NICARAGUA VOTES TODAY

Nicaraguans line up to cast their ballots in Managua this Sunday morning
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

Today is the big decision day in Nicaragua, the presidential election.

Three major candidates are vying for the presidency, along with two minors. The outcome in the hotly contested race in this nation of 5.4 million could be very fateful indeed. Will a hardcore Marxist aligned to Hugo Chavez win? Or will a free trader? If no one manages to get 35% of the vote and five points ahead of his nearest rival, there will be a runoff. That setup is where the problem lies, but first, a look at the candidates:

PLC Candidate Jose Rizo
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

First, there’s PLC party candidate Jose Rizo, a tough rightwinger who favors free trade and foreign investment. He’s friends with the coffee growers and said to be affiliated with the corruption-plagued Aleman administration a few years back, which was thrown out in disgrace. His appeal resembles that of Roberto d’Aubisson of neighboring El Salvador’s ARENA party way back in the ’80s – d’Aubisson had associations with so-called death-squads, which were retaliatory killers who sought to retrieve land expropriated from farmers in so-called ‘land reforms’ by the socialist, U.S.-backed government of Jose Napoleon Duarte, while Marxist, Cuban-backed rebels of the FMLN swirled all around, killing both Duarte’s people and D’Aubisson’s for the sake of Castro and Lenin. A seriously miserable situation all around. He’s the rightwing guy and he’s backed by Oliver North, who actually went down there and campaigned for him, which, believe it or not, is legal to do. Rizo’s also trailing in the polls, with only about 15% support, although North and his backers say those polls are wrong.

ALN-PC candidate Eduardo Montealegre
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

Second, we have ALN-PC party candidate Eduardo Montealegre, a center-rightist. He favors free trade and foreign investment. He also favors remittances from Nicaraguans abroad, often illegal immigrants in the U.S., making his stance roughly similar to that of Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Vicente Fox. He’s Mister Clean on the corruption question and he’s got a higher lead in the polls than Rizo, with about 20% of the voters. He also is supposedly backed by the U.S. administration, but I have yet to see one shred of evidence for that. The State Department’s official position is to favor any winner so long as the vote is democratic, and they’ve kept their mouths shut on every single election in Latin America all year. I do not believe the charges about the U.S. supposedly backing Montealegre, send me proof if you know otherwise. If Montealegre were to win, he’d put Nicaragua in line with virtually all the other Central American governments, which lean-center-right, love remittances, love free-trade, love the U.S., have many nationals working in the U.S. and are wary of Hugo Chavez. In my opinion, it would be natural if he won, because he reflects the Central American zeitgeist. One last interesting thing I have noticed about him – his babe quotient, the number of comely young women hanging around at his rallies, is high, higher than any of the others, to judge by news photos.

Minor candidates: MRS’s Edmundo Jarquin and AC’s Eden Pastora (with Oliver North)
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

There are two minor candidates running too – one is Edmundo Jarquin from a leftist faction that broke from the Marxist Sandinistas to set up and sell their own brand of Marxism, and the other is ex-Contra flipflopper Eden Pastora whose side in that Contra War of the 1980s was never clear. The only thing that was clear about him was that he bought a nice farm in northern Costa Rica.

FMLN candidate Daniel Ortega and his common-law wife Rosario Murillo, whom he finally got around to marrying in 2005 as his presidential campaign kicked off
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

That leaves the third major contender, former Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega, as odious and deceptive a thug as any you will find in Latin America. He makes my blood boil. He represents the same old FMLN party whose graffiti uglied up San Francisco, California, when I was a college student. Ortega took Cuban support to set up a confiscating, expropriating Marxist regime in the Americas, turning Nicaragua into a beachhead to spread Marxist “revolution” at the point of a gun through the Americas. In fact, Ortega’s been involved with Castro’s Cuba, deep, for most of his life. Ronald Reagan would not stand for it, and as refugees from communism swelled the Honduran border, people seeking freedom from communism, in vast tent encampments, the reason got clearer. Those huge vast refugee camps on the Honduran border shocked people in that era because no one know that communism was so hated by the poor. In those days, everyone thought poor people loved communism.

Meanwhile, a ten-year violent civil war followed from those tent encampments. It was truly horrible. Reagan wanted to save the Nicaraguans at all costs, so when the leftist U.S. congress cut these Nicaraguans loose and ran, abandoning them to their communist fate, some of Reagan’s men made a disgusting deal with the ayatollahs to get them to ship weapons to Nicaragua to arm the starving Contras. Bad as the ayatollahs were, they did hate the atheistic Soviets more than they hated us, thus that unsavory deal. Oliver North was involved in it – in fact, I think he dreamed it up – and was fired for his role, which though it had good intentions, was illegal.

Amid all this, Ortega was busy building reeducation camps to force Nicaraguans into communist ideology, and murdering those who resisted. Some of those who resisted were east coast Indians, known as Miskitos, who were forced on a long march to communism by Ortega, where many died. Ortega has recently been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for that little typical deed of communism.

Ortega was cast out by Nicaraguan voters in 1990, when Nicaraguans, in an astounding rebuke to pollsters, voted for freedom and Violeta Chamorro over the thuggish, confiscating Ortega. Bitter, Ortega vowed to ‘govern from below’ not giving up power and on his way out, did something called ‘the pinata‘ where he shook down all of Nicaragua for confiscation and robbed the country blind. To this day, he lives in a house he confiscated from others – his ex-Contra running mate, in fact, but there are many many more properties ripped off by Ortega besides that.

He stayed in the shadows for a short time and ran for president in 1996 and 2001, losing both times, mainly over that ‘pinata.’

But he never stopped governing from below. Over the years, he retained control of the courts, the bureaucracy and plenty of people in the legislature, enough to get them all to rewrite the electoral rules to enable him to win with just 35% of the vote, something that would serve him fine if he ran again with the opposition badly split, which it is. He made an alliance from hell with the corrupt Aleman people, anxious to avoid corruption charges and knowing Ortega would ensure that little favor if he had their support. Then he hooked up with the man of his dreams, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who shipped cheap oil to Nicaraguan mayors aligned with Ortega, bribing people for votes.

That’s what we are facing today – an Ortega victory with 35% of the vote. It is absolutely tragic that the opposition could not unite somehow before this coming fiasco, an Ortega back in power with just 35% of the vote!

Stratfor is doubtful that Ortega can pull it off and I hope to god they are right. If they can’t, Nicaragua, already the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere behind Haiti, stands to become the first-poorest. There will be no free trade agreement. There probably won’t be remittances. Trade with the U.S. will end and “trade” with Venezuela and Cuba will begin. Cuban doctors will be all over the place. There will be no coming canal to rival Panama’s because no one will invest under those conditions. There will be no foreign investment – who would invest with a guy like Ortega at the helm, with his fondness for taking things that don’t belong to him? Something that started since his bank-robber days in 1967.

Ortega says he’s a changed man since his Sandinista-dictator days but I do not believe him. He hasn’t returned any of the property he stole, for one thing. But more important, I remember in the late-70s when he said he wouldn’t turn Nicaragua into a Marxist hellhole and he lied through his teeth to fool gullible liberals. He cannot be believed. He is in bed with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro as always and has lied before and will lie again.

But if he gets in, the trails of Sandalistas and adoring congressmen from New England like Bill Delahunt and Chris Dodd flying in for pilgrimages will begin anew, putting us all in for the loathesome spectacle of ‘a new communism’ and ‘a truly different communism’ that never has failed to turn out to be the same old communism that laid the Soviet empire low and triggered the great Velvet Revolutions of democracy in 1989. I hope that Nicaragua doesn’t have to go through decades of communism before its democracy can be restored.

The Tally

Nicaragua’s electoral authority, El Consejo Supremo Electoral, can be watched for results here.

Polls close in three hours, so ( ;D ) help yourself to a cup of Contra Cafe here:

Wake Up With Freedom Fighters!
Source: Tom McMahon

Try their new Venezuela Freedom Blend :)

Blog and News Roundup

Hunnapah, a blog from El Salvador, reprints a Salvadoran editorial in Spanish, weeping for poor Nicaragua, “those masochists,” it notes, describing all that Nicaragua is going to lose if Daniel Ortega retakes power. It’s so good I will try to translate it later if I have any time. Read it here.

Wikipedia has an excellent roundup of all the facts on the ground and some great maps at this site here.

Der Speigel has an excellent, easy to read backgrounder on Daniel Ortega and all his foibles, the best part at the end where all his Sandinista buddies trash him. Read it here.

Dr. Roy of Dr. Roy’s Thoughts has additional background on Daniel Ortega’s sudden transformation into a social democrat and explains why he’s skeptical in this post here.

Erwin at the left-leaning Latin Americanist blog has quite a few news links and a few darts at the U.S. conservatives for dreading this possible specter of Ortega here.

If you can read Spanish, La Prensa, the newspaper Daniel Ortega tried to shut down, and whose owner, widowed Violeta Chamorro, defeated Ortega for presidency in 1990, has some kind of live coverage of the election, it looks like podcasting here.

El Nuevo Diario has a chart of all the candidates and will be adding in their tallies as the votes come in. It’s a must-see for the earliest results here.

Edwin Sanchez at El NUEblog Diario has a Nov. 3 chart showing how Daniel Ortega outspent all his rivals in this post here.

Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who knows her stuff on Nicaragua, has an insightful column based on an interview with Eduardo Montealegre here.

Amy Ridenour of the National Center blog has an excellent item on the consequences of an Ortega victory and tons of links on the infighting and pleading going on in Washington over this. It’s a must-read here.

Via Global Voices, Tim at Costa Rica Blog has a tightly summarized description of the election, saying that young voters will be critical in this election. Now, as you can see from this photo show here, that’s an interesting thing because nearly all these photos depict old people. When I saw it, I thought maybe there were just old people because all the young talent in the country has fled to the U.S. to wash dishes in restaurants as illegal immigrants. Apparently not. Although expats can vote in this, the observation does raise the question of whether the mainstream media is getting the whole story. Read it here.

Political Scientist Steven Taylor at PoliBlogger observes that if Ortega wins, that other pair, Rizo and Montealegre will have wished they united and the rest of us will then focus on what Ortega II, The Sequel looks like outside the context of the Cold War. He has lots of interesting chatter with his students, too. Read it all here.

Here’s one I shouldn’t have missed. Randy Paul, at Beautiful Horizons, a left blog, has the SAME opinion of Daniel Ortega as I do. His description of why he does is just beautiful. Read it here.

***

With Love In Their Eyes: Jimmy Carter reunites with his old friend Daniel Ortega
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Canada

Definitely more than I can handle!

RESULTS

There’s one hour left before the polls close and the counting begins and El Nuevo Diario has the best live coverage. Check out the news crawl at the top of its page, the moving words, that tells us the freshest information. What do I see?

They’ve begun closing the polling stations … Edmundo Jarquin met with Jimmy Carter, who is observing the election … His MRS party charged the FSLN with cheating … electrical problems in Leon and the far north … Nueva Segovia was drenched with rain … In Bluefields (Miskito territory) electoral silence was viollated (somebody must have illegally campaigned) …. thousands voted in Chinandega … Armed thugs intimidated voters in Condega … Puerto Cabezas was without light … Rizo will recognize whatever result … Nicaraguan expats vote in El Salvador and Honduras … Pot was found at a polling station in Managua … People denounced illegal campaigning by the FSLN in San Jose … Voting calm in Leon … Long lines in Rio San Juan … Huge turnout in Bilwe … President Bolanos votes …

UPDATE: There may be some bad stuff going on. El Nuevo Diario reports that people have been detained at voting stations and accusations between liberal parties and Ortega’s men have been traded over illegal campaigning in Bluefields. No poll results are up yet and there are lots of power and energy shortages reported around the country. Now, the U.S. ambassador is denouncing irregularities, this could shape up into lots of electoral trouble. Not sure if it will affect the result but keep eyes open, there’s some suspense now on top of just the question of who will win.

UPDATE: Washington Post is reporting that all is going smoothly. Maybe so. But the story was no doubt written and filed before these new developments cited in the Nicaraguan press, so I’ll keep an open mind. No results so far, the results are expected around early Monday at this writing.

UPDATE: Ortega has won, with 38% of the votes. Oh what a result!

UPDATE: A U.S. Congressman is calling for an end to illegal immigrant remittances sent to Nicaragua as a response to Ortega’s election. Read it at DriveThruPolitics here.