President Daniel Ortega’s growing authoritarianism is leading the Sandinista’s former cheer-leaders to have second thoughts after his government launched a crackdown on NGOs. Security forces last week raided the offices the Centre for Media Investigations (Cinco) and the Autonomous Movement for Women (MAM), seizing documents and computers.
Last month, the First Lady, Rosario Murillo, claimed that CINCO, MAM and Oxfam-UK – which has a relationship with CINCO and MAM – of “hatching a plan to destabilize the government,” prompting the interior ministry investigation into CINCO and MAM and 15 other Nicaraguan NGOs. Critics see the moves as a crude attempt to stifle dissent.
As Reporters Without Borders notes:
The interior ministry website claims that the 17 NGOs lack legal status because they are not formally registered as NGOs with the ministry. Officially, the embezzlement and money-laundering suspicions stem from some 58 financial accords – in some cases worth more than 400,000 dollars – with other NGOs that are registered. The registered NGOs have already been fined and could now lose their legal status.
The Inter-American Press Association reports that Ortega has attacked civil society organizations that criticize government policies. “The official media have even been ferocious in their attacks on leftist political and social leaders who were once public officials in the Sandinista revolution of the 1980s but who now dissent from government policies,” the IAPA notes. Ortega recently targeted the celebrated 83-year-old leftist poet Ernesto Cardenal, in a “crude act of political revenge”.
Thirty years ago, newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was assassinated for speaking out against Anastasio Somoza’s right-wing dictatorship. Today his son, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, is also an investigative journalist. Following a smear campaign on state media outlets, the Attorney General has started legal proceedings against him as president of the Centre for Media Investigations.
The government has also targeted independent media, including La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario newspapers, through legal proceedings, economic sanctions, and denigrating criticism by state media.
The recent attacks on civil society are part of a wider authoritarian trend, including the Supreme Electoral Council’s prohibited on national and international observers for forthcoming municipal elections and cancelling the legal status of the Sandinista Renovation and Conservative parties order to prevent them from participating in the November local elections.
Ortega received only 38% of the vote when took power through a pact 2000 with ex-President Arnoldo Alemán, who is currently facing a 20-year prison sentence on money laundering charges. The accord effectively gave Ortega control of the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and the judicial system, the Supreme Electoral Council, the Comptroller General, and the Attorney General, on top of his presidential prerogatives.
The government’s tightening grip over state institutions amounts to an “institutional dictatorship,” according to Sandinista Renovation Movement leader Edmundo Jarquin. “Ortega is oppressive like Somoza, yet with a totalitarian vision that even Somoza didn’t have,” he says.
[...] transition. Media freedoms are being eroded across Latin America and populist forces with dubious democratic credentials have come to the fore. In the developed West, a precipitous decline in political participation, [...]