Tuesday’s midterm elections weren’t the only elections this week in which the majority of Americans didn’t vote.
On Sunday, the people of Nicaragua voted for a new president. According to an early report, voter turnout in the Central American nation was about 70 percent. The full results are not available as I write this, but it looks likely that candidate Daniel Ortega will be either the winner or at least advance to a runoff election in December against the next-highest vote-getter.
If the name Ortega sounds vaguely familiar to you, it should, and not just because it’s the name of a popular brand of Mexican food products.
Back in the 1980s, Daniel Ortega was depicted by the Reagan and Bush administrations as a threat to freedom in the United States. On the American boogeyman scale, he was somewhere between Hugo Chavez and Saddam Hussein.
American officials, including U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, have tried to influence the Nicaraguan election by scaring the Nicaraguan people into voting against Ortega. American officials warn that economic aid and cooperation with Nicaragua might cease if Ortega is elected. Gutierrez referred to Ortega’s political alliance as “anti-democratic forces.” That may seem like boilerplate, empty tough-talk to American ears, but to Nicaraguans who’ve had their country trampled on by the United States for 150 years, it’s not taken lightly.
Why is Ortega so hated by the Bush administration? First, he’s viewed in the United States as an ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez recently promised to send boatloads of cheap oil to Nicaragua — an offer viewed by many in Nicaragua and the United States as a “there’s more where that came from” bribe aimed at getting Nicaraguans to vote for Ortega.
Secondly, Ortega is the leader of the Sandinistas, the leftist Nicaraguan political movement that in 1979 overthrew the nasty, corrupt and incompetent U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza.
The Somoza family had ruled Nicaragua since 1937. The United States supported them for two reasons. They maintained an economic system that was highly advantageous to wealthy U.S. agricultural interests in Nicaragua. They were also viewed by successive U.S. administrations as an ally against Communist expansion. According to the Houston Chronicle, FDR once said of the first Somoza dicator, “Somoza may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”
Despite the fact that we as a nation continually affirm the sacred right of nations to pick their own SOBs, the United States was nevertheless shocked, appalled and resentful of the Sandinistas for overthrowing our goon. Annoyance soon became alarm, however, as the Sandinistas started courting good relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba and other leftist movements in Central America that threatened U.S. business interests.
As this was the 1980s, the Reagan administration chose anti-Communism as its main anti-Sandinista talking point. Reagan said that the Sandinistas intended “to give the Soviet Union a beachhead on the mainland of this continent — only 2,000 miles from the Texas border, a clear national security threat.”
To combat the no-doubt-imminent threat of a 2,000-mile Soviet tank advance through the dense jungles and harsh deserts of Central America and Mexico into beautiful, downtown San Antonio, the Reagan administration helped destroy what was left of post-Somoza Nicaragua by illegally funding the Contra rebel movement’s civil war against the Sandinistas. Reagan called the Contras democrats and freedom fighters. Never mind that Daniel Ortega had been voted president of Nicaragua in 1984, in elections that international monitors deemed no less free and fair than, oh, presidential elections in Florida.
Approximately 60,000 Nicaraguans died in the fighting. Nicaragua is a tiny country. Its population at the time was about 3 million. A similarly deadly war in the United States would leave 6 million Americans dead. But at least Texas was safe.
If Ortega wins, expect Bush and Co. to start talking up the threat he poses to the United States. Hoping to draw more U.S. support, Ortega’s main electoral rival has already called Ortega a “friend” of Osama bin Laden.
Because it may be hard to convince Americans that a Catholic leftist in Central America is friends with an Islamofascist in Central Asia, I expect the White House will take a different approach. Perhaps they’ll depict Ortega’s control of Nicaragua’s banana plantations as a danger to American health. “Daniel Ortega threatens the dietary potassium intake of American children” would not be the dumbest thing a president has ever said about Nicaragua.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.
