Ortega Chooses His Opposition

As a result of a perverse combination of interests, actions, omissions, stabbings, tactical and strategic mistakes, blackmail, old grudges, plotting, complicities and media shows, the dictatorial couple has us where they wanted us to be for the November elections.

In other words, they have us where they had us before the revolution of April 2018. As if time had jumped from March 2018 to May 2021.

Although we all know that we are going to the worst possible elections, the dictatorship shows us every day that they still can be worse.

Until recently we believed that the elections had three important parts and an absolutely irrelevant sum of rubble. All of them lackeys of the dictatorship. On the one hand, there is the dictatorship with its war machine, on the other hand the Citizens Alliance and the National Coalition, as the third important part and the most important due to the nature of its members.

Between the dictatorship and the Citizens Alliance there are a series of coincidences: 1) for both, the most important adversary was the National Coalition; 2) for the dictatorship the two options were to win the elections or for the Alliance to win and for the Alliance the two options were to win the elections or for the dictatorship to win them. Between the two they could share first and second place without problems of any kind.

3) the dictatorship and the Alliance proclaim themselves Pro-Life; 4) the attacks of the dictatorship against the Coalition are exactly the same as those made by the Alliance against the Coalition. This can be verified in the considerations of the Electoral Council resolution; 5) between the dictatorship and the Alliance there is a previous relationship as partners.

In this context, what the cancellation of the legal status of the PRD does is to advance the elections. The elections were yesterday and the dictatorship, through the Supreme Electoral Council, chose the Citizens Alliance.

Now it is totally clear what Arturo Cruz was referring to with the “useful vote”. Only that now the useful vote has been transformed into a forced vote because they want to force us to vote for Cruz to see if in that way his position improves a little. But not even with that could Cruz win because the agreement with Ortega was that Ortega will ensure them a sure second place in exchange for eliminating the Coalition.

If there was any doubt as to why the C x L Alliance did not sign a unity pact with the Coalition, it is now clearer than ever. The plan was to make the Coalition appear as the enemy of unity, that the people condemn the Coalition and that we rejoice at their execution.

Now we just need to know how many votes they are going to assign to the C x L Alliance. They will be the one that legitimizes the elections and then the joint missions will depart to ask that the sanctions against the dictatorship be lifted, that foreign investment return, that the Chinese return build the canal, the return of the model of “dialogue and consensus” that caused and continues to cause so much blood, pain and death to the people.

What is the National Coalition? It is a diverse and plural political alliance, made up of broad-experienced political organizations in a mix with a large number of organizations that were born in the heat of the April 2018 struggle.

The National Coalition, counts among its ranks, the most numerous and valuable of the April struggle. The most battle-hardened, the bravest, and courageous of April is in the Coalition. The most persecuted, besieged, imprisoned, tortured and exiled fighters are represented in the Coalition.

What the Coalition lacks is the money that the Alliance can spare and the ideological sponsorship of the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy. But that was not needed in April to bring the dictatorship to its knees. They are the most and the best, although it is also true that they are not the only ones or that they are perfect.

What is the Citizens Alliance? Supposedly an organization of thousands of members that no one saw in April, not before, not ever again. It is an organization whose two fundamental pillars are the CxL party and the business sector. The rest are a chorus.

They decided to be partners in any kind of business with the dictatorship, which transformed them from partners to accomplices. They put together a model, a system that they called “dialogue and consensus” that they signed with blood and is valid for life. That model was elevated to constitutional rank and, therefore, capital will say that it has to comply with it after 2021.

That model was celebrated with great fanfare by the big money interests. They even applauded the confiscations when, in one of those shameful acts, the dictator said, referring to Morales Carazo: “his house is my house” and all the big businessmen applauded with a bloody good laughter celebrating Ortega’s cruel joke.

This model of “dialogue and consensus” between accomplices is called the triple alliance by Bayardo Arce, involving the dictatorship’s agents in the union movement.

It is difficult to understand how there are peasants who claim to support the Alliance, losing sight of the fact that the canal project will be pulled out of the drawers after 2021 and their lands will be confiscated by those who would receive their votes. In other words, there are peasants who are willing to vote in favor of their future confiscators if we do not warn them of the danger they are running. Not even if one of them becomes a legislator would that prevent the confiscation of their lands.

The Citizens Alliance has the support of capital, the Catholic hierarchy and a sector of evangelicals, but they lack popular support. That is why they need a little help from their partner Ortega. They will try to reverse the lack of popular support with torrents of money and ideological and religious manipulation.

However, the Citizens Alliance still has a chance to show that they are not colluded with the dictatorship.

They must open the registration of candidates to all those interested and that they undergo a popular selection process without pre-established scores, without imposing Arturo Cruz as a candidate for the presidency.

They must open a process to reformulate their government plan to prioritize justice, democracy and human rights over economic issues. That a secular state will be strengthened and not a confessional state. That people will be called to the streets without waiting for the electoral campaign to begin.

If the Citizens Alliance continues as it has until now, it will become part of the most ignominious pages of Nicaraguan political history. It will be filed away in the “Kupia Kumi” book.

 This article was originally published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times