Nicaragua: Once again, fear

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

On Nov. 5, Nicaraguans will go to the polls. It is very likely that Daniel Ortega, despite the rejection he provokes, will return to power 16 years after leaving it. A survey I saw placed him at the head of the voters' preferences, with 29 percent of the popular support. He is followed by Eduardo Montealegre, a youthful-looking liberal in the classic sense, former banker and former minister, with 27 percent. Lawyer José Rizo, vice president in the current government, gets 16 percent, and economist Edmundo Jarquín, a former Sandinista returned to sanity by his experience at the Inter-American Development Bank, gets 15 percent. Altogether, the anti-Sandinista vote approaches 60 percent, but it's deeply divided. The percentage of undecided votes remains high.

Runoffs are permitted in Nicaragua, but if the leading candidate garners more than 35 percent of the votes and outdistances the runner-up by more than 5 percent it is not necessary to repeat the contest between the two top vote-getters. Until a couple of years ago in Nicaragua, the leading candidate needed 45 percent of the votes to avoid a runoff, but the Sandinistas negotiated a 10-point trim with former President Arnoldo Alemán in exchange for forgiving him his crimes of corruption. Ortega's electoral ceiling happened to be about 40 percent. In the three elections conducted since 1990, he never got less than 40 percent of the votes. If the phenomenon repeats itself, Daniel can win.

That's bad news for everyone. Although disguised as Mother Teresa and spouting love and reconciliation, Ortega continues to be the extremist he always was, now revitalized under the revolutionary baton of Hugo Chávez. If he wins the election, he will join the Caracas-Havana-La Paz axis to engage in the creation of "21st-Century socialism," as that sect calls the ideological and anti-Western balderdash brewed after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. That means an increase in the frictions inside Nicaragua, inevitable conflicts with the nation's neighbors in Central America, and the worst possible relations with Washington.

Naturally, the economic consequences of this panorama are disastrous for Nicaraguans. Foreign investments will suddenly dry up and national capitals will seek shelter in Miami banks to wait for better weather. The country, which desperately needs entrepreneurs capable of generating jobs, will have to depend on Venezuela's unreliable charity to survive. That's what is happening with Cuba, which today receives covert subsidies totaling $2 billion or $3 billion a year from the magnanimous colonel Chávez, intent as he is on buying the leadership of the Third World with the (temporary) bonanza created by crude-oil prices.

Why and how did this old ghost emerged from the grave? During the decade he held the presidency in the 1980s, Ortega was the worst leader in Nicaraguan history. He provoked a devastating civil war and the exodus of a million compatriots, destroyed the entrepreneurial fabric, reduced the GDP by 40 percent, and unleashed a horrifying hyperinflation. His political police tortured prisoners and his army committed ethnocide against the indigenous minorities (who today accuse him at the Inter-American Court of Justice) and the murder -- mass or selective -- of its adversaries.

As if that weren't enough, on a personal level his stepdaughter Zoilamérica has accused him repeatedly and fruitlessly of having raped her since she was a girl, while the entire country knows he was a boundless thief who seized the properties of his adversaries and parceled out to his accomplices the wealth of the nation in an orgy of corruption known as "the piñata" after he learned in 1990 that he had lost the election. Like the pirates, he sacked the city before leaving it.

In fact, it is almost a mystery how the political class commits suicide. It happened in Venezuela and Bolivia, where the democratic parties, incapable of identifying the national interests, dug their own grave and opened the way to authoritarianism. The same could happen now in Nicaragua. How to avoid it? In Managua, two scenarios unfold. One possibility is that the anti-Sandinista voters, aware of the danger, renounce sectarianism and decide to vote for the candidate with the greatest possibility of winning.

The other, more improbable, is that, one week before the elections, one of the two other candidates on the democratic side (or both), facing certain defeat, renounce their aspirations and back whoever can beat Ortega, to save Nicaraguans from a new era of horror and shame. Few weeks remain for us to see the dénouement of this drama.

October 8, 2006

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