|
|
 |
 |
| Central American University - UCA |
 |
|
Number 307 | Febrero 2007 |
 |
|
|
Nicaragua
Nicaragua Briefs
Envío team
MRS ALLIANCE BETRAYED BY
TWO OF ITS LEGISLATORSThe MRS Alliance, which won five legislative seats in the elections last November 5, ended up with only three on its bench: Mónica Baltodano, Víctor Hugo Tinoco and Enrique Sáenz. First, six days after the elections, apparently while attending a Mass officiated by Cardinal Obando to celebrate Daniel Ortega’s victory, Mario Valle decided to shift to the FSLN bench. The national leadership of the Movement for the Rescue of Sandinismo, a member of the alliance, called Valle a “traitor” and expelled him from its ranks. Then on January 9, during the election of the National Assembly’s new seven-member directive board, MRS member Juan Ramón Jiménez, a departmental representative for Carazo, lent himself to an FSLN maneuver to give the seat supposedly granted to the small MRS Alliance bench in the spirit of plurality to Jiménez instead of the Alliance’s own consensual choice, Enrique Sáenz. The MRS threw Jiménez out of the party amid suspicions that bribery had played a role in his case, as opposed to Valle who was presumed to have been an FSLN plant.
With Jiménez and Valle now in the FSLN camp, the governing party’s bench is now up to 41, although only 38 FSLN legislators were actually elected. The other turncoat was Nicaraguan Resistance Party president Salvador Talavera, who ran and won on the ALN slate but had already signed an alliance with the FSLN over a month earlier. The FSLN is still 6 short of the number of votes needed to pass ordinary laws without help from any other party, but now has enough to push through constitutional reforms with the PLC’s 25 seats or the ALN’s 23.
SLIM COMES TO NICARAGUAMexican multimillionaire Carlos Slim came to Nicaragua on February 1 for a meeting with Daniel Ortega in which he reportedly promised to invest US$250 million in energy, computer science, tourism and telecommunications in Nicaragua in the next two years. He also pledged to contribute to health and education programs through his nonprofit foundations. Nicaragua’s business elite accepted an invitation from Ortega and Murillo that same day, something they had never done before, so they could rub elbows with the wealthiest man in Latin America and third wealthiest in the world.
THE MORAVIAN CHURCH
ELECTS A WOMAN SUPERINTENDENTThe Moravian Church, an early Protestant brotherhood that originated in Czechoslovakia and was established in Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast in 1849, held its 14th Synod on January 23-28. After long deliberation, the 82 synod members from the five districts into which this church is organized in Nicaragua elected Cora Luisa Antonio Matamoros, a 45-year-old Miskitu woman, as their first female superintendent for the next four years. Cora Luisa, married and mother of five children, competed with four men for the post.
MURRILLO EVEN CHANGED
NICARAGUA’S OFFICIAL EMBLEMNot satisfied with decorating government podiums, conference tables, backdrops and FSLN events with her ubiquitous flower arrangements and rainbow palette, Rosario Murillo also triggered a conflict with constitutional overtones by unilaterally changing the design of the country’s official emblem. She was found out when she sent off a mock-up of the stylized, multicolored and otherwise distorted design to be printed on all the government’s official stationary. On February 7, the PLC, ALN and MRS combined their National Assembly votes for a majority of 48 in favor of requesting President Ortega to “respect the nation’s symbols.”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America