2012 municipal elections: Chronicle of an outcome foretold

Nicaragua’s municipal elections were on November 4. Almost everything that happened could be seen coming, which means the current scenarios will continue and intensify. Nicaragua has a break from more electoral races until November 2016. Will we by then have constructed a new political scenario?

Envío team

According to the official data of the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), the FSLN won 134 of the country’s 153 mayoral seats with 67.9% of the total votes. The CSE assigned the other 19 municipal governments as follows: 13 to the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), 2 to the once front-running Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), 3 to the indigenous regional party Yatama and 1 to the Alliance for the Republic (APRE). It was an outcome foretold.

For the first time, a very specific and unprecedented expectation centered on the possible voting day abstention levels. In an M&R poll conducted 25 days earlier, only 28% of those surveyed said they would “very probably” vote, while 69% said it was only “somewhat probable,” “hardly probable” or “not at all probable.” But according to the CSE, abstention remained within the historical ranges for municipal elections at 44%. Even if true, it’s at the very low end of that range.

“Are you going to go vote?”

Using data from the 2008 municipal elections provided by the CSE itself, diverse studies were able to document scandalous frauds in 16, 30, 40 and 42 important municipalities, depending on the study and the methodology used. All agreed that the most documentable fraud was in the capital city of Managua. Given that history, the calculated opacity repeated and perfected in last year’s general elections, and many of the anomalies and maneuvers of both those elections repeated this time around, there seems to be little value to analyzing the CSE’s official figures.

As mentioned above, one of the more relevant data this time was how much abstention there would be. A week before the voting, CSE President Roberto Rivas announced that participation could reach 80%, which was absurd because even if all the dead people, emigrants and prisoners still on the electoral rolls showed up, that percentage tops the peak historical figure by far, even for presidential elections. And the truth is that the generalized distrust of all the CSE structures and particularly of Rivas, damped the decision to vote of a good part of the electorate around the country.

The dilemma wasn’t the classic one in any elections: who to vote for. Instead it was why bother. The closer election day came the more often one heard the question: “Are you going to go vote?” Despite nearly half a century of the Somoza dictatorship and its rigged elections—or perhaps precisely because of it—Nicaraguans are very committed to the idea that voting is a right and a duty, an opportunity for civic participation that shouldn’t be taken lightly. But this time around growing numbers voiced the opinion that not voting is also a right and a duty; citizens have the right not to legitimize elections that lack even the most minimum guarantees of transparency and reliability. Each person resolved the dilemma between these two positions as a matter of personal conscience, just as the Catholic Episcopal Conference, most social organizations and various other sectors counseled.

Most voters stayed home

Never in recent electoral history, dating back to the first post-Somoza elections in 1984, have we seen as little participation in an event we take pride in calling a “civic fiesta” as we did the morning of Sunday, November 4. In Managua and many other municipalities the guests didn’t show up at their fiesta. During the morning hours, when there are normally lines, the area outside the voting centers, many of them schools, was desolate. TV journalists deployed round the country ran out of adjectives to describe the scene: “Participation is light… paltry… scant… minimum… measly… weak…” Even the government and pro-government media found it hard to avoid mentioning what the cameras were showing.

Only in a few municipalities could voters be seen standing in line and waiting their turn. Those were the ones where the population felt genuine competition between the FSLN and the Liberals, be it the PLI or the PLC, which for separate reasons had decided to vie for the same anti-Sandinista vote, thus increasing the likelihood of giving the municipality to the FSLN. The most frequent excuse for the lack of lines elsewhere was religion: first people go to church, then they go home for lunch. They’ll be here in the afternoon.

Were they? Participation did indeed improve a little here and there. In some places, Managua included, the FSLN sent its activists out to find people who had received government handouts such as zinc roofing, food packets, hens and the like, as well as some elderly and disabled people and drive them to their polling place. But even in Managua that didn’t result in lines, just scattered grouplets of voters. Even that last-minute effort by the governing party wasn’t enough to challenge the image of an important degree of abstention.

Backlash effects of the handpicking of candidates?

Ethics and Transparency (E&T), a seasoned national election observation organization that has been denied accreditation by the CSE since 2008, estimated that abstention could reach 60-65% nationally and as high as 70% in some municipalities. The Institute of Democracy and Development (IPADE), also denied accreditation since 2008, put the figure more conservatively at 54.5%. In the “Speaking Out” article in this issue, IPADE Executive Director Mauricio Zúñiga offers five reasons why abstention could actually win for the first time in our electoral history. Four of them are the mounting distrust of the CSE as electoral arbiter, the split and weakened opposition, the near imperceptibility of the campaign and, of course, the traditionally lower turnout in municipal elections compared to presidential ones.

The fifth reason suggested by Zúñiga—discontent over the presidential couple’s handpicking of FSLN candidates—would have particularly affected FSLN militants and sympathizers. How much of the abstention came from that quarter is one of the most politically significant issues that should be coaxed out of these election results. While doing so is virtually impossible, the public and ultimately fruitless protest over the handpicking in over 40 municipalities may have combined with the FSLN’s smug certainty of victory, which freed Sandinistas from feeling that their vote mattered. That same certainty in 1990 led some Sandinistas to register their disgruntlement over certain issues at the time by voting for one of the opposition candidates, thus unintentionally contributing to Violeta Chamorro’s upset victory that year. If it didn’t make them cast a punishment vote for the opposition this time around, it very well may have led them to stay home.

“A party secret”

The top-down imposition of these mayoral candidates—most of whom were those allegedly “given” the office in questioned municipalities last time and were now being accused of corruption or poor administration—and of Municipal Council slates sparked rancor in the party ranks the minute the names were made known. “It was all done as a party secret and who the FSLN had registered as candidates only began to come out in timid assemblies and meetings of close supporters and public employees,” wrote one disenchanted historical FSLN collaborator after the elections.

On a Sunday three weeks earlier the FSLN spent significant resources to hold “simulated” elections among its sympathizers all over the country. According to First Lady Rosario Murillo, also the party/government’s citizenship and communication coordinator, it was done to verify the party’s political/electoral network and “verify that we’re ready.” The turnout was reportedly “light” that day as well.

Others suggest that turnout wasn’t all that critical, that the more important objective was to pre-mark ballots that would be stuffed into the real ballot boxes on November 4. If so, it was a brand new trick.

One way or another, in all of the 40 municipalities with disputed handpicked candidates, those candidates won. Who would have guessed?

A victory foretold

Nobody doubted that the FSLN would win, and the party predicted it on the nose well ahead of time, with some of its spokespeople saying “We’ll win more than 130 mayoral seats.” “We have to win at least 90% of the 153 municipalities,” wrote others. “Over 80% of the population will vote for the People-mayor,” enthused a priest allied to the FSLN days before November 4.

In the end, the FSLN won all but one of the 16 municipalities that are also departmental capitals. The exception was Puerto Cabezas, which is where Bilwi, capital of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, is located. It was won by Yatama, the largely Miskitu indigenous party on the Caribbean Coast that has run in alliance with the FSLN in recent elections but decided to go it alone again this year. Yatama also won Prinzapolka and Waspám in that same region, both of which have a mainly Miskitu population. Its victories suited the FSLN, because they buttressed the ever more criticized Brooklyn Rivera, who has managed to hang on to his leadership of Yatama since its formation as a direct heir of Misurasata 23 years ago.

The FSLN proclaimed itself the winner of all municipalities in 9 of the country’s 16 departments: Chinandega’s 13, Estelí’s 6, Carazo’s 8, Río San Juan’s 6, León’s 10, Granada’s 4, Madriz’s 8, Masaya’s 8 and Rivas’s 10.

Once the results were known, Rosario Murillo thanked everyone in a long message in her customary style, from which we extract only a fragment: “Thank you sisters and brothers, we assure you that we are, as I never tire of saying, very moved, but in addition to moved we are full of profound responsibility because it falls to us to continue producing the Feats, opting for the Miracles that reproduce themselves in this Blessed and Free Homeland, because we try to live God’s Will with Humility.”

By hook…
and by crook

In the governing party’s determination to sweep the municipal elections by hook or by crook, perhaps its most novel political decision was to move into what’s known as the “contra corridor,” whose municipalities are historically Liberal and up to now died-in-the-wool anti-Ortega turf, never governed even once by the FSLN. It was in those territories—which most directly experienced the war of the eighties—that the PLI also decided to invest its best effort and its limited resources.

The PLI announced that it thought it could win all the mayoral seats in that corridor, but it fell well short, at least in part because the PLC concentrated what was left of its exhausted energies in some of those same municipalities, winning three of them and splitting the Liberal vote and effectively handing the municipality to the FSLN in some others. Whether for that reason or for less legitimate ones, the CSE declared the FSLN the winner in such emblematic Liberal municipalities in “contra country” as El Cuá, San Rafael del Norte and Yalí in Jinotega; Rancho Grande and Matiguás in Matagalpa; El Coral, El Rama and Nueva Guinea in Chontales and El Almendro in Río San Juan. Outside of the corridor it also assigned the FSLN other historically Liberal mayoral seats, including San Nicolás and La Trinidad in Estelí. The governing party was already crowing about several of these victories on the morning of November 4, before voters had even gone to the polls: “When the FSLN wins in Nueva Guinea or La Trinidad, we’ll see if the opposition democratically accepts its defeat.” The PLC in fact challenged the results in Nueva Guinea and the PLI did so in 12 other municipalities.

The FSLN will probably invest a lot of resources into the municipal governments from which the Liberals have now been ousted, but it’s also foreseeable that its “muscling in” to those territories will trigger conflicts. “They’re playing with fire,” warned one former contra. Only time will tell which will weigh more: longstanding anti-Sandinista sentiments or zinc roofing and hens.

Nueva Guinea was “the
best-documented fraud”

Disagreement with the results sparked violence in some of those traditionally Liberal strongholds in the days following the elections. Matiguás was militarized for days, and Liberal sympathizers in San Nicolás torched the mayor’s offices. A young FSLN sympathizer was killed in El Jícaro, while in Ciudad Darío two residents died, more than a dozen were wounded and a string of arrests were made.

Nueva Guinea, a municipality on the western edge of the South Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAS), was also militarized after the elections, following charges of fraud reminiscent of the 2008 elections. The CSE awarded the mayoral victory to the FSLN there even though the sum of all the copies of the vote tallies issued to opposition monitors reportedly showed a difference of more than 3,000 votes in favor of the PLC.

Nueva Guinea was born in 1965 as a tight-knit settlement of largely Baptist migrants from the Pacific region, and grew significantly with the resettling of peasants ousted from their land in León by the 1971 eruption of the Cerro Negro volcano and subsequent assistance from the Somoza government. It acquired municipal status in 1981, during the revolutionary years, but has a history of rejecting the FSLN that dates back as far as its struggle against Somoza. Today it is one of the most developed municipalities in the RAAS.

“Will the FSLN accept a loss in Nueva Guinea?” asked E&T director Roberto Courtney rhetorically on November 3. “No matter how well things go for it in other places, there are some, like Nueva Guinea, in which fraud is the only way it will get there.” Afterward Courtney defined the way the FSLN “got there” in that municipality as the “best documented fraud” of these elections.

Both the Police and
the Army moved in

In all the outbreaks of post-electoral violence, the police riot squads gave unmistakable support to the FSLN sympathizers celebrating in the street or battling it out with their angry adversaries. In key places the riot police tested out their operations in public parks before election day. The Army also showed up beforehand in the most conflictive areas and patrolled with weapons of war. Some residents reported that “they say it’s to make us feel safe, but what they really want is to intimidate us.”

In addition, Army and Police contingents were brought in to vote in a number of the most disputed municipalities. While uniformed personnel are allowed by law to vote where they happen to be stationed, bringing in such sizable numbers just to vote can significantly alter the results of tables known to always vote anti-Sandinista.

Armed groups
with political aims?

We should bear in mind that there reports of some organized armed groups already challenging the central government in those contra corridor municipalities where the FSLN will be taking office as a local authority next January, including the mining triangle of Siuna, Bonanza and Rosita and areas of the Caribbean.

For some years now Juan Abelardo Mata, the bishop of Estelí, has been stating publicly that politically motivated armed groups are operating in various points of his northern Nicaraguan diocese. Both the Army and the Police have repeatedly denied this description, saying that they are simply criminal bands. Days before the elections, the archbishop of Managua, who has been backing Mata’s declarations since 2009, did so again, explaining that the bishops know about this reality because they are citizens of those places and are “privately” informed. Silvo Báez, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, seconded the archbishop’s assertion: “I trust the word of my brother [Mata] and, like him, regret that this exists. The path of violence is never the solution to social problems.”

Virtually no analysis of Nicaragua’s current political situation—in which the pivotal issue is invariably the concentration of power in the hands of Ortega and his group—fails to mention that the option of violence is gaining dangerous currency in the hearts and minds of those who disagree with the current government’s course. These are people who know their way around weapons and still have a vivid memory of the war of the eighties.

The message of
the abstention

Naturally, the widespread abstention favored the FSLN, allowing it to win with a wider margin. In almost the whole of the country’s Pacific region and in various departmental capitals in the northern and central parts, it was of little matter that the PLI charged out to “defend the vote,” because there wasn’t much to defend.

In that regard, the abstention wasn’t just a rejection of the FSLN-dominated CSE. It was also a message to both Liberal parties for deciding to run in elections that from the first moment lacked even minimum guarantees of transparency. Right up to the end PLI leader Eduardo Montealegre had insisted he was seeing “enthusiasm” to vote and the only thing missing was financing. “In this campaign,” he said, “we’ve only invested a fifth of what we spent in 2008.” Perhaps the reason business leaders with the money to finance campaigns didn’t do so this time is because the political situation under the FSLN doesn’t worry them enough. E&T’s Roberto Courtney explained the subdued, null or imperceptible campaigns characterizing these elections differently: “Some didn’t [campaign] because they don’t need to and others because they knew it was useless.”

Voters turned into “crazy mice”

Only in certain rural municipalities where the population perceived that there was competition did they enthusiastically turn out to vote for what they wanted… or at least against what they didn’t want. Not surprisingly, those were the very places where most of the irregularities at which the CSE has become expert were reported. According to E&T, at least 60 “irregularities” were practiced that could have altered the results to a greater or lesser degree.

One of the irregularities most commonly denounced was changing the voting place of important numbers of voters selected in advance for their known political preference. On election day they were turned away from their normal voting table because their name wasn’t on its roll, and were sent scurrying off to far-away places if they wanted to exercise their right to vote (known popularly as the “crazy mouse” tactic). It’s impossible to calculate the degree to which that affected the results because while Liberal monitors have all the tallies from the voting tables, many of these voters never managed to vote anywhere.

The clearest use of the “crazy mice” tactic was in Nueva Guinea, where Denis Obando, the popular PLC candidate for mayor, alleged that the tactic was applied to thousands of voters, who were sent as far away as other municipalities to vote. Despite that maneuver, Obando allegedly won by hook… and the FSLN by crook, as mentioned above.

And the clearest overturning of that tactic occurred in the small municipality of San José de los Remates in the department of Boaco, where Fabricio Cajina, the PLI’s well liked mayoral candidate, won 71% of the votes with 95% participation because supporters made prodigious efforts with all manner of vehicles to get voters from one side of the municipality to the other until they managed to find their name on some roll and were able to vote.

The observers

In an attempt to legitimize these elections, President Ortega personally invited the Organization of American States (OAS) in August to “accompany” them, and ordered that all doors be opened to them. Its mission, which was to have included 65 people, shrank to 25 due to “lack of resources.” Upon arriving in Managua, the mission chief let it be understood that OAS member countries hadn’t wanted to invest in this initiative.

The post-electoral OAS report insipidly noted that there was no violence on election day…and of course the mission didn’t “accompany” the violence that happened afterward. It also repeated the recommendations its mission had made to the government in 2011, which the CSE had ignored.

Three days before the elections, US Ambassador Phyllis Powers announced she had requested accreditation for electoral observers from the Embassy and as the CSE had not responded, they would observe from the streets. Forty-eight hours later, the Foreign Ministry and the CSE met with the diplomatic corps, offering to accredit any international mission officials who requested it.

United States:
“Disquieting practices”

US Embassy officials observed on the ground. Less than 24 hours after the polls had closed, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland issued this press statement: “The U.S. government is concerned that the municipal elections conducted Sunday, November 4, in Nicaragua failed to demonstrate a degree of transparency that would assure Nicaraguans and the international community that the process faithfully reflected the will of the Nicaraguan people.

“There have been widespread complaints about the partisan manner in which Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council managed the process in the run-up to and on Election Day to the advantage of the ruling party. Irregularities observed on election day included citizens being denied the right to vote, a failure to respect the secrecy of citizens’ votes, and reported cases of voters being allowed to vote multiple times. These disturbing practices have marred multiple recent Nicaraguan elections.

“We again urge the Government of Nicaragua to implement the recommendations the European Union and Organization of American States electoral observation missions made in the wake of the controversial 2011 national elections, and to uphold its commitment to representative democracy under the OAS Charter and the Inter-American Democratic Charter.”

Ambassador Powers herself commented that the Embassy teams had seen some people voting two and three times. To be sure no one missed the point, she added, “That means that there was probably fraud.”

Nicaragua was the loser again

As we said in these pages following the fraudulent results reported in the 2008 municipal elections, and reiterated when it happened again in the 2011 general elections, Nicaragua was the big loser this time as well. It’s no less regrettable because it was an outcome foretold, and no less worrying because the results were predictable or even largely what they would have been without all the games. The problem is that Daniel Ortega and his group today have absolute or near absolute power and are using it abusively.

They have an absolute majority in the legislative branch; total control of the judicial, electoral and executive branches;, increasing control in the National Police and the Army; an accumulation of economic power that is mounting daily; a close alliance with the country’s business elite; and now 25 more municipal governments than before. The Nicaraguan population not governed by FSLN-run local authorities is dwindling drastically.

Shortly before the elections, John Booth, a researcher and political science professor at North Texas University who has followed Nicaragua for many years, came to Managua to present a study he has done of its political culture. Recollecting an earlier experience living in Mexico learning how its Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) functioned, he made the following comment: “It seemed a democratic system, but there was a control and penetration by the PRI in all spheres of the country. I see the FSLN moving toward the PRI, although it has yet to reach that level.” At least the PRI alternated its presidential candidate; in Nicaragua, Ortega has already proclaimed himself a candidate for reelection in 2016, having run in every election since 1984.

The electoral casualties

Two elements essential to making democracy function that were already giving signs of being seriously eroded took a major turn for the worse this November. One is electoral faith and the other municipal autonomy.

Nicaragua is one of the Latin American countries that once had the healthiest “electoral faith.” After the farces organized by Somoza, the “faith in arms” was proven with the overthrow of the family dictatorship. But the elections of 1984, which were the first trial run of the new system, and 1990, which were a crucial test run of the new willingness to allow power to change hands democratically, proved to the population that the electoral path is the best way to resolve political conflicts.

That faith, with the ups and downs that afflict all genuine faith when confronted with reasonable doubt, survived election after election until 2008. Even those Sandinistas convinced by their leaders that they only lost the 1996 elections because of fraud continued to participate energetically in the electoral process, contributing to the high participation rate that demonstrated that faith. Even in 2006, despite rumors that Daniel Ortega only got the 38% of the vote he needed to win the presidency in a first round because the CSE failed to report some 8% of the country’s polling places, the vast majority of the population continued to trust the system. But that faith began to surrender to the doubts in 2008; the doubts overwhelmed the faith in 2011; and this year faith appears to be on its deathbed.

Interpreting this year’s higher-than-normal abstention as apathy is misleading and unfair. Not going to vote was a conscious decision for many people, a NO born of awareness. And as such it is a warning signal that needs to be heeded. The electoral rite, the electoral dogma, the electoral mediator, in other words all the components of electoral faith, have stopped making sense for a broad segment of the population.

The other casualty is municipal autonomy, which has been eroding since 2007 when, step by step, the FSLN political secretaries and the Councils and Cabinets of Citizens’ Power began converting the municipalities into extensions of the central government. The municipalities and their local governments began to act in its name, prioritizing the execution of national plans.

The case of Managua, where nearly a quarter of the population lives, is one of the most evident. Municipal expert Manuel Ortega Hegg says that “the Managua municipal government has become irrelevant. Managua has been turned into just one more central government ministry.” Giving the situation a more positive spin, Silvio Prado, another expert in municipal affairs, is counting on the new blow to autonomy in these elections to re-politicize the municipal governments as awareness of the importance of local power grows.

Will Chávez and Obama
be the same as before?

The three electoral uncertainties of this year all turned out favorably for the FSLN in the short run. Ortega has now accumulated all the power this impoverished country can offer him, while the elections in Venezuela and the United States were won by Chávez and Obama, respectively.

Nonetheless, President Chávez is still seriously ill and not the same as he was in his previous election. After celebrating Chávez’s electoral victory, Nicaragua’s big business leaders in the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) insisted on the need to “regularize” the trade relations between Nicaragua and Venezuela, which have been reporting major earnings for them for years. Venezuela is today the second largest market for Nicaraguan exports, behind the United States. Cairo Amador, president of the Chamber of Industries, which is a member of COSEP, is concerned because the two governments are defining the rules, so he is advocating an agreement that “guarantees the fluidity and continuity of trade relations for when the current government changes,” diplomatically defining that time as “within five, ten or twenty years.” COSEP president José Adán Aguerri recognized that signing a free trade agreement with Venezuela would be difficult due to the negative political connotation this concept has for Ortega and Chávez. So he basically proposed something similar but under another name: “a fair trade agreement.” Like Amador, Aguerri considers it necessary to formalize these trade relations “so they don’t depend on the health of two individuals.”

There are also no guarantees that Obama will be the same in his second term. His win may have been a relief to Ortega, but it’s much more positive than that for Nicaragua. A victory by Romney would have encouraged the age-old and well rooted idea in the mind of a sector of the Nicaraguan opposition that the solution to national problems must come from outside, especially from the power of the North. This has had disastrous consequences in Nicaraguan history, the most recent example being the war of the eighties.

Ortega’s own relief will be neither complete nor lasting, as the above-mentioned State Department statement suggests. Ambassador Powers’ post-election declarations, emphasizing that US aid will henceforward concentrate on “supporting the Nicaraguan people, especially in their struggle to have strong and democratic institutions,” is another sign.

The closing of political spaces in Nicaragua has been an issue on both the Republic and Democratic agendas for some time now. And the fact that Obama owes a large part of his victory to the Latino vote could give Latin America’s problems more visibility on the reelected President’s agenda, unlike the benign disinterest he showed in his first term and in his campaign.

Ortega’s path is uncertain

Less visible but every bit as real if not more so will be the issue of the advance of drug trafficking in the region, Nicaragua included. During Obama’s second term it’s more than likely that the United States will no longer be satisfied with Nicaragua simply continuing to proclaim itself a “retaining wall” against drug trafficking in Central America and pulling off spectacular drug busts from time to time.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department know better than anyone that Nicaragua’s retaining wall is full of cracks; they also know the institutional complicities being hidden in Nicaragua with increasing difficulty. And they know that the continued advance of drug trafficking could destabilize such an institutionally fragile country. This could force Ortega onto a path with no shortage of uncertainties dictated by political twists and turns in the North.

The opposition’s path is long

The opposition—which some consciously abstained from voting for and others equally consciously cast their vote for trusting that this time it could win—also has a long path ahead if it is ever to recover the electors’ faith in it and rescue municipal autonomy, assuming those elements are truly important to it. Like the Republicans in the United States, the fractioned Liberal parties in Nicaragua have to reinvent themselves following serious electoral losses.

Even some Republican analysts blame their party’s upset in the November 6 US elections on having lost touch with the country’s demographics: the “angry middle-aged, well-off white man” is no longer a winning constituency yet the Republicans had little to offer anybody else. Nicaraguan Liberalism also seems to have little to offer the real nation, although it has been so long since Liberal candidates have presented any sort of full-blown program that it’s hard to know what they think Nicaragua’s demographics even are.

For both Nicaragua’s opposition and many ruling party officials, the race for personal power has replaced the concept of serving the nation, addressing people’s real problems, governing with social justice or being any kind of ethical standard-bearer. The country has walked a long hard road between the eighties, with its revolutionary mystique of honesty, exemplary behavior, hope in the future, sacrifice and collective solutions, and today, in which the cynical motto of many of our public figures is “good guys finish last.”

Nonetheless, we need to remember that the near-dead can be revived and even those who died unjustly can be resurrected. We must maintain that faith, and harness and organize that hope. It won’t be a short or easy task, but it’s one in which abstention sends no valuable message.

A Novel “irregularity”:“Phantom candidates”

It was common in previous elections for the voter rolls to include the names of deceased individuals both because the rolls haven’t been cleaned in years and because in many areas families aren’t accustomed to registering deaths. But in this year’s elections, something quite unprecedented occurred: dead people, emigrants who have been living abroad for years and people who were never even consulted ended up on the Municipal Council candidate slates of the three tiny parties (APRE, ALN and PC) that ran in a tacit alliance with the FSLN.

The recent reforms to the Municipalities Law quadrupled the number of Municipal Council members and their alternates to some 12,000 people, which these parties couldn’t possibly come up with. The PLI discovered some 200 deceased candidates on those parties’ lists, dubbing them “phantom candidates.”

While the CSE has disqualified far larger genuinely opposition parties for allegedly having incomplete candidate lists or party structures , the electoral magistrates declared this time that they didn’t have the capacity to sanction these parties when cases started appearing in the media and charges were filed. “It’s not our legal faculty to investigate whether they are in heaven or on earth, whether they exist or not,” said José Luis Villavicencio, an FSLN magistrate, whose arguments were echoed by the Public Ministry’s electoral prosecutor.

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