MEXICO CITY — Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is poised to win a fourth consecutive term in office Sunday after wiping out all serious opposition in one of the most intense waves of political repression in Latin America since the 1980s.
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The election is the culmination of years of efforts by the 75-year-old former guerrilla leader to consolidate power. Since the spring, his government has arrested at least three dozen leading opposition figures, including seven potential presidential candidates, on what are widely viewed as spurious charges.
“These elections will have no credibility,” said Patrick Ventrell, director of the Office of Central American Affairs at the State Department.
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“We’re going into a scenario where you have a dictatorship,” he said in a panel discussion Thursday hosted by the Atlantic Council and the Wilson Center. “And we’ll have to respond to such.”
From rebel to strongman: how Daniel Ortega became the thing he fought against
Nicaragua represents the most dramatic sign of rising authoritarianism in Central America, a stark challenge to Biden administration policies. U.S. authorities fear that corruption and autocratic rule aren’t just weakening young democracies in the region, but fueling migration to America’s southern border.
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Nicaragua has not traditionally been a top source of migrants to the United States. But the government’s crackdown has supercharged an exodus that began in 2018, when Ortega’s security forces quashed nationwide demonstrations. U.S. border agents detained more than 50,000 Nicaraguans in fiscal 2021, a record.
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In Washington, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill Wednesday calling for expanded sanctions on Nicaraguan authorities and increased oversight of international lending to the country. The measure also urged a review of Nicaragua’s participation in the Central American free-trade agreement, which has boosted its exports to the United States. The Senate had earlier approved the bill, known as the RENACER Act.
The Ortega government’s clampdown on opponents “reeks of Putin-style tactics,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), explaining in a telephone interview why he had introduced the bill. “What he’s doing is basically taking steps to set up a dynastic regime, just like the Somozas before him.”
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Ortega helped lead the Sandinista revolution that toppled Anastasio Somoza, a right-wing dictator, in 1979. The young leftist went on to head Nicaragua’s government as it battled U.S.-backed Contra rebels.
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After a 17-year hiatus, Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007, jettisoning many of his Marxist views and forming alliances with the Catholic church and business groups. He has steadily expanded his grip on the courts, the legislature and the electoral machinery in the country of 6.5 million people.
In 2014, his allies changed the Constitution to allow him to run for reelection indefinitely. He subsequently made his wife, Rosario Murillo, the vice-presidential candidate and installed his children as presidential advisers.
A recent CID-Gallup poll found that only 19 percent of Nicaraguans interviewed would vote for Ortega if he faced one of the seven detained opposition candidates. Opposition activists have called on voters to boycott the election.
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Enrique Sáenz, a political analyst, said it didn’t matter whether Nicaraguans cast votes or not. “The authorities are going to say on Sunday night that there was an extraordinary turnout and that Ortega won with a mountain of votes,” he said.
Asked for comment on allegations of election irregularities, Murillo, who is also the main government spokeswoman, emailed a one-word response: “Gracias…!”
Michael Campbell, a Nicaraguan diplomat, told a recent meeting of the Organization of American States that critics of the election were trying to overthrow the government and supported the use of terrorism “to destabilize national sovereignty.”
As election looms, Ortega arrests his challengers
Relatives of the jailed opposition politicians say they’ve been held in harsh conditions, often in isolation. Bertha Valle, the wife of Harvard-educated political activist Félix Maradiaga, said he had lost 45 pounds since being arrested in June. “They only allow him to go out into the sunshine 10 minutes per week,” she said. (Murillo did not respond to a question about Maradiaga’s condition).
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The crackdown has expanded beyond politicians to business leaders, civic activists and journalists. The government has suspended the registries of dozens of civil society groups, ranging from medical and feminist organizations to Oxfam, the international charity group.
Authorities have raided newsrooms and summoned journalists for interrogations. Nicaragua’s main daily, La Prensa, shut down its print edition in August, saying officials had blocked deliveries of imported newsprint.
The government has repeatedly refused entry to foreign correspondents, including a Washington Post reporter who attempted to fly to Managua from Mexico on Thursday, after submitting the required travel documents and coronavirus test. (Murillo did not answer a question about why permission was denied.)
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Meanwhile, official propaganda has proliferated. Facebook said this week that it had discovered a troll farm run by the Nicaraguan government and ruling party that operated 1,300 Facebook and Instagram accounts. “This was one of the most cross-government troll operations we’ve disrupted to date,” the company said.
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Ortega says he’s not a dictator but a defender of the Sandinista revolution. He has compared the jailed opposition politicians to the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to block the confirmation of President Biden’s victory.
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“We are not putting politicians or candidates on trial,” Ortega said in June. “We are judging criminals who attacked their country.”
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He accused opposition politicians of plotting an uprising, like the pro-democracy protests that erupted in the spring of 2018. More than 300 people were killed as security forces crushed those demonstrations.
Since then, Washington has steadily ramped up sanctions against Nicaraguan government leaders — including Ortega’s wife and children. But so far they have had little effect.
Manuel Orozco, a prominent Washington-based migration analyst, said that the flow of Nicaraguans to the United States had accelerated since the start of Ortega’s latest crackdown, with 80 percent of border detentions occurring since May. “So it’s a consequence of what I call the criminalization of democracy,” said the Nicaraguan native.
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The Ortega government has charged Orozco in absentia with conspiring against national sovereignty for his work with opposition political activists and pro-democracy groups.
Analysts say Washington faces a dilemma: If it imposes tougher economic sanctions, they could harm ordinary people in Nicaragua, the poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti. And that, in turn, could prompt more migration.
And yet if Ortega faces no repercussions for holding a rigged election, that could “incentivize other autocratic rulers in Central America and beyond to follow this same route,” said Laura Chinchilla, former president of Costa Rica, at the Atlantic Council discussion.
The Biden administration has increasingly clashed with the leaders of El Salvador and Guatemala, who have ousted independent judges and prosecutors. Meanwhile, U.S. prosecutors have alleged that Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández accepted bribes from drug traffickers. (He has denied any ties to narcotics trafficking and has not been charged).
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Ortega’s victory in an undemocratic election “will be a major impediment for our larger regional project,” Ventrell said. “We are deeply concerned.”
López Ocampo reported from Miami.
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