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| Central American University - UCA |
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Number 273 | Abril 2004 |
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Nicaragua
NICARAGUA BRIEFS
ALEMÁN HITS THE TOP TENAccording to the 2004 World Corruption Report, prepared by Transparency International and released in March, former Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán came in ninth among the planet’s ten most corrupt leaders. The positions are decided by calculating how much each of these individuals stole from their respective populations by embezzling public funds. The report stresses that Latin America’s legal systems are currently being put to the test, and it remains to be seen whether they have the capacity to punish corrupt politicians. It mentions the cases of Alemán in Nicaragua and Fujimori in Perú as emblematic examples. Heading the list in order of the greatest larceny are Suharto (Indonesia), Marcos (Phillipines), Mobutu (Zaire), Abacha (Nigeria), Milosevic (Serbia), Duvalier (Haiti), Fujimori (Peru) and Lazarenko (Ukraine). Estrada of the Phillipines follows Alemán in tenth place.
SUPREME COURT FINALLY ELECTS A PRESIDENTAfter six months of crisis, Nicaragua’s Supreme Court finally elected Sandinista justice Yadira Centeno as its president and Liberal Carlos Guerra as vice president. The latter directly negotiated his post with Daniel Ortega, without subjecting himself to Arnoldo Alemán’s personal consent, thus breaking with the pact-imposed tradition for selecting court positions. Guerra was also elected to sit on the Central American Court of Justice, a post he will assume within a year and will exercise for a decade.
Following Guerra’s election, all manner of speculation circulated about the scope of his negotiations with Daniel Ortega and the role he will play in coming months in the Alemán case and in cases of vital economic interest to the finances of the top FSLN elite. Guerra declared that he is a friend of both Alemán and Ortega. His election could alter the correlation of forces within the Supreme Court, up to now balanced between eight Liberal and eight Sandinista justices.
CHALLENGES TO DANIEL ORTEGA’S PERENNIAL CANDIDACYEconomist Alejandro Martínez Cuenca, finance minister during the Sandinista government, announced in late February that he would run as a presidential precandidate in the FSLN’s primaries before the 2006 general elections. Martínez Cuenca already tried this in 2001, but was blocked by the Ortega-dominated FSLN structures.
At the end of March, Dora María Téllez, health minister during the Sandinista government, FSLN National Assembly representative until she left the party in the mid-nineties and currently president of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, announced that she too would run for the party’s presidential candidacy in the primaries on behalf of the National Convergence, a set of parties and personalities that have managed to remain in an alliance with the FSLN since the 2001 elections. “If Daniel Ortega has the right to be a candidate, I can’t deny myself the right as well. I’m not challenging him, I’m challenging myself,” said Téllez upon announcing her move.
MANAGUA’S OLD CATHEDRAL TO BE REVITALIZEDWhile visiting Managua in late March to promote his Plan Puebla-Panama, Mexico’s President Vicente Fox offered to chair an international association to restore Managua’s old cathedral and petition UNESCO to declare it Patrimony of Humanity. The building, with its eclectic styles and decorations, was finished in 1936 and suffered severe damage in the 1972 earthquake. Since then it has been totally abandoned, except for a brief period in the mid-nineties when it was minimally refurbished and hosted concerts and other events before being deemed unsafe and closed again.
Fox began to make good on his promise within days of his announcement, sending two Mexican restoration experts to Managua. For three days the architects studied what would be needed to restore the cathedral, which they considered to have been more damaged by years of neglect than by the earthquake.
“THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST”The controversial film “The Passion of the Christ,” directed by fundamentalist Catholic convert Mel Gibson, premiered on March 18 in 9 of Managua’s 17 theaters. In the first days the theaters were sold out to evangelical communities, Catholic high schools and groups of nuns, priests and Protestant pastors. Soon all attendance records had been broken as the movie became the biggest ticket seller in national history. In the first 10 days, 41,000 people saw the movie on the big screen while thousands more watched the pirated videos and and DVDs sold in abundance in the markets.
Catholic and Protestant hierarchs agreed on the “spiritual” value of the film, while isolated voices commented in some media on the excess of explicit violence used by the director to portray the torture suffered by Jesus. They also critiqued the absence of any real historic content about his life and message, an imbalance that characterizes the film and panders to an extremely conservative theological proposal.
THE FIRST OPEN HEART SURGERYAt the end of February, a team of national doctors performed open heart surgery without the collaboration of international colleagues for the first time in the country’s history. This type of operation was previously performed in the country thanks only to international medical brigades who operated on poor patients. The pioneer surgery, which lasted three hours, was performed in Managua’s Military Hospital on an Army sargeant who had a tumor in his right auricle.
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a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America