Feeling sad is inevitable these days. A new year usually means renewal, the possibility of change. In Nicaragua, though, our new year began with an old and all-too-familiar ceremony: the inauguration of our perpetual president Daniel Ortega and his vice-president wife Rosario Murillo.
For eleven years, Ortega and Murillo enjoyed more than enough tolerance. They were allowed, through our inaction, to change the constitution, the statutes that ensured a more-or-less professional army, and the laws they then used to destroy the integrity of our democratic institutions. But discontent accumulated, and expressed itself surprisingly. The country was calm, until, in the face of a 2018 protest — one of many sweeping through Latin America in those days — their fear of losing power unleashed them, and they decided to attack their own people.
Since then, the attacks have not ceased. Ortega and Murillo have been unable to recognize that they are the ones who abandoned the course they themselves proposed: a safe country, with strong class alliances, with handouts to ensure their popularity, with investments — a country open to the world, but under their total control. Many people went along with these designs. Big capital, the middle classes, and much of the general population may not have approved of the centralization of power, but they thought, if that was the price of living in peace and safety, they would surely pay it.
There were only a few of us at the time who warned that the accumulation of power — as I said during an interview in 2018, when I called the regime a “dictablanda,” or “soft dictatorship” — was such that we would be fine until the day Ortega woke up in a bad mood, with all the tools he needed to crush us in his hands. I think this warning has proved bitterly true since 2018.
It is not my purpose here to detail all the harm they have inflicted on us, since I think most of us feel it and live it, directly or indirectly. I would rather talk about their own failures, the failures they have brought upon themselves, through their own ruthless and autocratic behavior.
This was a sad and lackluster inauguration for them as well. Ortega and Murillo are too smart to actually believe their own anti-imperialist rhetoric. The U.S. ambassador has met with members of the opposition — that’s part of his job, as it is for all foreign ambassadors. But the U.S. of today is not the U.S. of the 1980s. They are focused more on their own domestic problems, and on the Middle East. Their meddling in Latin America, odious as it may be, is no longer as significant. They care about drugs and migration — and have been relatively satisfied with Ortega in that regard — but they don’t go around overthrowing governments like they did in past decades.
On the level of propaganda, however, the presidential couple knows that this phantom enemy serves them well, and so they use it. But not only do they reject the United States — they have shunned everyone in the world who abides by certain norms. These norms may not be perfect, but they allow for a more-or-less civilized life within the confines of the Western culture that Nicaragua shares. We have much more in common with the United States and Europe than with Russia or China. But, backed into a corner by their own outbursts and displays of omnipotent power, the presidential couple are thrusting Nicaragua into an orbit of countries notorious for abusing and committing atrocities against their own people.
Ortega and Murillo will continue to rule over a country whose society has been fractured by them, a society divided. They will continue to rule over a country where people dream of migrating; where recent years have witnessed the biggest brain drain in living memory; where talented young people who were beginning to generate new ideas have left, or face persecution; where every single family has suffered the loss of a loved one, or the deadly mismanagement of the pandemic whose victims the regime tries to hide. A country where 157 unjustly imprisoned political detainees languish in conditions as miserable as any Gulag.
They will govern surrounded by security, living in fear of their own people, circumscribed by a smaller and smaller group of cronies who stick by their side only because they owe them favors, but who they know they cannot trust blindly. They will continue to be cheered on by public employees who are forced to do so, and over whom they exert strict control.
They will continue to be supported by a party that no longer exists, run by officials paid for their loyalty, and who are capable, like a fanatical horde, of killing and breaking bones if their “bosses” ask it of them. They will govern with an army of fanfare and swagger, commanded by old, fat generals who are loyal only because they fear losing their comforts and privileges (and who knows what else). They will govern with a police force they have manipulated and subdued to the point that, far from being an institution beloved by the people, it is the very face of repression and abuse.
Their political project — everything they campaigned on for reelection: jobs, peace, reconciliation — has slipped out of their hands because of their own greed and ambition, because they believed themselves to be anointed by a God they invented in their own image, having never believed in the God of justice. It has slipped out of their hands because they are incapable of humility, of self-criticism, of accepting that they cannot spend their whole lives in power. Ortega and Murillo have become the monsters they once despised. And now, their vanity and pride and messianic delusions have forced them into the position of delivering their country into the hands of regimes that can sustain them and keep them in power, but that will destroy the Nicaragua of Rubén Darío and Augusto Sandino — the Nicaragua that once was, and that so many of us love.
This inauguration was a requiem for the soul of Nicaragua, submerging us deeper into the disgrace of a country that has been dispossessed, impoverished, humiliated, and forced into submission and silence — a country whose own people want to abandon it, because it no longer belongs to them.
On Jan. 10, 1978, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was gunned down in the streets of Managua; this Jan. 10, Nicaragua marked another dark day in our history.
*Translated by Max Granger
Editor’s Note: This column was originally published in the Nicaraguan newspaper Confidencial.
