Now that Michelle is done utilizing me as her personal tour guide, I can return my focus to the upcoming presidential election! So the election is this Sunday (do you think our voter turnout rate would better on a weekend?) and things are in full swing. When Michelle and I traveled to Managua on Saturday, we caught the tail end of a manifestation supporting Fabio Gadea. Mr. Gadea is running against incumbent president Daniel Ortega. Judging by the chaos and quantity of people there, I think it’s fair to say the Gadea is gaining support.
Fun fact. The last month the rainy season was raging but oddly enough, the local government here began major construction projects. They’re updating the water pipes to plastic, paved an important street and built a roof and installed lights on the community basketball court. I just find it interesting that our pro-Ortega mayor would complete such important projects the week before elections…
Michelle emailed me this article from the WSJ and I think it describes Nicaragua’s political climate better than I ever could. Enjoy!
On Sunday Mr. Ortega will again be the incumbent candidate in a Nicaraguan presidential election. And the polls again give him a comfortable lead. But the opposition remembers 1990, and it is not ready to concede. It believes that polls do not fully capture popular dissatisfaction with the wily, power-hungry Sandinista, and it hopes that his closest rival, center-right, anticorruption candidate Fabio Gadea, can come out ahead in a fair election much as Mrs. Chamorro did. What remains more doubtful is whether a fair election is possible.
It would hardly be surprising if a majority opposes more sandinismo. It is widely believed that, as president for the past five years, Mr. Ortega has used his executive office and alliance with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to advance his business interests and those of his party. One example is the privately held company known as Albanisa, which uses a state arrangement to import Venezuelan oil on discounted terms and then sells it at market prices. Albanisa's books are shrouded in secrecy. But the Nicaraguan daily La Prensa reported last week that oil imports from Venezuela will reach $900 million this year and suggested that while Nicaragua's "public finances are under pressure," there is a "bonanza in the oil business between the presidents Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chávez."
Nicaragua's "Alba" (the acronym for Mr. Chávez's Latin American alliance) network also controls a lucrative operation exporting agricultural products to Venezuela. And it owns the Seminole Hotel in Managua, several private television channels, and one of the country's largest livestock farms as well.
All of this has depended on presidential power and Mr. Ortega, logically, does not want to give it up. Even though he is constitutionally barred from running for a second term, he claims that the Supreme Court has given him the green light.
Yet only Congress has the authority to lift that prohibition. The fact that he was able to orchestrate a "vote" among selected Sandinista judges hardly makes his candidacy court-approved. Nevertheless, using the strength of his office and taking advantage of the fact that the Organization of American States (OAS) has become largely irrelevant under Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza, Mr. Ortega pushed ahead with his re-election campaign.
That campaign has had to battle significant negatives. The 2008 municipal elections were so wrought with fraud that the European Union and the U.S. refused to recognize the results and cut off bilateral aid. Venezuelan oil largess has allowed the president to buy support, and thanks to the commodity boom, the economy is growing. But Ortega enterprises have provided limited relief for Nicaragua's victims of grinding poverty. The opposition points out that he has never won more than 42% of the vote in any free election. In 2006 he only won 38%. If that number holds, Mr. Gadea has a serious shot at forcing a runoff.
Among the many opposition concerns has been the difficulty of securing voter identification cards. The nongovernmental organization HagamosDemocracia (HD), which is working to force a fair process, estimates that almost 5% of potential voters do not have ID cards. It says this could translate into some 200,000 disenfranchised individuals and in the event of a close contest, would be significant.
I asked Roberto Bendaña, chairman of the board of HD, if this is due to incompetence at the voter registry. "Incompetence, yes, partly," he said. "But mainly it's manipulation." He says the opposition believes this because officials haven't shorted known Sandinista voters. According to Mr. Bendaña, in some cases the cards have been hand-delivered to the homes of party loyalists. He also says that the areas where ID cards are hardest to come by are "principally where the liberal [i.e., opposition] vote is largest."
HD is not the only institution worried about a power grab. The Catholic Church in Nicaragua, while remaining apolitical, has questioned the threats to democracy coming from the government. The European Union, which has sent an observer mission, and the U.S. are also on high alert. On Friday a senior U.S. official told me that the U.S. is "concerned about the apparent documentation irregularities" and other issues like the government's "failure to give observer accreditation to certain domestic NGOs." Unfortunately, the official told me that the U.S. plans to rely heavily on the OAS observation mission to defend the process.
On election day HD says it will disperse 9,600 volunteers who will use a web-based messaging system to report precinct totals. That could go a long way in forcing an honest count. But at the same time, the Ortega-controlled electoral council is threatening to disqualify 51 opposition candidates for legislative offices. Bottom line: Mr. Ortega doesn't plan to allow a rerun of 1990 if he can prevent it—by whatever means.”
I’ll keep you, followers, apprised of any interesting updates. And I promise to keep my head down!
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