[lbo-talk] Ortega as sellout

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Nov 13 18:10:32 PST 2006


URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/13/opinion/13llosa.html

[The tone of this is irritating -- this guy celebrates it as a good thing -- but the narrative is interesting.]

The New York Times

November 13, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

¡Viva el Capitalismo!

By ÁLVARO VARGAS LLOSA

Guatemala City

THE irony could not be more poignant. Twenty years ago today, Ronald

Reagan went on national television and admitted his governments

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 weeks

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. Ortegas

Sandinistas, and they paved the way for Mr. Ortegas 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. Ortegas return amounts to a

revival of the cold war dynamic in the Western Hemisphere and, in

particular, to a retrospective impugning of Reagans 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. Ortegas 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 Ortegas 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 didnt 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. Ortegas 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.

The man responsible for the infamous piñata a series of laws put in

place just before he lost power in 1990 that allowed the Sandinista

leaders to take for themselves confiscated property worth hundreds of

millions of dollars is now talking about his respect for private

property and foreign investment.

He has tossed the olive green fatigues and the red and black flag; his

campaign colors were pink and turquoise, and his theme song a Spanish

version of John Lennons Give Peace a Chance. He apologized for the

massacre of the indigenous Miskito people that took place in the north

of the country during his first regime and, finally, he instructed his

legislators to vote for a bill banning abortion even in cases of a

threat to the womans life.

What this farcical saga tells us is that Daniel Ortega was much more

interested in being president than in being principled and, more

important, that anyone who wants to lead todays Nicaragua needs to

persuade voters that he will respect the rule of law and private

property, will try to lure investment and will be sensitive to the

nations religious heritage. The fact that Mr. Ortegas past conduct

casts a shadow over the proclamation that he is a reformed character

does not detract from the fact that Nicaragua has not voted for

radical leftist policies.

What about the broader claims that Mr. Ortegas victory is a

confirmation that radical left-wing politics are back in Latin

America? True, in addition to Mr. Chávez, leftists have taken power in

Brazil, Chile, Panama, and Uruguay. (Mr. Chávezs efforts have

apparently led the Bush administration to quietly lift a ban on the

training of military personnel from 11 Latin American countries in the

United States.) But these other Latin American socialists belong to

the vegetarian left rather than the carnivorous left. Other than the

occasional Castro-like rhetorical flourish, the new leaders are

avoiding the mistakes of the old left, including confrontation with

the United States and Europe, fiscal profligacy and nationalization of

industry.

Hugo Chávez has been unable to reproduce his regime in any other

country except in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales is now

increasingly unpopular and has been forced to backtrack on some of his

revolutionary announcements. Mr. Morales, for example, campaigned on a

promise to force the nationalization of Bolivias natural gas fields,

but last month came to a deal in which two major Brazilian companies

agreed to share revenues and operate as service providers to the state

energy company. He even sent his vice president to Washington in July

to appeal to the White House for renewed trade preferences.

And in the week since his victory, Mr. Ortega has been sending the

signal that he thinks joining the vegetarians will bring him more

credit than being a clone of Hugo Chávez without the oil. No one is

going to allow the seizure of property big or small, he told a group

of Nicaraguan businessmen after his victory. We need to eradicate

poverty, but you dont do that by getting rid of investment and those

who have resources.

Now, whether the moderate left will continue to enjoy the support of

the masses is an entirely different question. Since many of these new

leaders are not engaging in systematic reform, it is likely that

voters will hold them to account should their economies now buoyed by

the forces of globalization, through rising exports and foreign

investment start to sag. But for the moment, its their show, and the

carnivores are outside looking in.

In a sense, these moderate left-wing leaders, perhaps now including

Mr. Ortega, are a lot more in sync with what Ronald Reagan and his men

were aiming for in Central America in the 1980s than Oliver North

would care to admit. As they fall over themselves pandering to the

church, the business community and conservative voters, theres little

time left over for creating a New Man.

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.



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