Nicaragua: The right result..

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Getting the right result

Nicaragua's election showed the US still won't allow a free vote

Duncan Campbell
Wednesday November 7, 2001
The Guardian

During a recent television discussion in the United States chaired by
veteran presenter Barbara Walters, the subject for discussion was the new
national puzzle: why they hate us. The reason, suggested Karen Hughes,
President Bush's special counsellor and his senior press officer during his
election campaign, was that "they hate us because we elect our leaders".
Voters in Nicaragua, queuing at the polls last Sunday to elect a new
government, might have been forgiven a wry smile on hearing those words.
While the United States government radar may seem to have been pointed in
the direction of Afghanistan and the Middle East, the state department and
many American politicians and officials still found time over the last few
weeks to use money, free food and propaganda to try to influence the vote in
Nicaragua. In the short term, they may have succeeded - the US's favoured
candidate, the 73-year-old entrepreneur and landowner Enrique Bolanos of the
ruling Liberal party, defeated the Sandinista leader and onetime guerrilla
Daniel Ortega - but who knows what the long-term effect will be?

Some history: the Sandinistas ended the Somoza family dictatorship through a
revolution in 1979. Their leaders were more pluralistic and less
ideologically strait-jacketed than many similar movements and the victory
was broadly welcomed in the country. When the Sandinistas stood for election
in 1984, they won with 67% of the vote. The US, having seen which way the
vote was going, indicated before the election that they would not recognise
it. Instead, they supported what, certainly by today's definition, amounted
to a terrorist campaign under the contras or counter-revolutionaries. It was
an illegal war which resulted in up to 50,000 deaths in Nicaragua. In 1990,
a weary electorate backed the US-favoured candidate, Violeta Chamorro, and
Ortega surrendered power, the first such peaceful transition through the
ballot box in the country's history.

Ortega's political career since then has disappointed many of his former
supporters, not least because of the powerful allegations of sexual abuse by
his step-daughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez. Few imagined he would ever again
challenge seriously for the presidency. Then, earlier this summer, came the
results of opinion polls in the local press: Ortega was running some six or
seven percentage points ahead of his nearest rivals and might, it seemed,
return to power.

The US dispatched a state department official who told the local chamber of
commerce how damaging this would be to the country. Pressure was
successfully put on the third party candidate, the Conservative Noel
Vidaurre, to drop out in order to prevent the splitting of the anti-Ortega
vote. The US ambassador, kitted out in a Liberal party baseball hat,
embraced the Bolanos election campaign and invited the candidate to join him
on an emergency food-aid distribution trip. (Think the US ambassador to the
Court of St James dressed in Tory T-shirt, handing out free choc ices in
Swansea or Sheffield shoulder to shoulder with Iain Duncan Smith.)

John Keane, the US's acting deputy assistant secretary of state for western
hemisphere affairs, said last month that the Sandinistas included people
responsible for "abominations" of human and civil rights. Such has been the
official US rhetoric that former president Jimmy Carter, in Nicaragua to
oversee a fair election, was moved to say last week: "I personally
disapprove of statements or actions by another country that might tend to
influence the votes of people of another sovereign nation."

Jeb Bush, the US president's brother and governor of the state of Florida,
home of the one of the dodgiest election results in recent history, wrote an
article in the Miami Herald last month in which he attacked Ortega because
he "neither understands nor embraces the basic concepts of freedom,
democracy and free enterprise". Bush jnr added: "Daniel Ortega is an enemy
of everything the United States represents. Further, he is a friend of our
enemies. Ortega has a relationship of more than 30 years with states and
individuals who shelter and condone international terrorism." The article
was duly reprinted last week as an ad by the Liberal party in the Nicaraguan
daily, La Prensa, under the headline "The brother of the president of the
United States supports Enrique Bolanos". As satirist Tom Lehrer said on the
occasion of Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel peace prize - who needs irony?

Then, last week, three US politicians: Jesse Helms, the North Carolina
Republican, Bob Graham (Democrat, Florida) and Mike DeWine (Republican,
Ohio) put a resolution to Congress calling on the president to re-evaluate
his policy towards Nicaragua if the Sandinistas were to win - effectively
suggesting the further impoverishment of an impoverished country if the
wrong result came through. The resolution was duly reported in the
Nicaraguan press.

In the meantime, two of the architects of the illegal contra war have
returned from the elephants' graveyard. John Negroponte, who had not noticed
anything untoward when atrocities were being committed in Honduras during
the war, was confirmed as UN ambassador within days of September 11 when the
nation's attention was elsewhere. Earlier, Elliott Abrams, who had pleaded
guilty in 1981 to lying to Congress over the conduct of the war, was
installed by the president to head his "office for democracy and human
rights". See Tom Lehrer again. His criminal offence was described by White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer as "a matter of the past".

Ortega, sadly, was no Nelson Mandela. Now that he has lost, some of the
idealistic souls who once stood beside him in what was, by any standards, a
brave revolution may now return to the political arena. Other younger,
untainted politicians may emerge. But just at the moment when the US needs
to be convincing the world that they do not impose their will to protect
their commercial interests with little regard to local people's desires, the
events of the past few weeks in Nicaragua will serve to create more
cynicism.

The Sandinistas, a small, disorganised party in one of the world's poorest
countries, posed no threat to the US. To link them to terrorism in the wake
of September 11 was a cheap and dishonest shot. The next time Barbara
Walters asks Karen Hughes why do they hate us, she can add one small but not
insignificant cause.

duncan.campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx