<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110385177955609000,00.html>
The Wall Street Journal
December 24, 2004
THE AMERICAS
Chavez's Tyranny
Emboldens Nicaragua's Ortega
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
December 24, 2004; Page A11
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev famously boasted that he had prevailed in
the nuclear showdown with John F. Kennedy that ensured the Cuban
dictatorship. "We achieved, I would say, a spectacular success without
having to fire a single shot." That was perhaps true but the financial cost
of trying to compete with a more powerful America 25 years later drove
Russia's totalitarian dreams into the ground.
Poor Nikita must be tumbling in his tomb with regret these days as
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez shows the world how authoritarian power can be
seized on the cheap and even with the State Department's endorsement, as we
saw after Chavez staved off a recall through highly suspicious
vote-counting maneuvers.
The lesson has not been lost on other power hungry politicians elsewhere in
Latin America who, like Chavez, find institutional checks and balances
inconvenient. One example is in Ecuador, where the president has just fired
most of the Supreme Court. And the Sandinistas are at it again in Nicaragua
where a fragile democracy could meet its end in the coming weeks through a
Chavez-style constitutional coup.
Not surprisingly, a Soviet favorite from the Cold War, Sandinista Daniel
Ortega is at the heart of the problem. Helping him consolidate his power is
a notoriously corrupt ex-president from across the aisle, Arnoldo Alemán,
and his congressional Liberal Party loyalists.
Throughout the 1980s, Ortega's band of revolutionaries ruled the country
with an iron fist. In the Sept. 23, 1996, issue of the New Yorker magazine,
Paul Berman eloquently described repression under the communists: "Women
from the poorest families balanced canastas filled with fruit or grains on
their heads and went to market, exactly as they always had and the
Sandinistas police raided the rural buses and arrested the women as
speculators."
Sandinista abuse of the indigenous peoples brought about the famous
"contra" affair, in which the Reagan administration set about to aid
Nicaraguans fighting a guerrilla war against the communists. In "When
AK-47s Fall Silent," edited by Timothy C. Brown, one Atlantic coast witness
wrote of the great divide between what the Sandinistas had promised the
Indians and what they delivered. The Communist-Marxist government was
"principally committed to defending the interests of the senior
commandantes of the Sandinista movement and dedicated to promoting the
interest of international communism," writes Salomón Osorno Coleman. "We
fled [to Honduras] because of the unyielding persecution of my people by
the Sandinsta state security and their repression of all the indigenous
peoples of the Mosquitia."
When Nicaraguans were finally given the chance to vote in 1990, they
rejected Ortega. Yet he wasn't about to step aside. Instead, he promised
his followers that the Sandinistas would continue to rule from the bottom
up. President Violeta Chamorro gave him some help with this by letting the
Sandinistas keep control of the military, ostensibly as an olive branch.
Sandinista commandantes also kept hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
properties and businesses they had confiscated for themselves. Sandinista
judges were also allowed to remain in the courts, which of course made the
evolution of an independent, property-rights oriented judiciary impossible.
Still, Ortega might have been kept in check if not for the corruption in
the Liberal Party. It seems Alemán, who came to power in 1996, wasn't about
to let the commandantes have all the fun. Some argue that to compete with
the enriched Sandies he needed money. Whatever the motivation, his later
trials on corruption charges brought forth allegations that he had diverted
millions of dollars from government coffers and it is doubtful that some
party cohorts weren't involved.
In 1999, Alemán forged a power-sharing deal with Ortega that granted both
men lifetime congressional seats and immunity from prosecution. They also
divided up the seats on the electoral council, the Supreme Court and the
government's fiscal oversight agency and then rewrote election law to make
it difficult for other parties to get into congress. When one Sandinista
took up his new seat on the bench, after the reform, he announced publicly
that he was in the court to defend the interests of his party.
With so much power -- not to mention money -- in Alemán's hands, it's easy
to see why President Enrique Bolaños's decision to bring the oversized
party boss to justice has been unpopular among Liberal loyalists. Indeed,
it is amazing that Mr. Bolaños was able to strip Alemán of his immunity and
win two convictions against him. But Alemán went to jail still wielding
enormous power in the party. If you believe his critics it's because the
graft was not his alone. He also seemed aware of the potential of Ortega's
38 congressional members and the Sandinistas on the supreme court.
This brings us to the coup underway: Congressional Liberals and the
Sandinistas have approved, on a first-round vote, a constitution change
that if approved on a second-round vote, will strip Mr. Bolaños of power.
The measure grants congress new confirmation powers as well as the
authority to fire cabinet ministers and ambassadors. It explicitly states
that the goal is to elevate the legislature above the executive but it
makes Nicaragua neither a parliamentary nor presidential system. "They are
picking what they want from every different political system and creating a
monster," says Eduardo Enriquez, managing editor of Nicaragua's La Prensa.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the court has overturned one of Aleman's
convictions and the other is pending, leaving many to conclude that Ortega
is letting Liberal corruption slide by in return for Liberal support in
destroying executive power. Disgust among the Liberal's constituency
explains the shockingly low turnout of 44% in municipal elections last
month and the good performance of Ortega's party.
Now Ortega is feeling his oats. One example: Mr. Bolaños had told the U.S.
he would destroy the military's large collection of Soviet-made
surface-to-air missiles. But with the job only partly done, the congress
has put a stop to it, announcing that the executive doesn't have the power
to carry out his promise. It is a good indication of where the country is
headed if the unelected Ortega is able to destroy the office of the
president.
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The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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