Álvaro Vargas Llosa: What Ortega's victory doesn't mean
[Álvaro Vargas Llosa, the author of “Liberty for Latin America,” is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute in Washington.]
THE irony could not be more poignant. Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan went on national television and admitted his government’s involvement in an arms deal with Iran, the proceeds of which, we later found out, were diverted to the contra rebels fighting a Marxist regime in Central America. Now Daniel Ortega, the man those funds were aimed against, has just been elected president of Nicaragua.
And the irony does not stop there. A few days before last week’s elections, Oliver North, the face of the Iran-contra scandal, landed in Managua and asked Nicaraguans to vote for the right-wing Liberal Constitutionalist Party, which is made up in part of old contra sympathizers, and to stop Mr. Ortega.
Whatever else he might have been doing all these years, Mr. North has not been following Nicaraguan politics: for the last seven years, the Liberal Constitutionalists have been allied with Mr. Ortega’s Sandinistas, and they paved the way for Mr. Ortega’s victory by lowering the electoral bar for a first-round victory and by helping split the anti-Sandinista vote. The Gipper must be turning in his grave.
Some will be tempted to conclude that Mr. Ortega’s return amounts to a revival of the cold war dynamic in the Western Hemisphere and, in particular, to a retrospective impugning of Reagan’s policy in Central America. Some might also be inclined to see the vote as a confirmation that the radical left is sweeping Latin America and that the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, who supported Mr. Ortega and provides municipalities under Sandinista governments with fertilizer and oil, has scored a strategic victory.
That would be giving too much credit to Nicaragua, which is today a political and economic pygmy in the region; to left-wing radicalism, which had little to do with Mr. Ortega’s comeback; and to Mr. Chávez, whose favored candidates were recently repudiated in Peru and in Mexico, the two countries where he concentrated most of his efforts.
Daniel Ortega’s comeback is the result of two factors. One is the power-sharing pact that the former President Arnoldo Alemán sealed with the Sandinistas in 1999, with a view to protecting himself and his Liberal Constitutionalist cronies from charges of corruption after leaving office. (It didn’t work out well for Mr. Alemán, who in 2003 was given a 20-year sentence.) The deal they came up with gave Mr. Ortega, who was politically moribund at the time, the kiss of life and gave the Sandinistas seats on the Supreme Court and control of some key institutions, including the election authority.
The other factor was Mr. Ortega’s betrayal of his own creed. The Sandinista leader shed his Marxist rhetoric and, conscious of the need to seduce a profoundly Catholic nation, mended fences with the Roman Catholic Church he had once persecuted. His old nemesis, Cardinal Miguel Obando, presided over the religious (should I say bourgeois?) ceremony in which Mr. Ortega married his longtime partner last year....
Read entire article at NYT
THE irony could not be more poignant. Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan went on national television and admitted his government’s involvement in an arms deal with Iran, the proceeds of which, we later found out, were diverted to the contra rebels fighting a Marxist regime in Central America. Now Daniel Ortega, the man those funds were aimed against, has just been elected president of Nicaragua.
And the irony does not stop there. A few days before last week’s elections, Oliver North, the face of the Iran-contra scandal, landed in Managua and asked Nicaraguans to vote for the right-wing Liberal Constitutionalist Party, which is made up in part of old contra sympathizers, and to stop Mr. Ortega.
Whatever else he might have been doing all these years, Mr. North has not been following Nicaraguan politics: for the last seven years, the Liberal Constitutionalists have been allied with Mr. Ortega’s Sandinistas, and they paved the way for Mr. Ortega’s victory by lowering the electoral bar for a first-round victory and by helping split the anti-Sandinista vote. The Gipper must be turning in his grave.
Some will be tempted to conclude that Mr. Ortega’s return amounts to a revival of the cold war dynamic in the Western Hemisphere and, in particular, to a retrospective impugning of Reagan’s policy in Central America. Some might also be inclined to see the vote as a confirmation that the radical left is sweeping Latin America and that the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, who supported Mr. Ortega and provides municipalities under Sandinista governments with fertilizer and oil, has scored a strategic victory.
That would be giving too much credit to Nicaragua, which is today a political and economic pygmy in the region; to left-wing radicalism, which had little to do with Mr. Ortega’s comeback; and to Mr. Chávez, whose favored candidates were recently repudiated in Peru and in Mexico, the two countries where he concentrated most of his efforts.
Daniel Ortega’s comeback is the result of two factors. One is the power-sharing pact that the former President Arnoldo Alemán sealed with the Sandinistas in 1999, with a view to protecting himself and his Liberal Constitutionalist cronies from charges of corruption after leaving office. (It didn’t work out well for Mr. Alemán, who in 2003 was given a 20-year sentence.) The deal they came up with gave Mr. Ortega, who was politically moribund at the time, the kiss of life and gave the Sandinistas seats on the Supreme Court and control of some key institutions, including the election authority.
The other factor was Mr. Ortega’s betrayal of his own creed. The Sandinista leader shed his Marxist rhetoric and, conscious of the need to seduce a profoundly Catholic nation, mended fences with the Roman Catholic Church he had once persecuted. His old nemesis, Cardinal Miguel Obando, presided over the religious (should I say bourgeois?) ceremony in which Mr. Ortega married his longtime partner last year....