The life and death of the PLC: from strong men to lackeys of the FSLN
In Nicaraguainvestiga.com Dec 6, 2021
This is the history of the Liberal Constitutional Party which gave Nicaragua two presidents and became a very powerful political organizations which did not cringe before the FSLN.
The Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC) was an unbeatable political force for the leftist Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) that between 1979 and 1990 had imposed a cruel military dictatorship in Nicaragua. In the 1996 elections the PLC won the presidential elections with 50.99% of the votes and in 2001 won again with 56.31%. Daniel Ortega harvested defeat after defeat. No one would have believed in those years that a little later the PLC would begin its debacle to becoming currently, according to some critics, a type of political appendage of the FSLN.
When the Sandinistas saw themselves forced to leave the presidency in 1990, Daniel Ortega worked on doing all types of acts of vandalism and riots to try to destabilize the government of Violeta Barrios. At that time, a rising leader was willing to put an end to the terror that Ortega and his followers imposed. His name: Arnoldo Alemán Lacayo, the plump and charismatic mayor of Managua. At the end of 1991 the Sandinistas had destroyed the offices of the municipal government and Alemán warned that the Sandinista leader had to be put on trial.
“Now as just another citizen, I think that he had the obligation to appear before a court and have all the right to defense that any common citizen has,” said Alemán, a lawyer by profession.
From an incipient democracy to a kleptocracy
Alemán beat Ortega in the presidential elections of 1996. He was a leader who did not flee debate, even less with the communications media. He thought he was strong and publicly challenged the Sandinistas, who did not end their disturbances, trying to destabilize the government.
But integrity was not precisely the common denominator of the Alemán administration, and soon big corruption scandals and the ostentatious life of the liberal strong man and his coterie began to be denounced, at the cost of the puny state coffers. The incipient democracy of Nicaragua had been converted to a shameless kleptocracy.
The beginning of the end for the PLC: The Pact
In 1998 Alemán and Ortega began a negotiation which would be harmful to the PLC and, even worse, fatal for the entire country. It was the Alemán-Ortega Pact. Both strong men divided up the State, but in the end the big winner would be Ortega.
One of the architects of the pact, Dionisio Marenco, explained that it was Alemán himself who gave him the constitutional reduction from 45% to 35% of the votes needed to be president of Nicaragua. And that Ortega was looking to return to power, but he only needed one thing to do it in a democratic way: the will of the people.
In his book Prisoner 198 the journalist Fabián Medina recounts that on one occasion on leaving a meeting where the constitutional reform had been cooked up, the Sandinista strongman asked Marenco: “Why would the fat man have ceded that?”. The response from Marenco was, “Don´t continue asking for anything (…), let us sign now that 35% which is the formula that we need.”
Alemán, among other things, was looking for impunity for his cases of corruption. What Alemán did not know was that he was falling into the claws of his rival and signing the beginning of the end of his time as a liberal strongman and the end of his party. With the passage of years, Alemán ended up admitting, “It was a mistake to call Ortega a high school grad, in politics he is Cum Laude.”
A party in the hands of a “hostage”
Alemán did not save himself from jail. In 2002 Enrique Bolaños took on the presidency and began an unprecedented crusade against corruption. Alemán, who was the president of the National Assembly, was stripped of his immunity and arrested, and in December 2003 was sentenced to 20 years in jail for money laundering, fraud, embezzlement of public funds and other crimes.
But It was not helpful to Ortega to liquidate his partner yet. The judge who sentenced the liberal strongman was Juana Méndez, a well-known Sandinista player. She kept him under house arrest “for health reasons.”
Alemán pulled the strings of the PLC, and in that push and pull Ortega kept him in as a type of “hostage” which he had to use in the best way possible. On March 19, 2004 Alemán was taken from his hacienda and transferred to the La Modelo jail, but a few months later they brought him back to his home.
In July 2005 the judge Roxana Zapata gave Alemán a gift: starting at that moment he was under “Managua arrest”. Less than two years later, on March 15, 2007 he was under “country arrest”. Ortega had now taken on the presidency and was playing his cards.
On January 16, 2009 the Penal Chamber of the Court absolved Arnoldo Alemán and revoked his 20 year jail sentence.
Fight between Liberals
The jailing of Arnoldo Alemán was a harsh blow for the PLC, and clashes between Arnoldo followers and the other factions grew. Alemán and his people accused president Enrique Bolaños of being an “ingrate” and a “traitor”. But Daniel Ortega was not holding all the aces yet. He needed the Liberals to divide in the elections of 2006. The 35% was useless to him if his rivals reconciled with one another.
Effectively, there were attempts at reconciliation, but they never prospered. Finally the PLC ran with José Rizo as their presidential candidate and one of the factions, led by Eduardo Montealegre, ran with the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN). The day of the elections Ortega got 38% of the votes, Montealegre 29% and Rizo 26%. The two Liberal organizations had obtained 55% of the votes, Nicaraguans had once again said “NO” to Sandinism…but Ortega had won.
The former president Arnoldo Alemán blamed Montealegre for that defeat. “It was up to Eduardo to have a little bit of humility and take the time to wait until after the period of Dr. Rizo had passed, who could not be re-elected, to be the candidate of Liberalism as well, and we would have continued in power and not have what happened, that with 38% Daniel Ortega beats one with 28% and the other with 27%, which if you add the 28 of Eduardo with the 27 of José Rizo you get 55%,” justified Alemán 14 years afterwards in an interview with the Voice of America (VOA).
The former deputy Eliseo Núñez Morales stated in an interview with Nicargua Investiga that Montealegre had ceded “the presidential candidacy to José Rizo” and that “he accepted being his vice president.” “He asked Rizo for 23 deputies (…) José left, he was going to talk to Alemán, who was the strongman of the party and José never came back,” he said.
Núñez Morales said that a conflict emerged between Alemán and Rizo over deputies and over “other things that were happening” in the PLC, and that even for that reason Rizo thought about the possibility of supporting Montealegre.
“Arnoldo tnreatened Rizo with putting in Ramiro Sacasa as the candidate for the presidency and Martha McCoy as vice president, so José decided to go and support Eduardo. That is why we registered a 9:00pm the night of the last day for registering candidates, because we were waiting for José. José called about 7pm and said that he was going to register his candidacy for the PLC and that there was nothing more to discuss,” he explained.
Alemán has never accepted his political responsibilities and in March 2015 even said to Confidencial that he slept peacefully. “Without a doubt, laughing out loud, because my hands have never been stained with blood nor much less have stolen anything,” he stated in the interview.
There were approaches made for the municipal elections of 2008 , and even Eduardo Montealegre was the candidate for the mayorship of Managua for the PLC alliance. Those elections were branded a total fraud. The opposition took to the streets to protest, but little by little the protests deflated, their leaders did not persist in their claims, and everything was left as consummated.
The disputes among the Liberals continued. Years later Nicaraguans would face another political surprise.
Absolved from his 20-year sentence for corruption, but identified as a hostage of Ortega and therefore playing into the hand of his captor, Arnoldo Alemán imposed himself as the presidential candidate for the PLC in the elections of November 6, 2011. The Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) adjudicated 5.91% of the votes to him. His party got 2 deputies, 23 less than those obtained in 2006.
The formerly powerful Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC) and its strongman, the one who when mayor of Managua was not afraid of the Sandinistas and even threatened Ortega with putting him on trial, was left in intensive care in political terms.
Nevertheless, the worst was yet to come.
“And oxygen arrived! The Second political “force”
Alemán continued pulling the strings of the party. His detractors always warned that “the pact” continued in force or that given his condition as a “hostage” he danced to Ortega´s tune.
In the presidential elections of 2016, after taking Montealegre and his group out of the electoral appeal, Daniel Ortega was re-elected again, adjudicating 72.44% of the votes to himself. They were elections marked by a high level of abstentionism and accusations of fraud.
The PLC “miraculously” remerged as the second political force. The CSE adjudicated to them 15% of the votes with Maximo Rodríguez as the presidential candidate. It also granted them 14 deputies, one of them María Fernanda Flores, the spouse of Alemán.
Osuna, the new strongwoman
An elderly Arnoldo Alemán, burdened by health problems, nevertheless was not able to keep internal problems from continuing.
In 2020 they finally exploded more vehemently. The problem now: a fight over the presidency of the PLC between the deputy María Haydée Osuna and the deputy Miguel Rosales.
In September 2020 the CSE issued a resolution in favor of María Haydée Osuna, as the sole legal representative of the PLC.
On January 9, 2019 Osuna voted in favor of the re-election of the sanctioned Gustavo Porras as president of the National Assembly. After the governmental repression of 2018, that vote ended up being very suspicious for her detractors, and more voices wrote her off as an “ally” of the FSLN. Osuna has always denied it.
Strengthened by the resolution of the CSE, María Haydée Osuna began an unprecedented purge in the PLC.
On November 26, 2020 at her request, the National Assembly, controlled by the FSLN, stripped María Fernanda Flores, Alemán´s wife, of her seat as a deputy.
The accusations against Osuna that she was an ally of Ortega increased.
In January 2021 Miguel Rosales ceded and finally ended his complaints and recognized Osuna as the president of the party.
In nearly parallel fashion, Osuna continued with her party purge, cleaning out “Arnoldo supporters” from the party. At the end of January, she expelled Jamileth del Bonilla, Martha McCoy, Melba Martínez, Silvio Américo Calderón and Paul Antonio González Martínez and González were deputies in the National Assembly and were stripped of their seats at the request of Osuna.
In March something historic happened in the ranks of the PLC: Arnoldo Alemán and María Fernanda Flores were expelled from the party.
Cristhian López, national secretary of communications of the PLC confirmed the news to Nicaragua Investiga and emphasized that Alemán was now “history” in the party. The liberal strongman had been left even without the organization with which he got to touch glory in the Nicaraguan political arena.
The purges did not stop and in August the CSE stripped several municipal councilpersons of the PLC from their seats at the request of the powerful Osuna.
PLC goes to elections in the Osuna “era”
In the elections of November 7, 2021, identified as a farce by the international community and the opposition, the PLC ran with Walter Espinoza as their presidential candidate, a man with a long history in the party, who started as a driver for the former director of the Civil Registry, Martha Ramírez.
The relationship of Espinoza with María Haydée Osuna goes way back. After he graduated from high school in 1999, Osuna granted him a scholarship to study Tourism and Hotel Administration at the University of Managua (UdeM).
In these elections Ortega was re-elected with 75% of the votes, according to the CSE. The PLC of María Haydée Osuna was assigned second place with 14% of the votes and 9 deputies, five less than 2016.
Another “hostage”?
Osuna returned to the public arena because of the role she played in the general elections of 2021, and her connection with the FSLN.
And it is she, along with Walter Espinoza and other additional allies, who requested the CSE, identified as being aligned with Daniel Ortega, the cancelation of the legal status of the Citizens for Liberty Party. The request was expedited.
The detractors of Osuna recalled the cases of her brothers Julio César Osuna and José Francisco Osuna.
Julio César was sentenced in 2012 to 23 years in prison for being supposedly one of the ringleaders of a network of drug traffickers. He was not just any drug trafficker, he was a magistrate of the Supreme Electoral Council, who, according to his accusation, used his high post to transport enormous amounts of money and falsified documents for his allies in organized crime.
Among those for whom he had processed false identity cards was the Costa Rican drug trafficker Alejandro Jiménez, alias “El Palidejo”, responsible for the murder of the Argentinian songwriter Facundo Cabral, which happened in July 2011 in Guatemala.
The objective of the attack was Henry Fariñas, who supposedly had appropriated a shipment of drugs from El Palidejo. Fariñas was, supposedly, an old narco ally of the former magistrate Osuna.
On May 15, 2008 El Palidejo had obtained a Nicaraguan identity card, with Karla Elizabeth Fariñas Fonseca and Dina Ester Rosales appearing as his witnesses. Nevertheless, before that, José Francisco Osuna, the other brother of María Haydée Osuna, had processed a replaced birth certificate under the name of José Fernando Díaz Treminio from Tipitapa. Later he got his identity card processed by the former magistrate Osuna, and on January 22, 2009 obtained his Nicaraguan passport.
In 2012 José Francisco Osuna was detained by the National Police and he was using an ID from the General Office of Migration and Immigration, the state entity responsible for issuing passports. “El Palidejo” had obtained Nicaraguan passport C 1624646 under the name of José Fernando Treminio Díaz.
In 2016 the former magistrate Julio César Osuna was freed from the Penitentiary System under the “open regime” modality.
José Francisco has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for organized crime and 2 years for misrepresentation. The Appeals Court of Managua absolved him of the first case and in 2014 he was freed after serving his sentence.
Nothing but ashes
On Tuesday November 16 the National Assembly approved a declaration asking Daniel Ortega to begin the process to remove Nicaragua from the Organization of American States (OAS), the organization that days previously had written off the elections of November 7 as illegitimate.
A total of 83 deputies voted in favor of the legislative statement. Among them were the deputies of the PLC.
“We are not against the Organization of American States, but yes in terms of the resolutions that affect our people and our sovereignty,” justified the liberal deputy Roberto Lira, with a speech very similar to the official government line, which accuses the OAS of being “interventionist.”
Years before this would have caused an enormous outcry in Nicaragua. Nevertheless, on this occasion no one was surprised. “For some time now, Nicaraguans are clear there are only ashes left of the PLC which governed Nicaragua for two periods and was not afraid of Ortega,” said an analyst who requested anonymity.