2897. From a Revolutionary to a Capitalist Politician: Daniel Ortega's Crisis

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, April 27, 2018

Thousands marched in Managua on Monday, April 23, against repression and the Ortega-Murillo government.  Photo: Carlos Herrera /confidencial. 

Nearly forty years since a popular insurrection toppled Nicaragua’s right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the Central American nation has once again been engulfed by political unrest, and appears to be on the brink of momentous change.

The present convulsion began earlier this month, after President Daniel Ortega proposed a change to the country’s social-security provisions that would have forced taxpayers to pay more for the program while simultaneously cutting payouts to beneficiaries. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries of Latin America, and public reaction to this change was furious and swift, with demonstrators taking to the streets to protest. The government’s ensuing response was as ill-considered as it was cruel. Police around the country fired live ammunition to break up the protests; as many as sixty people are believed to have died in the chaos that followed, including Ángel Gahona, a young reporter who was shot in the head while conducting a Facebook Live report in the streets of the Caribbean coastal town of Bluefields.

As the civilian deaths mounted, Rosario Murillo—Ortega’s wife, Vice-President, and spokesperson—issued a stream of belittling comments, calling the protesters “bloodsuckers,” “criminals,” and “vampires.” This only raised the ire of many thousands of ordinary Nicaraguans, and, just as happened in the late nineteen-seventies, when the dictator Somoza tried to stamp out dissent with harsh measures, the sentiments on the street have only hardened.

By Sunday, Ortega backtracked on his social-security measure, but his unapologetic remarks on the matter were so casual as to seem offhand, and, in any case, the damage was done. In the street, people continued to chant “Ortega, Somoza, son la misma cosa” (“Ortega and Somoza are the same thing”), and not only have the protesters refused to disperse but many of them are now calling for Ortega to step down.

It’s clear now that, for all their pragmatic backpedalling on the social-security bill, Ortega and Murillo’s long time in power, and their near-total control of Nicaragua’s public institutions, have left them out of touch with the feelings of many of their countrymen. Ortega initially rose to power after the 1979 Sandinista revolution, when he was known as a Marxist firebrand, and he served as the country’s strongman President until 1990, when he ceded power after losing elections. He returned to the Presidency, in 2006, after dropping his Marxist tag, allying himself with former politicos and enemies that included Nicaragua’s corporate class and its archconservative Catholic archbishop, and declaring himself a belated follower of Jesus Christ. In the years since, Ortega and his wife have steadily consolidated their power, eliminating their opponents through a canny combination of economic co-option and, when necessary, outright repression.

In addition to the executive branch of government, Ortega and Murillo dominate Nicaragua’s Congress and judiciary. The couple’s children, in turn, run the family’s business empire via a web of public-relations firms and media companies that functions as the government’s communications department. The Ortega-Murillo regime, in other words, exists in an echo chamber.

There are many historical ironies to be found in Nicaragua’s crisis, not least the fact that, forty years ago, Ortega was a young revolutionary who convinced many Nicaraguans (and news consumers around the world) that he was part of a righteous campaign against Somoza, whose father and brother had previously ruled the country in a dynastic reign that stretched back to 1933. The group Ortega headed, called the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or F.S.L.N., was a guerrilla army, inspired and supported by Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. Upon seizing power, the Sandinistas immediately aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and embarked on an effort to help bring other guerrillas to power in El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries. While Ronald Reagan was President, Nicaragua became a front in the Cold War, which, eventually, thanks to the C.I.A.-backed Contra war against Ortega’s regime, led to the economic devastation of Nicaragua and the collapse of the Sandinistas’ hold on power.

Another irony is the fact that, just as it was at the end of the Somoza regime, the leading voices of dissent and custodians of press freedom in Nicaragua are the handful of media outlets owned by the Chamorro family. It was the January, 1978, assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the owner and editor of the country’s main newspaper, La Prensa, that sparked the anti-Somoza insurrection. Chamorro’s widow, Violeta, was a member of the original Sandinista group that took power after Somoza’s overthrow. But she joined the opposition to Ortega after he turned the government into a Marxist regime. And when he lost power, in 1990, it was Violeta who succeeded him.

Today, La Prensa remains a Chamorro family property, and it is the only daily newspaper in the country that stands in opposition to the government. Arguably the only other independent Nicaraguan media outlet of note is Confidencial, an online publication whose small team of reporters has taken on the Ortega government with uncommon valor. The editor-in-chief of Confidencial is Carlos Fernando Chamorro—one of the sons of Pedro Joaquín and Violeta Chamorro. Last week, in a parallel to the Somoza-era closure and censure of La Prensa, Confidencial declared that its Web site had been the target of a cyberattack and taken down for a crucial number of hours during the protests; to its staff, there seemed little doubt that Ortega’s people were behind the sabotage. “In the protests forty years ago, when Somoza cracked down on the press, the ‘journalism of the catacombs’ was born—people would read the news in church courtyards,” Carlos told me this week. “Now, thanks to social media, the people have defeated the censors and the attempts to create an official version of events. Once again, journalists are on the front lines.”

It can seem as if the cast of the country’s current political drama is the same one that took part in the 1979 uprising, with the players simply inhabiting different roles. In the nineteen-seventies, at the time of his murder, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro’s assistant was a young woman named Rosario Murillo—Ortega’s future wife and the country’s current Vice-President. After the overthrow of Somoza, a young writer named Sergio Ramírez Mercado served as Ortega’s Vice-President for five years. Ramírez eventually broke with Ortega, and, at the height of last week’s riots, Ramírez, now the undisputed grand old man of Nicaraguan letters, was in Madrid to receive the prestigious Cervantes Prize for his lifetime of literary output. During the ceremony, Ramírez dedicated the prize, which was bestowed upon him by King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, “to the memory of the protesters being assassinated in the streets.”

Part of what makes the recent protests in Nicaragua so notable is that, amid a collapse of the political left across Latin America that is under way, Ortega was beginning to look like the Great Survivor. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is dead, and his bumbling successor, Nicolás Maduro, presiding over a disintegrating country. Brazil’s once wildly popular leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is in prison. In Cuba, the Castro era is over, at least in terms of sanguineous inheritance. For now, only Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ortega remain in power out of the original club of hard-core “Pink Tide” izquierdistas. (In Argentina, as well, where the husband-and-wife team of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner played at leftist politics for over a decade, a right-of-center capitalist, Mauricio Macri, is now in charge. And in Ecuador, the Chávez protégé Rafael Correa, an outspoken anti-American, has been replaced by his less confrontational former Vice-President, Lenín Moreno, who appears to have seen the writing on the wall and is reëstablishing good relations with the United States.)

The unrest of the past week appears to have inched Ortega close to the exit door. This is an outcome that he and Murillo did not expect, and they may not yet believe it to be a real possibility. In their televised appearances over the past week, Ortega and Murillo have been shown in safe settings in the Presidential complex, surrounded by a handful of loyal ministers and generals. They have worn the mild and uncomprehending expressions of people who seem genuinely unaware of the reality outside their privileged circle of influence. They have reminded me of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, who believed themselves to be the anointed custodians of the destiny of the Romanian people until that fateful evening in December 1989, when the cheers of a crowd turned to boos, and would not stop. The look of incomprehension, and then terrified awareness, on the Ceaușescus’ faces as the booing grew more audible was the moment at which their dictatorship ended. Within a few days of that speech, the Ceașescus were shot to death by a hastily convened firing squad. As in so many violent overthrows in history, the men who executed them had been regime loyalists—outwardly, at least.