On January 9th in the ceremony on the opening of the Nicaraguan Parliament Daniel Ortega talked about the rise of fascism in the world today. This unique piece compares the situation in Nicaragua with the fascist elements of both Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil, and how these three systems have dealt with their respective dissidents. In contrast to the cases of the US and Brazil where Parliaments were attacked by mobs, in Nicaragua people took to the streets to protest. The lack of any fair judicial process and extremely harsh treatment of the opposition in Nicaragua stands in stark contrast to the legal process provided Trump and Bolsonaro followers. The author goes on to make an evidence based argument that no one is more fascist than Ortega.
The great imitators of fascism
By Wilfredo Miranda Aburto
January 10, 2023 in DIVERGENTES
I have to confess that the cynicism of Daniel Ortega never ceases to surprise me. The evening of this past January 9th, during the event of the “solemn installation of the 2023 legislative period”, he gave a long speech which was a guide for how to twist facts and realities to justify the unending barbarism in which Nicaragua is engulfed. Even the attack on the Capitol carried out by Trumpists on January 6, 2021 in Washington he had already used to excuse his refusal to free more than 200 political prisoners. After the invasion of the Bolsonarists into the Congress of Brazil, who demanded a military intervention to depose the recently elected president Lula de Silva, the Sandinista strongman took up that argument again.
In the United States as well as in Brazil the attacks on the legislative chambers left more than a 1,000 arrested and facing trials. In contrast to those prisoners, who did have procedural guaranties and impartial justice, Ortega hinted that he will not free political prisoners in Nicaragua. “Is justice going to disappear in the face of the terrorists, in the face of the coup supporters? No, it is a sacred principle, just as we defend peace, we have to firmly defend justice and the application of justice against the criminals,” he maintained.
To equate the political prisoners of our country with those of Brazil and the US is an authentic absurdity. In both cases the protofascist leaders, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro, encouraged these violent acts with their speeches to try to subvert the electoral results that gave the presidency to Joe Biden and Lula de Silva. Emulating Trump, Bolsonaro whipped up the supposed idea of electoral fraud. Neither in the US nor in Brazil was there any proof of irregularities in the polls. No evidence at all. And even so, both tried to dynamite institutions, especially the chamber of representatives, which are key elements in democracies.
In the case of Nicaragua there was no coup attempt at all. What happened was a popular uprising motivated by more than a decade of a corrupt, family government, a violator of human rights, and that – get this – has perpetrated a series of electoral frauds since 2008, which have been widely documented. The thousands of Nicaraguans who protested for months did not invade the Parliament, but the streets, a right to demonstrate which the Constitution supports. Then came a brutal repression that modified the course of the peaceful protest toward a resistance in the fact of precision kill shots from police and paramilitaries (whom Ortega still calls “voluntary police”). A true bloodletting that left more than 356 deaths.
To top it off, with superlative cynicism, Ortega stated that “fascism is reinstalling itself in the world”. I fell over backwards on hearing him because totalitarian power is precisely the nature of fascism. And I hear from him, the big totalitarian of Nicaragua, talking about fascism. Since he returned to power in 2007, Ortega along with his wife Rosario Murillo have worked for a model of family power with many fascist tones, which was accentuated even more in 2021, with the implementation of a single party regime which today monopolizes all spaces.
Fascism is characterized by eliminating dissent: “Social functioning is sustained in a rigid discipline and total adherence to the chain of command, and in pursuing a strong military apparatus, whose militaristic spirit transcends society as a whole, along with education in military/police values and a strong identity-based nationalism with victimizing components that leads to violence against those who are defined as enemies.” Another definition adds the destruction of democratic institutions, like the Ortega-Murillos did, to concentrate all power in their hands, galvanized by a strong social control of their party structures intermixed with those of the State.
Benito Mussolini defined totalitarianism in this way: “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” With Ortega-Murillo it can be paraphrased in the following way: “All within the Family and the Party, nothing outside of El Carmen, nothing against DOS.”[1]
The Ortega repression unequivocally pertains to fascism. Since the 2018 massacre, marked by extrajudicial executions, disappearances, a family burned alive, desecrated graves, persecution, denial of medical attention, rape, exile, torture, until reaching the current state: a totalitarian model with political prisoners, ad hoc laws providing legal support to the persecution and a single party reigning in the Executive, state offices and the 153 municipal governments of the country.
Or in other words, persisting with the example of Mussolini: he maintained a puppet Parliament (like the one Gustavo Porras leads), disappeared political parties, the press was inhibited, books considered subversive were burned (Ortega prohibited the entry of the last novel of Sergio Ramírez), people considered enemies were mistreated and murdered and the exile of many opponents began to other countries (in the case of Nicaragua to Costa Rica and the United States, principally). Within the Ortega repression there have existed episodes of clear fascist fabrication, like marking the outside of homes of opponents with the words “coup supporters”. An unavoidable parallel to the distinctive stars which the Nazis imposed on the Jews.
The rosary of human rights violations, which have been described as “crimes against humanity”, place Ortega and his wife in the band of the clearest fascists in the world today. Not even the propaganda armor by which they self-describe as leftists and “progressives” can hide the totalitarian vocation of the presidential couple who decide everything in Nicaragua, like the “Great Fascist Council” of Mussolini used to do, the body to which judges responded for ramming through political crimes. In our tropical case, the Great Fascist Council operates in El Carmen, residence, presidential office, and party headquarters.
To top it off, all fascism (and totalitarianism) needs to dress itself with symbols which would be reproduced throughout the State, in such a way that this style becomes uniform. That is why they gave so much importance to the communication strategies of Mussolini as well as Hitler. Ortega has left that strategy in the hands of his “co-president”, who he remembered to recognize only at the end of his speech, when they had already played the national anthem. Her esoteric symbols, colors and even his clothing is reproduced among their followers.
I could go on with more examples of the totalitarian repression of the Ortega-Murillos, especially the dehumanization with which the political prisoners have been treated in El Chipote, different from the treatment provided prisoners in Brazil and the United States. The political prisoners in Nicaragua have been mistreated to perverse extremes, playing with their hunger, with interrogations that try to break them, isolation with widely spaced-out family visits subjected to blackmail, with over-medication, and with judicial processes without legal foundation.
Without a doubt, Trump and Bolsonaro are two proto-fascist, conservative and nationalistic leaders who knew how to interpret the weariness of a good part of their societies in the face of the failures of democratic governments, after a decade of austerity. They came out as false messiahs to offer “protection” in exchange for restricting fundamental individual and political liberties. Nothing more came of them because institutions, above all the one that counts the votes with transparency, resisted their attacks.
In contrast, Ortega and his wife, who have no counterweights, not only are more proto-fascist than Trump and Bolsonaro, but are full blooded totalitarians, who, like those fearful fascists of the past, did not hesitate- nor hesitate now – to murder, jail, torture and force into exile in order to impose their power.
[1] El Carmen refers to the neighborhood where Ortega lives and where his office is located. DOS = Daniel Ortega Savaadra.