested lack of compliance by the Nicaraguan government with the terms of relevant development cooperation agreements.

The pronouncement ended with an avowal that the development cooperation community would monitor developments closely. The blatantly presumptuous neocolonial sub-text could hardly be clearer: “do what we want, or else…” The list of countries supporting that pronouncement consists almost entirely of US and allied countries and also multilateral bodies, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, controlled by the US and its allies.

The electoral tribunal’s decision and the donor countries’ pronouncement came after a high-profile 11-day hunger strike by the opposition leader Dora María Tellez. The opposition won international publicity for Tellez’ protest when a group of leading international intellectuals including Eduardo Galeano, Noam Chomsky and Mario Benedetti published a letter supporting her call for a national dialogue. They may or may not have been aware that Dora Maria Tellez’s idea of dialogue is to demand, in the most insulting possible terms, that Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s President, resign.

NGOs — part of opposition electoral maneuvres

This latest episode in the Nicaraguan opposition’s efforts to destabilise the FSLN coalition government re-runs similar US and allied-country funded conspiracies to overthrow democratically elected governments leading to the coups d’état in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. NGOs and the managerial class that lives by them are invariably important players in such coups. They mushroomed in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolutionary government lost the watershed 1990 presidential election. Almost all are heavily dependent on funding from US and allied country governmental and non-governmental institutions and agencies.

With those resources Nicaraguan NGOs are able to play a political role in Nicaragua because they constitute in large part the electoral base for the centre-right MRS party, which won barely 7% of the vote in the 2006 presidential election. Because their political support is located overwhelmingly in Managua and other urban centres on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, the MRS has difficulty complying with the electoral law. They voted for that law when the measure was passed in 1995 but have subsequently found it hard to consolidate the national structures that electoral law requires.

Faced with that difficulty and its very limited electoral support, the MRS, by default or by design, set itself up for elimination as a legal political party. Its leaders and the party’s right wing allies, principally Eduardo Montealegre, generally regarded as the leader of Nicaragua’s traditional oligarchy, seem to have carefully planned events around that predictable outcome. They have used their resource-rich NGO base to mobilise high profile protest. It chimes well with the motif of dictatorship and democratic crisis the US and allied country interventionist scenario demands.

In fact the electoral authority’s ruling may help the MRS party achieve two things. It makes it much easier for them to justify electoral alliances with the right because they can claim they have to do so in order to be able to participate in elections. It also means they can focus their resources on the electoral areas in Managua and the urban centres of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast where they have most support. This will help Nicaragua’ s right wing and centre-right consolidate their electoral campaign more effectively.

Democracy — look who’s talking

While the local European representatives talk human rights to Nicaragua, their European Union governments are accomplices both to the genocidal collective punishment applied by Israel to Palestinians in the Gaza strip and to systematic racist abuses and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Wherever one looks in the world, from Equatorial Guinea to Morocco to Uzbekistan, one will find that the same European countries currently threatening Nicaragua, support the most cruel and vicious tyrannies. Canada did the same in Haiti during that country’s long agony under the illegitimate Latortue regime.

These are the people warning Nicaragua’s FSLN-led coalition government to respect the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Organization of American States and the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Together with that contemptible hypocrisy, if one turns to the practice of democracy and transparency in Europe itself, the picture looks much worse than it does in Nicaragua.

European countries colluded in CIA torture flights and then obstructed investigation by the European Parliament into that appalling betrayal of public trust. One should remember episodes like the comprehensive ELF corruption scandal and the Taiwan frigates affair in France, the British Aerospace-Saudi Arabia scandal, the mass resignation of the European Commission in 1999, the corruption scandal around Helmut Kohl in Germany. In Italy, one has to recall the Parmalat scandal and the systematic corruption associated with Bettino Craxi’s regime, never mind Silvio Berlusconi.

The endemic corruption in Ireland embodied by the governments of Charles Haughey has been rife too in other small European countries like Greece or Portugal. Many scandals like those mentioned were found out. But the culture of corruption recurs time and agai, surviving along with all the scandals that never see the light of day. And yet, these are the countries trying to wag their finger convincingly at Nicaragua about good governance.

As for the EU’s bogus espousal of democracy, all the EU countries except Ireland have denied their peoples a say on the corporate friendly Lisbon Treaty because these countries’ ruling elites know their peoples would very likely reject the treaty if they had the chance. That is what happened in Ireland, the only country whose constitution forced the ruling elite to put the Lisbon Treaty to a democratic vote. The European Union’s executive, the European Commission, is appointed, not elected. So it is absolutely clear that the development cooperation representatives of these countries in Nicaragua operate by longstanding neocolonial double standards.

Nicaraguan government stresses sovereignty

By contrast, the Nicaraguan government’s response has been fine, dignified and clear. The Vice-Minister of the office of External Cooperation said of the donor representatives: “they have not accepted that there are substantial changes, a fundamental transformation in the way we relate to each other, and here there are two keywords: sovereignty and dignity… if they argue there is to be no cooperation because we don’t do a particular thing, we have no other option but to say ‘well, if you want to go off with it, then off you go,’ that is dignity’s final argument, that is the final point.”¹

Nicaragua’s FSLN-led coalition government is ultimately in a stronger position to resist foreign intervention than was, for example, Haiti’s President Jean Bertrand Aristide. But the strength of the Nicaraguan government’s position depends overwhelmingly on support from Venezuela. It is hard to see how Nicaragua could defend itself against consistent US and allied country blackmail and incessant destabilisation were it not a bona fide member of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, the ALBA bloc of countries comprised currently of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Neither the US government nor its European allies look kindly on the socialist inspired, solidarity based, trade and development cooperation model being developed by the ALBA countries. They support the Nicaraguan opposition’s destabilisation campaign just as they support similar opposition campaigns in Venezuela and Bolivia. All these campaigns are part of US and allied government efforts to roll back attempts by Latin American countries to move towards progressive sovereign integration outside the capitalist scheme of corporate globalization.

As Orlando Nuñez, the director of Nicaragua’s landmark Zero Hunger program has said, the destabilization campaign in Nicaragua is the latest stage of an ongoing low-intensity war to re-establish the neocolonial debt-plus-aid model imposed for so long in Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America by the United States and its allies. They want to prevent Nicaragua’s progressive government implementing its programme successfully so as to ensure it loses electoral support. The next decisive battleground will be the municipal elections in November this year.

1. Jaentschke ratifica principos de política exterior sandinista

The signatories’ response to criticism of their endorsement of the former MRS president’s oportunistically calculated, factitious appeal is likely to be that critics of their letter themselves offer misplaced solidarity the FSLN government does not merit. But a brief review of the facts of the MRS record in the last few years renders the dishonesty and shiftiness of Dora Maria Tellez and her colleagues in the MRS leadership very clear. Apologetics on behalf of the FSLN are superfluous in this case. The facts speak for themselves.

It is also possible the signatories might try and evade the issue by pretending they can separate Dora Maria Tellez as a person from the MRS party. They may try and suggest that her 12-day hunger strike – intended to apply moral pressure the Supreme Electoral Council – was not wholly designed to promote the political agenda of the MRS. If they were to make that argument, the letter’s signatories would be adding pathetic absurdity to their already glib intervention in Nicaraguan domestic politics.

Confirmation that the MRS cynically engineered the whole affair came with the letter’s sequel. First appeared a paid advertisement in the local press from the group of foreign cooperation development donor countries – who like the Bush regime have consistently promoted the MRS – criticising the Supreme Electoral Council’s interpretation of Nicaragua’s electoral law. Then the same day, the MRS held a national rally in support of Dora Maria’s protest. According to the MRS newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, the rally attracted a few thousand supporters from all over the country. The whole series of events was very clearly orchestrated by the MRS leadership, including Dora Maria Tellez herself.

Any attempt to patronise the signatories of the letter, suggesting maybe they are somehow unable to analyse all this for themselves along with what is happening in Nicaragua would be extremely foolish. They are all very politically sophisticated people, as well able as anyone to research via the Internet and to confirm via personal conversations the nature of the developing destabilisation campaign in Nicaragua of which the MRS is, from the US State Department’s point of view, a vital part. So one has to assume they know what they are doing and have no regrets about serving the interests of the campaign by the Bush regime and its European allies to destroy the solidarity based ALBA initiative, led by Cuba and Venezuela, in Central America and the Caribbean.

Before clarifying that assertion, it may help to recall some context vis-a-vis the MRS. The MRS themselves are very sophisticated political and diplomatic operators. Domestically, they have locally powerful and influential media at their disposal in the shape of the Canal 8 TV channel, the El Nuevo Diario daily newspaper. On the internet those news media are supplemented by the web sites of numerous NGOs who are extremely active political supporters of the MRS.

Since they are mostly talented and personally charming individuals, it has not been difficult for the MRS leadership and their supporters to sustain friendships and acquaintanceships forged during the 1980s, during the Sandinista revolution of those years, with similar individuals influential in North American and European media, academic and political circles. The FSLN has not been very effective internationally in combatting the MRS disinformation effort.

This explains in part how such a short document can come loaded with such a weight of disinformation both explicit and implicit. Nor is it surprising that a group of social democrats and liberals – in the USAmerican sense – should be doing John Negroponte’s and Tom Shannon’s low intensity war propaganda work and that of US ambassador Paul Trivelli, with his Masters in National Security from the Naval War College. Prior to the 2006 presidential election in Nicaragua, much of the US solidarity movement showed no qualms at all in duplicating the US embassy’s propaganda line that the FSLN and its leader Daniel Ortega were undemocratic. They said the same about the right wing Constitutional Liberal Party.

In the 2006 presidential election, the FSLN won almost 39% of the votes cast, the PLC won just over 26% and the MRS just over 7%. What that means is that the “undemocratic” parties won 65% of the vote between them, while the MRS alliance – the alliance, not the MRS party itself – just made the 5% cut off point below which they would have had to return public money disbursed to them for their electoral expenses. If the MRS party had run alone it is quite possible they would not even have made that 5% cut. This is the political party of which Dora Maria Tellez was president that the letter’s signatories allege represents a broad section of Nicaraguan political opinion.

The MRS party does not represent a broad body of Nicaraguan political opinion. It represents a very limited managerial class based largely on professional people and the plethora of non-governmental organizations who often claim, falsely, to represent Nicaraguan civil society. It is not surprising that the letter’s signatories are in solidarity with the MRS since they occupy a very similar class position to that of the MRS leadership in the societies of their own countries.

The MRS manage two – to keep matters simple, because they actually manage several – main discourses, one for domestic consumption and one, with the appropriate variations depending on context, for foreign consumption. Within Nicaragua their political and economic arguments are for neoliberal economic policies in line with the practice of their European, Third Way, New Labour-style social democrat supporters and acceptable to their supporters in the US government. Outside Nicaragua they tend to drop those arguments and put up front alleged concerns about democracy and freedom of speech. The division of labour is clear. Sergio Ramirez sells the MRS to the centre and the right. Monica Baltodano sells it to the left, Sofía Montenegro to feminist opinion, María López Vigil to progressive church opinion, and so on.

In striking consonance with the anti-Hugo Chavez, anti-Evo Morales formula, along with those freedom and democracy concerns they also stoke criticism about government economic policy. Sometimes they do this from the right via the perspective of Edmundo Jarquin, especially when the government criticises multinational corporations like Union Fenosa or Esso. Sometimes they attack from the left via the consummate opportunism of Monica Baltodano who, when she had the opportunity to vote against the grotesque manipulation of the Venezuelan RCTV case by the MRS and its right wing allies in the National Assembly, abstained.

Just so as to be clear about the level of identification the MRS leadership have with US and European policy one should remember that the MRS leadership – including former FSLN comandantes Luis Carrion and Victor Lopez Tirado – negotiated funding from the US electoral destabilisation quango, the International Republican Institute to train up MRS electoral officials prior to the 2006 presidential election. As part of that successful negotiation they held a meeting with Jean Kirkpatrick, IRI board member, whose record as US ambassador to the UN under President Reagan in support of mass murderers like the Argentinian junta and Augusto Pinochet, Rios Montt in Guatemala, the army death squads in El Salvador and of the Nicaraguan Contra should need no elaboration.

Likewise, they actively sought a meeting with Robert Zoellick when Zoellick was still Condoleezza Rice’s deputy Secretary of State. Current Assistant Under Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon was quoted by Nuevo Diario of June 27th 2006 saying that then MRS Alliance leader, Herty Lewites, and right wing oligarch Eduardo Montealegre “represent the future of this country and the chance to open a space for all Nicaraguans.” The MRS is an active political ally of the US embassy’s political intervention inside Nicaragua and also that of European governments whose most vocal representative has tended to be Sweden’s ambassador, Eva Zetterberg.

Since the 2006 presidential election the MRS has consistently voted with the right wing Alianza Liberal Nicaraguense in the National Assembly including those votes critical of the Chavez government in Venezuela. The only issue on which their voting record has been more progressive than the FSLN is on the issue of abortion rights. On almost every other issue their voting record has been well to the right of the FSLN. Edmundo Jarquin, the party’s leader in the National Assembly worked for ten years as a senior official in the Inter-American Development Bank. So the affinities of the MRS leadership, whatever their role as individuals in the years of the Sandinista Revolution, are now very firmly with the discredited Washington Consensus as its proponents slowly help it shape-shift towards a workable policy program appropriate to an updated neocolonialist agenda.

It may help to remind the letter’s signatories of all this. They are all busy individuals. It is possible they had either forgotten or that they never knew. That factual review of matters is by no means intended to justify any allegedly repressive actions by the Nicaraguan government. In fact, it is the majority in the National Assembly, the right wing parties and their centre-right allies in the MRS, who have behaved with consistent vindictiveness and aggression since losing the presidential election to Daniel Ortega. Dialogue and negotiation have necessarily been the FSLN’s strategy ever since it lost power in the election in 1990, because they have not enjoyed a majority in the National Assembly since then.

It is also worth pointing out that the MRS formed part of the FSLN-led Convergencia Nacional until late in 2005. The FSLN is visibly very much the same party with the same leadership that it was during all the years the MRS formed part of the Convergencia. The only thing that has changed is that after the MRS jumped ship in 2005, the FSLN, electorally, did better than ever. Tellez and her colleagues would give even Alan Dershowitz a run for his money in terms of chutzpah, vindictiveness and doubletalk.

So now the MRS are alleging that a coalition government with a minority in the National Assembly is somehow imposing a dictatorship. It alleges the FSLN achieves this Incredible Hulk feat by means of an anti-democratic deal with the PLC. With just barely 7% national support, the MRS accuses two parties with 65% electoral support of an anti-democratic pact while the MRS themselves have struck deals and alliances consistently ever since 2005 with the most reactionary sectors of Nicaragua’s traditional oligarchy – most of whom, incidentally, also voted against abortion rights for women at the time that measure came before the National Assembly.

It is in all this context that the MRS decided quite deliberately not to comply for well over a year with repeated attempts, urging and encouragement from the Supreme Electoral Council to bring their electoral legal status up to date by satisfying various requirements in relation to procedural and administrative anomalies in violation of their party’s own statutes. The relevant electoral law was legislation supported by the MRS itself at the time of its approval in the National Assembly.

This same party that has repeatedly called for consolidation of a sound legal basis for public institutions in Nicaragua itself broke, in the most flagrant, negligent way, the very legality it so vociferously and demagogically purports to revere. They had every opportunity to put the relevant documentation in order. They did not do so. So what was the Supreme Electoral Council supposed to do? The MRS made it impossible for the Council members not to cancel the party’s formal electoral status. Unless one adopts Tony Blair, New Labour style obtuseness, one has to conclude on the facts that they did so deliberately to provoke a crisis.

If one looks at the modus operandi of US and European governments from the time of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran to the present, it hardly varies – media attacks, economic disruption, political division, military intimidation. It is hard to believe the letter’s signatories cannot discern the propaganda gift they have handed the US government. Condoleezza Rice, John Negroponte and Thomas Shannon can all now say, “Well look, it’s like we said all along. Even Tom Hayden, Brian Wilson and Noam Chomsky agree with us….”

The FSLN is not shutting down democratic spaces in Nicaragua. On the contrary, it is the victim of a vicious international disinformation campaign. The FSLN government is the Central American government doing most in the region to address the looming food crisis with investment, unprecedented since the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980s, in credit, technical support and subsidised inputs for small farmers, innovative sustainable agriculture programmes and an active environmental conservation policy.

The accelerating inflation rate throughout the dollar zone in Latin America is a direct result of deliberate dollar devaluation by the US monetary authorities who are increasing the money supply currently at a rate of 16% and more a year. They are doing that while local US government allies in Nicaragua hypocritically throw up their hands at accelerating price inflation, a world wide phenomenon. The government’s response has been to consult widely with the banking, industrial, farming and business sectors and with cooperatives and labour unions.

Whether they eventually work out a successful anti-inflation policy under the dauntingly adverse international economic situation is anyone’s guess. One thing is certain though, the stale, neoliberal managerial-class recipes on offer from the MRS will do little to ameliorate things any more than their deliberate attempts to provoke a bogus political crisis. The signatories of the letter in support of former MRS president Dora Maria Tellez have made themselves part of that fakery. Hayden, Chomsky, Wilson and the others have helped Thomas Shannon and his team pull off another propaganda coup to notch up alongside the RCTV farrago, the Buenos Aires suitcase affair, and the FARC laptops.

This is a time when the ALBA solidarity based trade project is under fierce attack by means of diplomatic pressure, internal destabilisation, military intimidation and economic disruption. Nicaragua is an important member of ALBA. The FSLN government’s friendly relations with other Central American governments facilitate continual discussion about how to extend ALBA’s solidarity based model in the region.

The FSLN government programme very clearly seeks to meet the needs of Nicaragua’s impoverished majority within an adverse configuration of political power. The country’s media are controlled by the right and the centre-right. The FSLN face an opposition majority in the National Assembly. The right and centre-right – like the MRS – accuse them of being authoritarian because the FSLN oppose the neocolonialist corporate globalization agenda advocated by the MRS and its backers in the NATO governments who dominate Nicaragua’s foreign development cooperation budget. Resistance to NATO government policy is invariably characterised as populist and anti-democratic.

The FSLN government is in some ways a quixotic attempt to manage seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. The Sandinista bourgeoisie rode to power in 2006 on the overwhelming popularity of Daniel Ortega. Their contribution was to fund the campaign and bring on board Nicaragua’s politically open-minded business classes. The popular base in the urban barrios, in rural areas, in the cooperatives and labour unions mobilised the electoral support. These two main components of the FSLN’s political viability enjoy an equivocal relationship which tends to be reflected in government policy. The MRS acts constantly to upset that equivocal balance and lever internal FSLN contradictions, so far without notable success.

The MRS is a key component of the US government’ efforts to stymie and destroy ALBA’s appeal in the region and promote corporate friendly policies like those implemented in, for example, Brazil or Uruguay – never mind all the throw away, ready-to-go “pink tide” commentary. US policy in the region will not change even if Barack Obama becomes US President. Noam Chomsky, Brian Wilson and Tom Hayden and their fellow signatories have helped the Bush regime recoup lost ground for unjust US and European militarist corporate domination in Latin America which they will bequeath to whichever US plutocrat dauphin is anointed in November.

Notes

1. Documento de grandes figuras internacionales – Dora María merece ser escuchada, El Nuevo Diario, 16 June 2008.

Translation :

The signatories of this pronouncement have, one way or another, shared Nicaragua’s history. During the Sandinista struggle against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and afterwards during the years in which Nicaragua suffered the aggression produced bythe interventionist policy of the Reagan Administration, we accompanied revolutionary Nicaragua with our positions and our actions. Many of us formed part of a broad solidarity movement.

From that time on we have gotten to know and admire the valour and commitment of Dora María Tellez. Her integrity, prestige, dedication and the risk caused to her life by staying on hunger strike for 13 days prompts us to make a pronouncement asking the Nicaraguan government to meditate well on the consequences of not paying attention to the demands she represents.

What led Dora María to once more put her life and health on the line is a clear demand : that political spaces not be closed and that a national dialogue take place to resolve the food crisis and the high cost of living which, like many countries, Nicaragua faces.

None of these demands is irrational and a government that wants popular support ought to respond to them.

We want to support this demand and this protest. Political representation is a right. It is a right to protest against mechanisms that shut down this space. Dora María is exercising her right. She represents a broad sector of Nicaraguan society that ought to be listened to. We ask for her right, for that of her comrades and that of all Nicaraguans.

• Noam Chomsky
• Susan Meiselas
• Ariel Dorfman
• Salman Rushdie
• Eduardo Galeano
• Hermann Schulz
• Juan Geiman
• Brian Willson
• Tom Hayden
• Bianca Jagger
• Mario Benedetti