The path to the polls

Trusting in their electoral system, Venezuelans decided by a clear majority to stick with Chávez’s project, at the same time registering their discontent with some aspects by giving him a far less massive mandate than they did last time. We Nicaraguans, however, are again going into our elections on a path strewn with mines.

Envío team

As we approach the municipal elections on Sunday, November 4, two of the country’s de facto powers, the business elite and the Catholic hierarchy, took diametrically opposing positions in messages to and about the government.

Why we’re “fighting”…

In response to the basic dilemmas of whether or not to run candidates and whether or not to vote, representatives of different social sectors have taken the position that the decision must be left to each individual’s “conscience.” This was the posture finally adopted by the Catholic bishops in their pastoral message at the end of September. In it they lucidly, concisely and forcefully described the crisis of both the electoral system and the entire political system, strongly criticizing both the government’s abusive authoritarianism and the opposition parties’ disconnect from the population. (envío’s translation of the bishops’ complete text is included in this issue.)

In contrast, Nicaraguan big business is still in its very satisfactory and satisfying alliance with the government. On the 40th anniversary of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP), Carlos Pellas, indisputably the country’s top private enterprise representative, praised the “enormous improvement” he’s seeing in Nicaragua’s economic situation and defended the business elite’s alliance with the government: “Could Nicaragua move forward if we were in constant confrontation with the government?” He then dodged the question of what he thought about changing the thoroughly discredited authorities of the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE)—a change the entire nation is calling for—by explain¬ing that “fighting about the institutional part is a matter for politicians; we’re fighting for our economic rights.”

Such a display of political hands off was unimaginable in the eighties, during the FSLN’s first experience in power. Throughout that decade, COSEP played a powerful political role in opposition to the Sandinista revolution, allying itself firmly with the emblematic imperial power of the US government. One can only wonder what the outcome of that revolutionary experiment would have been had the relations between COSEP and the FSLN followed the course they’ve chosen this time.

COSEP’s current thinking differs greatly from that of the Catholic hierarchy, which in its latest message and many previous ones isn’t only fighting for its own issue, religious freedom, which is generally not a front-burner issue in today’s Nicaragua. Instead it has become a mouthpiece for the citizenry that’s clamoring for an improvement in the country’s democratic institutionality and deteriorated political life.

The biggest mine in the road

Chávez’s victory was undisputed. There’s genuine confidence in Venezuela’s electoral system both inside the country and out. Former US President Jimmy Carter, who has carved out a space for himself as a world-class election observer, and who certainly couldn’t be accused of being a Chávez sympathizer, praised that system as “the best in the world.” The Carter Center discarded any possibility of fraud and other international auditing authorities agree.

There isn’t a trace of similarity between that system and Nicaragua’s today. Given the accumulation of fraudulent irregularities that allegedly riddled them, both the 2008 municipal elections and the 2011 general ones have been severely questioned by both domestic and foreign observation organizations, including the Organization of American States and the European Union, and by voters themselves. Even more seriously, none of the accusations and accompanying evidence has been taken seriously and not one of the challenged results has been rectified or even reviewed: the electoral system continues to function unabashedly on behalf of the governing party’s interests.

Distrust in the CSE is the main mine on the road to he elections, and it has triggered unprecedented electoral polarization alongside the eternal political and economic polarization. The population opposed to Ortega’s project, or at least to the way he’s implementing it, is split between those convinced there’s no point in voting and those determined to vote and defend that vote. Some of them have gone so far as to add “even with my life.”

Where there is no apathy

The pre-electoral apathy is visible and unprecedented in the cities of the country’s Pacific belt, whose population tends to be better informed. The clearly fraudulent operations with which the governing party “won” the capital and several other main cities in 2008 is still fresh in people’s minds (a full 30% of the ballots never appeared tallied on the CSE results list). It is mainly in more isolated rural areas that some enthusiasm can be found.

Even with the rampant irregularities last year, the PLI Alliance, made up of the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), the Christian Democrat Union (UDC) and other party fragments and civil society organizations, took a respectable second place. But with the MRS boycotting this year’s elections and the UDC eliminated by a bogus technicality, the PLI is going it alone this time despite the torrent of criticisms that decision earned it. It is the only real opposition on the ballot given that Arnoldo Alemán’s Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN) and the Alliance for the Republic (APRE) are now mere shells that owe their place on the ballot to the FSLN’s desire to give the appearance of a thriving opposition.

The PLI’s voter base and sympathizers in what used to be called the “contra corridor” have expressed their determination to cast their vote and defend it. The “contra corridor” is a wide strip running down through the center of the country from the Honduran border to the Costa Rican border and covering extensive parts of the northern and southern Caribbean autonomous regions. It is the area that the US-financed contras penetrated from their bases in Honduras and Costa Rica to give the Sandinista Army a serious run for its money in the eighties. Those areas, populated by eastward-migrating, largely poor and traditionally Liberal mestizo peasants, suffered the war intensely and still carry deep, unhealed anti-Sandinista scars. In alliance with at least a part of the Nicaraguan Resistance Party (the former contras mutated into a political party), the PLC easily controlled that area’s myriad smaller rural municipalities throughout the nineties and the first half-decade of this century. In 2006, the ALN, created by banker-politician Eduardo Montealegre only a year earlier, moved it into third place and last year the PLI Alliance, running conservative rural radio hero Fabio Gadea as its presidential candidate, worked the area strongly, wresting significant support away from the remnants of the PLC still loyal to its corrupt and discredited leader.

The pros and cons
of running

In mid-August, the PLI presented what it called its “new” electoral strategy: it would concentrate its efforts and limited resources in that corridor, where it has greater probabilities of winning. Although its activists claim they’ve been unable to get campaign loans and are working in austerity, they still hope to win the 6 municipalities in the department of Chontales, the 7 in the department of Jinotega and a good number of those in Matagalpa and the Caribbean autonomous regions, including Siuna and Rosita. Throwing down the gauntlet to the FSLN, the PLI announced that it aspires to win at least 70 mayoral seats.

The contradictions created inside the PLI Alliance by the PLI’s decision to run in these elections, thus de facto legitimizing then, have not yet waned. The response of the PLI’s national and territorial leaders is that if they didn’t run candidates, it would be tantamount to gifting the FSLN those seats without a fight, in other words letting it win without fraud. They say that by participating, they’ll not only be putting up a fight for the traditionally Liberal municipal governments, but will also create “another precedent in the electoral system‘s illegitimacy.”

How big will
the abstention be?

These elections are adding some new irregularities to the long list the CSE has accumulated since 2008. The CSE’s electoral rolls show a more numerous population than appears on the national census in at least 22 of the 153 municipalities (including departmental capitalist such as León, Matagalpa, Jinotepe, Rivas, Puerto Cabezas, Bluefields and San Carlos).

Other anomalies include the fact that in numerous municipalities the PLI representatives—who for the first time are occupying posts as municipal electoral authorities as a result of placing second in last year’s general elections—are seeing the functions assigned them by law taken over by representatives of the governing party. Meanwhile, the CSE has made changes in the territorial demarcation and assigned new numbers to the voting tables without giving the other political parties the new codes. The CSE also decided, illegally, not to publish the electoral rolls on its web page…

If the climate of apathy continues to prevail, the levels of abstention could be even higher than normal in municipal elections, which always have less voter turnout than presidential elections. The FSLN benefits from the abstention of opposition voters because its hard-core voters always turn out in droves, but this time abstention could fall below the acceptable limit. The governing party is so sure of winning massively that it would prefer a sizable turnout to provide some legitimacy and mask the population’s growing lack of confidence in the electoral path. That also explains why President Ortega, who has taken a dim view of international observers since he returned to office, invited the Organization of American States to send an “accompaniment” mission, hoping that this too would give it some legitimacy. The OAS mission’s final evaluation of last year’s elections was marginally less critical than that of the European Union.

Important mutations

The road to these municipal elections is not only mined by the lack of credibility enveloping the electoral branch of government and the lack of confidence that has engendered in the population. This year, various legal and ideological mutations along the road have also made the process more unique and its consequences less predictable.

In March and again in April, the FSLN secured the PLI legislators’ backing in the National Assembly to reform the Municipalities Law and establish, among other things, a considerable increase in the number of Municipal Council members to be elected in each municipality (there will now be 6,534), half of whom must now be women, including on the mayor/deputy mayor ticket. It also establishes a considerable number of new municipal government meetings involving the population’s participation, as well as massive local citizen assemblies supposedly to prepare for those town hall forums.

The FSLN seemingly hopes that this important effort to achieve gender parity, include a substantially greater number of councilors and frequently involve the local population will inject positive new elements into municipal life. With respect to the multiplication of meetings, municipal expert Silvio Prado, whose opinions on the new reforms were published in last month’s issue of envío, fears that “what’s behind this design isn’t to increase participation, but to ensure mobilization; not to expand the opportunities for citizens’ participation, but to keep the population constantly mobilized for the simple purpose of receiving ‘lines’ from above, in assemblies where many can talk if they want, but only a few decide.”

These mutations are unquestionably as problematic as they are bold. Although we won’t be able to verify the changes they have wrought for at least another four years, the term of a municipal government, we will surely begin to see their effect on the evolution of the local powers starting next year.

What does it take to be an FSLN mayoral candidate?

Some of the FSLN’s selected mayoral candidates are running for reelection. They are well known in their communities and have earned significant prestige, with the population recognizing that some of them have administered their municipalities very well. Nonetheless, the most compelling qualification of both those running for reelection and those looking to occupy the post for the first time is that the party’s central power recognizes all of them as unconditionally loyal.

In the case of journalist Daisy Torres, who is running to continue as mayor of Managua, a post she inherited with the death of Mayor Alexis Argüello in 2009, her loyalty is matched by another sterling quality in the FSLN’s eyes: lack of charisma. The mayor’s office in the capital has been the springboard for the two most important leaders who have challenged Daniel Ortega’s leadership in the FSLN: Dionisio Marenco and Herty Lewites. Both were unconditionally loyal to Ortega when they took office, but both their personalities and the creative quality of their administration began to overshadow him, thus earning the un-rotatable leader’s wrath. The grey figure of Torres is the perfect way for the FSLN to avoid repeating that risk.

Interestingly, a full 40 of the candidates imposed by the governing couple through its hand-selection process sparked strong opposition and even bewilderment from party activists and sympathizers. The discontent among the FSLN’s historical base was enough to trigger repeated protest marches in the affected municipalities, and in some cases the protesters traveled all the way to Managua to demonstrate in front of the presidential offices.

Some of the groups didn’t include either a more credible CSE or a transparent electoral process in their demands; their only beef was that they hadn’t been listened to. They warned that if the offending candidates weren’t changed, they would respond with a “punishment vote.” In other words, they would vote for another party, not vote at all or at the very least break their tradition of ensuring the FSLN’s electoral grid, working as members of the voting tables, monitors or route chiefs. Their threat went unheeded. Will these Sandinistas make good on it? If they do, will we have any way to measure it?

It doesn’t matter
who they are…

An ad hoc FSLN congress was held on August 15 to quiet the clamor about the handpicked candidates. The expectation was that Daniel Ortega would use his indisputable authority to end the revolt on his farm by personally reading off and thus implicitly endorsing the list of definitive candidates—who many believe were actually chosen by First Lady Rosario Murillo.

But he didn’t read off any names that day. Instead, he floated an idea that amounts to a kind of ideological mutation to electoral theory: individuals come and go at the polls; it doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done… “What this is about is achieving victory in the majority of the mayoral races,” said Ortega. “And who’s going to do that? It’s not going to be Pedro Pérez or Juan López or Roberto García; it’s going to be the Sandinista National Liberation Front… That’s what we’re defending; a project! A project that goes well beyond individuals, a project that’s much more powerful, much more gigantic…”

The matrix of military organization, of hierarchical military culture reappears in Ortega’s idea. It’s alien to the democratic culture of debate, consensus, dissent and alternation in which the FSLN itself was historically forged and for which it fought to bring down the Somocista dictatorship. But military hierarchism is an ideological womb that the FSLN resists abandoning, either because it doesn’t know how, can’t or doesn’t want to as it’s way too comfortable and convenient.

Without faces or names

On September 7, CSE president Roberto Rivas seconded the President’s idea and announced that in these elections the ballot for mayor won’t carry the candidate’s photo and the ballot for councilors won’t even carry the candidates’ names. All that will appear are the parties’ acronyms and flag color, and in the case of the mayoral ballot also the two names on each party’s ticket. Although the law doesn’t stipulate the printing of the mayoral candidate’s photo, it was included in the 2008 elections to facilitate the illiterate population’s vote, especially in rural areas.

Politically speaking, the most interesting thing was Rivas’ justification: “in Nicaragua you don’t vote for a particular candidate, you vote for a flag, for a party; that’s the simple unvarnished truth.” While that is indeed true, most Nicaraguans today aren’t affiliated or even identify with any political party. It’s one of several important reasons why some reformers have long fought for ballots in which voters select individuals for elected posts rather than slates of candidates chosen by the parties.

Another reality is that municipal elections are where individual candidates matter most. As municipal expert Manuel Ortega Hegg points out, “in the municipal arenas people know each candidate and know what he has done; municipal elections are really elections among neighbors” He thinks that eliminating the photo is a way to minimize the importance of the municipal elections and reduce the protagonism of electoral authorities to a minimum. If he’s right, it adds even more weight to Silvio Prado’s interpretation of the new municipal government reforms.

Daniel Ortega will be the
winner in each mayor’s office

Ortega’s idea to annul names, minimize protagonism and erase faces doesn’t seem to have convinced every-one. On September 13, a week after Rivas’ declarations, Rosario Murillo, the government’s communications and citizenry coordinator, felt compelled to reinforce the idea in a working session with FSLN campaign teams in Chinandega, the municipality that put up the most opposition to the party’s hand-picked mayoral candidate. The First Lady also contributed a new element: “We’re already campaigning for 2016 and each thing we do puts down a property marker,” she enthused. “Comandante Daniel has to win the 2016 elections. And it’s the people, the FSLN, Daniel, who’s going to win in each municipal government.”

The interpretation of Murillo’s surprisingly early proclamation of Daniel as the FSLN candidate for the seventh consecutive time is simple: she’s trying to damp down the controversy now running through the governing party, particularly the contradictions provoked by her persistent, seemingly tireless self-protagonism.

The start of decadence…

The most acute interpretation of her speech in Chinandega came in the text “The owners of time” by jurist Julio Icaza, a member of the civil society umbrella organization Citizen’s Union for Democracy: “The absolutist dream of stopping time and abolishing change has a mortal wound that is causing it to irremediably bleed out: the death wound of succession. Monarchic absolutism responds to this problem with the divine and hereditary right of kings and democracy with institutions and periodic replacement of the people heading them through elections. Dictatorship, on the other hand, has no answers… Death, the real possibility of death at any moment, breathes through every pore of the regime. With the increase of security apparatuses, the palace becomes filled with spies and conspirators and an ever thicker and more complex web of intrigues grows around the presidential throne. The recent proclamation of Ortega as a candidate for the 2016 elections following a series of failed trials and errors by the communication coordinator is proof that the regime is beginning to face that problem peculiar to dictators. The response so far has been the absence of a response. But the need to insist so early, and publicly, on the caudillo’s continuation in order to placate the infighting only betrays the growing gravity of the problem, which is the start of decadence.”

He’s got both pans
by the handle

The Chinandega speech shows that the governing party’s own path to the elections is mined as well. There’s a latent but growing generational problem in the FSLN between its historical members—those who sacrificed their own futures in the insurrection and then the revolutionary eighties and have now been denied spaces in the party and even access to Ortega—and the youths organized by Murillo around her own leadership.

There’s also a gender problem: the FSLN has traditionally been a party of men forged in political and military experience, but Murillo has now invaded “their” party with contingents of upstart young women without much political experience and thus dependent on her power. For the moment, all these divisions are increasing Ortega’s arbitration power, which so far he’s using to keep hold of “both frying pans by the handle,” controlling both the historic members and the pro-Murillo members. For the moment.

Managua and Condega:
Two cases of repression

With Chávez’s new victory in Venezuela, it will be hard to dispute in the short run the nearly absolute institutional power Ortega enjoys today and the legitimacy given him by the sectors of the poor benefitting from the social programs paid for with Venezuelan money. Moreover, there’s no opposition cohesive enough to dispute it. It’s a power that will surely expand in these municipal elections.

But this isn’t impeding the emergence of new contradictions provoked by the model’s excess social control and the growing economic power that Ortega and his close circle are acquiring. Protests are emerging among those “on the bottom” and when deemed serious enough the government resolves them with increasingly disproportionate political repression.

The two most recent cases were seen in Managua and in Condega, a municipality in the department of Estelí. In September, in a fight of the poor against the poor, Managua taxi drivers protested the unfair competition from the little three-wheeled motorcycle-engine taxis that largely operate within the confines of smaller communities and towns. The taxi drivers demanded a higher gas subsidy because the continuing fuel price hikes are making it impossible for them to survive. Even though Nicaragua imports oil from Venezuela with a preferential payment system through its Petrocaribe agreement, the government maintains high prices to the consumer (over $5 a gallon). Forty taxi drivers were beaten by anti-riot police and criminal charges were then brought against them in the courts. The taxi cooperatives called off the protest in exchange for nothing more than the release of their colleagues.

The previous month, bean producers in Condega demanded fair prices and conditions to be able to export their harvest—in that case it was the poor against a power group that controls prices and exports. The response was more violent in that municipality, where television cameras seldom go: the government sent brigades of riot police, who repressed the producers and removed them from the highway, beating and wounding a number of them and arresting six. Days later the repression continued in the municipal capital. Riot police were deployed to the neighborhoods, where they raided dozens of homes, made more arrests and inundated the city with tear gas. Many residents fled to the outskirts of town to escape the repression.

Such a response is what is now labeled the “criminalization of social protest,” and is adopted by authori-tarian governments around the world to put a halt to discontent and sow fear among those who dare to claim their rights. It is invariably unleashed against those at the bottom, while those “on top” don’t seem to experience major problems. In this same issue, fiscal law expert Julio Francisco Báez examines factors that demonstrate what he calls an alliance with a “corporatist stamp,” expressed in recent months in the bilateral government-big business negotiation of a tax reform that he insists “threatens us.”

Just a “soap opera”?

We now have more evidence of a particularly harmful factor in the deterioration of institutionality and political life: the penetration of drug trafficking both among those on top and those on the bottom. We’ve learned more details by following the Fariñas-Osuna and Televisa cases, two powerful mines that have already blown up in the government’s face, showing us where we may be heading.

A public trial on the Fariñas-Osuna case, held in Managua between August 22 and September 27, was quickly dubbed “the trial of the year.” The defendants were 5 women and 19 men, variously accused of drug trafficking, organized crime and money laundering. In the end, 22 of the 24 were found guilty of between one and all three of these crimes and sentenced to prison terms ranging up to the maximum of 30 years. They had been working in various capacities for a drug ring in Nicaragua run by a 38-year-old Costa Rican named Alejandro Jiménez, a.k.a. “Palidejo” (Paleface), currently in prison in Guatemala accused of being behind the July 2011 shooting in that country that mistakenly took Argen¬tine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral’s life.

The most relevant cases were those of nightclub owner Henry Fariñas, the intended target of the shooting, and alternate CSE magistrate Julio César Osuna, accused of making counterfeit Nicaraguan ID cards, including one for Jiménez. The court heard 58 witnesses, most of them members of the National Police’s drug division, who appeared wearing hoods and seemed to be repeating—even in some cases read-ing—scripts prepared previously to fit with the prosecution’s version. No expert witnesses were brought in.

In his final statement, Fariñas repeated what he had said ever since he was unexpectedly arrested in Managua in March: that he had been friends with National Police chiefs for years, although he did not mention any names. He wondered how it could have been possible for them to have such a relationship with him if he was a criminal. And he added another relevant tidbit: he said one of the farms he was accused of owning illegally had been given to his father by Daniel Ortega. The investigation by the National Police (PN) and the Office of Public Prosecutor dug no further than Fariñas. According to that investigation he had created 15 shell businesses to launder money. José María Enríquez Moncada, a lawyer reportedly linked to the Ortega-Murillo family businesses and a partner in Nicaragua’s National Petroleum Distribution Company, directed by one of President Ortega’s daughters-in-law, was involved in drawing up 7 of the documents of constitution for these 15 companies.

Four days into the trial, the PN presented 18 Mexicans—17 men and 1 woman—who identified themselves as journalists with the powerful Mexican television corporation Televisa. They were arrested at the Nicaraguan border having just crossed over from Honduras in six sophisticated vans equipped with costly communication technology and emblazoned with the Televisa logo (the vans cost a reported $750,000 each). A search of the vehicles had uncovered US$9.2 million, which was seized. Costa Rica soon reported that this same caravan had made at least 16 round trips through the isthmus from Mexico to Costa Rica during the previous two years. It was also learned that police, customs, migration and tourism officials knew about the trips and that the Mexicans had lunched and chatted with some PN officers. The PN announced that they would be investigated. A week later, PN Chief of Police Aminta Granera declared that the investigation had uncovered nothing and that lunches and other contacts were perfectly proper behavior for “intelligence operations.”

It took Televisa executives 17 days to react to events in Nicaragua, denying any link to the group or the vehicles. Independent Mexican journalists, including the widely-acclaimed Carmen Aristegui and reporters for the magazine Proceso, had quickly demonstrated that the six vans had been registered in the name of the television consortium, but Televisa countered that the documents were forged. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office has so far backed the version offered by Televisa, which is reportedly linked to the country’s new President, Enrique Peña Nieto.

On September 7, in his speech celebrating the 33rd anniversary of the founding of the Nicaraguan Police, President Ortega put significant distance between himself and Televisa by laughing off the case as the “Televisa soap opera,” thus minimizing its magnitude. That same day he announced that $7 million of the $9.2 million found hidden in the vans would be used to improve several of the national penitentiary system prisons, which are in an appalling state, and the other $2.2 million to buy new patrol vehicles for various police units. The President’s decision, announced in a simple speech, not even a decree, and even before the detained Mexicans had had their first hearing, expressed significant ignorance of or disinterest in the law. PN First Commission Granera, however, called the announcement “very wise” and said she applauded it.

Writing in Proceso, journalist Jorge Carrascosa offered the following thoughts about this aspect of the issue: “Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega has a big debt with the old PRI [Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party], which supported him in his revolution against the Somoza family regime. Now, with Televisa’s name at the center of the sizable international money-laundering operation, he has a strong card in his favor with President-elect Peña Nieto. But he is also heading toward strong pressure from the formal and de facto powers… Ortega knows very well that Peña Nieto is a Televisa product and that, as President, he will have to defend the television monopoly in this drug trafficking operation discovered by the Nicaraguans…. Daniel Ortega’s government could also come under pressure… from Televisa itself, which could unleash a media campaign against him and his government, and from the [drug] groups affected by this failed money-transporting operation, which will want to settle scores.”

Televisa’s appearance on the stage teaches us even more about the implications of this trans-regional narcotic penetration. It shows at the very least that the Ortega government doesn’t have full control over either the information flowing from Mexico and other cases or the responses it needs to make a graceful exit from this scandal.

Which way will President Ortega lean? What finish can we expect from this soap opera? The lack of any signs of further investigation beyond Fariñas suggests a desire to cut that case there in an attempt to take attention away from the obvious: we in fact don’t have a strong “retaining wall” against drug trafficking, despite the fact that everyone from the President down to the lowest uniformed agent of the Army and the Police are fond of repeating that we do. The wall that does exist is riddled with cracks, chinks and holes.

Breathing room for Ortega

Hugo Chávez won Venezuela’s elections on October 7. His victory, although not by the steamroller 10 million votes he asked his supporters for, and not with the KO he predicted for his opponent Capriles, was an absolute priority for Daniel Ortega, who has based his power project on the hundreds of millions of dollars received annually from Venezuelan cooperation. He, his family and the FSLN’s business group have so far taken privileged advantage of the highly advantageous oil agreement that opened up so many opportunities for Nicaragua.

But this breath of air won’t blow away the specter of uncertainty in the presidential offices: the direction that Chávez’s illness takes is the next cliffhanger. Although Chávez’s physical disappearance would surely not result in an immediate suspension of Venezuelan cooperation, changes in it could be determined by how the transition develops in the party Chávez pulled together in such an absolute way.

If Chávez dies and the opposition wins the next elections, it would surely put an end to that favorable oil agreement. And even if Chávez’s heir wins, the transition in the PSUV could turn tense or chaotic due to infighting among such diverse interests, which could end up changing the agreement’s terms. As hard as it is to believe, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Chávez’s big gamble in Nicaragua, is “wearing no clothes,” as the article on ALBA in this same issue explains.

Venezuela’s electoral
system is enviable

Venezuela’s election path was tested again on October 7. Nicaragua’s, which culminates on November 4, is mined. The dilemma of whether or not to vote isn’t the crucial issue for Nicaraguans. The challenge is how to rescue from the rubble an electoral system that would allow us to settle both present and latent conflicts. How could we get a system like Venezuela’s?

Looking at Venezuela makes us feel ashamed of our system and envious of its. In consecutive elections Chávez has been willing to risk his power, leaving the decision in voters’ hands. And in consecutive elections the Venezuelan population has gone to the polls trusting in the electoral authorities and the transparency they guarantee. Ortega is unwilling to run that risk. And the Nicaraguan population has lost its faith in the electoral path. For how long? The future, the opening of other paths, largely depends on the answer to that question.

Print text

Send text