What are we talking about when we talk about Nicaragua?
Nicaragua has just added an additional quota of anarchy to a region in chaos. It has done so with an operation to annihilate the opposition with the defined format in one fell swoop, which is what happens when the institutional system is disrupted. For almost three decades, Nicaragua has experimented with the current regime headed by Daniel Ortega, a democracy more than imperfect, repressive and censorship but with some political opposition movement in operation. This coming November, in the national elections, precisely, a dissident leader, Cristiana Chamorro, was emerging to reach the government and avoid a fourth consecutive term of the current authoritarian regime. This woman, journalist, daughter of the legendary former president Violeta Chamorro, was arrested last June 2 at the beginning of an ordeal of arrests without cause that already includes 14 political leaders, including three other candidates for the presidency. With this operation, the election was left empty of opponents. The controversial Ortega government accuses them of crimes against national sovereignty, a precarious language with resonances of the darkness of the Cold War. The banning of the opposition, with any argument, is typical of the coup. That term defines the event whether it is a rebellion against the authorities or from them to annul their critics and their own system. This violence against institutions is not new in the region or the rest of the world. It is a well-known hallmark of the Chavista regime that has censored the main dissidents in the last presidential elections to ensure a victory that should have been made up anyway. The same happens in Iran, Chad or Russia. Countries like Argentina that have endured extensive military dictatorships and autocratic models they know in detail those behaviors and what they imply for individual freedoms. Cristiana Chamorro, arrested on June 2 by the national police in Managua. Photo EFE  Ortega has accelerated the authoritarian rule for two reasons. In principle, the proximity of the elections and the fear of a growing repudiation that leads to an economic crisis that devastates the great majority of the poor in the country. That social fury three years ago left at least 450 people in the morgue and threw another 100,000 into exile who dared to sue in the streets the reigning despotism. The other reason is the perception that there would be no limits in the region and, particularly from the United States, a country with which Ortega has had a ambiguous and sometimes patronizing behavior. Two years after the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House, the Nicaraguan autocrat abstained from defending his Venezuelan partner in a key OAS vote that questioned the process of the 2018 elections of the Chavista experiment. One of the currently detained dissidents, a former comrade in arms and later an opponent of Ortega, Commander Hugo Torres, was the one who then wondered what happened at the OAS.   In that flirtation, the Managua regime also shelved the pharaonic operation with a Chinese corporation that it proposed to build a canal that cut Nicaragua in two, in the style of the Panamanian, a work questioned by Washington and that was going to give one hundred years of control of that passage to the Peoples Republic. The gestures were crowned with the participation of Ortegas army in Panamax military maneuvers, an annual event sponsored by the United States to exercise war games with a score of countries, including Great Britain, to protect the Panama Canal from an eventual attack. In the sights  Those attitudes have been moderating since before Trumps departure from the White House and are now almost completely extinguished. They have been replaced by an action with outlines that would seem even challenging. Chamorro was arrested when Joe Bidens Chancellor Antony Blinken was in Costa Rica discussing the growing erosion of democracy in the region, particularly in Central America. The other candidates and leaders were arrested when Vice President Kamala Harris was on a tour of Guatemala and Mexico to discuss the complex issue of immigration and after claiming that judicial independence is a key factor in democracy. Two young people walk in front of a banner with the image of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (r), and his wife Rosario Murillo (i), in Managua. Photo EFE  Ortega, of course, has appealed to his revolutionary decor and imperialism as an alibi to wipe out the opposition. But this regime that has kidnapped Nicaragua has also falsified that identity. It is a nationalist, authoritarian model that, for example, has maintained a fluid relationship with the IMF, an organization that has just endorsed that Managua expand its deficit if necessary to contain the economic impact of the pandemic.  In the midst of the brutal crisis tied to last years pandemic, impoverished Nicaragua managed to a surprising 9.5% increase in its export basket, a number without parallel in the region. Almost inexplicable were it not for Ortegas success by keeping the economy fully open, ignoring the human costs of the pandemic. In the same period, and despite the health disaster, it reduced per capita social spending to $ 190 from the previously meager $ 207, an adjustment designed to protect its fiscal surplus. Demands  Against these inequities, the 2018 uprisings were produced, which had the same tones of demand for a change in the rules that Chile or Ecuador experienced in 2019, a few years before Venezuela and recently Colombia. The disease has enlarged that social ocean. More than twenty thousand jobs were lost. Mostly in black, which is the almost total characteristic of employment in Nicaragua. Repression and adjustment have gone hand in hand. A Freedom House report from 2019 related the scenario of human rights violations in the Central American country to the harsh reports prepared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the socialist Michelle Bachelet, on Venezuela. Daniel Ortega, Evo Morales and Nicols Maduro, in 2016. Photo EFE  Nicaraguas democratic backwardness is evident, the report argued, among other ways, in the holding hundreds of political prisoners, arrested by paramilitary forces controlled by the government of Ortega and Rosario Murillo (the wife and vice president), for protesting against the regime . When the devastating 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua and caused nearly 20,000 deaths in just 30 seconds, the Somoza family that ruled the country stole international aid and left the victims of the disaster to their own devices. Ortega, who once fought this caste of dictators, has now followed the same path, ignoring the dire fate of tens of thousands of people who have been left in the open for the two devastating hurricanes that hit the country last November. Nicaragua was one of the countries most affected by this phenomenon, which left more than half a million people on the northern coast of the Caribbean in ruins, including a large portion of children. A Unicef report clearly exposes the absence of the State in the face of this nightmare. The only drinking water is that which is collected from the rain, there is no food or sanitation. The Ortega regime and his extravagant wife have only sent the survivors a few badges and a handful of nails. In those regions native peoples reside, always present in the opportunistic verbiage of the self-styled Latin American progress, such as the Miskito Indians. Part of that abandoned universe. The recent abstention of Argentina along with Mexico and three other countries, in the OAS condemnation of the Nicaraguan regime, denotes at least an abysmal absence of reading and information about what this matter is really about. Foreign policy, says Kissinger, is the art of setting priorities. In other words, action is taken as long as the result is in the national interest, which is one of those priorities, possibly the most relevant. In a tone consistent with the general confusion of this stage, it is not clear what benefit abstention confers. Any intention to differentiate, as has been speculated as an argument to defend these positions, dissolves because differentiation requires strength and authority. Argentinas international policy lacks this, which also makes any possibility of mediation illusory, as our country claims, in the different Latin American crises. Mexico, which largely led Buenos Aires stance on voting, followed an already traditional path with that attitude that wields non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries as a pretext to avoid condemnation of abuse. But in this case, the intervention would not violate the limits of non-interference, because it is a coup against the institutions The purpose of the denunciation actions is to prevent that type of authoritarian movements from contaminating the rest of the region. The national interest, precisely. The Democratic Charter of the OAS obliges this procedure. It includes a mechanism for collective action in the event of an abrupt or irregular interruption of the democratic institutional political process (what has just happened in Nicaragua) or the legitimate exercise of power by a democratically elected government . And in its article 23 it remarks that the Member States they are responsible for organizing, carrying out and guaranteeing free and fair electoral processes . When the coup against Hugo Chvez took place in Venezuela, led by businessman Pedro Francisco Carmona and with the enthusiasm of Jos Mara Aznar from Spain or the IMF from Washington, this entire space of nationalities became confused. The new Venezuelan regime arrested the Bolivarian leader, proclaimed the new boss and he immediately closed Parliament and the Supreme Court. Without anything. Hurricane survivors in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. AFP photo  At that time there was an effective reaction led by Buenos Aires and Mexico to denounce the coup because it configured the reincarnation of the military coups of the long night of the 70s. That return could not be allowed. It is difficult to see what part of the same thing that is happening now in Nicaragua cannot be understood. One fact in favor of Ortegas authoritarianism is that his ideological falsification is consistent with a region where there are no longer traces of that supposed real left or of the old socialism. Only simulators. In that deserted sidewalk what happens in abandoned places happens, inevitably it is filled with the worst.  Copyright Clarn 2021