Getting
the right result
Nicaragua's election showed the US still won't
allow a free vote
Duncan Campbell
Wednesday November 7, 2001
The Guardian
During a recent television discussion in the United States chaired by veteran
presenter Barbara Walters, the subject for discussion was the new national
puzzle: why they hate us. The reason, suggested Karen Hughes, President Bush's
special counsellor and his senior press officer during his election campaign,
was that "they hate us because we elect our leaders".
Voters in Nicaragua,
queuing at the polls last Sunday to elect a new government, might have been
forgiven a wry smile on hearing those words. While the United States government
radar may seem to have been pointed in the direction of Afghanistan and the
Middle East, the state department and many American politicians and officials
still found time over the last few weeks to use money, free food and propaganda
to try to influence the vote in Nicaragua. In the short term, they may have
succeeded - the US's favoured candidate, the 73-year-old entrepreneur and
landowner Enrique Bolanos of the ruling Liberal party, defeated the Sandinista
leader and onetime guerrilla Daniel Ortega - but who knows what the long-term effect
will be?
Some history: the
Sandinistas ended the Somoza family dictatorship through a revolution in 1979.
Their leaders were more pluralistic and less ideologically strait-jacketed than
many similar movements and the victory was broadly welcomed in the country.
When the Sandinistas stood for election in 1984, they won with 67% of the vote.
The US, having seen which way the vote was going, indicated before the election
that they would not recognise it. Instead, they supported what, certainly by
today's definition, amounted to a terrorist campaign under the contras or
counter-revolutionaries. It was an illegal war which resulted in up to 50,000
deaths in Nicaragua. In 1990, a weary electorate backed the US-favoured
candidate, Violeta Chamorro, and Ortega surrendered power, the first such
peaceful transition through the ballot box in the country's history.
Ortega's political career
since then has disappointed many of his former supporters, not least because of
the powerful allegations of sexual abuse by his step-daughter, Zoilamerica
Narvaez. Few imagined he would ever again challenge seriously for the
presidency. Then, earlier this summer, came the results of opinion polls in the
local press: Ortega was running some six or seven percentage points ahead of his
nearest rivals and might, it seemed, return to power.
The US dispatched a state
department official who told the local chamber of commerce how damaging this
would be to the country. Pressure was successfully put on the third party
candidate, the Conservative Noel Vidaurre, to drop out in order to prevent the
splitting of the anti-Ortega vote. The US ambassador, kitted out in a Liberal
party baseball hat, embraced the Bolanos election campaign and invited the
candidate to join him on an emergency food-aid distribution trip. (Think the US
ambassador to the Court of St James dressed in Tory T-shirt, handing out free
choc ices in Swansea or Sheffield shoulder to shoulder with Iain Duncan Smith.)
John Keane, the US's
acting deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, said
last month that the Sandinistas included people responsible for
"abominations" of human and civil rights. Such has been the official
US rhetoric that former president Jimmy Carter, in Nicaragua to oversee a fair
election, was moved to say last week: "I personally disapprove of
statements or actions by another country that might tend to influence the votes
of people of another sovereign nation."
Jeb Bush, the US
president's brother and governor of the state of Florida, home of the one of
the dodgiest election results in recent history, wrote an article in the Miami
Herald last month in which he attacked Ortega because he "neither
understands nor embraces the basic concepts of freedom, democracy and free
enterprise". Bush jnr added: "Daniel Ortega is an enemy of everything
the United States represents. Further, he is a friend of our enemies. Ortega
has a relationship of more than 30 years with states and individuals who
shelter and condone international terrorism." The article was duly
reprinted last week as an ad by the Liberal party in the Nicaraguan daily, La
Prensa, under the headline "The brother of the president of the United
States supports Enrique Bolanos". As satirist Tom Lehrer said on the
occasion of Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel peace prize - who needs irony?
Then, last week, three US
politicians: Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, Bob Graham (Democrat,
Florida) and Mike DeWine (Republican, Ohio) put a resolution to Congress
calling on the president to re-evaluate his policy towards Nicaragua if the
Sandinistas were to win - effectively suggesting the further impoverishment of
an impoverished country if the wrong result came through. The resolution was
duly reported in the Nicaraguan press.
In the meantime, two of
the architects of the illegal contra war have returned from the elephants'
graveyard. John Negroponte, who had not noticed anything untoward when
atrocities were being committed in Honduras during the war, was confirmed as UN
ambassador within days of September 11 when the nation's attention was
elsewhere. Earlier, Elliott Abrams, who had pleaded guilty in 1981 to lying to
Congress over the conduct of the war, was installed by the president to head
his "office for democracy and human rights". See Tom Lehrer again.
His criminal offence was described by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer as
"a matter of the past".
Ortega, sadly, was no
Nelson Mandela. Now that he has lost, some of the idealistic souls who once
stood beside him in what was, by any standards, a brave revolution may now
return to the political arena. Other younger, untainted politicians may emerge.
But just at the moment when the US needs to be convincing the world that they
do not impose their will to protect their commercial interests with little
regard to local people's desires, the events of the past few weeks in Nicaragua
will serve to create more cynicism.
The Sandinistas, a small,
disorganised party in one of the world's poorest countries, posed no threat to
the US. To link them to terrorism in the wake of September 11 was a cheap and
dishonest shot. The next time Barbara Walters asks Karen Hughes why do they
hate us, she can add one small but not insignificant cause.
duncan.campbell@guardian.co.uk