Nicaragua

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 28, 2021 2:11 pm

NicaNotes: Letter to UNHRC about Political Exploitation of Indigenous Communities in Nicaragua
October 28, 2021

This letter, signed by solidarity, human rights, religious, labor and other organizations, has been sent to the UN Human Rights Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It denounces the misrepresentation and exploitation of disputes over land in Nicaragua’s autonomous Indigenous territories for political purposes by local and international organizations which claim to represent the interests of Indigenous peoples.

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Police inspect the site of a violent incident in an artisanal goldmine run by Indigenous people in Bosawás, Nicaragua

To: The United Nations Human Rights Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

Copy to:
CEJIL (the Center for Justice and International Law)
Center for Civil and Political Rights (CCPR)
Front Line Defenders (FLD)
Global Witness (GW)
Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos (IM-Defensoras)
International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR)
International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
International Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights (IIREHR)
International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA)
Peace Brigades International (PBI)
Red Internacional de Derechos Humanos (RIDH)
Red Internacional de Derechos Humanos – Europa (RIDH-E)
Unidad de Protección a Defensoras y Defensores de Derechos Humanos – Guatemala (UDEFEGUA)
Women’s Link Worldwide (WLW)
World Organization Against Torture (OMCT)

FROM: Undersigned solidarity, human rights, religious, labor and other organizations

Political exploitation of Indigenous communities in the Bosawás region

Nicaragua is a country with some 40,000 Indigenous families who benefit from the region’s most ambitious system of decentralized Indigenous government. Three hundred Indigenous communities legally own approximately one third of Nicaragua’s national territory. Within four years of returning to government in January 2007, President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista administration had granted Nicaragua’s Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples title to 15 territories covering more than two million hectares.

The largest tropical rainforest reserve in Central America, Bosawás, includes seven territories belonging to Mayangna and Miskitu Indigenous groups. Under autonomous government, Indigenous peoples participate actively in decisions relating to the protection of this environment. Land in these territories is held communally and cannot be sold, only leased.

However, there is a long history of mestizo settlers (called colonos) moving into the territories, a process which accelerated under neoliberal governments in power from 1990 until 2007. From January 2007, the new government worked to mitigate the continuing adverse effects while also consolidating the region’s autonomous administration. In fact, most mestizo settlers are accepted by the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and live alongside them.

Despite that generally stable context, some mestizo settlers occupy land illegally. Most disputes over land are resolved peacefully, but there is a history of occasionally violent conflict, with some 37 Indigenous deaths in the six years to 2020 reported by international organizations, who invariably omit other deaths of mestizo people resulting from attacks by Indigenous groups. Guillermo Rodriguez of the Center for Justice and International Law has admitted that “It’s a really complex situation. In some places, 90% of the current inhabitants are colonos.”

Regrettably, local and international NGOs ignore such complexities. They also fail to abide by basic reporting norms, making little effort to corroborate information they receive from local sources, seldom comparing reported incidents with other versions of events and rarely seeking genuinely independent verification. While other countries have bona fide representative organizations (e.g. in Honduras, COPINH’s defense of Lenca communities and OFRANEH’s reporting on attacks against Garifuna people), in Nicaragua elected Indigenous leaders reject the incompetence and biased reporting by local foreign-financed NGOs, finding them to be neither representative nor impartial.

The UN system and other international institutions seem almost invariably to accept the reports of international NGOs as if they were presented by impartial interlocutors, which, in the case of Nicaragua, categorically they are not. In doing so, such organizations fail the majority of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people in Nicaragua by misrepresenting the problems they face and by propagating falsehoods about the causes of any violence. They disregard the views and experience of Indigenous community leaders themselves, who are given no voice in these debates (as, for example, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights holds hearings without inviting local elected Indigenous leaders, such as the one on March 18 2021).

At both local and international level, NGOs exploit the occasional violent incidents in Nicaragua’s autonomous Caribbean Coast regions, using them in effect as ideological propaganda against Nicaragua’s socialist government. Here are four recent examples (for details, see links in text and sources at the end of this letter):

An incident in Kiwakumbai on August 23 of this year led to nine deaths and two women being raped. The Oakland Institute, together with Nicaraguan NGOs CALPI, CEJUDHCAN and Fundación del Río claimed that “settlers massacred at least 11 members of the Indigenous Miskitu and Mayangna peoples living in the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve.” In fact there were no settlers involved: the victims, who were Mayangna, Miskitu and other people operating an artisanal goldmine, were attacked by a group composed mainly of other Indigenous people in a dispute over profits from the mine. This was an intracommunal conflict.
On February 16, 2020, according to CEJUDHCAN, a young girl in the Miskitu community of Santa Clara was shot in the face in a settler attack, an allegation repeated by the Oakland Institute. The girl’s injury was actually due to a domestic firearm accident, as community leaders later confirmed. Settler attacks giving cause for concern have indeed occurred in Santa Clara and nearby Wisconsin, but as a result of illicit land sales by other local Miskitu community leaders to mestizo families.
On January 29, 2020, 12 houses in the Mayangna community of Alal were burnt down by colonos and two people injured. The Oakland Institute’s report Nicaragua’s Failed Revolution wrongly claimed that there were four deaths. This was repeated in a statement by the UN Human Rights Commissioner on February 7. In fact, the violence was a revenge attack by colonos to whom some Mayangna people from Alal had illegally sold land. The attack targeted the houses only of those people involved in the sale, apparently because they wanted to illicitly resell the same land to other buyers.
More widely, in 2020 the Oakland Institute and CEJUDHCAN launched a completely spurious and baseless campaign to portray Nicaraguan beef exports as “conflict beef” coming from disputed Indigenous territories, ignoring the protective mechanisms which the government has put in place and which meet stringent international norms.
Recently, the United Nations Human Rights Council received a letter signed by many of the organizations listed above, falsely accusing the Nicaraguan government of “negligence… and impunity in the face of the recurrent attacks against Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region with the aim of widespread land-grab.” The letter repeats the incorrect version of the incident in Kiwakumbai on August 23 and is based on a statement by Amaru Ruiz of the NGO Fundación del Río, who has himself now been charged by Nicaragua’s authorities with deliberately publishing false information and provoking communal hatred.

Several of the organizations have condemned the Nicaraguan government in the most extreme terms, accusing it of “ethnocide” and labelling Nicaragua “the most dangerous country” for environmental defenders.” One body warns sensationally of the “complete disappearance” of Indigenous peoples, when the overall population of the Miskitu and Mayangna peoples alone number some 180,000 and 30,000 respectively.

The letter’s completely distorted picture ignores the interlinked problems of the remoteness of the areas, the extreme difficulty in policing them and the culpability of some members of Indigenous communities involved in illicit land sales. In the worst neocolonial style, these NGOs idealize all Indigenous people as environmental and human rights defenders when, naturally, this is not always the case. They dismiss the Nicaraguan government’s continuing efforts to resolve land disputes, omit the role of autonomous regional, territorial and communal governments and ignore far-reaching improvements brought by the government to the social and economic wellbeing of Indigenous peoples.

We therefore call on the United Nations Human Rights Council to reject the accusations in the letter from the 16 organizations. We also call on the international NGOs concerned, to act in good faith when reporting on Nicaragua in the future. At the very least, we urge them to abide by basic reporting norms so as to investigate and corroborate far more thoroughly claims about the situation of Indigenous peoples of the kind made by the Oakland Institute and by Nicaraguan NGOs CALPI, CEJUDHCAN and Fundación del Río. We demand that all these organizations desist from making exaggerated, misinformed and categorically false criticisms of Nicaragua’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples.

Signed by the following organizations:

ÃBACOenRed
Alliance for Global Justice
Australia Solidarity with Latin America
Black Alliance for Peace
Casa Baltimore Limay
Casa del Agua
Chicago ALBA Solidarity
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
Communist Party of Ireland
Community Organizing Center
Friends of Latin America
Friends Of The Congo
Friendship Office of the Americas
Genesee Valley Citizens for Peace
Give Ye Them to Eat
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
International Action Center
Marxist Think Tank
Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign
Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group
Nicaragua Solidarity Ireland
Ode to Earth/Echoes of Silence
Orinoco Tribune
Pan-African Roots
PCOA: Anti-imperialist Working Class Platform (Ireland)
Popular Resistance
REDH: The Network in Defence of Humanity (Irish Chapter)
Rights Action
Sustainable Orphanages for Haitian Youth
Task Force on the Americas
Venezuela Ireland Network
Veterans For Peace Linus Pauling Chapter 132
Victor Jara Siempre Canta
Women Against Military Madness

– – – – – – – – – –

Sources:
The Kiwakumbai, Santa Clara and Alal incidents and the “conflict beef” issue are described in these articles:
Nicaragua’s Rainforest and Indigenous Peoples: a Story of Falsehood, Lies and US-based Political Campaigns
Progressive Media Promoted a False Story of ‘Conflict Beef’ From Nicaragua
Recorded interviews with Indigenous and other community representatives are presented in:
Nicaragua’s Indigenous Peoples: the Reality and the Neocolonial Lies (author Stephen Sefton)
Details of a site visit to Kiwakumbai, including interviews with the Mayor of Bonanza and a report by the Nicaraguan police:
Site visit to Kiwakumbai, Cerro Pukna, Bosawás (video by Stephen Sefton)
Report by Nicaraguan police
Interview with the mayor of Bonanza (by Stephen Sefton and Jimmy Altamirano)
Video report of site visit with the mayor of Bonanza to Kiwakumbai, Cerro Pukna, Bosawás (by Stephen Sefton and Jimmy Altamirano)
A summary of Indigenous leaders’ views and the background to these issues is given in:
Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast Indigenous Leaders Speak Out (author Rick Sterling)
https://taskforceamericas.org/pbs-and-o ... nicaragua/

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-10-28-2021

************************************

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Ten Things for US to Understand About Latin America
October 27, 2021
By Laura Wells – Oct 21, 2021

The United States — the land and people — will be a lot better off when the idea of US supremacy is dropped. Toward that end, and toward the goal of a better world, here are ten things for US to understand about Latin America. This piece has a special focus on Nicaragua, a country whose sovereignty needs respect, especially during this election season, from US critics both Right and Left.

1. Threat of a good example. That is the main reason countries get on the “bad lists” of the US, not oil since not all maligned countries even have oil. The reason is that the countries do not “have the interest of the United States at heart,” as CIA director George Tenet said during the US-backed 2002 coup against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The bad lists include Trump’s “Troika of Tyranny” — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — and the 30-plus countries around the globe suffering from the deadly effects of US sanctions. The US justifies sanctions by saying that they are based on matters people care about deeply, such as human rights abuses and trafficking, and that they are less damaging than war. Meanwhile, sanctions are lethal, and the United Nations charter clearly prohibits “unilateral coercive measures” taken by one country against another.

2. Sovereignty YES, Sanctions NO. Latin American countries are sovereign nations. They are not a “backyard” requiring US protection or interference. They have many leaders, in government and not in government, who are very intelligent with in-depth knowledge of history. They are not, as the US government and media call them, dictators, regimes, strong-men, or tyrants. To repeat, they are sovereign nations capable of choosing their own leaders. Certainly anyone familiar with US elections can believe it is possible to find improved, more easily verified electoral systems outside the US, for example, Venezuela’s system, which is computerized and has paper ballots that allow for audits.

3. Constitutions get updated. Most Latin American nations are among the more than 90 countries in the world with proportional representation. PR is the key to having multiple parties, which allow voters to actually affect their governments because they can vote for the candidates most aligned with their values, not just against the worst candidates. It is said that it’s virtually impossible to eliminate from the US constitution even the based-on-slavery Electoral College, which installed two recent presidents who lost the popular vote, both Bush and Trump.

4. Term limits are not a solution. Term limits are not the great electoral reform many people believe them to be. Nicaragua and some other “bad list” Latin American governments have dispensed with them. When Venezuela held a vote to remove term limits, there were loud cries that “Hugo Chavez wants to be dictator for life!” but significantly, those accusers did not point out that Venezuela joined other nations without term limits, like the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, and most Scandinavian nations. When facing term limits, elected officials tend to be less focused on their current duties and more focused on positioning themselves and their campaign contributors for their next move. Terms limits came in after FDR and stopped voters from being able to re-elect presidents they still wanted. More effective electoral reforms are proportional representation, free and fair media coverage, and open debates.

5. Nicaragua’s healthcare system is free. A major hospital has a huge sign telling people, “All services are free. If anyone tries to present you with a bill, report it.” That certainly constitutes a “threat of a good example.” When a poor country like Nicaragua can provide healthcare to its residents, then there is no excuse for the US, the wealthiest nation the planet has ever known, to have the worst healthcare system — in terms of cost, access, and results — of the 30 wealthy, industrialized (OECD) countries. People question statistics with good reason, but it is clear Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela have dealt with the COVID pandemic better than the US. The Nicaraguan government had plans in place as early as January 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID, but did not impose quarantines. Most Nicaraguans could not have worked from home on their computers. Quarantines would have been an economic death knell to the majority of the population that work in very small businesses including farms and the informal economy of open air stands selling everything from food to furniture.

6. Food sovereignty is key to Nicaragua’s resilience. Nicaragua produces about 90% of its food, primarily on the small farms of the campesinos. This represents a beneficial change from the mono-cropping agribusiness model that took over so much land in Latin America, and from the abandonment of farming that happened in oil-rich Venezuela in the 1900s. The ability of Nicaraguans to feed themselves locally helps them survive despite the pressures of US sanctions, the COVID pandemic, and yet another 2020 disaster: two hurricanes, category 4 Eta and then category 5 Iota, two weeks apart in November 2020.

7. Devastating hurricanes — climate crisis is real. Wawa Bar is a small community in Nicaragua that was hit by both hurricanes. It is in a semi-autonomous region on the Caribbean Coast that has afro-descendant and indigenous populations. The devastation was heart-breaking — huge trees that had survived decades of hurricanes were uprooted, 700 head of cattle were killed; crops were ruined, and the soil had become too salty from the flooding to replant — but not one person died, everyone was evacuated in time, and all community members are moving back. Food was provided and within weeks the Nicaraguan government restored electricity and sent roofing supplies so everyone again had a roof over their head. Among the first buildings the community restored was the school. The hurricanes had destroyed their textbooks, bilingual in both Spanish and the indigenous Miskito language, but education will continue for their children. How can the US continue illegal sanctions in the face of such devastation? Sanctions, in the process of trying to effect “regime change,” greatly hurt ordinary people. Sovereign nations have the right to choose their own presidents, governments and economic systems.

8. Nicaragua has the fifth highest gender equality in the world. It is not surprising the first four countries are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, but how many people would guess Nicaragua to be fifth? The reason is that they have a mandate to have 50/50 in their legislatures, and if, for example, a president or mayor is male, then the vice-president or vice-mayor will be female. Or vice versa.

9. Daniel Ortega is in for the long haul. President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega is a controversial figure particularly outside of Nicaragua, where media and official stories are not countered by people’s direct experience. Ortega was president in the 1980s when the Sandinista revolution ended the 45-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. The Sandinistas lost the 1990 elections, as the opposition promised peace from contra violence if elected. However, support for the Sandinistas remained strong in the popular neighborhoods and much of the countryside, so in 2006, Daniel Ortega was elected president again with 38% of the popular vote, re-elected in 2011 with 62% of the vote, in 2016 with 72.5% of the vote, and has the same level of popular support leading up to the elections in November 2021. Nicaraguans approve of their healthcare system, literacy programs, free higher education, expanded and improved roads and electricity — and they remember how those gains were reversed during the 1990s when the Sandinistas were out of power, and services including water were privatized. The large rural population likes land reform, which enables them to work their own small farms. They have hope for a good life for their families. That is why Nicaraguans re-elect Daniel Ortega, and why Nicaraguans are not joining the caravans migrating to the US the way many other Central Americans are trying to do.

10. Power of a good example. It’s an American tradition to end with hope and this piece follows that tradition. There is hope for improvement in the US and the world, although it’s unclear whether the US will change significantly through a people’s revolution or a capitalist collapse. Even though, unfortunately, US media from FOX to PBS line up with the military-industrial-complex, people can still learn how the US affects the world, through compelling writings by authors such as Smedley D. Butler, Noam and his daughter Aviva Chomsky, John Perkins, and Naomi Klein.

Life can certainly be better for people in the US, with better healthcare, housing, jobs, justice, education and environment, and less student debt, incarcerations, and wasteful military spending. What is needed is to raise expectations, increase pressure on politicians — including Biden/Harris, who have not shown signs that they will reduce Trump’s ramped-up sanctions — and find ways to stop believing the lies.

https://orinocotribune.com/ten-things-f ... n-america/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 30, 2021 2:40 pm

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Indigenous Leaders in Nicaragua Speak Out Against Western Media and NGOs “The Creators of Fake News Took Charge of Spreading the Word …Through Facebook”
October 29, 2021
By Rick Sterling – Oct 28, 2021

Nicaragua has an election to choose their president and national assembly on November 7. According to polls, the Sandinista Front (FSLN) currently in government is expected to win the presidency and a majority of seats in the assembly.

At the same time, the Sandinista government is intensely disliked by Washington and there has been a steady stream of negative news and accusations.

One theme of accusations concerns the indigenous peoples. In October 2020, PBS Newshour broadcast an episode claiming the US is importing “conflict beef” from the indigenous regions of Nicaragua. This story relied on an Oakland Institute report which alleges rampant violence against indigenous communities and a complicit Nicaraguan government.

The PBS story and Oakland Institute accusations were criticized at the time, but there was no retraction or serious response.

One month later, in November 2020, Stephen Sefton travelled to eastern Nicaragua to interview indigenous community leaders and determine the facts. He asked the elected indigenous leaders about the situation, the challenges and whether the PBS story and Oakland Institute reports were accurate.

Sefton, a community worker who has lived in Nicaragua for 25 years, has published the interviews in a 79-page PDF booklet titled “Nicaragua’s Indigenous Peoples: the Reality and the Neocolonial Lies”.

Sefton interviewed an impressive set of indigenous leaders. With photos at bottom they are:

Arisio Genaro Selso (President Mayangan Indigenous Territorial Government) ; Eloy Frank Gomez (Secretary Mayangna Indigenous Territorial Government); Fresly Janes Zamora (President of the Miskito Indigenous Territorial Government Twi Yabra); Ronald Whittingham Dennis (President of the Indigenous and Afro Descendant Territorial Government Karata); Rose Cunningham Kain (Mayor of Waspam and President of the Indigenous Territorial Government of Wanghi Awala Kupia); Dr. Loyda del Carmen Martinez Rodriguez (District Judge of Waspam, Rio Coco); Lejan Mora (President of Indigenous Territorial Government of Wangki Twi / Tasba Raya).

Nicaragua’s Autonomous Zones
In 1987, the Sandinista government passed Law 28 which gave legal support to indigenous land claims. After the Sandinistas lost a hotly contested election in 1990, neoliberal policies took over and progress on indigenous claims was stopped and reversed. In 2005, the FSLN was still in opposition but secured passage of Law 445.

As a result of these laws, approximately 31% of Nicaragua’s territory is considered communal property owned by the indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples of the country.

Key Questions and Answers
Are cattle being raised for export in the autonomous zones?
Rose Cunningham Kain:

Cattle here have been like pets in other countries. And little by little we have been making a shift to having more cattle. But here there has been no certification process to permit meat exports.

The people here supply the local market and, as often as not with some difficulty, we manage to find someone who wants to butcher their cattle for the local market. Of course, in the last few years we have been encouraging people to improve their cattle stock, so that IPSA (Institute of Agricultural Protection and Health) can do its work teaching us how to improve our cattle rearing.

But we keep animals on a very small scale. So, this report saying that settlers are killing us for land to raise cattle on is not true either. That is not true. Not one cattle rancher has died here, not one Miskito involved in any kind of cattle related killing. It’s a Disney World story, maybe, a Mickey Mouse story, who knows. But it is not a real story of this municipality Waspam or any of these municipalities where there are indigenous peoples.

What about media claims that a little girl was shot in the face by a land invader?
Lejan Mora:
In that case, a 13-year-old boy was handling his father’s handgun inside the house. The gun went off and the bullet pierced through here and came out here on a nearby girl. What did they do when that accident happened? The creators of fake news took charge of spreading the word through the media, through Facebook, claiming that a lot of men appeared, 200 men and attacked the community. And we showed that was false. We went to the house and to the community.

We interviewed people. We even visited the site where it happened. Everything was false. But that information spread internationally as if it was something real, which is untrue. Today even we could go… if we go to the community, we can go and talk also to the mother of the girl about what happened, and she can tell us the truth.

Some mestizo farmers purchased land in the indigenous regions. How did this happen?
Eloy Frank Gomez:
Yatama (indigenous opposition political party) mayors and deputies of Yatama were involved in the sale of indigenous lands. The community members didn’t know. The mestizos came in big numbers, families after families entering indigenous territories, for example in the area of the Rio Coco.

In certain areas of our communities in the Bosawas Reserve, which borders with Miskito land, many mestizo settlers came to enter our Mayangna lands. But how? Through these sales authorized by politicians from Yatama.

It’s no secret that Liberal mayors and municipalities with mayors opposed to the government also promoted land trafficking, even financed organized groups, armed groups to invade indigenous lands and to dispossess the indigenous people of their lands. There is evidence of that.

Lejan Mora:
YATAMA leaders were the ones who started selling land. We have documents showing they were the vendors. Who were the buyers? People from the Pacific, who don’t have land. So, they began selling, they began doing business, and that is where the problem of land invasion arose.

How are relations between indigenous and mestizo settlers?
Fresly Janes Zamora:
From the 1980s to date, if that person lives in that area, in that community, they already know the language, the culture, they already live with the same culture. The children, for example, are already over 30 years old. So, all these things give them that right.

But what happened? The problem of the invasions started after the year 2000.It was difficult for the communities… they didn’t even have the authority to make decisions. So, what happens then? From 2013 onwards, we do have that dominion.

We have that dominion, and we do still have that conflict, not with the government, not with the State of Nicaragua, but the people, the mestizos themselves are invading properties. Because as I told you, we conserve areas. Our ancestors, that is our culture. We are few but we have large tracts of land, because they are the areas where we go out to hunt animals, to sow our crops, to fish. So, these are areas where we as indigenous peoples abide. That is our culture.

So, we now have the title. We have … dominion, we do have now, and the government, the State recognizes it. The only problem we have is that sometimes outsiders want to invade us or are invading our property. So, something that we must teach them is to recognize that they are our lands, and that this land is not empty and unclaimed.

It has an owner. And the owner is the indigenous peoples. Therefore, although they do need land, they must coordinate, to reach an arrangement, to engage in dialogue, a negotiation with the owners

Sometimes we have a conflict. With two or three of the ten mestizos that are within our lands, not all of them agree to recognize us. Always, in everything, there are two or three families that do not agree, that do not want to recognize us. So, what do we do?

When this is the case, we visit the place, because it is our land, and we go in a commission to explain to them the internal regulations of our communities, or the internal regulations of the territory. If they agree, we can reach an understanding.

We can sit down and start a dialogue, negotiate. Because the lands cannot be sold, even if I want to sell, I cannot, even if I want to give them away, I cannot. Because that’s a crime. But yes, the land can be leased.

So, what we are doing is, as Twi Yabra, we are leasing land. We are leasing land, after several lawsuits, there was even bloodshed. But what good is that?

Rose Cunningham Kain:
Here in Waspam we are practicing coexistence with those who have come to settle in Waspam. So, in this municipality we have different models of relations with non-indigenous peoples, with non-indigenous settlers. At this moment in the context of the hurricane, we have also had news of agricultural losses these non-indigenous people have suffered too. And as the mayor’s office we have to listen to them because they are Nicaraguan citizens. They have human rights. They are human too.

What is true is that we always call on them to reach agreement with the indigenous peoples. Either they leave or they come to an agreement with the owners of the land. The last violent activity must have been in about 2013/14. We have not had violent activities in this part of our territory. Here we have seen meetings where people speak their minds. We have documented meetings that have taken place in the mountains between non-indigenous settlers and indigenous settlers where 17 communities, leaders of 17 communities, come together and walk to meet at a certain point.

The last stage of the transition in the autonomous zones is remediation (‘saneamiento’). What is the status of this?
Lejan Mora:
We’re in the last phase of the remediation, which is clearing the boundaries, the inter-territorial limits and so on. So, we are at that stage right now. I remember very well indeed that in 2015 there were clashes between Miskitos and those who were invading the land.

The political opposition are insisting on self-remediation. So, the people in the communities rise up, get involved in confrontations, and then they persist, and that’s how it happened that, I think there have been four or three deaths, something like that.

We invited the settlers and we sat there under a tree. We started to make a presentation of the real situation there because they know very well they are on land that does not belong to them, we presented this to them. And we have shown them what and how might be the most appropriate way forward. It is a negotiated way, not through confrontations or anything like that.

We talked and reached an agreement that… because there are people who have been on that land for several years. And that land where they are located, they got it because another territory sold it. One territory agreed the sale, but it is a piece of land that belongs to a different territory.

So, it is a bit of a complicated situation. So, we talked with them, and precisely this coming Wednesday we have planned to go and prepare the ground for to another type of approach, namely leasing. We as the territory of Wangki Twi have not yet taken that approach but seeing the situation and to alleviate it a little, we must take that step. To what end? To a point we regard as feasible for creating a calmer and more durable situation, so that there are no conflicts.

What about “self-remediation”?
Fresly Janes Zamora:
The opposition is promoting violence between indigenous and mestizos… Self-remediation means promoting violence between indigenous against mestizos.

So, when they throw a stone, someone else will throw stones.

Why do they send NGOs and programs for this? … On paper it says one thing, but on the ground it’s something else. That’s it. So that’s what they are promoting. When there is no fire, there is no money. As I told you, things are calm, things are resolved, but that’s what they do.

So, we as Twi Yabra territory are against those people. That is why we are not involved with any organization. Because at the beginning we thought they entered in good faith to support us. But during the execution of these projects, of these visits, which they did in my absence, they were already doing other things. We immediately prohibited their visits to our communities because they were trying to destabilize the structure of the territorial government, the structure of the communal authorities and at the same time to bring violence between the Miskito peoples and outsiders, so we are against it.

When do you negotiate with non-indigenous people?
Ronald Whittingham Dennis:
There are people who say remediation is to clear out, to get everyone out …. But some people say no, remediation is to seek an understanding, to remediate is to reach an understanding. And part of that understanding is the well-known term of reordering. That is the concept.

So, what does it mean to reorder? It is not that the mestizos or the outsiders that are within your territory, within your area, that they are going to decide where they are going to be. You will tell them where they are going to be. That is reordering. And how much you can give in the portion of land. That is the zoning.

It is a component for solving problems. Now in that reordering you also have to see who will go and who can stay. That is reordering.

The State provides that through the Army and the Army’s Ecological Battalion, and no territory can say that’s not the case. They have indeed provided accompaniment. They have provided accompaniment.

If a member of the community sold a certain portion of land for whatever reason, you are forced to sit down and negotiate. To see what can be done. And to negotiate you have to do so in a spirit of wanting to solve the problem. But if there is no will to resolve the problem rather than to create more problem, then you will never solve the problem.

So, you have to look for strategies on how you are going to resolve it. Because these people who have already, imagine, who have already come to live here for fourteen years, fifteen years, they came to plant their crops, they have their own livestock, they have their animals, they are already well established.

And that is what we in the territories have to understand. The damage is already done. What we have to look for is how to resolve the problem.

What happens to settlers who are violent or refuse to leave the indigenous areas?
Dr. Loyda del Carmen Martinez Rodriguez:
The State has vindicated the indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples’ right to the land, and the State is also a guarantor in the efforts to secure social peace in our country and in our region. It is a process in which the State has guaranteed and has given those peoples this right, but the political opposition always does not see this. They also say that the cases we have prosecuted are of little importance. But no. The indigenous peoples are being protected and the rights the indigenous peoples are being vindicated. And the State has contributed a great deal to this because no other government had ever recognized the indigenous peoples, giving them a title to what before was only private property, where only the oligarchy and the bourgeoisie had the right to own land.

Also, I have participated in dialogue between mestizos and Miskitos in which there are territories that want to resolve the remediation process by means of a leasing agreement with the territory. They make the proposal, then the territory, its president will decide if they are going to lease or not. So, we have carried out these procedures as a judicial authority… by way of accompaniment, then. So, you see, we have participated listening to both parties, the mayor of the municipality has invited me to participate and listen to proposals made by the non-indigenous party.

Likewise, we have made progress in this aspect of property remediation, and we are not trying to drag it out, although the opposition always sees it like that. But there has been a lot of progress, because there is a dialogue between mestizos and Miskitos in which the State guarantees as established in Law 445 that those communities, that now have their legal title, can lease their land and that is allowed by law. But this is something that as regards the State and the territories, each territory president is able say whether they want to lease or not.

Lejan Mora:
We’ve stopped the invasion that was taking place. By applying that law, we are able to get people imprisoned via a judicial process. We get them imprisoned and they end up with three-year prison terms.

And that is how we are trying to calm the situation. And later, we seek to reach a peaceful solution, without confrontations or anything else. The issue of territorial rights here in Nicaragua is something new for us. What the current government has done for us is a very good thing.

What is the role of foreign funded NGOs?
Arisio Genaro Selso:
There are organizations, NGOs that use the name of the indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations to make accusations against the government, to denigrate the government, to try to destroy the government’s image and that of the work it does within the protected areas, for example, in the case of the Río San Juan, for example, or in the case of the Indio Maíz Reserve, and here in the case of the Bosawas Reserve.

Rose Cunningham Kain:
I think that, like this person, there are many who take advantage of the poverty and conflict of others. That is not and never has been the spirit of the creation of non-governmental organizations. For me, non-governmental organizations should not want to profit from poverty or people’s conflicts. And when I say poverty, it’s not that we are poor.

We have been impoverished by the same people who have funded the people who say that we live in conflict.

It is a big lie. We have not had that kind of conflict for many years. We are building peace. Peace is not just words. Peace is a process. And the social reinsertion after the eighties, when the counterrevolution was also financed from the north, that peace process that led us to Autonomy, we continue to weave it, we continue to build it, and we continue to strengthen it. And today, after 33 years of Autonomy, we feel, and I feel proud to see how our community leaders are able to give you an interview and tell you the reality. And they know where the bad is and where the good is.

What is the role of the Center for Justice and Human Rights in the Atlantic District of Nicaragua (CEJUDHCAN) and its leader Lottie Cunningham?
Arisio Genaro Selso:
CEJUDHCAN is not the institution she claims or projects at the international level, as an organization or institution defending indigenous rights.

Why doesn’t she ever consult us? Why doesn’t she come to the communities to consult us? Why not our national leadership, which is who we are, leading the national government of the Mayangna Nation, or else to the presidents in our territorial governments…? She is not present. She speaks from afar. She uses the indigenous name. She uses it without having been there when the events are taking place. For example, when the Alal case occurred, up there in the Reserve, she said that the government was not defending the indigenous people.

In practice, Lottie works with opposition activists. They are people who live as we Nicaraguans say, making accusations against the government, talking badly about the government. So, she takes that and exploits it to say that the government does such and such, but really if it were the organization, she says it is, she should be open to consultation. But she is not. She just turns up for a short while. And sometimes she exaggerates things. And she makes use of the indigenous peoples.

Fresly Janes Zamora:
CEJUDHCAN does training on the rights of indigenous peoples. But at the same time, they have another interest. Two programs came to my territory, that they are going to help me, that are going to help me with remediation, this, and that… We said, look, these are our conditions and priorities. So, help me on such and such a matter.

For example, when in my second year as president, they saw things were going to improve, change, become more formalized, they did not like that. Why? Well, as long as there are incidents, then there are conflicts, so for them that means there is always funding. So, what did I do? I told them, I sent two letters, saying that we want nothing to do with them. We no longer want to have a relationship with them.

Lejan Mora:
I have seen the video that Lottie released. She says every pound of meat that sold to the United States is a drop of blood of the Miskito. Which is totally false. I don’t know what her objective is in spreading so many lies. Because it has nothing to do with anything real, nothing at all. These are not right. I mean, a lie of such magnitude.

How are relations between the indigenous leaders and the Nicaragua government?
Arisio Genaro Selso:
Before there was this great project for Bosawas it was worse. There was no consultation, the decisions weren’t taken by the indigenous communities.

Now things are different. This is an opportunity for the indigenous peoples, this recognition, this respect of the government towards indigenous institutions, towards indigenous peoples. This also allows indigenous peoples to participate directly and broadly in the decisions that are being taken.

Progress has been made. Why? Because the government authorized the creation of a body within the courts, namely the figure of Defenders of Indigenous Peoples was created, wherever there is the presence of indigenous population. What is the function of these Defenders? It is the direct accompaniment these Defenders provide to the indigenous organizations for the judicial process of settlers, those who are destroying the environment, all these types of cases. So, there is greater accompaniment.

And the other important element is that we have also achieved within the judiciary, our indigenous officials also hold positions in the courts. So now the recent appointments of the Defenders of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples are also indigenous people who speak the indigenous languages. That is the other element, which for us is vital.

The government has guaranteed that in all the municipalities where indigenous peoples are present, there will also be functionaries who speak indigenous languages.



Summary
Readers who are interested to learn more facts and perspectives on the situation in Nicaragua’s autonomous regions are encouraged to read Sefton’s entire book. While there is much in common, the indigenous leaders have different experiences and perspectives on certain issues. There are many rich insights and subtleties in the full text. What comes through very clearly is that the news and analysis of the situation in Nicaragua is being hugely distorted.

In the last month (October 2021) a violent attack took place in the Bosawas indigenous territory. Again, Stephen Sefton travelled to the remote area by car and horse to ascertain the facts about what really happened. It turns out that the conflict was over a mining operation and both the victims and perpetrators were indigenous. This is documented in Sefton’s article The Truth about Recent Violence in Bosawas. From the misinformation about “conflict beef” and other accusations last year, to the recent events in Bosawas, the common thread is that information about Nicaragua is being manipulated for geopolitical ends. That is why these first person interviews and statements from indigenous leaders are so crucial to hear.

Interviewed Indigenous Leaders

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Arisio Genaro Selso (President Mayangna Indigenous Territorial Government) Eloy Frank Gomez (Secretary Mayangna Indigenous Territorial Government)


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Rose Cunningham Kain (Mayor of Waspam and President of the Indigenous Territorial Government of Wanghi Awala Kupia).


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Lejan Mora (President of Indigenous Territorial Government of Wangki Twi / Tasba Raya)


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Fresly Janes Zamora (President of the Miskito Indigenous Territorial Government Twi Yabra).


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Ronald Whittingham Dennis (President of the Indigenous and Afro Descendant Territorial Government Karata)


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Dr. Loyda del Carmen Martinez Rodriguez (District Judge of Waspam, Rio Coco)


Featured image: United States ambassador, Kevin K. Sullivan, meets with representatives of CENIDH, CPDH and CEJUDHCAN to reaffirm US government commitment to “democracy and respects of human rights” in Nicaragua. Photo courtesy of Twitter / @USAIDNicaragua.

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 04, 2021 1:10 pm

NicaNotes: United States Trying to Sabotage Nicaragua’s Elections Yet Again
November 4, 2021
But Nicaraguans Will Not Let the Evil Empire Dictate Who They Vote For, with Sandinista Revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega Poised to Return to Power

(This article was originally published in Covert Action Magazine on Nov. 3, 2021.)

By Nan McCurdy

(Nan McCurdy is the editor of NicaNotes. Now working in Mexico, she lived over 30 years in Nicaragua. She is currently in Nicaragua for the Nov. 7 elections.)

The Sandinista party won with 62% of the vote in the 2011 elections and with 72.5% in 2016. Polls show the Sandinista party winning with between 64% and 75% in the November 7 elections, during which more than 3 million people will vote for President and Vice President, 90 National Assembly representatives and 20 Central American Parliament representatives.

The likely reason for such a majority vote for the Sandinista party is that people want the progress their families have experienced since 2007, like universal free health care and education, to continue; Nicaragua has made the greatest investments in infrastructure, including new modern health facilities and road networks, in the Central American region.

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New Departmental Hospital in Chinandega, one of 22 built since 2007. [19Digital]

Since 2007, poverty has been cut in half, maternal mortality has dropped by 70%, infant mortality by 61% with a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children 6 to 12 years old. With a high percentage of small and medium-scale farmers and significant government investment in training and local food-production programs, Nicaragua has achieved 90% food sovereignty.
In the last 14 years potable water access has risen from 65% to 92%; electricity coverage has increased from 54% to 99% and 80% of the energy comes from renewables; in fact Nicaragua is number three in the world in renewable energy. In gender equality Nicaragua has gone from 62nd to 5th in the world; and it holds first place in the world for women’s health and survival, women’s educational attainment and women cabinet ministers.

The satisfaction of the population with public services, Nicaragua’s transparency, lack of corruption and good project execution is even recognized by international banks.

The U.S. strategy in the 2021 elections is to declare the elections illegitimate even before they take place.

The U.S. has intervened in every election since Nicaragua’s first free and fair election which took place in 1984. That year, the U.S. used the Contra War and the U.S. economic blockade to twist the arm of the population. But when polls showed the Sandinista Party winning by a large margin, they told “their” candidate, Arturo Cruz, to drop out and say he was not participating because the elections were not going to be free and fair.

RAIN: a CIA regime change plan

A United States Agency for International Development (USAID) regime change document was leaked to independent Nicaraguan journalist, William Grigsby in July of 2020 from the U.S. embassy.

RAIN, or Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RFTOP No: 72052420R00004) is a Terms of Reference contract for hiring a company to oversee what it refers to as a “transition” – a word used more than thirty times in the document. It was written in the spring of 2020 and much of the U.S. destabilization activity to try to get the Sandinistas out of power has likely been under this plan.

“The purpose of this activity is to provide rapid responsive … assistance to create the conditions for, and support, a peaceful transition to democracy in Nicaragua [regime change].”“RAIN will contribute to the Mission’s … objective of enabling the environment for Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.”
“…targeted short-term … activities during Nicaragua’s transition that require rapid-response programming support until other funds, mechanisms and actors can be mobilized.”“Rain will pursue these activities against a variety of scenarios…

Free, fair and transparent elections lead to an orderly transition [the US-backed party wins].
A sudden political transition occurs following a crisis [including a health crisis] leads to a new government [a coup d’état]
Transition does not happen in an orderly and timely manner. In the case that a transition does not happen and the regime is able to hold onto power … by winning fairly, then RAIN … will relate to bridging to…longer-term activities…”
“…Any national election could yield a result accepted by Nicaraguans and the International community.” [recognition that the Sandinistas could win in free and fair elections] “If the regime remains resilient RAIN … will have the ability to respond … outside of other USAID programming [covertly], to … needs to maintain civil society on track…”
“A delayed transition may require greater emphasis on … civil society leadership, with discreet technical assistance types of activities …”

“In the case of a coup, RAIN [the US, the CIA] takes actions to show the new government is legitimate [like US recognition of the new government].
In the case of a Sudden Transition [coup], RAIN will likely require more use of Rapid Response Funds, … with attention to potential for conflict, legitimacy of new government actors and setting up the transition for success.”

U.S. actions to isolate Nicaragua

On September 24th at the United Nations, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with the presidents of Mexico and all Central American countries except for Nicaragua and gave them the order to isolate Nicaragua.

It is very unlikely that this will happen, despite all of these countries behaving in a relatively subservient way to the U.S.

The economic relations between Central American countries are very powerful and commerce between them is strong. Attempting to blockade Nicaragua would be difficult given that Central America is an isthmus and Nicaragua is right in the middle.

Not to mention that because Central American countries and Mexico already face a lot of problems, they likely do not want a problem with Nicaragua. They have generally good relations with Nicaragua, who is very respectful of other countries. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) has always wanted to achieve the integration of Central America.

Sanctions: another form of war

The U.S. first considered sanctions on Cuba in 1960 when Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory said that the purpose of a blockade on Cuba was to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

In the 1980s, in an attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government that had taken power in 1979, the US funded counter-revolutionary forces against Nicaragua and declared an embargo on all trade with the country.

In 2018, the U.S. passed illegal unilateral coercive measures [sanctions] against Nicaragua. The Nicaragua Investment Conditionality Act (Nica Act)—which passed the House of Representatives with zero opposition by a 435-0 margin—directed the Executive Branch to “oppose new loans or agreements with Nicaragua through the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and directs agencies to create a ‘civil society’ engagement strategy [fund and support opposition groups], among other actions.”

The Nica Act was to punish Nicaragua for not being a subservient colony; it is not based on any wrong-doing. For example the multilateral lenders only praise Nicaragua for its transparency and efficiency in project execution, going so far as to specifically say it is not corrupt.

The Nica Act reduced multilateral loans hurting development in Nicaragua as well as impacting healthcare during the pandemic. With damage from two strong hurricanes in November 2020 and Covid-19 some of the institutions have provided loans.

A number of members of the government have been sanctioned as individuals, like Paul Oquist, Minister for National Policies, who has since passed away. Oquist was an internationally recognized expert on climate change and co-chair of the Green Climate Fund in 2018. Born in the U.S., he gave up his U.S. citizenship in the 80’s in protest of the Contra War.

On October 16 the Pope tweeted this about sanctions:

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In order to punish Nicaragua further for having a growing economy, outdoing the other Central American nations in health care, education, infrastructure and all statistics related to poverty, and for having the lowest Covid death rate in the region, Congress is now on the verge of passing further sanctions called the RENACER Act.

Activists lobbying against this bill learned from Congressional Aids that members of Congress have received significant pressure from the U.S. government through USAID, Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy and others.

The RENACER Act (Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform) is a form of coercion to try to get Nicaraguans to vote against the Sandinista government. Nicaraguans know what sanctions mean for their economy. RENACER would make development financing even more difficult to get and could possibly make the economy scream.

The bill has passed the Senate and will likely go up before the House soon. The bill would already have passed without a formal vote, like the Nica Act, if it weren’t for impressive lobbying efforts by constituent friends of Nicaragua.

The RENACER ACT applies targeted sanctions to card-carrying Sandinista members, some 2.1 million people, a third of the population.

Included in the stated reasons for attacking Nicaragua with RENACER are two laws that Nicaragua passed in October 2020: the Foreign Agents Regulatory Law—similar but not as stringent as the US FARA law, and the Cybercrimes Law, also not nearly as punitive as U.S. cybercrimes laws. Astounding considering that the US has the same laws!

U.S. funding of propaganda

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided US$234 million to Nicaraguan civil society from 2015 to 2121; and with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and others, the U.S. gave well more than US$300 million openly to their Nicaraguan operatives and the nongovernment organizations they manage.

Below is some of the funding for media outlets that stirred up anti-Sandinista hatred and distrust of the government, in favor of the 2018 U.S.-directed coup attempt. The media created and/or funded included slick websites, online magazines, social media, radio, tv and syndicated shows and the only newspaper that existed at the time, rabidly anti-Sandinista.

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US Funds for Anti-Sandinista propaganda outlets at the time of the 2018 coup attempt

In 2007 when the Sandinista Party returned to the presidency, U.S. agencies began providing funds to create media, including web-based outlets and social media pages to invent and spread lies, fake news and disinformation to influence both Nicaraguans and the international audience. The U.S.-funded fake news outlets are the sources used by the U.S. mainstream media. Your tax dollars fund propaganda in Nicaragua that you then read in your local paper.

U.S. Money to influence the November 2021 elections

Much of the U.S. money for media was channeled through the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, run by Cristiana Chamorro, daughter of former president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (who was handpicked by the U.S. to be the 1990 candidate to oppose the Sandinistas). In the lead-up to the current elections USAID provided the Foundation with U.S. $998,958 in 2020 and U.S. $1.601 million in 2020-2021. Part of that money is reflected below together with funding for other NGO’s.

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After Nicaragua passed laws to keep foreign money out of Nicaraguan politics in the fall of 2020, Chamorro shut down the foundation in February 2021 in order not to comply with the Foreign Agents Law which requires nonprofits to provide information on foreign funds received and evidence of how the funds were used.

According to Nicaraguan journalist William Grigsby and former Contra leader turned news analyst, Enrique Quiñones, Chamorro transferred some US$7 million to her personal accounts. Chamorro has been under house arrest since June 2nd, and along with nine others associated with the Foundation including her brother Pedro Joaquin, is accused of money laundering, abusive management of funds, misappropriation and other crimes. The newspaper La Prensa and a number of its executives are also being investigated for fraud and money laundering.

It is interesting to note that important USAID partners like the VBCF used to be listed on the website; and just in the last year the information has been redacted.

The Nicaraguan Public Ministry has accused or is investigating more than 30 people for crimes like fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and treason. Many of those accused of conspiracy, treason and other crimes were involved in the 2018 coup attempt.

However, they are not being investigated for that involvement because in June 2019 the government gave amnesty to everyone involved in the coup attempt. The current accusations are for requesting sanctions and other forms of war from a foreign country and for taking part in a new coup attempt.

The Nicaraguan Public Ministry Document of Accusations describes some of the crimes

“The crimes consisted of triangulating funds from US institutions like the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in order to create organizations, associations and foundations that would channel resources to other organizations, projects, programs and people.”

Since these investigations began in June the U.S. media has fallen into line accusing Nicaragua of wrong-doing. Their headlines stated that Nicaragua was jailing presidential precandidates and disqualifying any opposition parties to ensure that the Sandinistas would win.

First of all the polls show the Sandinistas winning with anywhere from 64% to 75% of the vote. Secondly the five people the media say were precandidates were not even members of a party. Under Electoral Law parties do not officially inscribe candidates until the month of August and there is no such thing as a pre-candidate.

In any case, along with an Alliance that includes the FSLN and eight other legal parties, six more parties are running, many more than in any election in the US. The government provides campaign funds to the parties.

All but one of the parties with representatives in the National Assembly are running. And the party that won second place in 2016, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) is running.

Influencing Nicaraguan voters through Covid-19 scare tactics

The U.S.-directed media in Nicaragua and its echo-chamber in the international press have carried out health terrorism since Covid-19 began, asserting that many more people are sick and dying than is the case. This is part of the media distortion described above.

Unfortunately due to these lies, as Covid-19 was beginning, some people didn’t go to the hospital for fear of getting sicker like the U.S.-backed media purported. And some of these people died.

Nicaragua spends a fifth of its budget on health care and has invested millions in new infrastructure and equipment, including 22 new hospitals!

Nicaragua has had far fewer cases per capita than any country in the Americas: The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) which calculates excess deaths worldwide shows 268 deaths for Nicaragua, 7,521 for Costa Rica and 10,760 for Honduras.

Despite having the lowest Covid mortality rate in the Americas, the U.S. embassy lists Nicaragua as a level 4—do not travel country, whereas Honduras, much more dangerous for Covid-19 or simply for murder and violence, is listed as Level 3.

The U.S. also practices vaccine diplomacy: it has given vaccines to all of the Central American nations—except Nicaragua. Although Nicaragua has been vaccinating since March, only in October did it get larger quantities of vaccines from Spain, Russia, India and the COVAX Mechanism, vaccinating the population from age 30 up.

The U.S.-backed media says people are fleeing political persecution

The U.S.-backed media says people are fleeing political persecution. This is another lie the U.S. has ramped up for the elections. According to the Department of Homeland Security between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Nicaraguans apprehended at the border was 2292, very small compared to Hondurans at 63,741.

U.S. Border Patrol has encountered more Nicaraguans in 2021 (33,000), but still low compared to Hondurans (218,000) and Salvadorans (73,000). Tom Ricker of the Quixote Center says the push factors include Covid-affected economies for all the migrants, wrecked tourism, which provided substantial employment in Nicaragua; destruction of crops by two major hurricanes in 2020 affecting Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua; and the 2018 sanctions of the Nica Act along with the threat of more sanctions. Prior to Covid-19 there were seasonal jobs in Costa Rica, but now there are more people returning to Nicaragua.

Honduras and U.S. Double Standards

Honduras will also have elections in November, but the U.S. is not trying to oust the government even though its president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, blatantly rigged elections, stole millions from Honduran social services, and has been accused of protecting drug traffickers and helping to flood the US with cocaine.

W.T. Whitney Jr. wrote in People’s World:

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70% … Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished. According to insightcrime.org, Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate … Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020 …

What will the impact be on Nicaragua’s elections?

The U.S. government has been extremely successful in terms of getting the press, in chorus, to denigrate Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for being a “dictatorship.”

It’s been even more successful at keeping all the good news of Nicaragua’s amazing social and economic advances out of the U.S. press. If you only read mainstream sources you would have no idea that Nicaragua is the safest most secure and highly functional country in the region.

The government of Nicaragua reaffirmed at the United Nations General Assembly that in the November 7 elections it is not the U.S. Empire that will choose but the Nicaraguan people.

During his UN speech, Foreign Minister Denis Moncada reaffirmed Nicaragua’s commitment to continue working for peace, security and tranquility of individuals, families and communities. Statistically, every aspect of life has improved under the Sandinistas and the intention to vote Sandinista has increased monthly in the polls.

It appears that U.S. sanctions, coercion, and disinformation will have little effect on how Nicaraguans vote.

Author’s note: To help stop the RENACER Act please go here: https://afgj.org/action-alert-stop-the-renacer-act

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-11-04-2021

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Socialist International’s Parroting of US Line on Nicaragua Shows What a Worthless Fossil It’s Become

November 3, 2021
By Peter Bolton – Nov 1, 2021

On October 25, about two weeks before Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, the Socialist International (SI) released a statement titled Nicaragua: A Contemporary Victim of Absolute Power. Given the steady stream of tendentious twaddle about Nicaragua that’s been disseminated from Washington and dutifully repeated by the corporate-owned media, one might reasonably assume that the global federation of social democratic and labor parties would at least provide some semblance of balance.

But far from adding nuance, the statement reads as if it were a press release sent directly from the US State Department. Apparently, the SI isn’t interested in supporting socialist movements in other countries unless they are pro-Washington neoliberal-lite formations in the vein of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom and Gerhard Schroder’s Social Democratic Party in Germany.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, the SI counts amongst its members some parties with laughably dubious socialist credentials. Examples include the highly corrupt, clientelist and largely centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from Mexico as well as the Colombian Liberal Party, whose membership included hard-right former president Álvaro Uribe until 2001. But perhaps the most notable example is the Venezuelan party Popular Will, which was admitted to membership in 2014.

Popular Will purports to be a “social democratic” party despite being led by the notorious far-right Venezuelan opposition figure Leopoldo López. The party emerged in 2009 as a splinter group of Justice First, the party to which fellow right-wing opposition leader Henrique Capriles has belonged since defecting from the hard-right COPEI in 2000. Popular Will’s most notable member of late is Juan Guaidó, the leader of the Washington-backed coup attempt that has been ongoing since January 2019. Guaidó was a member until 2020 when he left to become an independent. If ever there were a reductio ad absurdum to the SI’s claim to be a socialist organization, then the inclusion of Popular Will is surely it.

It’s only a small step, therefore, for the SI to start openly propagandizing for Washington’s coercive foreign policy. It has now done so with a statement that patently serves to support the US-led effort to delegitimize the upcoming election in Nicaragua. Apparently, the statement’s authors couldn’t even get past the first sentence without repeating all of the usual self-serving talking points, which Washington uses to provide bogus justification for its self-interested campaign of regime change. It reads:

Since the grave events of April 2018, when the violent repression of social protests by the government of Daniel Ortega left hundreds of fatalities among the thousands of citizens who demonstrated in the streets and cities of the country to make their voice heard for their rights, the sombre will of authoritarianism emerged in Nicaragua.

Contained within just this one sentence is an avalanche of dishonest misrepresentation and manipulative rhetoric that can be easily debunked by even the most cursory examination of what happened during the social unrest in 2018. For a start, the “violent repression of social protests” in part resulted from the fact that some of the protesters were themselves engaging in violence and other criminal acts. They, therefore, could only have expected to face arrest, as they would have in any country with a functioning criminal justice system. So, far from constituting “authoritarianism,” the Ortega government was simply upholding the rule of law—a purported lack of which Washington frequently invokes to provide cover and manufacture consent for its global campaign of regime change.

The sentence also contains some staggering lies-by-omission. Among the “hundreds of fatalities” were those committed by anti-government actors, who also attacked public property and houses belonging to government officials. Anti-government mobs even firebombed a building that housed an independent media outlet called RadioYa!, which they perceived to be pro-Sandinista—while the station’s 22 staff members were still inside! There were also many people marching in support of the government, whose point of view evidently counts for nothing to the pro-Washington media, given that it largely failed to report these gatherings, or to the SI, which did not mention them once in its statement.

The statement then says:

It is within this context that in recent months a number of citizens in opposition to the regime made known their aspirations to stand as presidential candidates in the elections on November 7, and ended up in prison. Today there are 37 opponents arrested, including seven who had made known their intention to run as candidate for the presidency.

The first thing to mention here is that the statement is clearly trying to imply that the government arrested these figures because of their purported political ambitions. But it fails to point out that many of these so-called dissidents have been receiving money from Washington’s major regime change bodies such as the CIA and/or CIA front groups such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment of Democracy (NED). This behavior, which amounts to serving as an agent of a hostile foreign power, is criminalized in many other countries including in the US itself. Indeed, in a cruel irony, the new national sovereignty laws that Ortega’s government introduced to address this problem of foreign interference in the country’s political processes were based on the US’s own FARA Act.

Furthermore, none of those arrested were in consideration as candidates for the upcoming presidential elections. None of them even belonged any active, registered Nicaraguan political party. So, the (itself dubious) claim that they “had made known their intention to run as candidate for the presidency” is (even assuming it’s true) seemingly just a useful ad hoc declaration made solely to discredit Ortega and his government. Indeed, the SI statement says that in addition to Ortega’s own registration as a candidate, “five other lists… were accepted by the current electoral bodies that will supervise the elections.” In other words, Ortega has numerous opponents in the election, a fact which contradicts the statement’s own insinuation that he is misusing the criminal justice system to remove rival candidates.

Next the statement says:

The United Nations, the European Union and the Organization of American States have spoken out and reiterated their concern over these developments, which indicate that elections can hardly be considered free, fair and transparent.

Though accurate prima facie, the statement nonetheless leaves out some crucial nuance. The Organization of American States (OAS), for example, has long been an instrument of Washington’s coercive foreign policy all throughout the Western Hemisphere. A recent example of its flagrant partiality to the US is the 2019 coup in Bolivia against the democratically elected president, Evo Morales.

The OAS colluded with Washington by falsely claiming that the result was tainted by fraud. The organization based this accusation on its own audit of the election results, which even The New York Times described as “marred by grave irregularities”. The Times concluded: “A close look at Bolivian election data suggests an initial analysis by the OAS that raised questions of vote-rigging—and helped force out a president—was flawed.” The OAS’s secretary-general, Luis Almagro, meanwhile, has used his position to undermine other left-of-center governments such as that in Venezuela, his contempt for which he makes no secret of whatsoever, by misusing the organization’s “Democratic Charter.”

In October, the OAS released a statement about Nicaragua that preposterously claimed that Ortega’s government “has used a series of Russian inspired laws as justification to repress [his] people.” Again, these laws are based on the US’s own FARA Act, which criminalizes foreign funding and other intervention into its elections and political system, and which has counterparts in many other nations.

The United Nations (UN), meanwhile, has frequently been subjected to pressure from pro-Washington organizations such as Human Rights Watch, whose lack of independence is so brazen that it even contains former State Department personnel on its board of directors. In June 2021, Reuters reported:

Human Rights Watch urged the United Nations and member countries on Tuesday to pressure Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to stop alleged human rights abuses, including a crackdown on opposition figures ahead of a November presidential election.

UN votes to condemn Nicaragua, meanwhile, haven’t exactly passed with unanimous approval. In June 2020, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning alleged human rights abuses by Ortega’s government. The measure passed 24-4, but with 19 abstentions. Had those 19 abstaining countries had the courage of their convictions, the resolution would have passed by just a single vote.

In any case, the UN has long been dominated by Western imperialist powers, which make up the majority of the UN Security Council. The US has frequently used its veto power to overrule resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly. Examples include a resolution condemning the US’s unilateral blockade of Cuba, which has passed by a majority every time a vote has been held since 1992.

US intelligence has even, on at least one occasion, illegally spied on other countries in order to blackmail them into supporting its resolutions, as was uncovered by UK whistleblower Katharine Gun in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. In spite of the high hopes that were placed on the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War and the failure of the League of Nations, its structures were ultimately unable to prevent the US from unilaterally deciding to go through with the invasion on patently false pretenses.

As for the European Union (EU), one can only wonder what business a regional institution composed of European nations has commenting on a situation thousands of miles away in a different hemisphere.

The SI concludes its statement:

Today, two weeks before the elections, the SI once again reiterates its rejection of government interventionism and condemns the repression that the government has been deploying throughout the country, on Nicaraguan society as a whole. The regimes of one party and the restriction of freedoms and fundamental rights of the people are incompatible with democracy and contrary to the principles that inspire the Socialist International.

Notice again that its claim of one-party rule is flatly contradicted elsewhere in the statement, where it acknowledges that Ortega will face opposition from five separate challengers in the upcoming election.

But moreover, what this conclusion doesn’t say is even more interesting than what it does say. It talks of “government interventionism” without once mentioning the aggressive foreign US intervention that Nicaragua has been on the receiving end for decades. Even before the Sandinistas entered the scene, Washington was propping up the ruthless dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Life for ordinary Nicaraguans was hardly a bed of roses under Somoza given his staunch adherence to strong arm rule and nepotistic policies that led to widespread inequality. But Washington didn’t indignantly pontificate about human rights violations back then since Somoza was obediently serving US economic interests.

As soon as the Sandinistas succeeded in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the CIA created, armed, and trained a bloodthirsty paramilitary organization called the Contras, which waged a brutal dirty war against the new government and meets the US government’s own definition of terrorism. Washington’s continued support for the country’s right-wing opposition, meanwhile, has involved pumping tens of millions of dollars into organizations like the Chomorro Foundation, which has been a major player in undermining the government and facilitating the US’s regime change efforts.

Whatever shreds of credibility the SI might have had have now been sledgehammered into dust by this pathetic, servile statement, which serves only to provide further cover for Washington’s efforts to undermine Nicaraguan democracy for its own self-serving purposes. It is also another small piece of proof of the complete uselessness of the tepid social democratic ideology that has so disastrously failed to resist the imperialist and neoliberal status quo upheld by both US parties and allied right-wing forces across the world. This failure has now morphed into a new phase of outright support for Washington’s coercive foreign policy, which perfectly demonstrates what a worthless fossil the SI has become.



Featured image: (From left to right) Eduardo Verano de la Rosa (Candidate for Governor for the Atlantic department for the Liberal party in Colombia), Horacio Serpa (Former Colombian presidential candidate) Luis Ayala (Secretary General of the Socialist International), Carlos Vecchio, Guaido’s fake ambassador to Washington, and Luis Florido, a Popular Will politician at a Socialist International event. Photo: La Patilla

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 07, 2021 2:48 pm

Nicaragua's Elections and the US’ 'Color Revolution'

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Poll: Nicaragua's FSLN has 70% electoral support for the November 7 presidential elections. | Photo: Twitter/@OrinocoTribune

Published 5 November 2021 (15 hours 16 minutes ago)

Facebook and Instagram canceled 1,300 accounts based in Nicaragua and after the response of activists on Twitter, the platform applied a double blow to the freedom of expression, according to analysts.


The so-called color revolutions or soft coups are today one of the silent intervention strategies employed by the United States, with the purpose of overthrowing governments contrary to its economic, political, social and military vision.

One of the most recent cases against Nicaragua is the suspension of hundreds of accounts of journalists and activists in favor of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the social networks Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, less than a week before the general elections.

The censorship campaign also swept media outlets advocating a leftist media agenda from digital platforms, representing another of the actions taken by U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden after the failed coup attempt in 2018.

Later came the closure of profiles with thousands of followers belonging to large and influential media within the country.

For Uruguayan political analyst, based in Managua, Jorge Capelán, Washington has used all methods of destabilization in the Central American nation, and since the very triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 it has financed a counterrevolutionary paramilitary force.

“During 10 years, the deaths as a consequence of that confrontation are estimated at over 50,000. The so-called contras tortured, burned cooperatives, attacked health posts and blew up bridges, but they were never able to establish a beachhead in national territory,” he told Prensa Latina.


In the end, they had to sit down to dialogue with the government headed by Daniel Ortega and accept elections within the constitutional framework. However, for the 1990 elections, the United States allocated huge amounts of money to support the opposition to the FSLN.

In addition to the economic funding, the U.S. exerted pressure on the citizens with the purpose of achieving an unfavorable vote against the FSLN. They promised the end of the conflict and that election meant the beginning of “the long neoliberal night," which translated into 16 years of plundering and privatization.

The U.S. ambassadors in Nicaragua have always assumed an aggressive posture since the arrival of Ortega to the presidency, Capelán recognized, among them, Paul Trivelli and his successor Roberto Callahan.

“However, each of those diplomats wore down until, under the presidency of Barack Obama, Laura F. Dogu arrived in the country in September 2015. This official, contrary to her predecessors, “maintained her willingness to work with the people and the government of Nicaragua,” he stressed.

In Capelán's opinion, the preparation of the 2018 coup attempt was already “under the table” with an “enveloping strategy.” While she served as a diplomat, they infiltrated institutions and trained young people from private universities in courses linked to, for example, community development.

“In those study programs they taught them how to subvert the country through social networks, the creation of media, the management of numerous digital platforms and under the facade of a supposed social work, they kept bank accounts for their activation when the time came," he indicated.


Capelán recalled that, on that occasion, they promoted a state of opinion unfavorable to institutions such as the National Police or the Sandinista Youth. They offered no support or evidence of any kind for their claims, and then came the whole campaign related to the fires in the Indio Maíz Reserve, the second most relevant in Nicaragua.

“It was then when they undertook a media crusade about an alleged government operation in that region, they brought out totally disproportionate versions of the fact, and then they even discovered that the fire had been arson,” he considered.

On April 16, 2018, Ortega announced measures aimed at increasing the contribution of workers and employers to social security and the creation of a special tax on pensions of 5%; the following day the Twitter account, @SOSINSS, announced an alleged murder of a young man employed in the local economy.

From that moment on, the calls for protests in different cities against the reforms increased. According to some academics, the attackers of spaces such as the University Center of Leon “were turned into fascists and skillfully manipulated for acts of violence and hatred."

The Sandinista president then decided to postpone the reform of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute, apparently one of the triggers of the protests, and the following week sectors of society began a series of demonstrations in favor of the FSLN government.

The "tranquistas" -the promoters of the blockades in towns and cities-, according to Capelán, did not succeed in economically suffocating the country. A few weeks later the National Police intervened in the lifting of the barricades and, little by little, the Sandinistas regained control of the streets.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nic ... -0013.html

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Women’s struggle in Nicaragua: from liberation fighters to building an alternative society
Originally published: Peoples Dispatch by Erika Takeo and Rohan Rice (November 4, 2021 ) | - Posted Nov 06, 2021

Throughout Central America, women are actively mobilizing for their rights; the crucial difference in Nicaragua is that the new government has a commitment to support them. The challenges they face are similar to those faced by each of the neighboring republics–but only in Nicaragua have concrete opportunities for change arisen.

– Helen Collinson et al., ‘Women and Revolution in Nicaragua’ (1990)


According to the Global Gender Gap Index, the Central American country of Nicaragua currently places twelfth in the world for gender parity, above the likes of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Since the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the living conditions for women have drastically improved, successes which even the period of neoliberal rule from 1990 to 2006 couldn’t completely overturn. Throughout the second Sandinista period—from 2007 until today—the material and social position of women has continued to strengthen. Recently, new laws protecting the political and economic rights of women have been ratified after organized campaigns from the Nicaraguan women’s movement, while women’s organizations are receiving unprecedented investment and interest from the socialist government.

What can we learn from the Nicaraguan women’s movement about the global struggle for women’s rights and gender parity? This is the central question we will answer, by first giving a general overview of the conditions for women under the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FLSN) before, during, and in-between both revolutionary periods.

Firstly, it must be said that it is impossible to separate the women’s movement in Nicaragua from the Sandinista revolution. They are mutually interdependent. The reason is quite simple: women’s lives are dramatically better under Sandinista governance. During the Somoza dictatorship, supported by the U.S. and its allies, many women lived in slave-like conditions. They were prevented from owning property, accessing health care, directly receiving salaries, or attending formal education. Reproductive rights and information on sexual health were non-existent. Rape was extraordinarily common, particularly on the plantations. Under Somoza’s tyranny, women existed for expropriation and nothing more. Lola del Carmen Esquivel Gonzales, today a member of the Gloria Quintanilla Co-operative in Santa Julia, shared reflections on her life under Somoza:
At the very young age of 11 years (during the Somoza dictatorship), I worked in the fields, the campesino life. I didn’t have land; I was an agricultural worker. It was hard because there was no education, no protection for children. There were no rights for women. There was no healthcare. My mother and I were nomads, moving through various departments looking for work, harvesting cane sugar. We didn’t have a home. I became a woman: I learned to walk with a machete, cut coffee and cotton and cane, sell fruit, and clean rooms in Corinto, Chinandega.
Much of this changed after 1979: women were instrumental in the overthrow of Somoza, both as combatants and in supporting roles. Throughout the 1980s women fought for all the basic human rights, many of which were immediately granted by the socialist FSLN. In Nicaragua’s first democratic elections in 1984, 67 percent of the women who voted in that election voted for the FSLN.

Following the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 after a decade of the US-Contra war, Nicaragua entered a period of three neoliberal governments (1991–2006) whose policies had little interest in improving the qualities of life for women. Neoliberal policies in Nicaragua were harsh on women, especially for working class and rural women, who were made invisible despite being key actors in Nicaraguan production. Public education was privatized and public healthcare was left without funding. The informal job sector boomed, dramatically worsening labor conditions. The burden of this increasing poverty fell disproportionately on women.

The Sandinistas were voted back into power in 2007. During this second revolutionary period, women’s rights have again returned to the fore. Many of the laws enacted in the 1980s were put into better practice and the women’s movement found a new lease of life. Women’s working conditions have become a priority of the government. The advances have positively impacted urban and rural women-led households as different social programs have focused specifically on them. Yet international attention, notably that of Western middle-class feminist groups, have often ignored these advances, instead focusing on one issue: abortion rights. Both deserve equal attention, inseparable as they are, and will be covered below. Let us initially make a sweeping pass through the history and praxis of the organizations involved in the women’s movement, including the victories and the problems they faced.

The women’s movement–history and praxis

The women’s movement began in earnest with the guerrilla war against Somoza in 1979. Thirty percent of guerilla combatants were women. Some militias were made up exclusively of women, while others took up leadership of mixed units and entire battalions. A handful of these same women went on to senior military positions in Sandinista society and have worked tirelessly to progress the revolution ever since, like Doris Tijerino, who led the Sandinista Police, or Leticia Herrera, who directed the Sandinista Defense Committees.

This composition of all-women militias and women in mixed formations came to inform the women’s movement as it progressed. The Luisa Amanda Espinosa Association of Nicaraguan Women, or AMNLAE, the first group dedicated solely to women’s rights, emerged around 1978. AMNLAE, “sees itself as an umbrella organization incorporating women from all the different sectors, including the trade unions”, although by 1985 registered as an official non-profit (Collinson et al, 1990). In its early years, one can think of AMNLAE as reflecting the all-women militias that emerged during the revolutionary war. Alongside AMNLAE, women were also setting up initiatives within their mixed institutions to give a voice to their struggle.

The most notable of these latter groups was the Women’s Secretariat of the Rural Workers’ Association, or ATC to use the Spanish acronym. The approach of women in the ATC was that forming a separate women’s organizations would only serve to ghettoize the women’s struggle. In other words, it would remain an issue only for women rather than for both men and women.

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Young Nicaraguan women students at IALA

This mentality was also informed by the widespread skepticism of the feminist movement at the time. For broad sections of the Nicaraguan population, suggests Lea Guido of AMNLAE, feminism was seen as a Western ideology that only further divided men and women in their journey to “mutual liberation”. For the women’s movement of past and present, it is “capitalism [that] has divided men and women so that we couldn’t join together and change things,” remarked former AMNLAE worker, Heliette Ehlers. As it was the Western imperialists who imposed capitalism, who aided Somoza during his dictatorship, and who still fund armed conflict in Nicaragua today (see: 2018 coup attempt), Western ideologies are treated with a healthy distrust, to the extent that even in this second Sandinista period some women prefer to use the term ‘women’s movement’ rather than ‘feminist movement’.

The tactical split in the women’s movement has not got in the way of it making tremendous gains. The first major victory was the Agrarian Reform and Co-operatives laws of 1981 whereby Nicaragua became the first country in Latin America to recognize women’s rights to wages, land, and co-operative organizing as equal to that of men. This was soon followed by, “the Law Regulating Relations Between Mothers, Fathers and Children [1981] . . . which created equal rights over children for both parents; and the Law of Nurturing [1982] which obliged all men to contribute to their children’s upkeep and to do their share of household tasks” (Collinson et al, 1990). Both of these latter laws were won after campaigning by AMNLAE. In these early revolutionary years, single women also won the right to legally adopt; the trafficking of Nicaraguan children was banned; and women began to fill various positions in the National Assembly.

One of the most significant moments in the 1980s for the women’s movement came in 1987 with the Proclama. The Proclama was the result of seven years of lobbying and agitation by the movement. Numerous open meetings had been held during this time discussing the plight of women, namely their dual role as unpaid careers for the family and poorly paid salaried workers. Popular Sandinista newspaper Barricada ran dozens of articles on the matter, as well as on questions of reproductive rights and sexual liberation. The Proclama, a policy published by the FSLN, acknowledged for the first time that, “women suffer additional exploitation specific to their sex and that struggles within the revolutionary process were legitimate; it also roundly condemned machismo. Most importantly, it argued that women’s issues could not be ‘put off’ till after the war” (Collinson et al, 1990).

Machismo no longer had anywhere to hide. A huge societal shift emerged in Nicaragua and the discussion of women’s rights, as well as the attitude of men, went mainstream. Extensive education programs challenging domestic violence were rolled out, with harsher punishments for repeat offenders. The first TV show on sexual education, ‘Sex & Youth’, aired on the Sandinista channel SSTV, discussing everything from masturbation to homosexuality. Following the Proclama, the salient Divorce Law of 1988 was passed, permitting women to leave their toxic and/or abusive relationships.

Of course, no policy can force attitudes to change, so machismo still remains an issue in 2021. Yet the difference between the women’s movement under the FSLN and the movement under neoliberal governments, is that the FSLN has provided important support to the fight for gender equality, and since the return of the FSLN government in 2007, a number of laws have been passed in this vein.

The Gender Policy and Law No. 648: Equal Rights and Opportunities Law (2007)—quickly passed after FLSN re-assumed power—are based on the premise of working for gender equality, strengthening women’s protagonism, and the construction of more humane, equitable, and complementary gender relations as both a human right and a strategic necessity for the country’s development.

Later came the approval of Law 779: the Integral Law against Violence against Women (2014), a policy first proposed in the 1980s and finally ratified, despite strong counter-opposition by the religious sector, with the return of the FSLN government. It gives Nicaraguan women a legal framework for the protection and defense of their lives which is implemented with the assistance of 85 all-women police stations, comisarias, whose main focus is on protecting women and children from abuse.

In 2021, the government additionally passed a law enshrining women’s representation at parliamentary level, which was vehemently condemned by the opposition. All electoral lists, from local councils to the National Assembly, must now comprise 50 percent women. The percentage of congresswomen now stands at 48.4. For comparison, Canada is only at 28.9 percent. Today, Nicaragua ranks fourth in the world for women in parliamentary positions and first in the world for women in ministerial positions. It is one significant indicator of the FSLN’s attempts to eradicate gender disparity and make it easier for the women’s movement to have both a voice and enact law.

In the 21st century, the women’s movement has undoubtedly made huge gains at parliamentary level, yet it has also made a big impact in other areas of society. One of the most important actors in this regard is the aforementioned, ATC.

Working for liberation

The most essential component of Nicaragua’s economy has for centuries been its agricultural sector. Prior to the revolution, all available fertile land was forcibly converted into vast monocultural cash-crop plantations and worked by the local population, be that slaves, Indigenous people, or mestizos. From the moment William Walker’s men invaded in 1855 up until 1979, Nicaragua was a victim of this agro-imperialism. However, when the Sandinistas launched a comprehensive agrarian reform in the 1980s, land was democratized and given to peasant families, creating the base for Nicaragua’s food sovereign model today. Moreover, when men went to fight in the mountains during the US-funded counter-revolution in the 1980s, women took on agricultural jobs that had been traditionally held by men—carrying out the field work, driving tractors, applying inputs, tending to the animals—in addition to all of the traditional housework and childrearing. This was an important moment that showed that women too could carry out agricultural activities other than harvesting, breaking off from traditional machista ideas about the division of agricultural labor.

In the build-up to the Sandinista revolution, the ATC was founded with the goal of organizing peasants and farm workers in defense of their rights as well as to improve living conditions in the countryside. Shortly after the historical triumph, they made the decision to found the ATC’s Women’s Secretariat (later adding the ‘Movimiento de Mujeres del Campo’/MMC or Rural Women’s Movement). This space was perhaps the first in a Nicaraguan organization specifically created to address women’s issues, and in this case, to meet the demands of peasant and working-class women. The Secretariat and MMC have since their inception struggled for better wages, access to education, respect for women’s physical and moral integrity, and equal opportunities. This union has continually played a crucial role in defending the needs of both male and female land workers, especially during the first phase of the revolution when many workers left bondage for the first time in their lives to then define a new form of workplace that would transform society.

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Women founders of ATC including Lola Esquivel (center), El Crucero

With the arrival of the neoliberal period in 1990 and the concomitant decline in workers’ rights, women’s organizing became even stronger as a response. ATC women led shutdowns of main roads in Managua to ensure that the land they had obtained during the 1980s agrarian reform was respected. They also spearheaded the creation of new autonomous zones in northern regions of the country, especially the department of Jinotega.

Today, the ATC has 18,000 women members in different social sectors. Both women and men are trained by the likes of the Francisco Morazán Peasant Worker School in gender relations and eliminating violence against women. These programs also work on fostering women’s leadership for rural movements; in the ATC itself the majority of both national and departmental leaders are women, not just the Women’s Secretariat.

Government social programs such as those organized by the Ministry for Family, Cooperative, Communal, and Associative Economy/MEFCCA, have a particular focus on women heads of households, providing them with the productive resources they need to run their own small business and contribute to the country’s economy. One such notable initiative is the Zero Usury program, that provides financing at an annual interest rate of 2 percent to women entrepreneurs, farmers, and producers. Women are also given quick access to credit and without the risk of being dispossessed of their land or belongings. This is in sharp contrast to the neoliberal system that, through private microfinance companies, charged rates of up to 11 percent per month, snatching from women the little they had because they did not provide support or training for the development of their businesses. Since 2007, the Zero Usury program has provided one or more loans to over a half million women in Nicaragua.

Another notable MEFCCA program is the Hunger Zero program (modeled on the one in Brazil), whereby all agricultural assets are put in the woman’s name, including livestock, inputs, and technology. This model, not seen anywhere else in Central America, has empowered economically rural women to be self-sufficient. These initiatives are crucial because they allow women to break the dependency on male breadwinners, giving them more autonomy and stopping the cycles of violence that have historically existed in the Nicaraguan countryside.

One example of where this has all come into action is the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative in El Crucero, a nationally-recognized women’s coffee farmer cooperative. The 22 women members are leaders in their community that is made up of 79 families. With assistance from both the ATC and the Sandinista government, the women have organized to build an elementary school in the community, inaugurate a well for potable water, and all of the women farmers are trained in agroecological techniques that they implement in their plots, contributing to the national food sovereignty and security campaigns.

As shown by the Gloria Quintanilla Co-operative, raising employment for women cannot happen without increasing participation and standards of education. Before 1979, there were no educational provisions for children of any gender under six years old. Schooling post-13 was rare. Illiteracy was at 50 percent with women forming a majority of the illiterate (Collinson et al, 1990). Responding to the successes seen in Cuba—over a thousand Cuban teachers came to Nicaragua in 1981 to assist in the education sector—the FSLN embarked on a ‘Literacy Crusade’. Within only a year, illiteracy was reduced to 12 percent, with women being the primary beneficiaries. This is reflected in the mass training of ‘popular teachers’ after the crusade, 95 percent of whom were women. Education thereafter became another key source of employment for women, especially in rural areas. As of 2017, 78 percent of the teachers are women. Starting in 2012, the government has promoted a program of specialization and professionalization of school teachers to improve the quality of the education system across the country.

This is an education system that under the FSLN has always been rooted in the popular pedagogy of Marxist thinker, Paulo Freire. In the second revolutionary period, his teachings are embodied in the creation of the Latin American Institute for Agroecology/IALA, an education centre established with the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina, and former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. The IALAs, including the IALA campus in Nicaragua called IALA Ixim Ulew (meaning “land of corn” in Maya Quiche) are training centers for youth that come from social movements and rural areas providing political, ideological, and technical training in agroecology. Part of this training is about dismantling patriarchal systems that have acutely affected rural areas and replacing them with a model that not only acknowledges women as the cornerstone of agriculture, but values seed saving, fights machismo, builds shared responsibilities between women and men, and boosts food production. These concepts are included in the ‘popular peasant feminism‘ modules that are imparted at the IALAs.

Bertha Sanchez is an 18-year-old young woman from the department of Masaya. She is a single mother and is currently studying to be a specialized technician in Agroecology at IALA. In her testimony as an IALA student, she shared:
My experience has been unique because, truthfully, I never thought I’d say, ‘I’m going keep studying’. I am a single mother of a three-year-old child, I thought I’d just get a job and struggle from paycheck to paycheck. But by the grace of God, I now have the opportunity to continue studying. I like to work the fields. I have a plot where I grow vegetables… I have to think about the fact that I have someone who comes after me, in this case my son. I need him to feel proud of me, to be an example of discipline and show him what is means to be from the countryside
While there are IALA campuses throughout Latin America, the IALA campuses in Nicaragua and Venezuela are unique in that their training programs are state-accredited, meaning that the students receive a valuable title in acknowledgment of the studies they have carried out.

Reproductive rights and healthcare
Women’s healthcare and reproductive rights are a major priority of the FSLN. With the reinstatement of the universal right to healthcare after 2006, a series of impressive achievements have been made that mean that women, and consequently their families too, are living healthier lives.

Through Nicaragua’s extensive public healthcare system, women receive access to free, high-quality, and culturally-appropriate healthcare from the Pacific to the Caribbean Coast. This includes a whole fleet of mobile clinics that tour the country to perform regular cervical and breast cancer screenings, along with the opening of a women’s hospital in 2015 to specifically treat women’s health issues.

The Maternal Homes program, that covers women from rural areas or with high-risk pregnancies, ensures accommodation, food, and prenatal training for pregnant women. In 2015, 51,189 pregnant women were housed in 174 Maternal Homes and in 2018, 61,648 pregnant women were housed in 178 Maternal Homes. According to the Nicaraguan Ministry for Health, these types of programs have contributed to the 60 percent reduction of maternal mortality rates, going from 78.2 deaths in 2007 to 47 deaths per 100,000 live births registered in 2018.

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An example of the Nicaraguan Casa Materna

Family-planning methods are widely available in the Nicaraguan public healthcare system, where five types of contraception are freely available. The Ministry of Health also connects with local community health promoters to ensure that women can access their preferred birth control method without even having to leave their communities, helping to reduce teenage pregnancies.

Internationally, there is much attention around the case of abortion in Nicaragua. In order to understand why abortion has not been nationally legalized, it is important to understand some cultural components of Nicaragua. The large majority of Nicaraguans are Catholics or Protestants, which combined with traditional peasant cultures, means public support for abortion is low. At all levels, but particularly at a governmental level, there is a greater focus on family planning (rare in other Catholic countries) and avoiding unwanted pregnancies, as well as ending and criminalizing violence against women. For example, rape is heavily criminalized, with average sentences of 25 to 30 years in prison, significantly more than the average 5-year-sentence rarely handed out in England.

That all said, abortions can be carried out for medical reasons and so far there has not been a case of imprisonment nor a legal case brought against a woman who had practiced abortion.

The right to live in peace

Owing to the Sandinista Revolution, women in Nicaragua now have the political power and organization to struggle for their demands, whether it be land, education, potable water, or community health programs. These in turn support the working class and all Nicaraguans in improving their quality of life, on its own terms and according to its own needs and culture.

What should also be obvious from the above is that the Nicaraguan women’s movement is deeply engaged with the country’s political future and with women’s everyday lives. Whether fighting on a local, national, or international level, it is evidently an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement with a clear sense of identity and autonomy.

In this regard, the last word ought to go to Lea Moncada, secretary of the Gloria Quintanilla Co-operative:
Now we are prepared for anything. The advice I could give is that we unite more, that we look out for the well-being of our country, of our nation, of our world. We are all human beings and we have to love each other because the big businessmen only look out for their stock market; they don’t look out for the proletarian class, the poor people, the working people, the peasant people.
The authors would like to thank the Women’s Secretariat of the ATC, the Rural Women’s Movement, Magda Lanuza, Ada Farrach, and Jenny Bekenstein for their invaluable contributions, without which this piece would not have been possible.

This article was written in collaboration with the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign UK. On 7 November 2021, Nicaraguans will vote in their national elections. The USA has already begun a campaign to try to oust the incumbent socialist FLSN government at the voting booth. This article is part of a year-long series that seeks to present the truth of Nicaragua under the Sandinista government.


https://mronline.org/2021/11/06/womens- ... nicaragua/
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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:14 pm

Nicaraguan Elections Update: Long Lines Reported During Vote

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From the early hours of this November 7, Nicaragua breathes the air of a civic party in peace and tranquility with the celebration of the general elections. | Photo: Voz de el Sandinismo

Published 7 November 2021 (23 hours 46 minutes ago)

“This country lives immersed in electoral processes. Voting is highly valued here because the vote does not call for war, terrorism, or destruction. The vote calls for peace,” Daniel Ortega, the FSLN leader stressed.


On Sunday at 7 a.m., 3,106 voting centers and 13,459 polling station boards opened their doors in Nicaragua for the election of the president, vice president, lawmakers, and representatives to the Central American Parliament.

12:32 p.m. Through social networks, the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) welcomed the electoral process in Nicaragua and indicated that "its people sovereignly reiterate their vocation for peace and reconciliation."

12:15 p.m. Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo cast their votes at a polling station in Managua. They are the presidential binomial presented by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) for the 2021 elections.

"We all saw it and lived it. We managed to put an end to terrorism, reestablish peace, and stabilize. We not only stabilized but also advanced towards Nicaraguan families’ well-being and progress," Ortega said.

“This country lives immersed in electoral processes. Voting is highly valued here because the vote does not call for war, terrorism, or destruction. The vote calls for peace,” the FSLN leader added.

10:44 a.m. Citizens recognize the good organization of the electoral process. The actions previously carried out by the Supreme Electoral Council are allowing citizens to exercise their right to vote without further delay.

“The elections show the world we are a sovereign nation capable of selecting its leaders through electoral processes, in democracy and with citizen participation. I hope… we will celebrate new victories together at the end of the day,” teacher Melvin Guzman, who voted in Leon city, said, adding that the Nicaraguan development will have a greater chance of success after the elections.

10:18 a.m. Nicaragua’s Foreign Affairs Minister Denis Moncada confirmed that President Daniel Ortega’s administration is not afraid of the United States and the European Union criticizing the election results.

"We will not be intimidated by their unilateral sanctions and their threats to ignore the elections," he said after casting his vote.

“Polls indicate a big victory for the Sandinista Revolution. However, the threat of foreign intervention hangs over the vote. The US government invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and they've regarded it as their colony ever since,” British journalist Ollie Vargas recalled.


The tweet reads, "Blanca Segovia Sandino Arauz, the daughter of Gen. Augusto C. Sandino and Blanca Arauz, national heroes of Nicaragua, exercised her right to vote in a voting center in the capital."

10:00 a.m. The elections are proceeding normally. The population is coming to exercise their right to vote in 13,459 polling station boards set up by the authorities throughout the country. Dozens of international election observers are present at the voting centers.

"I've already voted. We are here to ratify our duty as citizens. My duty is to defend the democracy that has cost us so much,” a young woman, Kiuptza Arias, said.

"I've already voted and ratified the continuity of peace in my country. For more progress and stability," journalist Kenia Doña tweeted.

09:00 a.m. National Assembly President Gustavo Porras highlighted that the Nicaraguan electoral process is being carried out in an orderly, transparent and peaceful manner.

07:30 a.m. After casting her vote, the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) magistrate Alma Nubia Baltodano described the general elections as a civic day that runs in peace and quiet.


Six candidates compete for the Presidency. The Presidency of the Republic is disputed by six political parties. Among them is the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) whose candidate Daniel Ortega will seek re-election for his fourth consecutive term and will be accompanied by his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice-presidential candidate.

The Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC), the country's second most important political force, presented Walter Espinoza and Mayra Arguello as presidential binomial. Nicaragua's Christian Path, a party that took part in the 2011 and 2016 elections in alliance with the FSLN, nominated Guillermo Orozco and Violeta Martínez as its candidates.

The Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance Party (ALN), a right-wing organization created in 1999, participates in the elections with Alfredo Montiel and Jennifer Espinoza. Finally, while the Independent Liberal Party (PLI) proposed Mauricio Orue and Zobeida del Socorro as its candidates, the Alliance for the Republic Party (APRE) competes with Gerson Gutierrez and Claudia Romero.

During election day, some 30,000 police and military will guard the polling stations, which will close at 6:00 p.m. local time. The Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) will present the results of the democratic process around midnight.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Nic ... -0003.html

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Polls Close for Nicaragua's 2021 Presidential Elections

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Election day continues normally in Monimbo, a town located in the municipality of Masaya, in Nicaragua. November 7, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/@telesurtv

Published 7 November 2021 (16 hours 39 minutes ago)

The general elections for the selection of the president, vice-president and deputies began this Sunday in Nicaragua, with an electoral roll of more than four million voters and six candidates vying for the highest governmental position.


Polls have officially closed at 6:00 PM local time for Nicaragua's general elections this Sunday in which President Daniel Ortega, candidate for the FSLN (Sandinista Front for National Liberation), is seeking re-election. Some polls will remain open until everyone lined up has had a chance to vote.

According to local media and foreign electoral observers, the elections have been carried out in a peacful and tranquil environment, without any notable disturbances disrupting the smooth development of Sunday's democratic process.

Given the current sanitary conditions as a consequence of COVID-19, the various presidential campaigns took place until last November 3, mostly through social media, and the inauguration of the different posts will take place between January and February 2022.

According to the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), 232 electoral accompaniers from 27 countries and 600 national and foreign journalists are taking part in the overseeing process, described by the authorities and foreign representatives as free, democratic and sovereign.

Voters have cast their ballots at 3,106 Voting Centers and 13,459 Voting Boards (JRV), whose members include the parties with the two first places in the last general elections: the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC).

During the elections, the approximately 80 thousand members of the JRVs, including those appointed for the positions and alternates, have successfully guaranteed the exercise of the vote, the deposit of the votes in the corresponding ballot boxes and the scrutiny of the ballots, in addition to ensuring order in each of the precincts.


Per Nicaraguan regulations, no citizens were able to vote if he/she is not included or registered in the voter's list; neither is the presence of witnesses during the voting process allowed, nor the use of a photocopy of the ID card or for the JRV officials to leave the voting site.

Other voting regulations meant the prohibition of access to the voting spaces for people wearing clothes or propaganda alluding to partisan organizations or those in a state of drunkenness; similarly illegal is to distribute or remove from the premises any material related to the process.

The measures make it impossible to carry out actions aimed at disturbing or impeding the normal development of the elections and, according to the country's provisions, "voting may not be carried out outside the place or the hours established for such purpose," nor may electoral ballots be fraudulently added or removed from the ballot boxes.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pol ... -0008.html

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Majority of Nicaraguans Elect FSLN to Lead for Four More Years

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The Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) has won Sunday's general elections as President Daniel Ortega is re-elected for a fourth consecutive term. | Photo: Twitter/@Glomar69Gloria

Published 7 November 2021 (11 hours 33 minutes ago)

The Sandinista Front for National Liberation has won this Sunday's general elections in Nicaragua as President and Commander Daniel Ortega is elected for a fourth consecutive term with 74,99% out of 49.25% counted thus far.


Despite international attempts to discredit and not recognize the elections months before occurring, Sunday's general elections in the South American country were carried out peacefully and without any serious incidents.

Commander Daniel Ortega has been re-elected by the Nicaraguan people through a popular mandate to continue his role as president of the nation and leader of the Sandinista Revolution, while his wife, Comrade Rosario Murillo, will continue to serve as the Vice-President of Nicaragua.

Sunday's vote showed the surreal disconnect between Western imperialist accounts of Nicaragua's reality and the truth on the ground, as 65,34% expressed their support for the process and out of that 74,99% voted for the current government led by the FSLN, which has ushered in significant advances in the fields of healthcare, education, infrastructure, food sovereignty and gender equality since regaining power in 2007.

Hundreds of international election observers from dozens of nations were able to witness firsthand on Sunday the peace, calm and stability of Nicaragua's popular democratic process, disproving U.S. government and E.U. accusations of a "sham," fraudulent or un-democratic electoral system, more fitting for the recent electoral processes in U.S. ally countries like Honduras in 2017 or Brazil in 2018.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Maj ... -0013.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:23 pm

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From Nicaraguan Revolutionaries to US Embassy Informants: How Washington Recruited Ex-Sandinistas Like Dora María Téllez and her MRS Party
November 7, 2021
By Ben Norton – Nov 5, 2021

The story of how Nicaragua’s former guerrilla Dora María Téllez and her anti-Sandinista MRS party allied with the right wing and became coup-supporting informants for the US embassy.

One of the most high-profile opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government points to her revolutionary youth to justify her position. And while the international media constantly sings her praise, what it does not mention is that she abandoned revolutionary politics long ago, and has become a key asset in the US government’s campaign of unconventional warfare against Nicaragua.

When she was just 22-years-old, Dora María Téllez fought as a guerrilla in Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution, alongside current President Daniel Ortega. But she broke with Sandinismo over two decades ago, and has steadily drifted toward the US-backed right wing.

Téllez is a key figure in a group of former revolutionaries, many from elite, upper-class backgrounds, who cohered as a right-wing split out of the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the 1990s. Together, they formed a centrist political party called the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, or MRS), trading on their revolutionary histories to advance a neoliberal counter-revolution.

Under the leadership of Téllez and her colleagues, the MRS developed a close relationship with Nicaragua’s rightist oligarchy. It also collaborated extensively with the United States government, working with neoconservative members of Congress and Miami’s regime-change lobby, all while raking in funding from US interventionist organizations.

Classified State Department cables published by WikiLeaks and analyzed by The Grayzone show that Téllez and fellow leaders of her MRS party have frequently met with the US embassy and served as informants for years.

In regular meetings with US officials, Téllez, Sergio Ramírez, Hugo Torres Jiménez, Victor Hugo Tinoco, and other top MRS figures provided the United States with intelligence about the FSLN and internal Nicaraguan politics, in an attempt to prevent the Sandinistas from returning to power. They then helped Washington try to destabilize the government of President Daniel Ortega after he won the 2006 election.

The embassy clearly stated that “the USG [US government] position [is] that the MRS is a viable and constructive option, with whom the United States would maintain good relations.”

The embassy added approvingly, “if the MRS can shift votes from the FSLN and garner some of the undecided vote, it is still a viable option — and could be the key to preventing an Ortega win.”

Today, Téllez and her MRS are openly allied with the right wing – even as she and her followers cynically exploit her former revolutionary bona fides to divide left-wing support for the Sandinistas and confuse progressive observers outside of the country.

The MRS played a key role in a violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, in which extremist forces backed by the United States paralyzed the nation by erecting barricades, called tranques, while they hunted down, tortured, and murdered Sandinista activists.

With substantial funding from CIA cutouts dedicated to promoting regime change, MRS leaders helped organize and lead the failed putsch. And they used their influential positions in the media, NGO sector, and academia to craft how the violent operation was marketed to the rest of the world.

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One of scores of violent barricades, or tranques, created around Nicaragua in the 2018 coup attempt

In terms of pan-Latin American politics, Dora María Téllez and the MRS likewise became a reliable ally of the region’s right wing.

When Washington and Christian fundamentalist oligarchs sponsored a far-right military coup in Bolivia in 2019, Ortega’s Sandinista government staunchly opposed and condemned the plot, standing firmly with elected Bolivian President Evo Morales. Téllez, on the other hand, cheered on the putsch, smearing Morales as a wannabe dictator and claiming Bolivia was “better” with him overthrown.

Téllez declared with glee that the coup in Bolivia had “terrified” the Sandinista government, and expressed hope that Nicaraguan military officers would be inspired to launch a putsch of their own. The MRS leader praised the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) and its hyper-interventionist leader Luis Almagro, calling on him to expel Nicaragua.

Téllez told AFP that the Bolivia coup set a positive example that could scare the Sandinista government. She then conducted an interview with US government-funded opposition outlet Confidencial titled, “Dora María Téllez: ‘The Ortega-Murillo [family] are demoralized by the exit of Evo Morales’.”

“After Evo’s renunciation there is enormous desperation” in Nicaragua, she gloated. “They are in a very important situation of nervousness and desperation.”

Téllez expressed hope that the coup in Bolivia would send a message to the leaders of the Nicaraguan military to launch a putsch of their own, claiming “there is a very important part of the officer corps that” is not as loyal to Sandinismo.

Téllez and her MRS have taken an even more hardline position toward Venezuela. While the administration of President Ortega has steadfastly supported Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government against numerous US coup attempts, Téllez has relentlessly demonized the elected government of President Nicolás Maduro as a “dictatorship,” calling for it to be toppled too.

Téllez even expressed support for Washington’s Venezuelan puppet Juan Guaidó and far-right opposition oligarch Leopoldo López, proclaiming, “We are walking together.”


By 2020, Téllez and her MRS party had moved so far to the right that they decided to drop any pretense of fidelity to Sandinismo, removing all references to the Sandinista movement from their platform and changing the name of the Sandinista Renovation Movement to the Unión Democrática Renovadora (Democratic Renovation Union), or UNAMOS

All the while, Téllez and her UNAMOS colleagues have publicly lobbied the US government and European Union for more aggressive sanctions on their own country, which have already damaged the nation’s economy.

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Former MRS President Ana Margarita Vigil, the life partner of Dora María Téllez (center-right, in the glasses and sweater), meets with neoconservative Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as part of a regime-change lobbying campaign in 2016

In 2021, the Nicaraguan government arrested a series of MRS leaders, including Téllez, Hugo Torres Jiménez, and Victor Hugo Tinoco. An investigation by The Grayzone shows that each of these figures has been a US embassy informant for at least 15 years, according to State Department cables.Nicaragua also ordered the arrest of founding MRS president Sergio Ramírez, who has for decades served as a US government informant, a fact confirmed by the classified documents. (Ramírez lives in Costa Rica, so he was not apprehended.)

The detainees were charged with “inciting foreign interference in internal affairs, requesting military interventions, plotting with the funding of foreign powers to carry out acts of terrorism and destabilization,” and “demanding, praising, and applauding the imposition of sanctions on the State of Nicaragua and its citizens.”

These opposition figures were arrested under Nicaragua’s law 1055, which was approved by the country’s democratically elected National Assembly in December 2020. Titled “Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination for Peace,” many of the world’s governments have legislation similar to this Nicaraguan law, forbidding citizens from coup-plotting, treason, and conspiring with foreign nations to attack their nation.

The detention of Téllez and the MRS leaders led to a wave of denunciations from Western governments, corporate media outlets, and even some left-wing activists and intellectuals who had supported the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980s but later turned against it.

Critics exploited the arrests to craft a warped narrative, accusing the Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo of having abandoned their leftist roots by arresting historic revolutionaries.

But the reality is the complete opposite: participants in the failed coup attempt such as Téllez and her MRS party broke with Sandinismo decades ago and became loyal allies of the right wing, and the United States, ever since.

Washington responded to Nicaragua’s arrest of two dozen US government-sponsored, coup-plotting opposition leaders by imposing a new round sanctions on the Central American nation, and by attacking the legitimacy of its November 7 elections. The administration of President Joseph Biden made it clear it would refuse to recognize the results of the vote.

At a special October session of the Organization of American States (OAS), convened for the sole purpose of condemning Nicaragua, the Sandinista government defended itself against these accusations by stating, “In our country there is not a single detained candidate, not one; not a single innocent is prosecuted, not one. Those who are being subjected to legal processes are foreign agents, plainly identified within the payrolls of foreign governments, who, using the structures of private organizations, received millions of dollars to destroy, kill, bankrupt the economy, and subvert the constitutional order.”

While Western governments and corporate media outlets have condemned statements like these as propaganda, what Nicaragua said is factually correct. It is a matter of public record that those detained received millions of dollars in funding from the United States and European states, and subsequently used that money to organize a coup attempt, violating numerous laws on foreign agents, money laundering, and treason.

Moreover, the accusations made by the Nicaraguan judicial system, which maintains that the MRS leaders it arrested had conspired with a foreign power in a bid to overthrow their government, are confirmed by numerous classified US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

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State Department cables expose Dora María Téllez and fellow MRS leaders as US government informants

The Movimiento Renovador Sandinista party that Dora María Téllez helped found has enjoyed support from the US government for at least 15 years.

In the lead-up to Nicaragua’s 2006 national elections, when Téllez served as president of the MRS, the party chose the former mayor of the capital Managua, Herty Lewites, to serve as its presidential candidate. Lewites showed little commitment to any coherent political ideology, but he was charismatic and had a base of support.

That February, Lewites met with the US ambassador for breakfast. The former Sandinista wanted to reassure Washington that, if his party won the upcoming November elections, it would maintain close relations with the United States – the very country that had supported far-right Contra death squads and waged a brutal terror war against Nicaragua.

Lewites was once part of the Sandinista movement, but when the FSLN lost power in 1990, he initiated a series of alliances with the right wing and became a businessman. He went on to create an aquatic park, and, never one for modesty, named it after himself: Hertylandia.

By the time 2006 rolled around, Lewites was a bitter rival of the Sandinista Front, and explicitly preferred the right winning over Daniel Ortega return to power.

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MRS presidential candidate Herty Lewites (right) with oligarch Carlos Fernando Chamorro (left) on the US government-funded media propaganda Esta Semana

A State Department cable titled “Herty seeks cordial, constructive, cooperative relations with the United States” made it clear that the MRS presidential candidate was more than happy to ally with Washington against his former comrades in the FSLN.

“Lewites was effusive in his desire to maintain cordial, constructive, and cooperative relations with the United States,” the embassy wrote contently. It added that, “if he is elected, he will request a high-level U.S. delegation to attend his inauguration to demonstrate that the two governments will be strong allies.”

Lewites told Washington he approved of its attacks on Ortega, and insisted that “the Ambassador and other officials [should] continue to strike hard against Ortega.”

The MRS candidate not only sought close ties to the country that had repeatedly invaded and militarily occupied Nicaragua; he also supported neoliberal economic policies. The cable happily noted that “Lewites was unequivocal in his support for CAFTA,” the Central America Free Trade Agreement imposed on the region by the George W. Bush administration.

Lewites reassured the ambassador that his ideal vision for an MRS-led government in Nicaragua would be textbook neoliberal, run by “young technocrats,” with “cuts in government fat” and pro-corporate policies to attract “foreign investment.” He promised that his “consensus government” would be a centrist “balance” between the left wing and right wing.

The embassy cable revealed that almost all of the funding for Lewites’ presidential campaign came from outside Nicaragua, mostly from wealthy oligarchs and corporations in Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

It also noted that Lewites had been meeting with fellow presidential candidate Eduardo Montealegre, a fanatically right-wing and notoriously corrupt, Harvard-educated multi-millionaire banker. Lewites and Montealegre hoped to come together in an anti-Sandinista alliance to prevent Ortega from becoming president again.

Lewites had in fact publicly called for this cooperation with the right in a 2005 interview on the US government-funded media program Esta Semana. The MRS candidate admitted he had repeatedly asked Montealegre to make a “public agreement” with him so they could push through constitutional reforms that would make it almost impossible for the Sandinistas to return to power.

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Right-wing multimillionaire banker Eduardo Montealegre (right, in white) clasping hands with MRS presidential candidate Edmundo Jarquín (center, in pink) and Liberal politician Enrique Quiñónez (left, in red), with campaign materials for Herty Lewites in the background

“Remarking that he will not be upset if Montealegre wins the election because he knows Montealegre will also lead the nation forward, Lewites argued that the two need one another,” the US embassy wrote after its February 2006 meeting. “He believes that between the two of them they can gain the 56 National Assembly seats required for much-needed constitutional reforms. Lewites hopes to sign some sort of pre-election commitment with Montealegre agreeing to work together if either of them wins the presidency.”

Lewites’ call for a pact with Montealegre was highly hypocritical, because the MRS had endlessly criticized, and capitalized on, a short-term agreement that Ortega’s Sandinista Front had made with Liberal former President Arnoldo Aléman, known as the “pacto,” in order to rewrite electoral law to allow presidential candidates to win in the first round if they had more than 35% of the vote.

But this was just the first instance in a long record of the MRS party openly allying with and supporting Montealegre, one of the most infamous right-wing oligarchs in Nicaragua.

Lewites unexpectedly died of a heart attack in July 2006. His vice-presidential pick, Edmundo Jarquín, became the MRS’ new presidential candidate in the November elections, and ultimately got just 6% of the vote.

From then on, the MRS continued to lurch further and further to the right. And the party’s leaders collaborated more and more closely with the United States.

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A September 2006 State Department cable, titled “MRS: ‘We want to bring Ortega down,’” is one of the clearest examples of the US government supporting the Sandinista Renovation Movement party.

The document reveals that after the death of Herty Lewites, his nephew Israel Lewites, the spokesman of the MRS party, met with the embassy’s polcouns (political counselor) and doubled down on his request for Washington’s support.

“The MRS is the only viable option for the 2006 election,” Israel Lewites insisted. Desperate to maintain US backing, “Lewites emphasized that the MRS would never return to an FSLN controlled by Ortega.”

In turn, the embassy’s “Polcouns reiterated the USG [US government] position that the MRS is a viable and constructive option, with whom the United States would maintain good relations.

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Israel Lewites “made a point of mentioning to poloffs [the political officer] that he had studied in the United States (at the University of Texas in Arlington) and believes in ‘the American dream’ and supports responsible capitalism — since it so clearly benefited him,” the embassy wrote happily.

The MRS spokesperson did however acknowledge that the party’s presidential candidate, Jarquín, was having trouble gaining traction. (The cable noted, for instance, that “Jarquin expressed his support for legalizing elective abortions, a procedure opposed by a large majority of Nicaraguans.”)

But Washington still clearly saw the MRS as useful in its crusade against Ortega: “Though current polls show Jarquin in third place, if the MRS can shift votes from the FSLN and garner some of the undecided vote, it is still a viable option — and could be the key to preventing an Ortega win,” the embassy hoped.

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The document also revealed that the US government’s International Republican Institute (IRI), a sibling of CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy, had trained roughly 30% of MRS party poll watchers for the 2006 elections. (IRI has been used to fund coups and regime-change operations across Latin America and the world, targeting elected left-wing leaders like Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.)

The State Department evidently considered this cable on the MRS to be very valuable, because it forwarded it to the CIA, DIA, National Security Council, secretary of state, and US embassy in Venezuela.

But this is just one of a dozen cables showing how the United States has worked with leaders of Nicaragua’s MRS party to destabilize the Sandinista government of President Ortega.

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In November 2006, Dora María Téllez met with US diplomats as well. It was the eve of the elections, and she was worried that the Sandinista Front might return to power.

A classified State Department cable, titled “Dora María Téllez concerned about fraud, possible FSLN government,” reveals that the former revolutionary was conspiring with the US embassy in Nicaragua to try to prevent the Sandinista Front from returning to power in that month’s elections.

At the time, Téllez was president of the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, and a candidate to be a deputy in the National Assembly.

In her rendezvous with the US embassy’s “Polcouns and Poloff” – political counselor and political officer, respectively – Téllez was joined by Israel Lewites, the MRS spokesman.

“Tellez has often been critical of U.S. policies, but showed an apparent openness to discuss issues with emboffs and to pursue future meetings,” the State Department wrote after the engagement, using an abbreviation for “embassy officers.”

It added that Téllez “told emboffs that she would be interested in encouraging dialogue between MRS members and the United States.”

“Tellez, who says she has a cousin in the United States and a nephew fighting in Iraq, stated that she does not have an issue with the United States, but believes that Nicaraguans often manipulate Americans to do ‘their dirty work,’” the cable noted.

In the meeting, Téllez provided the US embassy with intelligence about the inner workings of Nicaraguan political parties, and accused the Sandinista Front of planning to win the election through supposed “fraud.”

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This State Department cable was classified by the George W. Bush administration’s ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul A. Trivelli, who helped lead a full-scale meddling operation in a failed bid to tilt the 2006 election against Daniel Ortega.

Trivelli threatened that Washington would destabilize Nicaragua if Ortega won. The US embassy used hundreds of millions in USAID dollars as leverage to essentially bribe people to vote against the FSLN, while heavily pressuring anti-Sandinista parties to unite against Ortega.

Despite the US intervention campaign, Ortega and the Sandinista Front won the 2006 election, while the presidential candidate from Téllez’s MRS, Edmundo Jarquín, barely eked out 6 percent of the vote. (In subsequent elections, the MRS’ support base shrunk even further.)

Following Ortega’s victory, files published by WikiLeaks show how Téllez continued her role as an informant for Washington, providing it with sensitive information in an attempt to destabilize the new Sandinista government.

Another State Department cable classified by Ambassador Trivelli in January 2007 shows that Téllez and MRS leaders met with the embassy for a “cocktail” meeting that was “relaxed and cordial.”

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Titled “MRS loses caucus status but continues as most vocal opposition group,” the document reveals that Téllez was joined at the meeting with US emboffs (embassy officers) by the failed MRS presidential candidate Jarquín, National Assembly member Enrique Saenz, and party co-founder Luis Carrion.

It is noteworthy that the US embassy chose to meet with these MRS leaders at a cocktail event, highlighting their shared elite backgrounds.

Carrion is the son of a wealthy banker from a powerful family, and Saenz has long been in the foreign NGO sector, working for the European Union and United Nations.

Jarquin is married to the ultra-rich oligarch Claudia Chamorro Barrios (a daughter of the US-backed right-wing President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro). He worked for more than a decade at the neoliberal Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, DC after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990.

The elite background of these MRS leaders clearly reflected the base of the party, which back then and still today has been with upper-middle and upper-class Nicaraguans, highly educated, fluent in English, with opportunities to travel, and lucrative jobs (paid in dollars) in the non-profit industrial complex, academia, and media.

The Sandinista Front, on the other hand, has always remained firmly associated with poor and working-class Nicaraguans, with its base in impoverished barrios where residents didn’t even have paved roads in the 1990-2007 neoliberal era, and in rural areas where people did not have electricity or potable water.

In fact, the anti-Sandinista opposition is notorious for mocking FSLN supporters with classist tropes, claiming Sandinista Youth militants are uneducated and demeaning them for not being able to correctly pronounce English words.

In their friendly 2007 cocktail meeting with the US embassy, MRS leaders provided the foreign diplomats with sensitive information about the inner workings of Nicaraguan politics.

The WikiLeaks document shows that Téllez fed Washington intelligence about the country’s police commissioner and police chief.

Yet these two meetings were by no means the only times representatives from Nicaragua’s MRS party met and conspired with the US government. The cozy relationship continued well beyond.

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A US government cable from April 2007, titled “MRS focused on legislative agenda, municipal elections,” reveals that the party’s National Assembly deputies Enrique Saenz and Hugo Torres, along with Torres’ alternate Victor Hugo Tinoco, had met that March with the embassy’s political officer, as well as analysts from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the intelligence agency of the US State Department.

The MRS leaders gave the foreign diplomats information about the newly elected Sandinista government and the MRS’ plans to undermine it, which they deemed an “authoritarian project.”

Torres fed the US government officials intelligence about the Nicaraguan military, which he hoped could be used to undermine the elected president.

“Torres commented that he holds hope for the future of the military,” the embassy wrote. “Omar Halleslevens, Chief of the Nicaraguan Army, and Torres were schoolmates and Torres respects him. He believes that Halleslevens will be able to stand up to Ortega.”

Saenz, the other MRS lawmaker, reassured the embassy “that Nicaraguans recognize the importance of the relationship with the United States.”

Torres’ collaboration with the US government continued for years. Another State Department cable from July 2008 shows Torres providing Washington with detailed analysis of the inner workings of the Sandinista government.

In June 2021, Torres and Tinoco were arrested on charges of conspiring with and taking funding from foreign powers to destabilize the government, in violation of the sovereignty law 1055.

While Washington claimed the charges were baseless and politically motivated, its own classified State Department cables, published by WikiLeaks, tell a totally different story.

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MRS leader Sergio Ramírez speaking at the US government-backed Centro Cultural Nicaragüense Norteamericano (CCNN) in 2016

(End of Part I, continued on following post)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:26 pm

(Part II, continued from previous post.)

Founding MRS leader Sergio Ramírez has served as US embassy informant for decades

Washington’s collaboration with MRS leaders goes all the way up to the founding president of the party, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, who has in fact served as a US government informant for decades.

Ramírez had been an elite member of Nicaragua’s intelligentsia under the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Although he played no role in the armed struggle, he supported the Sandinista Revolution, and as a conciliatory symbol was selected as Ortega’s vice president from 1985 until the Sandinistas lost power in 1990.

Like many other wealthy Nicaraguans who had joined the Sandinista Front out of opportunism, Ramírez took a turn to the right in the 1990s. He and Dora María Téllez, among others, created the MRS as a right-wing factional split out of the FSLN in 1995.

Ramírez led the party until Téllez took over from 1998 to 2007. He ran as the MRS’ first presidential candidate, in the 1996 election, earning just about 1% of the vote.

Although he served as the leader of the MRS for a mere three years, the party was so closely associated with Ramírez – and his self-importance was so notorious – that Nicaraguans joke that he named it after himself: MRS is the inversion of his initials, SRM.

Hardly any average working-class Nicaraguans supported Ramírez and his MRS. However, he had the ear of the US government – and internal documents published by WikiLeaks show that he has served as a US government informant since at least 1978.

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In January 2007, mere days after President Ortega returned to power, Ramírez met with the US ambassador, Trivelli, for a friendly tete-a-tete.

A classified State Department cable titled “Ex-Sandinista VP Sergio Ramirez: Recent Ortega actions do not auger well for Nicaragua” shows that Ramírez provided the US ambassador with valuable intelligence about Ortega’s cabinet picks and the newly elected president’s relationship with the military and police.

“Ramirez lauded the USG’s [US government’s] approach towards President Ortega,” the document stated contently.

The MRS leader’s rendezvous with the ambassador was also apparently aimed at generating more financial pressure on Managua from Washington. The report recounted that “Ramirez noted the important role of international donors, who must hold Ortega accountable.” He stressed the influence that European Union economic aid to Nicaragua had gained over the neoliberal period, and said “the EU and a number of member countries should tie their assistance to” political demands.

In the meeting, Ramírez flaunted his right-wing stripes, attacking the democratically elected government of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez and claiming he was a secret puppet master who “calls the shots” in Nicaragua.

In the same vein, Ramírez demonized China, Iran, and Cuba – making it clear beyond a doubt that he was firmly on the side of the United States.

The embassy cable delightedly added that, before the 2006 election, Ramírez had publicly called on Nicaraguans to vote for neoliberal candidate Eduardo Montealegre, the corrupt right-wing multi-millionaire banker. It was just one episode in the long relationship between the MRS and Montealegre.

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In May 2007, the US ambassador in Nicaragua hosted a dinner aimed at unifying the opposition, seeking to defeat the Sandinista Front in the 2008 municipal elections. Trivelli invited the banker Montealegre, former MRS presidential candidate Edmundo Jarquín, and Sergio Ramírez, among others.

A formerly classified cable reveals Washington’s plans to craft “The opposition’s recipe for success: A Montealegre-Jarquin-Rizo alliance.” The document shows that, in the May 3 “dinner hosted by the Ambassador, Montealegre and Jarquin deliberated opposition unity with five prominent Nicaraguan political analysts and Embassy officials.”

Ramírez was one of those five influential pundits. He dined alongside the US embassy’s PolCouns (political counselor) and deputy chief of mission (DCM), as well as figures from Nicaragua’s conservative and liberal movements.

Together, the anti-Sandinista opposition leaders blatantly conspired with the US government, plotting ways to weaken and ultimately overthrow the democratically elected administration of President Ortega.

In the dinner, MRS veteran Jarquin complained to the US diplomats that Ortega has a “visceral loathing of free market economies, and [an] ingrained dislike for the United States.”

Another WikiLeaks document from 2008 recalls a trip that the US State Department’s office director for Central American affairs, John Feeley, took to Nicaragua that March. Feeley met with Ramírez, who said he “supported the USG’s [US government’s] general engagement policy in Nicaragua.” (The cable also laments that “USAID’s democracy partners warned that a divided and weakened civil society is incapable of mounting organized opposition to Ortega.”)

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These meetings in 2007 and 2008 were far from the first time Sergio Ramírez had served as a US government informant. Back in October 1978, on the eve of the Sandinista Revolution, he was already feeding inside information to Washington.

A State Department cable from that year shows that Ramírez had met with the US embassy and given it intelligence on the anti-Somoza opposition.

Ramírez was “open and friendly,” the embassy recalled. It emphasized that he was more than willing to compromise with “more moderate elements.”

“We plan to continue our direct contact with Ramirez,” the cable stated.

Ramírez’s role as a US government informant indeed continued from there. In August 1979, just a month after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, Ramírez reunited with the US ambassador, Lawrence Pezzullo, and provided him with intelligence on Nicaragua’s new revolutionary government, with an emphasis on its internal foreign policy debates and education strategy.

That November, the supposed revolutionary met with embassy staff and Florida Congressman Dante Fascell. Ramírez reassured Washington that the Sandinista government would not threaten the private sector, and called for boosting exports to the US.

Ramírez was also more than happy to throw Fidel Castro’s movement under the bus, insisting that “Nicaragua has no intention of becoming a new Cuba, and is, indeed, a little irradiated at this false accusation,” the embassy recalled.

These documents clearly show that Ramírez – the founding president of the MRS party – was never truly committed to the Sandinista Front’s socialist and anti-imperialist ideology. Instead, he opportunistically joined the Sandinista movement when it was ascendant; and when it lost power, he quickly abandoned it.

In September 2021, Nicaragua ordered the arrest of Ramírez, accusing him of conspiring with foreign governments to destabilize the country. The US government, grateful for the intelligence he had fed it for so long, immediately showed support for Ramírez, as did Spain, the former colonizer of Nicaragua.

Ramírez faced no consequences for his decades of collaboration with the US embassy, given that he lives in Costa Rica, a major US asset in the hybrid war on Nicaragua. But the wealthy Nicaraguan author did take advantage of the charges against him to become a regular fixture in the Western corporate media, frequently appearing on outlets from CNN to the BBC to demonize Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

MRS leaders lobby neocons in Washington for more US meddling in Nicaragua

While the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista has never been able to get more than a few percent of the vote in national elections, it has significant influence in the non-profit sector, academia, and media, both inside and outside of Nicaragua.

This is largely because MRS leaders overwhelmingly come from wealthy, privileged backgrounds, and while they cannot connect with poor and working-class Nicaraguans, they are most comfortable rubbing elbows with politicians, think tanks policy-makers, and media pundits in the Global North.

Many MRS leaders run NGOs and media outlets that are funded by the US government, via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and/or USAID.

A case study of these MRS leaders who are cultivated by elite Western institutions and turned into loyal neoliberal foot soldiers is Ana Margarita Vijil Gurdian, who served as president of the MRS from 2012 to 2017.

Vijil, who is Dora María Téllez’s longtime romantic partner, has enjoyed a jet-setting life of luxury, while the vast majority of Nicaraguans make very little money and could never afford to fly outside the country.

After she graduated from Nicaragua’s most elite private university, la Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), Vijil moved to the Netherlands, where she worked at the Hague and the notoriously corrupt Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) – which has been exposed by multiple whistleblowers to essentially be a tool used by Western governments to attack independent nations like Syria.

Vijil was then awarded a Fulbright Scholarship from the US State Department, which she used to secure a master’s degree in political science in Arizona.

After completing her US government-funded studies in the United States, Vijil returned to Nicaragua to try to enter politics as a hardcore anti-Sandinista activist. She soon climbed the ranks to become president of the MRS – the position once held by her mentor and life partner Téllez.

In her capacity as MRS president, in 2016, Vigil returned to the United States to lobby for Washington’s support for regime change in Nicaragua. There, Vigil met with neoconservative Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the former representative of hardcore right-wing anti-Cuba and anti-Venezuela elements in Miami.

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Former MRS President Ana Margarita Vigil, the life partner of Dora María Téllez, meets with neoconservative Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as part of a regime-change lobbying campaign in 2016

Joining Vigil in the meeting with Ros-Lehtinen (standing to her right in the photo) was right-wing Nicaraguan activist Violeta Granera, an inveterate conservative and former World Bank official who comes from a powerful family that strongly supported the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

Granera is a vocal advocate for the coup-plotting hard-right leader of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, who oversaw a military coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist government in 2019, led by fascist extremists.

In June 2021, the Nicaraguan government detained Téllez, Vigil, and Granera, all on charges of conspiring with foreign governments to destabilize the country.

While the arrests of MRS leaders and other prominent coup-plotters were vociferously condemned by Western governments and the foreign corporate media, many Nicaraguans who survived the bloody 2018 putsch attempt that these opposition leaders orchestrated were in fact relieved.

Family members and friends of victims of the coup, whose loved ones were targeted, tortured, or even killed by the US-backed tranquistas, held the detainees responsible.

A security guard for the mayor’s office in the city of Masaya, named Reynaldo Urbina Cuadra, was kidnapped and brutally tortured by anti-Sandinista extremists during the US-sponsored 2018 coup attempt. He was so badly wounded that he nearly died, and lost his left arm.

Urbina filed a formal complaint with the state accusing fanatical right-wing media pundit Miguel Mora, of the US government-funded outlet 100% Noticias, of bearing responsibility for inciting the violence against him and his colleagues at the mayor’s office.

Mora was detained by the Nicaraguan government in June 2021, in a move widely denounced by Western capitals.

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Reynaldo Urbina Cuadra, a security guard for the Masaya mayor’s office who was tortured by extremists during the US-backed 2018 coup attempt, causing him to lose his left arm
In an interview with The Grayzone, Urbina praised the Nicaraguan government for arresting Mora. “This is the beginning of justice,” he said. “But nothing can bring back what those terrorists took from me.”

Urbina’s comments about the Sandinista government’s arrest of roughly two dozen opposition leaders in 2021, all of whom were deeply involved in the violent coup attempt, are often heard repeated in working-class communities in Nicaragua.

While Global North governments and legacy media exploited the arrests to portray President Ortega as authoritarian, the detentions were quite popular in poor, humble barrios, where Nicaraguans who survived the terror of the tranques consider the opposition leaders to be coup-plotting criminals who should have been behind bars long before 2021.

MRS’ origins in the class contradictions of the Sandinista Revolution

The key role of the MRS in the bloody 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua made the party’s blatant alliance with the Nicaraguan right-wing completely undeniable.

But although the MRS had previously portrayed itself as a center-left social-democratic party, its historical roots were always in the political right.

Self-declared “leftist” critics of the Sandinista Front and President Ortega – many of whom live outside Nicaragua and have not closely followed its internal politics since the neoliberal era began in 1990 – often point to the revolutionary past of some older MRS leaders to try to depict the party as the real torchbearer of Sandinismo.

But this revolutionary past has been directly contradicted by decades of overt right-wing activities.

On the surface, the story of Dora María Téllez in particular seems compelling. In August 1978, when she was just 22 years old, Téllez served as the third-in-command of a major operation in which the Sandinista Front took over the National Palace in the capital Managua, earning her the nom de guerre “Comandante Dos” (Commander Two).

But how Téllez transformed from this young revolutionary to becoming a US embassy informant allied with the coup-plotting right-wing is a process that reflects the political contradictions present in the Sandinista Revolution since its inception.

In July 1979, after years of struggle, Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of General Anastasio Somoza, whose family dynasty had ruled the country for decades.

But in some ways, overthrowing Somoza was easier than governing. When he ruled the country with an iron fist, it was easy to unite opposition forces against Somoza, from across a wide range of class interests.

The Sandinista Revolution had broad support from several classes, not just poor and working-class Nicaraguans. Significant sections of the middle class and even part of the upper class had lost faith in the Somoza dictatorship.

Somoza had pursued backwards economic policies that served the class interests of the wealthy elites, but his regime became increasingly decadent, corrupt, and incompetent, and thought the solution to all problems was more violence and repression. It was only a matter of time until there was a social explosion.

Most of the founders and leaders of the MRS were from the comfortable upper-middle class of Nicaraguans who opposed Somoza and initially supported the revolution.

Many were also quite young. Téllez was a medical student when she joined the Sandinista Front as an activist, and at the time of the victory of the revolution, she was just 23 years old.

Téllez worked with the Sandinista Front for just 15 years, before later becoming one of its staunchest opponents, spending the last 27 years organizing against it. So her time as a Sandinista militant is greatly outnumbered by her time as a US embassy informant and ally of the Nicaraguan right wing.

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Dora María Téllez (wearing the black beret) in Leon, Nicaragua in 1979

Toppling an unpopular dictator is not as difficult as governing a country under attack by the world’s hegemon. And internal political contradictions quickly emerged in the 1980s.

Right-wing oligarch Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who represented the upper-class elements that had opposed Somoza, turned swiftly against the Sandinista Revolution in early 1980.

The US government then launched a terrorist war on Nicaragua, with the CIA pouring millions of dollars into arming and training far-right death squads, known as the Contras, who massacred civilians; assassinated Sandinista leaders, judges, police, and state officials; and burned down hospitals, schools, and government buildings.

Washington also imposed a devastating – and internationally illegal – blockade, which crippled the impoverished Central American nation’s economy. The US goal was to terrorize the Nicaraguan population into submission, overthrow the Sandinistas, and install a compliant neoliberal regime.

Faced with such a relentless onslaught waged by the most powerful empire on Earth, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government lost the support of the middle class that had once supported the uprising against Somoza.

Washington recruited the Nicaraguan wealthy elites and disenchanted middle class, and eventually succeeded in breaking the Sandinistas. The FSLN did win a 1984 election in a landslide, but by the end of the decade, many Nicaraguans had been sapped by the US-led war and economic depression.

In 1990, the Sandinistas lost the vote to Violeta Chamorro, the right-wing oligarch from one of the most powerful families in Nicaragua, whose presidential campaign had been created, advised, and funded with millions of dollars by the US government.

This meant that the Sandinista Front went from being the governing party to the political opposition. And cracks soon began to emerge.

In the 1990s, revolutionaries watched as leftist movements around the world were overthrown, with coups in the former Soviet Union and subsequent US-backed neoliberal “color revolutions” in its former republics.

Given both the national and international context of counterrevolution, the Sandinista Front was gripped by a series of serious internal debates.

Two main factions emerged in the FSLN: On one side was the left-wing faction loyal to the revolution, called the principistas, which consisted more of working-class activists who were close to the labor unions, sought a confrontational approach against the neoliberal US-backed government of President Chamorro, and remained committed to socialism and anti-imperialism, despite the end of the Cold War. The principistaswere led by Daniel Ortega.

On other side was the right-wing faction, the renovadores. They sought dialogue with the other neoliberal political parties and a more conciliatory strategy with Chamorro, and wanted to turn the Sandinista Front into a moderate social-democratic party, modeled after the European center-left.

The renovadores were led by Sergio Ramírez, with other prominent members such as Dora María Téllez and Luis Carrión Cruz. They demonized the revolutionary principistas led by Ortega as “archaic,” “obsolete,” Marxist-Leninists.

In an “Extraordinary Congress” meeting in 1994, the FSLN held an internal vote, and the renovadores were defeated. So some of their top followers left the party in protest, including poet Ernesto Cardenal and writer Gioconda Belli.

These members of the right-wing faction of the front subsequently published an open letter titled “For a Sandinismo that Returns to the Majorities” (“Por un Sandinismo que vuelva a las Mayorías“).

This letter would essentially become the founding document of the MRS, and was signed by all of the major figures in what would soon be the new party, representing a Who’s Who of anti-Sandinista opposition leaders:

• Dora María Téllez
• Sergio Ramírez Mercado, a wealthy author
• Luis Carrión Cruz, a rich activist from an oligarchic banker family
• Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a media mogul from Nicaragua’s most powerful dynasty, who runs major anti-Sandinista media outlets with US government funding
• Xavier Chamorro Cardenal, another media oligarch who ran the anti-Sandinista newspaper El Nuevo Diario
• Claudia Chamorro Barrios, yet another member of the Chamorro dynasty
• Carlos Mejía Godoy, a prominent musician
• Ernesto Cardenal, a Catholic priest and renowned poet
• Gioconda Belli, a novelist from a rich Nicaraguan family who previously worked as a Pepsi-Cola executive
• Oscar René Vargas, an academic who called for a US military invasion and bloody coup in Nicaragua
• Sofía Montenegro, a liberal feminist who runs NGOs funded by the US government

It was noteworthy that almost all of these figures came from wealthy families, and many were educated in the United States and spoke English.

They represented the upper-class, upper-middle-class, and bourgeois factions who had supported Sandinismo in the 1980s, many of whom had enjoyed comfortable government positions as ministers or advisers, but who turned against the movement when it lost power in the 1990s.

These Nicaraguan elites had happily worked in the government when they had an opportunity to taste power, but when the FSLN entered the opposition and they had to do the hard work of organizing with working-class people, most left the country for the Global North, and they quickly drifted to the right.

In 1995, more figures from the renovadores faction resigned from the FSLN, and they officially formed a separate party: the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, or MRS).

At the time, it was obvious that the MRS was a right-wing split out of the front. This is clearly reflected in the party’s founding document, “For a Sandinismo that Returns to the Majorities.”

In the open letter, the MRS leaders intentionally left out any reference to socialism or anti-imperialism. Neither word is mentioned. Instead, the document only expresses opposition to “neoliberalism.”

Moreover, the MRS founding letter made it clear that the new party’s leaders wanted to reconcile with US imperialism, stating explicitly, “Our relations with the United States should be mutual respect.”

To understand the ideological divisions and history that eventually led to the split, The Grayzone interviewed prominent FSLN leader Carlos Fonseca Terán, a son of the founder of the front and leading member of the revolutionary left wing of the party.

Fonseca Terán explained that the many debates going on inside the Sandinista Front when it entered the opposition in the 1990s boiled down to four fundamental issues:

1. Socialism

– the renovadores, who became the MRS, wanted to drop socialism from the FSLN’s mission

– the principistas, led by Ortega, were committed to socialism

2. Popular struggle

– the renovadores were against any and all forms of violence by the working class, including peasants trying to defend their lands from violent takeovers by landowners and companies or workers engaging in militant struggle against corporations

– the principistas did not want to return to the armed struggle, but did support the right of Nicaraguan workers to defend themselves

3. Anti-imperialism

– the renovadores wanted to abandon anti-imperialism and seek good relations with the United States

– the principistas were firmly committed to anti-imperialism above all

4. Vanguard character

– the renovadores considered the vanguard model to be outdated and wanted to emulate European social-democratic parties

– the principistas continued seeing the FSLN as the vanguard party that would lead the working class in its struggle against capitalism and imperialism

“As time passes, the MRS’ rightwing character became more obvious. It couldn’t be denied,” Fonseca Terán reflected. “But from the beginning they were right wing.”

“They were always reformists,” he added. “And they never cared about anti-imperialism.”

Fonseca Terán said the MRS’ critiques of the Sandinista government’s economic policies is especially hypocritical, given the party has repeatedly shown support for neoliberal reforms over many years.

“The only way for our economic program to be more left-wing would be to start expropriating properties,” Fonseca argued, referring to the current FSLN-led government.

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MRS party president Dora María Téllez (left, in orange) with right-wing multi-millionaire banker Eduardo Montealegre (center, in white) and MRS presidential candidate Edmundo Jarquín (right, in pink)

MRS forms alliances with Nicaragua’s right-wing elites

The creation of the MRS as a right-wing, social-democratic break with the Sandinista Front mirrored similar splits that happened inside revolutionary socialist parties around the world at the time.

Given their elite class positions and knowledge of English, MRS leaders quickly burrowed into the media, NGOs, and academia, taking control of these sectors and turning them into anti-Sandinista outposts. They also used their friends abroad to try to turn the international left against the FSLN.

Yet after it split of the FSLN, the MRS struggled to find popular support at home. In the 1996 presidential election, the party’s candidate Sergio Ramírez got just 1% of the vote (compared to 38% for the FSLN’s Ortega).

Having been thoroughly defeated and embarrassed, the MRS did its first and only second-guess, deciding to form a brief alliance with the Sandinista Front for the 2001 election. But when they lost that vote, the MRS turned against the FSLN once and for all, and embarked upon its long journey to the right.

In 2006, MRS presidential candidate Edmundo Jarquín earned a mere 6%, against Ortega who won the election with 38%.

This year saw the beginning of the MRS’ alliance with notorious Nicaraguan oligarch Eduardo Montealegre, of the right-wing Independent Liberal Party (PLI).

A multi-millionaire banker, Montealegre is infamous in Nicaragua for his corruption, closely linked to a massive debt bonds scandal.

“The term conservative doesn’t work anymore in Nicaragua. Anyone who uses the word loses support. So all the right-wing call themselves liberals,” Fonseca Terán explained in his interview with The Grayzone. “But Montealegre is not even a liberal; he is a conservative, an ally of big capital.”

Dora Maria Tellez Eduardo Montealegre MRS
MRS party president Dora María Téllez (left) with right-wing multimillionaire banker Eduardo Montealegre (right)
The 2006 State Department cable recounting the US embassy meeting with Dora María Téllez noted that then MRS presidential candidate Edmundo Jarquin had been secretly meeting with Montealegre behind the scenes and “renewed their prior agreement not to attack one another.” The US embassy noted that “MRS ads criticizing Montealegre have disappeared.”

For his part, Montealegre was also a US embassy informant. A 2007 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks reveals that he met with Washington’s Ambassador Trivelli in January of that year to provide sensitive information.

When the MRS and Montealegre’s PLI lost the 2006 election and the Sandinistas returned to power, the MRS began to openly collaborate with the plutocratic banker.

In 2008, Montealegre ran for mayor of the capital Managua, and the MRS publicly supported his right-wing campaign against FSLN candidate Alexis Argüello, a legendary Nicaraguan boxer, who ultimately won the election.

Téllez herself endorsed Montealegre, while in characteristic fashion bending herself into an ideological pretzel claiming that she and her party did not support him.

“The MRS is calling to vote for Eduardo Montealegre, although we are not supporting him under the table,” Téllez insisted.

To justify their undeniable alliance with the right wing, fellow MRS leader Edmundo Jarquín argued, “This is not a conflict between the right and left; it is between dictatorship and democracy.”

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Dora María Téllez and MRS leaders supporting right-wing politician Eduardo Montealegre

The rightward drift became a lurch from there, and by the 2010s, the MRS had totally abandoned its alleged commitment to the left and become a right-wing party.

In 2015, the MRS once again signed an agreement with the right-wing Independent Liberal Party (PLI), hoping to defeat the FSLN in the 2016 election as part of a short-lived National Coalition for Democracy(Coalición Nacional por la Democracia).

When the Nicaraguan government approved plans for a Chinese company to build an interoceanic canal that could challenge the monopoly held by the US-dominated Panama Canal, the MRS helped organize opposition against the project. Téllez and other MRS leaders exploited liberal environmentalist talking points in order to push the geopolitical agenda of Washington, which desperately, yet successfully, sought to halt the construction.

A blatant example of the MRS’ right-wing character came in 2016, when the party posted a meme on its Facebook page (where it scarcely has any followers) cheering on the recent death of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, as well as the 2013 demise of Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez.

“The hour arrives for all pigs, the next is Daniel Ortega,” the MRS wrote. “In Hell he will pay everything that he owes the people.”

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MRS president Ana Margarita Vijil, Téllez’s partner, wrote an op-ed in 2017, titled “The MRS and private enterprise,” that demonstrated the party’s complete descent into neoliberalism.

Published in the US government-funded right-wing newspaper La Prensa, which is owned by the oligarchical Chamorro dynasty, Vigil’s rhetoric in the article sounded totally indistinguishable from that of a World Bank official.

“We believe in permanent dialogue and the alliance between the public and private sector,” Vijil wrote.

Welcoming “big business” to Nicaragua, while giving lip service to supporting “small businesses” as well, Vigil declared, “We welcome foreign investment,” in order to “inject capital flow into the country.”

When the violent US-backed coup attempt kicked off in 2018, the MRS played a crucial role. The MRS took a lead in running the Unidad Nacional Azul y Blanco (Blue and White National Unity), a neoliberal opposition alliance that strongly supported the putsch, with backing from Washington.

But when the coup failed, the MRS faced a crisis, and decided to rebrand.

MRS rebrands and drops any reference to Sandinismo
The MRS once absurdly claimed to be the true representative of Sandinismo, but it abandoned that cynical marketing strategy in 2020.

That year, the MRS held an internal vote and decided to renamed itself the Unión Democrática Renovadora (Democratic Renovation Union), or UNAMOS for short.

By rebranding, the MRS cast off its mask of Sandinismo once and for all. In an interview with Nicaragua Investiga, a right-wing media outlet funded by the US government, Dora María Téllez admitted that MRS/UNAMOS, the party she helped found, was a big-tent party with no real coherent ideology.

“We have people who come from liberalism, from Sandinismo, from conservatism, people who have not been in any political party,” Téllez said.

While MRS supporters outside of Nicaragua had spent decades depicting the group as a supposed “leftist” alternative to the Sandinista Front, Téllez and her allies admitted that they had no real loyalty to Sandinismo, and no longer even pretended to be a left-wing party.

The MRS had long used socially liberal issues like LGBT rights and support for abortion to appeal to leftists outside of Nicaragua, but there is nothing socialist about the party.

In fact, for the MRS’ foreign sponsors, the group’s decades-long rightward drift was entirely predictable. The centrist renovador reformists who split from the FSLN in 1995 and formed the MRS were never very ideologically dedicated in the first place.

A 1978 US government cable published by WikiLeaks shows how former Sandinista militant Hugo Torres Jiménez, who went on to become vice president of the MRS, never embraced a coherent leftist ideology.

The document also reveals that US journalist Tad Szulc, who was a reporter for the New York Times and Washington Post, had been a State Department informant.

On the eve of the revolution, Szulc met with top leadership of the Sandinista Front – co-founder Tómas Borge, Edén Pastora (Comandante Cero), Hugo Torres (Comandante Uno), and Dora Maria Téllez (Comandante Dos) – for a lengthy interview. Szulc then recounted his meeting in close detail to the US government, so that it could use the intelligence to undermine the FSLN.

Szulc told the US embassy that Borge was “a militant ideological Marxist” and was the most ideologically committed of all of the leaders. He noted that “Borge seemed to have a clearer idea of where he was going and how to get there than either [Comandantes] Zero [Pastora] or Uno [Torres].”

“There was a distinct split between the rescuers (led by Zero [Pastora] and Uno [Torres] and the rescued (led by Borge),” Szulc explained to the US embassy. “The Borge group is allegedly intransigent in its determination to seize power in Nicaragua without bourgeois help, whereas Zero and Uno are more inclined to flexibility in tactics.”

That is to say, Torres was part of the less ideologically socialist, more opportunist right-leaning faction from even before the revolution triumphed, and he was always willing to make a deal with Nicaragua’s capitalist oligarchs.

On the other hand Borge, one of the original leaders the FSLN, who remained loyal to the party and to President Ortega right up until his death in 2012, had always been the most ideologically committed.

When Torres was arrested in June 2021, his detention was cited by putative “left-wing” critics as a sign that Ortega had supposedly betrayed the revolution. But the reality is Torres and his MRS allies had always been willing to compromise with the United States and form alliances with Nicaragua’s conservative oligarchic elites.

The reality is there is a long history of self-identified “leftists” in Nicaragua allying with the right wing and US imperialism against the revolutionary Sandinista Front.

In the 1990 election which dynastic oligarch Violeta Chamorro won thanks to a campaign run and funded by the US government, the CIA helped her set up a National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositora, or UNO) that was made up of more than a dozen small political parties.

Two of the members of this US-created, anti-Sandinista UNO alliance, working alongside hard-line right-wing parties, were the Communist Party of Nicaragua and Nicaraguan Socialist Party.

Both groups were tiny and basically irrelevant, run by obscure academics and little-known intellectuals. But it was an early example of the so-called “left opposition” to the Sandinistas forming alliances with Washington and the most rabidly conservative and neoliberal forces in the country.

Nicaragua’s history is replete with examples of self-described “leftists” undercutting the Sandinistas and joining hands with the US government and right-wing oligarchy. The MRS/UNAMOS, and leaders like Dora María Téllez, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, Hugo Torres Jiménez, and Victor Hugo Tinoco are perhaps the most high-profile case studies, but they are far from alone.



Featured image: Photo Courtesy of The Grayzone.

(The Grayzone)

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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 10, 2021 3:18 pm

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North American electoral accompaniment hold press conference in Managua to report their experiences during the 2021 Nicaragua elections. November 9, 2021. Photo: Friends of the ATC

North Americans Debunk US & OAS Claims on Nicaragua Election
November 10, 2021

While major news networks and the Biden administration have labeled Nicaragua’s election a “sham”, North American delegations say their observations contradict the accusations.

Members of delegations from the United States and Canada who were first-hand witnesses of the election held a press conference in Managua, in which they characterized the process as efficient, transparent, with widespread turnout and participation of opposition parties.

165 international representatives from 27 countries were represented in delegations which traveled to 10 departments and two autonomous regions of Nicaragua on the day of the vote.


Speakers visited polling centers in Leon, Bluefields, Bilwi, Chontales, Granada, and Managua and interviewed voters, poll workers and political party representatives from across the political spectrum.

The overwhelming message was the Nicaraguan people’s desire for peace and the ability to exercise national sovereignty without foreign interference.

On Tuesday, the OAS called on the international community to “demand the annulment” of Nicaragua’s November 7th elections and for the “holding of a new electoral process” in 17-page report. The release followed similar statements from Joe Biden on Sunday night and another by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday.

Speakers at the press conference represented the following organizations: Jubilee House Community, Black Alliance for Peace, Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice, Casa Baltimore-Limay, Friends of the ATC, Plataforma de la Clase Obrera Antiimperialista, Alliance for Global Justice, Friends of the Congo, CodePink, Friends of Latin America and Task Force on the Americas.

President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo celebrated the major electoral victory on Monday with Sandinista youth and live music at Plaza of the Revolution, in an act commemorating the 45th anniversary of the passing of Carlos Fonseca, founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).

https://kawsachunnews.com/north-america ... a-election

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The Facebook team that tried to swing Nicaragua’s election is full of U.S. spies
Posted Nov 10, 2021 by Alan MacLeod

Originally published: MintPress News (November 8, 2021 ) |

Less than a week before Nicaragua’s presidential election, social media giant Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government, a top Washington target for regime change.

Facebook claims that these accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more heavy-handed and intrusive. However, early reports show that if their goal was to swing the result, it has failed badly and the Sandinistas have achieved an overwhelming victory.

“This is appalling interference by Facebook in particular (which is the most popular social media outlet in Nicaragua). They allege that they’ve stopped a government-deployed troll farm but what they have actually done is to close accounts of ordinary Sandinista activists, particularly young people, often with many followers,” John Perry, a journalist living in the city of Masaya, told MintPress.

Worse still, after dozens of Sandinistas took to Twitter to record video messages proving they were real people being censored, their accounts were systematically deleted as well, in what Managua-based journalist Ben Norton described as a Silicon Valley “double-tap strike.”

“These are accounts that average Nicaraguans have come to count on for news and communicating with each other about current events and, in this case, about the election. So it is very troubling that it was obviously targeted against one political group: the Sandinistas,” said Daniel Kovalik, a human-rights lawyer and an observer of this weekend’s elections.

Both Perry and Kovalik were of the opinion that it was no coincidence that Facebook had taken action against precisely the group the U.S. government is trying to overthrow.

Facebook as security-state beard

Perhaps even more worrying from a freedom-of-speech viewpoint is who made the decision at Facebook. The 11-page report detailing the company’s supposed evidence of inauthentic behavior has just two contributors: Luis Fernando Alonso and Ben Nimmo, individuals with deep and long-lasting ties to Western military intelligence. According to his biography on LinkedIn, Alonso was, until last year, working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a shadowy corporation situated in the area around Washington, D.C. colloquially known as “Raytheon Acres.” The national security state farms out much of its most controversial work to the firm, which is technically a private company (and therefore not subject to the same oversight and scrutiny as public agencies). Edward Snowden, for instance, actually worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, not the NSA. Before that, Alonso directly worked for the government at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a Department of Defense-controlled institution that trains top military and intelligence leaders.

Nimmo’s background is equally spooky. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. The Institute for Statecraft established a secret network of journalists across Europe who were used to push anti-Russia and pro-establishment talking points, all in coordination.

In 2019, Nimmo played a key role in downplaying the bombshell news that the Conservative government was quietly negotiating to sell off key parts of Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) to foreign plutocrats. When the Labour Party publicized this information just days before the election, Nimmo jumped into action, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents in question “closely resemble … a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture–together with help from allied journalists in the Integrity Initiative–allowed the story to become “Labour’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret,” helping the Conservatives make huge electoral gains.

Nimmo also became a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.

Facebook–now officially called “Meta”–is extremely secretive about who actually works at their intelligence department. Nowhere can one find a list of names of key figures. However, going back through months of reports and blog posts for names reveals a veritable revolving door between big tech and big government. In short, Facebook is strewn with spies.

For example, a document published in May, entitled “The State of Influence Operations, 2017-2020,” lists five author names in addition to Nimmo’s, at least four of whom have long histories as senior agents in the national security state.

In order, they are:

*Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy: Gleicher spent two and a half years at the White House as the National Security Council’s Director of Cyber Security Policy. Before that he also spent five years at the Department of Justice.

*David Agranovich, Head of Security Communications: Agranovich worked for more than six years in a senior role at the Department of Defense, before, in 2017, moving on to become the Director for Intelligence for the National Security Council at the White House.

*Olga Belogolova, Influence Operations Product Policy Manager: The most academic of the authors, Belogolova teaches cybersecurity and influence operations to students at Georgetown University, an institution notorious as America’s spy school. Before that, she worked at the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and on Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian policy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also served on several working groups at government- and military-funded think tanks like The Center for New American Security, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Atlantic Council.

*Mike Torrey, Threat Intelligence Analyst: From 2010 until 2018, Torrey was a high-level CIA agent, specializing in cyberwarfare against China. Before that, he worked as a global network intelligence analyst for the NSA.

Of the six authors listed, only one, Margarita Franklin, comes from a non-governmental background.

Looking further into Facebook’s official blog, Mike Dvilyanski is described as the company’s Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations. From 2005 until 2018, Dvilyanski was an FBI agent in Washington and New York City, rising to the rank of Supervisory Special Agent, leading teams investigating cyberwafare.

Another official Facebook report from April was authored by the company’s Technical Threat Investigator, Michael Flossman, who spent nearly six years in the Australian Department of Defense.

In 2018, Facebook announced a partnership with The Atlantic Council, whereby it gave an undisclosed amount of control over users’ news feeds to the group, allowing it to help them decide what posts users saw and which ones were suppressed. Given that the council’s board features a plethora of military generals, former cabinet members, and no fewer than seven former CIA directors, this is tantamount to state censorship on a global level. A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

Silicon Valley: tip of U.S. imperial spear
It might be unfair, however, to single Facebook out. Other large platforms are similarly stocked with government plants. Reddit’s Director of Policy, for instance, was formerly a Deputy Director of The Atlantic Council’s Middle East Task Force. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive is also an active duty officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare and online propaganda brigade.

Silicon Valley has not only made their peace with this relationship; they actively court it. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, “The New Digital Age,” laying out how they saw Silicon Valley becoming the tip of the American empire’s spear.

Washington has already used social media as a weapon aimed at its enemies. In July, Americans in Miami used Facebook to organize an attempted color revolution in Cuba, while Twitter ignored blatantly obvious bots boosting the anti-government message, even choosing to put it at the top of its “what’s happening” sidebar for 36 hours, meaning every user in the world was alerted to the news. Individuals inside Cuba complained to MintPress that the endless supply of fake news citizens receive from the U.S. via Facebook and WhatsApp is spreading disinformation and rotting Cubans’ brains.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the U.S. government persuaded Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance of its app because of widespread protests it was fomenting in Iran, knowing the platform was being used to coordinate anti-government forces. Last year, Facebook banned all positive references to Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in the wake of his assassination by the Trump administration. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership,” the company said in a statement. Despite the fact that over 80% of the country held positive views towards the general (even before his killing), this meant that even Iranians speaking Farsi with other Iranians online in Iran could not share an overwhelmingly held view. This is but one example of the extraordinary power the U.S. national security state now holds over the means of communication worldwide.

Ineffective interference
The United States has a long history of interfering in Nicaragua, from invasions to propping up the 40-year Somoza family dictatorship. When Sandinista rebels ran them out of town in 1979, Washington began a long campaign of terror against the Sandinistas, including funding, training and arming the infamous Contra death squads. After more than a decade of interference, U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro won the 1990 election. However, after Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas returned to power in 2006, the U.S. once again began trying to undermine their rule through sanctions and by supporting a 2018 coup attempt. Washington has also unleashed an army of NGOs into the country, each attempting to foment discontent with the ruling government.

In September, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met in New York with the foreign ministers of Mexico and every other Central American country in an attempt to organize a united front against Nicaragua. Last week, the U.S. also announced new sanctions on the country. Kovalik told MintPress:

This is clearly punishment for the fact that they’re going to vote [the wrong way]. And meanwhile, of course the U.S. is putting millions into the country in terms of supporting opposition groups and different propaganda sources. So that continues. Again, what passes for alleged foreign interference in the U.S…. is nothing compared to what the U.S. is doing here.

Western journalists and election observers whose opinions the U.S. government would rather not be shared have also been targeted. British journalist Steve Sweeney was detained in Mexico en route to Nicaragua. “It is no coincidence that it came just weeks after my ban from the U.S. I fully believe my detention is political and an attack on press freedom,” he wrote, after being released. Meanwhile, Canadian observer Dr. Timothy Bood was barred from sharing his experiences on Facebook, the platform blocking him immediately after he made a comment about U.S. interference in the election.

Perry suggested, however, that if Washington thinks that sanctions sanctions or other new measures will dislodge the government and break the people’s will, they are mistaken, and that the plan could backfire:

We had the approval in the U.S. Congress of the RENACER Act a few days ago, which is another threat of U.S. interference during and after the election process. I think opinion polls show that most people reject U.S. interference very strongly. I think in most cases it will strengthen people’s desire to vote and probably to vote for the Sandinista government. So it could have the opposite effect to the one that the U.S. wants to achieve.

Judging by the jubilant Sandinista parades in Managua and other cities today, coupled with the announcement that Ortega won an estimated three-quarters of the vote on a 65% turnout rate, Perry might have been proved right.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/10/the-fac ... u-s-spies/
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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 13, 2021 2:31 pm

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I Monitored the US-Denounced Nicaraguan Election; People Believe in the Ortega Government
November 11, 2021
By Daniel Kovalik – Nov 8, 2021

Despite Western media and politicians labelling the Nicaraguan general election a “sham” and “parody,” citizens turned out in large numbers to cast their votes on Sunday, and also to show they reject foreign meddling.

According to preliminary results, over 65 percent of voters turned out, 75 percent of whom cast their ballots on November 7 for Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, securing him a fourth consecutive presidential term.

For many Nicaraguans, especially the poor and working people, the choice is an obvious one. The Sandinistas have led this country to its greatest victories, defeating the brutal US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, instituting the first free and fair elections in Nicaragua in 1984, and defeating the US-backed Contra, who terrorized this country through the 1980s.

Since retaking office in 2007 after 17 years of neo-liberal rule which neglected the well-being of the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people, the Sandinistas have built a vibrant economy, created free education and health systems for all, and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure.

And so, not surprisingly, 77.5% of Nicaraguans polled a few days before the election agreed “that for Nicaragua to advance socially and economically,”, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) should govern the country, while 74.6% believe that the country would be better off with a Sandinista government. In addition, “91.8% of Nicaraguans agree with President Daniel Ortega’s proposals on unity to be stronger and defeat poverty.”

The strong support for President Ortega’s “proposals on unity to be stronger” is telling, for it seems to show approval of recent measures taken by the government against a number of people accused of helping orchestrate and/or support, often with US financing and other support, the violent insurrection of 2018 which cost the lives of at least 200 Nicaraguans.

Meanwhile, a poll back in August showed that “76.8 percent [of Nicaraguans] considered that there is respect for fundamental rights and the promotion of equal opportunities without discrimination.”

The aforementioned poll numbers are consistent with what I witnessed during my time here in Nicaragua as an official election observer. I was posted with a number of other observers in Chinandega, northwest Nicaragua, on the Pacific coast. There, I witnessed individuals and whole families, almost all from modest backgrounds, come to the polls to vote in an election which certainly mattered to them. Many came dressed in their Sunday best.

I saw many elderly people who could barely walk show up to the polls, often with the help of a family member. One woman was carried up the stairs in a wheelchair by four other people so she could vote. In other words, a number of people took great pains to vote. Some voters proudly showed us their thumbs stamped with purple ink, indicating that they had already voted. At one of the four polling areas we visited, there was a festival-like atmosphere, with people selling food and drinks, and voters cheerfully mingling both inside and outside the polling area.

At least from what I saw, the Nicaraguan people believe in their government and their electoral system. And one of the things they believe in is the government’s right, and indeed duty, to protect the country and its sovereignty from outside intervention, and in particular the incessant intervention by the US, which has been interfering in Nicaragua — often through local quislings — in quite destructive ways for over a century.

While the Western press pretends that such US meddling never happened, and while most Americans either never knew or forgot that it ever took place, the Nicaraguan people are painfully aware of this reality. They are going to resist this interference with all their might. And indeed, Sunday’s vote was as much about rejecting this foreign meddling as about anything else. This is why the US government and media are so apoplectic about it.

https://orinocotribune.com/i-monitored- ... overnment/

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Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 10 Nov 2021

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Class Warfare and Socialist Resistance: Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela as Existential Threats to the US

Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? The promise of socialism and their resistance to US class warfare.

One of the extreme ironies of the latest attack by the settler-colonial regime of the United States against the national democratic project of Nicaragua is that in Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Americas, universal healthcare and education are guaranteed to the population as a human right, while in the U.S. those kinds of basic human rights are distant dreams.

The day after the so-called progressive block of legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives surrendered to President Joe Biden and the right-wing corporate wing of the party on the Build Back Better legislation that offered some minor and temporary relief for workers and the poor, many of those same “progressives” voted for the RENACER Act . The RENACER Act is a vicious piece of legislation meant to undermine the ability of the Nicaragua government to protect the human rights of its people and to punish the people for having the temerity to support their government and their anti-colonial project.

Why do Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela pose such an existential threat to the U.S.? Why are they able to unite all the wings of the democrat party and the republican party against them? It boils down to two factors. First, the power of their example in attempting to build independent, self-determining projects that center the material needs and interests of the people over those of capital. Second, the class warfare politics of the U.S. state.

The reassertion of the racist Monroe Doctrine by the former US National Security Advisor John Bolton was not repudiated by the Biden administration because it is also the guiding framework for its policies. The reference to the Monroe Doctrine was nothing more than connecting that doctrine to its contemporary policy expression reflected in the doctrine of “Full Spectrum ” dominance that has been bipartisan U.S. foreign policy for twenty years. The thrust of this policy is that any nation that attempts to defy the U.S. and build an independent project that threatens U.S. hegemony in any region of the world will be destroyed.

The fact that Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela are not only attempting to build independent projects but build socialism makes their example even more of a threat.

But there is also a domestic ideological component to this as well. The very existence of these nations at this historical moment, a moment characterized by the deepening and irreversible contradictions and current crisis of the capitalist order poses a potentially serious ideological threat. If these relatively poor nations can build public housing and eliminate homelessness, offer free education and universal healthcare, guarantee that no one will be allowed to go hungry, can build democratic structures with the protected right of popular participation, the question as to why these kinds of human rights are unrealizable for the people of the U.S. is a destabilizing one that must be avoided at all costs.

For the U.S. it has never been about human rights but hegemony

Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela are attempting to build a socialism that is committed to a framework of social justice that we refer to as People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs). PCHRs are informed by the theoretical social practice of the African American radical human rights tradition and have emerged as the flip side of the same coin from People(s)-centered development. Unlike the liberal, individualist, state-centric and legalistic conception of human rights, PCHRs are defined as:

“Those non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment to universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and secure for themselves through social struggle.”

This approach to human rights views human rights as an arena of struggle that when grounded and informed by the needs and aspirations of the oppressed, becomes part of a unified comprehensive strategy for de-colonization and radical social change.

U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega was “no different from the Somoza family that Ortega and the Sandinistas fought four decades ago.” He went on to say that “the United States, in close coordination with other members of the international community, will use all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal to support the people of Nicaragua and hold accountable the Ortega-Murillo government and those that facilitate its abuses.”

Biden forgot to mention that the U.S. placed Somoza in power and supported him until he was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979.

The idea that the U.S. is concerned about democracy or human rights anywhere in the world is an insult to all thinking persons. I will not list once again the litany of crimes that support that assertion except for two. The Biden administration and their ideological lackeys in the media and even among some elements of what is referred to as a left question the 65 percent turn-out for the elections in Nicaragua. But when it was objectively verified that less than one quarter of the voting population turned out for the phony election of the Clinton imposed president of Haiti Martel Martelly, or equally phony election of Jovenel Moise with less than twenty-percent turnout, where were the questions from the New York Times, Washington Post and all the other propaganda outlets posing as news operations?

What was Joe Biden’s position in the administration when his boss President Obama gave the greenlight to overthrow the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras? Did he oppose it?

Criminality is a core characteristic of all settler-colonial states because they are born out of systematic, terroristic, and genocidal violence against indigenous populations, and even more so when, as in the case of the U.S. they become global empires. Democracy and human rights are no more than ideological props to obscure the real interests and intentions of the rulers and to build domestic support for whatever criminal activity the state has embarked on.

Subversion in Haiti, sanctions and attacks on Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela and the ongoing wars launched from the over 800 U.S. military bases world-wide continues and will continue as long as the U.S. public is confused, disorganized, and diverted from understanding that the interests of the capitalist oligarchy are not their interests.

Slowly that shift in consciousness is happening in the U.S. The economic crisis of the last year and half, coming on the heels of the devastating crisis of 2008-9, has created a legitimation crisis and a new understanding of the real interests of the rulers that will not be reversed. The precarity of workers and the poor are forcing them to eliminate any and all illusions about their government and the economic system.

Debate around the Build Back Better legislation and the elimination of provisions that could have had a material impact on the lives of workers, in particular women of color workers, exposed the legislation as a cynical public relations stunt.

Compared to the attempts by states attempting to move toward socialism, the provisions in the bill even before it was stripped of most of its progressive provisions, still did not offer a real minimum floor for the protection of the fundamental human rights to social security, the right to an adequate income, housing, education, the right to participate in governance with the right to vote as a minimum, and healthcare, to name a few of the rights denied the population in the U.S., and even more so for its racialized and colonized captives.

That is why the idea of socialism and the possibility of an alternative to the barbarity of capitalism has been attacked. The U.S. intends to turn Nicaragua into Haiti, Cuba into Honduras, and Venezuela, which is key for liberation movements in the region, into Libya - the U.S. and European latte-left is helping.

But as brother Netfa Freeman stated, Black anti-colonial revolutionaries will stand with Nicaragua and all the struggling peoples of the planet against the number one threat to international peace and human rights – the United States of America. In that position, there is no compromise and no retreat!

https://www.blackagendareport.com/class ... threats-us

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Nicaragua rejects OAS resolution on elections in the country

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The OAS spoke out against the electoral victory of President Daniel Ortega in the elections on November 7. | Photo: EFE
Published November 13, 2021 (5 hours 10 minutes ago)

The Nicaraguan diplomat condemned that the governments sponsoring the resolution have ignored the social and political situation they are going through.

The Nicaraguan delegation to the Organization of American States (OAS) rejected the draft resolution of the regional body on the situation in their country, after the general elections on November 7.

"Another attack against the dignified, free and sovereign people will be recorded in history as one of the worst aggressions against democracy, the principles of International Law, the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of the OAS itself," he denounced Michael Campbell, alternate permanent representative to that body.

The Nicaraguan diplomat condemned that in order to teach the Central American country about its internal affairs, the governments sponsoring the resolution have ignored the social and political situation they are going through.


Since the installation of the OAS Assembly in Guatemala, the inclusion of the issue of Nicaragua in the discussion agenda has been rejected by the representatives of Managua, who warned of constant interference in the internal affairs of the member states.

Given the insistence of Canada and the United States to carry out the vote on the text, Michael Campbell considered it inappropriate to have among the speakers an imposter of the legitimate government of Venezuela in all debates and votes, despite objections from several countries against such as Mexico .

According to the Nicaraguan diplomat, the spirit with which some governments represented in the organization are given the task of passing condemnatory resolutions hiding the realities in their own countries is notorious.


The Alternate Permanent Representative of Nicaragua to the OAS recounted the human rights violations in Canada, Colombia, Brazil, and the United States.

"Who thinks that Colombia enjoys a real democracy when thousands of indigenous and social leaders have been systematically persecuted and assassinated, and could have been deputies, mayors, governors or presidents," said the diplomat.

In the case of the United States, Michael Campbell recalled that Washington has militarily intervened in Nicaragua, overthrew governments and imposed rulers, has protected dictators and terrorists against its people.

The draft resolution, proposed by Canada with the support of Antigua and Barbuda, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the United States, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, received 25 votes in favor, one against, seven abstentions, and one delegation was absent.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/nicaragu ... -0004.html
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Re: Nicaragua

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 15, 2021 2:56 pm

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Nicaragua has a Public Relations Problem, Not a Democracy Problem
November 13, 2021
By Roger D. Harris – Nov 12, 2021

US President Joe Biden hectored Nicaragua about their November 7 elections accusing them of “a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.” Three days earlier, the US lavished a $650mil arms deal on Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where they don’t even pretend to have elections for higher office. Clearly more than democracy is at issue with the US offensive against Nicaragua.

At issue is what Biden described as “the arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates.” An objective investigation reveals: (1) the motivation for the arrests had nothing to do with the election and (2) the effects of the arrests had no impact on the election.

The US government, along with its political allies and corporate media, have spun the arrests into a public relations nightmare for the ruling Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The arrests are being used as a pretext for a concerted operation to delegitimize the genuinely democratic elections of a government seeking to be independent of Washington. This is part of a larger regime-change campaign against the left-leaning governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; what former US National Security Adviser John Bolton called the “Troika of Tyranny.”

The seven presidential “pre-candidates”

The corporate press, hostile to the elected Nicaraguan government, dubbed seven of those arrested as “pre-candidates.” However, none of them were associated with the ballot-qualified political parties in Nicaragua, and not one of them had a popular following outside the Washington Beltway. In short, they were not seriously running for presidential office and, if they had been, none would have mounted a serious challenge to the ruling Sandinistas.

Even if the “pre-candidates” were legitimate presidential hopefuls, the fact that there were seven of them demonstrates that the US was unable to unify the opposition around a single candidate. Had the seven “hopefuls” run, they would have further split the opposition vote. The notion that the Sandinistas arrested the seven to ensure they would win is a fiction.

The violent opposition has been in disarray ever since their 2018 coup attempt fizzled and a tidal wave of public opinion turned against them. The US had spent tens of millions of dollars generating the opposition but was unable to get the fractious parties to coordinate amongst themselves.

Nicaragua’s electoral oversight body, the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), is an independent branch of the government. Both Sandinista and opposition party representatives are on it. Rather than suppressing the opposition, the CSE extended the deadline for parties to register to run in the November elections to encourage a diversity of voter choices. However, one far-right grouping, headed by a former Somoza general, did not get their paperwork in order on time and was therefore not certified.

The seven “presidential hopefuls” plus 30 others were arrested for another reason. Following the 2018 coup attempt, Nicaragua passed two laws that criminalized promoting foreign interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs, seeking foreign military intervention, organizing acts of terrorism, and promoting coercive economic measures against their country. They were arrested for these illegal activities; activities, it should be noted, that are similarly prohibited by the US’s own FARA Act, after which the Nicaraguan laws were modeled.

US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua
Biden castigated Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for being “no different from the Somoza family.” Perhaps Biden forgot that the US installed and supported the Somoza dictatorship, while the US regime-change campaign is trying to do exactly the opposite with the current Sandinista leadership.

If Daniel Ortega were truly “no different from the Somoza family,” the US would be supporting the Nicaraguan government rather than trying to overthrow it. In fact, an examination of the historical record indicates that the US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua.

The US Marines landed in 1912 and occupied the Central American country on and off until the Somoza dynasty dictatorship replaced direct US control. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the dictator in 1979, the US resurrected remnants of Anastasio Somoza’s national guard, the contras, that brutally terrorized the fledgling republic.

To this day, the US has opposed the Sandinistas. Empires like that of the US do not support democratic self-determination of vassal states. Dating back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, Latin America and the Caribbean are regarded as the empire’s “backyard.”

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All elections center staff have by law an equal number of male and female members. Photo by Roger D. Harris.

Popularity of the Sandinistas

Biden carped that the democratically elected Nicaraguan leadership is “long unpopular.” However, Biden’s own plunging approval rating of 42.8% isn’t anything to envy. In contrast, a reliable pre-election poll indicated 73.1% approval for President Ortega. More to the point, the popularity of a country’s politicians is an internal matter and not the business of the US.

It is noteworthy to understand why the current Nicaraguan “regime” enjoys considerable popular support. Fundamental to this understanding is a long and concerted history of grassroots organizing by the Sandinistas. They led a successful revolution and today continue deep organizing in poor urban barrios and rural areas, especially among the youth, Indigenous and Afro-descendent Nicaraguans, and women.

Second, the “regime” enjoys popularity beyond the Sandinista base as an embodiment of national sovereignty, unity, and peace in reaction to the long and lamentable history of US intervention. This is especially the case after the US-instigated coup attempt of 2018. Although this is anecdotal, just about everyone I spoke to in Nicaragua had a horror story of the recent violence.

More than other elections, this November 7th sparked celebrations lasting through the night and into the early morning on the streets of popular neighborhoods throughout the country. It marked, in the popular consciousness, an official “end to the terrible nightmare and the return to a peaceful process of nation building,” in the words of Abigail Espinosa, a small farmer from Masaya.

Third, the “regime” has achieved so much with few resources. As Nan McCurdy, a United Methodist missionary who lived in Nicaragua for over 30 years, reports: “Since 2007 [when the Sandinistas returned to power] poverty has been cut in half, maternal mortality has dropped by 70%, infant mortality by 61% with a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children 6 to 12 years old. With a high percentage of small and medium-scale farmers and much government investment in training and loans, they have achieved 90% food sufficiency.”

Given this record, the current Sandinista election victory by a 76% margin, following 72.5% in 2016, 62% in 2011, and 38% in 2006 are indications of growing popular support and not of dictatorship.

The parallel reality of follow-the-flag journalists

The corporate press has been savage in its treatment of Nicaragua, echoing and embellishing the distortions of the US State Department. If Nicaragua is indeed “a slow-motion horror movie” or “a hell,” as described by the follow-the-flag journalists, at least the sinners have universal free education and health care. What these State Department scribes fail to ask is, if the second poorest country in the hemisphere can afford these social welfare measures – really human rights – why can’t the richest?

It was striking how much the corporate press accounts of the election differed from what happened on the ground in Nicaragua. The Times, gleefully spun: “The streets of the capital, Managua, were also quiet, with little to show that a significant election was underway.” That is, the newspaper of record failed to acknowledge that the election was proceeding peacefully, and the usual Sunday afternoon calm prevailed. But the literally hundreds of thousands of celebrants spontaneously taking to the streets in Nicaragua after the polls closed got no coverage. Meanwhile the corporate press reveled about a few contras demonstrating in Costa Rica.

Yes, as the New York Times reported, the government “banned large campaign events.” The ban, which applied to all political parties, was due to the COVID emergency and not to suppress political expression. No, as the Times implied, “the only candidate is Daniel Ortega.” Six candidates stood for the presidency.

After its initial report, the Times had to retract their falsehood – they called it an imprecision – that there were only Sandinista party campaign advertisements in Managua. By my count, banners for the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) were most prevalent.

Nicaragua exercises electoral sovereignty

Months before the elections, Biden had already pronounced the vote a fraud because he anticipated that the majority of Nicaraguans would vote their choice rather than Washington’s. The US imperiously implored the Nicaraguans to boycott their own elections, which was ignored by a respectable 65% of the electorate; a turnout similar to the vote that landed Biden in office, which was touted in the US media as a “record turnout.”

On election day, Biden, acting like a schoolyard bully, then threatened to use “all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal” to punish Nicaragua for exercising its national sovereignty. This was no idle threat.

Nicaragua is already suffering from illegal US sanctions. The NICA Act of 2018, under the Trump administration, imposed sanctions, including blocking loans from international financial institutions controlled by the US. In August 2020, the Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) plan was revealed, which was a multi-faceted coup strategy by which the US contracted corporations to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. RAIN called for a “sudden, unanticipated transition” government to forestall what they admitted would otherwise be a Sandinista victory in a free election.

In a seamless handoff from the administrations of Trump to Biden, the RENACER Act, which passed Congress just days before the election and was signed into law immediately following, will visit even more misery on the people of Nicaragua. The Organization of American States, the European Union, and individual state “partners” of the US imperial project such as the UK and Canada have or are in the process of imposing additional hardships on the Nicaraguans.

Such is the price for holding what the Nicaraguans called their eclecciones soberanas, sovereign elections. Those who deny this right, disallow the Nicaraguan’s imperative to fight back against the imperialist assault.

https://orinocotribune.com/nicaragua-ha ... y-problem/
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All US Elections are Fraudulent; Shut Up About Nicaragua
November 11, 2021
By Caitlin Johnstone – Nov 9, 2021

Western media are blaring headlines today about a rigged election, not in the United States or any of the other powerful nations allied with it whose elections are consistently fraudulent from top to bottom, but in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua.

A Google search brings up only news stories disparaging the Nicaragua election and its results. As flagged on Twitter by Left I on the News, CNN’s coverage of President Daniel Ortega’s victory featured a chyron with scare quotes around both the words “election” and “wins”, and a newscaster flatly stating “Ortega got 75% of the vote, results that we know are illegitimate.”

New York Times correspondent Natalie Kitroeff reported that Ortega has been “arresting all credible challengers; shutting down opposition parties; banning large campaign events; closing voting stations en masse” and that “there were no billboards or campaign posters” for the opposition, all claims that have been squarely refuted by observers reporting on the scene like Wyatt Reed, Ben Norton, Margaret Kimberly, Ahmed Kaballo, Caleb Maupin and others.


This mass media concern trolling about Nicaragua’s elections would not be so outrageously absurd were the elections of the US and its allies anywhere remotely close to free from fraud and manipulation.

There’s a common misconception that nothing ever changes in the US political status quo because an ideological tug-of-war between two equal and opposing factions keeps things in a state of stasis where it’s impossible to advance changes which would benefit ordinary Americans. In reality those two “factions” are in complete alignment in all but the most superficial ways, the electoral contests between them are dominated by a donor class with a vested interest in protecting the status quo, the candidates who compete in them are pre-selected by a corrupt and meticulously vetted primary process to ensure the public only ever gets to cast votes for those who will preserve oligarchy and empire, and third parties are constitutionally prevented from ever becoming politically viable.

All US elections for positions of real power are fraudulent. None of them ever permit real opposition. It’s a one-party system controlled by plutocratic and military institutions fraudulently disguised as democracy, and yet people who call themselves “journalists” have the temerity to criticize the integrity of Latin American elections without ever criticizing their own.

Just once it would be great to hear widespread discussion of US election rigging in the same alarmed tone we hear mass media concern trolls talking about nations like Nicaragua, Bolivia or Venezuela. “Very alarming how third parties are forbidden from participation in the US presidential debate.” “Concerned about the way any real opposition to the US power structure is banned from mainstream media.”


Whenever I raise this point I get people saying “Well the US doesn’t imprison its political opposition leaders like other tyrannical countries!”

That’s only because the US doesn’t have any political opposition leaders. There are no politicians in America with any political purchase who oppose the ruling power structure in any meaningful way. All true opposition has been quashed; all you ever get is two virtually identical lackeys of the oligarchic empire bickering over irrelevant narrative fluff like whether or not Critical Race Theory is being taught in schools.

There is no real opposition to the US power structure in electoral politics; it has been too aggressively stomped out for generation after generation since the days when it was openly incarcerating political dissidents like Eugene Debs for “sedition”. And anyone who comes anywhere close to threatening that power structure outside electoral politics is indeed imprisoned, as we are seeing right now in cases like Julian Assange.

There is no valid reason to believe the official imperial narratives about Nicaragua or any other empire-targeted nation, both because the US is virtually always far more guilty of whatever it’s accusing its enemies of doing and because its political/media establishment lies constantly. If you believe the mainstream narrative about any US-targeted nation you will wind up on the wrong side of debates about that nation, because the US empire is the single most corrupt and murderous institution on earth and its power is held in place by lies and propaganda.

The sooner you have your “Are we the baddies?” moment, the faster you get to truth.

The US empire—by which I also mean the client states around the world who support its agendas of planetary domination—has no business criticizing governments which are far less powerful, far less destructive, and far less corrupt. Elections throughout this US-centralized power structure are consistently rigged in myriad ways to ensure the survival of the political status quo upon which it is built, and if the mainstream news media existed for the purpose of practicing journalism this is something we would all be acutely aware of.

Until you are living in a nation with real political opposition and real elections, maybe shut the fuck up about places like Nicaragua.

https://orinocotribune.com/all-us-elect ... nicaragua/

Amen. The heavy lifting comes when you gotta convince Amerikans that they live in an Empire.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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