This article provides the perspective of several analysts on this anniversary of the revolution, and expresses a surprising amount of unanimity around Ortega´s successor, showing how his son Laureano is being set up to succeed his father.
July 19: Ortega and Murillo install a single party model while they prepare dynastic succession
In DIVERGENTES July 19, 2022
After 43 years since the triumph of the revolution which placed Nicaragua in the imagination and dreams of a large part of the world, the Sandinista Front has suffered a political mutation at the hands of its leader, Daniel Ortega, consolidating in the country the single party model. With the opposition leadership in jail or exile, censure and harassment of NGOs, the Catholic Church and independent journalism, we have wanted to check with a group of political analysts and experts their vision about the model to which it seems Ortega aspires. The conclusions are clear: Cuban model under the control of a dynasty for which there would already be a successor: Laureano Ortega Murillo. The roadmap also seems obvious “power or death”, a Nicaraguan sociologist points out.
The caudillos of the Sandinista Front, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, attended this 43rd anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution this July 19th in the midst of a repressive wave that has been brutal with its direct victims: political prisoners, universities, NGOs, journalists and opposing municipal authorities. Political analysts and historians think that the regime in power is celebrating the consolidation of the single party model, Cuban style, while dynastic succession is being prepared.
For the sociologist and historian Óscar René Vargas, the regime is consolidating a single party model even though it does not dare to say so publicly. “Daniel Ortega has a logic of acting without announcing what he is going to do. He is never going to declare the single party because that would increase his international isolation and would influence international loans, like for example those that he receives from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI).” The authoritarian drift of the regime has resulted in the fact that multilaterals like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (BM) would reduce or eliminate financing for Nicaragua, which would take the regime to depend almost exclusively on the CABEI as an organization that grants loans. Between June 2018 and July 2021 CABEI has granted $1,906,875,641 dollars in loans to the Ortega-Murillo regime, which have been vital in order to not collapse economically.
The doctor in Political Science and historian, Andrés Pérez Baltodano, characterizes the current model of the government as one very similar to Somocism, with some differences. First of all is the family centralization, like what happened with the dynasty of the Somozas during the 42 years (between 1937 and 1979) of rule in Nicaragua. And secondly, they do not have a defined political ideology “The ideology of Somoza as well as Ortega is ambition for power and a feeling of opposition by anyone who would critique them.”
In an interview with DIVERGENTES, the former deputy Eliseo Núñez, said that the regime is migrating from a hegemonic party, a model that they have had for some time, toward a single party model. “The principal issue is leaving the population without the capacity to find alternatives outside the State. Creating an absolute dependency of the citizen on the State,” added Núñez.
Stop by step toward totalitarianism
Since January 10 of this year, when Ortega and Murillo took on five more years in power, after being re-elected after jailing or inhibiting all the significant opposition in November 2021, they continued paving the path toward the destruction of the few critical spaces that existed in the country. In February the trials and sentencing began against 40 political prisoners captured since before the presidential elections, among them at least seven presidential aspirants.
Alongside this, the regime began the elimination of five universities and confiscated their campuses. They also approved a new University Autonomy Law through which they removed the Central American University (UCA), led by the Jesuits, from access to the 6% of the funds of the Government budget. But they also continued with the stripping NGOs of their legal staus (1,071 up to the close of this note), some of which saw their installations snatched away through confiscations.
Later in April the regime took another step toward international isolation and announced their departure from the Organization of American States (OAS) and confiscated the offices of the regional organization in Managua. The installations were declared to be of “public interest” and were ceded over to the Culture Institute (INC) to build the “Museum of Infamy”, which supposedly woult “promote the culture of respect for sovereignty, education on recent history, in terms of actions that have harmed the principal and elemental human rights of the Nicaraguan people,” according to the Attorney General´s Office of the Republic (PGR), the entity responsible for the confiscation.
In recent weeks the regime has directed its attacks on various flanks. On the one hand, five municipal governments were taken over that belonged to the opposition political party Citizens for Liberty (CxL). This happened just four months from the municipal elections. Analysts and opponent politicians point out that with this the coming political process “was invalidated.” “We are going toward the Cuban model,” assessed the political scientist Silvio Prado.
The recent event that had an international repercussion was the expulsion from the country of the sisters of one of the organizations that was stripped on June 29, the Association of Missionaries of Charity of the Madre Teresa of Calcuta Order, an entity that worked in Nicaragua since 1988. The organization administered shelters for abandoned or abused adolescents, a home for the elderly, a project of school reinforcement for at risk students and a child care center for families without resources. The religious sisters have to leave immediately through the southern border to Costa Rica, as some communications media showed.
And if that were not enough, that same day the regime unleashed a hunt down of journalists and workers of the newspaper La Prensa who covered the expulsion of the sisters. They detained two drivers of the newspaper and raided the home of several reporters of the newspaper. In addition, they have extended the harassment to journalists of other independent communications media.
Laureano, the successor in the dynasty
The British firm The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a prestigious publication and source of information for investors, published a report where they predicted that the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) will continue being the dominant political force in Nicaragua through “a growing authoritarianism”. The publication projected that Daniel Ortega “will remain in power as long as his health permits.”
The EIU pointed out that Laureano Ortega Murillo, son of the presidential couple, “has assumed more political responsibilities in recent years, possibly paving the way for dynastic succession.”
Óscar René Vargar explains that the political model that Ortega and Murillo are implementing is similar to that of Somoza because they want to form a dynasty. “This is the central element: the dynasty. That is why I believe that the successor is not Rosario Murillo, but Laureano Ortega (their son),” adds Vargas.
For the historian, Rosario Murillo generates animosity within the party and Nicaraguan society, while Laureano “does not generate anything and to whom it is easier to pass power”. Vargas says that Murillo “has banged up a lot of people, and that generates resistance.” Ortega knows that with Murillo “Orteguism is divided”, he concludes.
FSLN between 1979 and 2022: political mutation
The doctor in Political Science and historian, Pérez Baltodano, explains that the Sandinista Front in 1979 was able to present a proposal that at that time seemed viable and legitimate: “the aspiration of a Nicaragua based on three essential values: national sovereignty, social justice and popular democracy.” Nevertheless, Baltodano synthesizes that the revolutionary failure led to “the polarization of the country, dismantling of the economy and war.” This unsustainable situation forced the parties in conflict to accept peace and hold presidential elections in 1990, when the Sandinistas lost power.
For Pérez Baltodano the abuse of power and human rights violations committed by the Sandinista government in the eighties “are realities that co-existed, contradictorily, with the project of the creation of a just, free and sovereign Nicaragua.”
Óscar René Vargas remembers that the cultural backwardness of the Sandinista leaders in the eighties, some of whom only had finished high school as their highest academic level, resulted in the fact that the Cuban vision of the revolution was taken on. “The Cubans have an important ideological political influence in Nicaragua, to this is added th influence of the so called socialist countries and the adversarial position of Ronald Reagan (then president of the United States),” states Vargas. “So in my criteria a type of tropical Stalinism was created, a supposedly socialists verticalism but with all the tricks of repression that had the objective of eliminating the adversary,” he expands.
Vargas thinks that the original ideas of the Sandinista Front in 1979 have undergone “a mutation that has a direct relationship to the political mutation of the leader (Ortega) and the circles of power who accompany him.”
“The strategy of Ortega: power or death”
The preparations for the celebration of the anniversary of the revolution were publicized in an official television channel by Fidel Moreno, the secretary of the Municipal Government of Managua, one of the most trusted people of the couple in power. In the morning of July 19th there will be meetings in neighborhoods and walks through all the municipalities of Nicaragua “so that the power be seen”, according to Moreno. In the afternoon the principal event will be held in a reduced capacity in the Plaza of the Revolution, as done since the pandemic. For the third consecutive year there will be no massive mobilizations in the Plaza La Fe, which had been turned into the chosen place until prior to 2019.
A sociologist consulted under condition of anonymity pointed out the sign of debility that not convoking massive mobilizations implies for the Front. “That a party that lived off of mobilizations, now does not have them, because for this year there is no excuse of the pandemic, show the little popularity that it has within their own ranks,” assessed the sociologist.
For Óscar René Vargas, the repressive escalation of the last months is explained by the fear that Daniel Ortega has of losing power. “He knows that most of the population is not in agreement with the political position of the Sandinista Front and what he is going is repressing everyone and preventing any gap through which the jackrabbit might jump through,” says Vargas. “The deterioration of the standard of living that the population has had since 2018 is a factor that can unleash new social protests,” highlighted the historian.
Vargas states that the logic of Daniel Ortega is to preserve power to establish a family dynasty. “That is why, his strategy is power or death,” he concludes.