Using international leverage to arrest Nicaragua’s downward spiral toward authoritarian rule could prevent President Daniel Ortega from “morphing” into another Robert Mugabe, argues Kevin Casas-Zamora, senior fellow in foreign policy at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

Ortega’s Sandinista movement has reacted violently to the alleged rigging of last month’s elections, cancelling the registration of two opposition parties, and harassing its critics - including former Sandinista poet Ernesto Cardenal - as well as domestic and international civil society groups.

“Our democracy is in grave danger,” said Carlos Tunnermann, a former Sandinista ambassador. “There are dictatorial tendencies taking away Nicaraguans’ right to choose.”

As the largest bilateral provider of aid, the U.S. should follow the lead of European states, and reconsider cooperation links with the Ortega regime, Casas-Zamora argues, “prudently, but firmly” using as leverage the $175 million five-year Millennium Challenge agreement signed in 2005.

With the lowest approval rating of all six Central American heads of state at just 22 percent, Ortega has been courting unsavory international allies, including Iran and Libya. “Ortega has become a deeply unpopular president after a series of scandals,” the U.S.-based Stratfor consulting firm notes. “Making grand gestures in the international system is one way for Ortega to step into the spotlight and perhaps attract an international sponsor.”

Venezuela may be forced to cut government spending next year after oil prices fell by more than 70 percent, Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez has admitted. After recent electoral setbacks, the Chavista parliament approved a 2009 budget that includes a 22 percent spending increase, and the government will delay any cut until after the proposed referendum on President Hugo Chavez’s controversial constitutional amendment proposals.

After ten years in power, declining oil revenues are undermining Chavez’s efforts to spread his Bolivarian revolution. By some accounts, the Financial Times reports, Venezuela has “either spent or committed itself to spending over $30bn on supporting like-minded governments in the region, either through direct payments, cheap oil financing, buying up debt, or the construction of oil refineries, most of which are still at the planning stage.”

“Chávez wants to be the leader of an important international anti-imperialist alliance,” says Demetrio Boersner, a former Venezuelan diplomat. “But because of the economic difficulties he faces, those hopes are going to collapse.”

The regime and its supporters realize that significant gains in state and local elections were a real political watershed for the opposition, providing “something of an institutional power base” to its hitherto fractious and fragmented forces.

“The strategic victory of the opposition forces can’t be denied or discounted,” Eva Gollinger, a leading Chavista cheerleader, recently conceded. Her assessment suggests that the regimes’ supporters are in denial about the government’s failures, attributing recent setbacks to foreign intervention and obscure conspiracies on the part of “a complex web of different actors, entities, front groups, and agencies” that “penetrates communities and barrios and promotes alternative projects and programs to those proposed by President Chavez.”

The Chavista forces have good reason to be worried. Venezuela’s student movement is also reinvigorated, and could be at the heart of a popular movement against the regime. The students “have the organizational wherewithal necessary to challenge Chavez; now all they need is public support,” suggests Stratfor, the strategic consultancy. “The combination of the referendum campaign plus looming economic troubles could give Venezuela’s student movement just what it is looking for.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has restarted his campaign to amend the constitution to allow him to remain in power. “Chávez is here to stay,” he told party activists yesterday.

His announcement came a week after elections which saw the opposition register big wins in the most populous states and the capital Caracas. Chávez appears ready to gamble on a vote before his popularity wanes further as falling world oil prices hit government revenues and the regime’s power of patronage.

“As soon as Venezuelans really start to feel the pain of a declining economy, they will protest,” notes strategic analyst Stratfor. “Once that happens, the opposition - including the student opposition movement - will have the impetus it needs to stage massive and widespread protests.”

Despite the opposition gains, the ruling PSUV party performed well, and the pro-Chávez vote rose by 1.1 million on the December 2007 referendum that ended Chávez’s previous attempt at constitutional reform.

“It’s an insult to people that at this time we’re already talking about a new electoral campaign, when they’re overwhelmed by far more pressing problems.” Maybe so, but Chávez “lives to be on the offensive,” says one analyst. “Demonizing the opposition, polarizing the country is the way he’s succeeded up to now.”

“The urgency with which the president is seeking the means to abolish term limits seems to indicate that he sees his window of opportunity closing,” Stratfor suggests.

The announcement appears to confirm the expectations of independent analysts Arca and Associates who reported earlier this week:

[Chávez] is expected to revive plans to revise the constitution in order to remove presidential term limits, allowing him to stand in 2012. There will be a strong temptation to push for this early in 2009, ahead of any potential downturn in the economy, and in order to prevent the opposition from capitalising on its election successes. However, this will be a further distraction from pressing policy pressures in areas such as crime and corruption, where the government has made negligible progress. It will be a major political gamble for Chávez, with a second defeat following the December 2007 setback likely to undermine his prestige amid pressure for renovation and fresh faces.

Arca notes that last week’s elections saw moderate Chávista candidates perform better than figures closely identified with Chávez, possibly prompting more moderate left-of-centre politicians to develop regional powerbases and challenge radical factions.  ”Tensions will deepen in 2009 if the radical socialist agenda pursued since 2006 comes to be seen as an electoral liability by the broader party base,” it concludes.

The opposition’s significant gains in Venezuela’s state and local elections may represent a real political watershed and have likely dealt a decisive blow to President Hugo Chávez’s plans for indefinite rule. The results mean that opposition forces will “now have something of an institutional power base” to challenge the regime.

The adverse circumstances facing the opposition make their gains all the more impressive, as Alvaro Vargas Llosa notes:

The environment in which these victories were obtained could not have been worse for the opposition. Five of its best candidates, including Caracas politician Leopoldo Lopez, whose approval ratings were higher than Chavez’s for most of the year, were disqualified through various legal maneuvers. In recent weeks, as it became apparent that the government was in trouble in key states, Chávez led a personal campaign of intimidation, threatening to jail the outgoing governor of Zulia, who was running for mayor of that state’s capital, and warning the voters of Carabobo that he would send in tanks if the opposition prevailed.

The victory of opposition candidate Carlos Ocariz in the Caracas suburb of Sucre, home to one of the largest slums in Latin America, had a special resonance. “Ocariz broke the myth that Chávez cannot be beaten in poor barrios,” said Luis Vicente León, director of Datánalisis, a Caracas-based pollster.

“It should make Chávez realize that instead of traveling the globe promoting socialism, he needs to address basic issues back home,” says Chávez sympathizer and biographer Bart Jones.

But the electoral gains also represent a challenge to the disparate opposition forces to unite and to develop a meaningful program for change. “It’s not enough that the opposition has won isolated triumphs against Chávez in places where it was unexpected,” pollster Leon said. “They have to convert them into real plans and proposals if they are to compete. That’s their real challenge.”

The government won a majority of the provincial races - 17 of 22 governorships - but the opposition won four of the five most important states, including the capital Caracas and the populous surrounding province of Miranda, oil-producing Zulia, and the country’s industrial hub of Carabobo, areas which “represent the most important symbols in terms of cities and population.”

Chávez responded to the setback by insisting that Venezuela was still “taking the road to socialism” and he has threatened to withhold funding for opposition-controlled states and set up a parallel system of handpicked regional authorities that would rival elected governors.

Fidel Castro is a revolutionary in the guise of a caudillo, while Chávez is the reverse, writes Inter-American Dialog’s Dan Erikson. A PBS documentary confirms that he possesses the megalomaniac qualities of a caudillo, a characteristic that “hardly instills confidence that he is capable of the tact and coalition-building needed to effect significant, positive change.”

“A clip that shows him turning on an Irish reporter and plunging into a tirade about Europe is jaw-dropping,” notes a New York Times review. The reporter in question, Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent for the left-wing Guardian newspaper, here reports on the results of Venezuela’s local and regional elections where he describes Chávista candidates openly giving gifts for votes, a form of political largesse that plummeting oil prices will make less feasible.

Authoritarian petro-states were riding high earlier this year, enjoying record receipts from oil revenues which provided the basis for securing domestic political support through rising living standards, as in Russia, or subsidies and patronage, as in Iran and Venezuela. The surplus also provided resources for growing soft power initiatives and for funding international allies and proxies.

But the downturn in oil prices, which could yet plummet further in the face of the global economic and financial crisis, has chastened at least some members of the axis of diesel, as this report suggests:

Venezuela’s Chavez, who blustered and spread the wealth, has become more contrite as oil income shrinks; Iran spent a lot on crowd pleasing measures that did not manage to throw off the dead weight of sanctions. For now, only Russia seems able to have it both ways, pushing against the U.S. when oil was expensive, and now that it is cheap, cutting a deal with China that could change the game for everyone.

Sunday's election may determine whether Venezuela starts to resemble Castro's Cuba

Venezuela’s voters go to the polls Sunday to elect 22 provincial governors, 328 mayors and 233 regional legislators. The vast majority of these posts in the hands of politicians loyal to President Hugo Chávez, in part because the opposition boycotted the regional elections last time around.

So the polls will certainly boost the relative strength of the opposition - Chávez may lose up to a third of the provinces - even though the regime has banned prominent critics from participating. Amid widespread popular discontent with rising crime rates, deteriorating public transport, power cuts and inflation at over 30%, the government is raising the stakes.

“If I am to continue governing Venezuela, it will depend on what happens on Sunday. Make no mistake, Chávez’s political destiny is in play here,” the president told a recent rally. The results will determine whether Chávez has sufficient political capital to revive constitutional reform proposals, rejected in a plebiscite last year, to allow him to run in the 2012 presidential election.

“Both Chávez and the opposition have turned these elections into a plebiscite on the president’s rule,” said Edgardo Lander, of the Central University of Venezuela. “A significant advance by the opposition could force Chávez to rethink his strategy [of eliminating presidential term limits],” he added.

Some observers suggest the elections could be a watershed, although an openly pluralistic liberal democracy appears unlikely in the short term. “Will it go the way of Cuba, which has exhibited anemic industrial capacity and recently took steps to open up parts of its controlled economy? Or will it be similar to China, whose economy has demonstrated tremendous growth since the 1990s?,” one analyst asks. “Either way, Venezuela appears increasingly similar to these countries in its restriction of personal liberty and expression, as well as other rights such as private property ownership.”

It has also been suggested that serious losses could prompt the regime to establish parallel structures of power to continue the transition to “21st century socialism”. “Chavez is autocratic and doesn’t want to share power,” said Milos Alcalay, Venezuela’s former U.N. ambassador. “He’s already said he will try to put new structures above and below opposition governors.”

Venezuela is the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter, with the fourth highest proven oil reserves. But the global financial crisis and sharp decline in oil prices have prompted Chávez to call for “austerity” in the 2009 budget.

The government’s economic dirigisme, mismanagement of PDVSA, the state-owned petroleum company, and profligacy with the country’s oil revenues are all catching up with the regime, a Caracas-based analysis suggests: “PDVSA has been suffering from under-investment in its core business for some years, as windfall profits from rising oil prices are deployed in domestic social programmes and to support international political ambitions. ”

As geopolitical analyst John R. Thomson observes after a recent trip to Caracas:

Showpiece foreign projects, including refineries in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Paraguay, are being stretched out, embarrassing recipient despots like Daniel Ortega. Years of foreign ventures have drained funds needed for Venezuela’s development, yet another factor favoring major opposition electoral advances on November 23.

Equally important, Chávez will be hard-pressed to continue underwriting foreign elections. In the first proven incident, bagman Guido Antonini broke with the Chávez regime after being apprehended smuggling $800,000 into Buenos Aires, part of a $5 million cash shipment from Caracas in support of last year’s Argentine presidential elections.

He quotes newspaper editor, ex-leftist guerrilla, and former minister Teodoro Petkoff estimating hardcore Chávista support at 20 percent: “He peaked when he was reelected in 2006 and has been declining slowly but steadily since,” he says. “The reasons are multiple, but a major one is that the Chávistas indulge in obscene, obvious consumption, while little gets done for the people. No schools, little or nothing on shop shelves, huge military expenditures - he has dreams of the re-emergence of the Soviet Union!”

The “color revolutions” ushered in democratic transitions, but also prompted a pronounced backlash against freedom of association worldwide, according to a new report from Freedom House. Governments are taking calculated action to restrict nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups and independent trade unions, notes Freedom of Association Under Threat: The New Authoritarians’ Offensive Against Civil Society.

“There are reasons to believe that the current round of restrictions is not a passing phenomenon,” said Arch Puddington, Freedom House director of research. “These setbacks can largely be traced to the emergence of a new breed of authoritarian leaders who employ repressive tactics that are much more sophisticated than those used in the past.” 

From 2004-2007, freedom of association deteriorated in almost every region except Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with the most pronounced declines in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, while associational rights were already endangered in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East/North Africa region. The analysis draws on the organization’s Freedom in the World data and includes reports on countries where associational rights are particularly threatened: Algeria, China, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. 

“The officers of NGOs are seldom arrested, placed on trial, sent to gulags, exiled, or murdered, though all these things do happen from time to time,” the report states. “Today’s authoritarians instead rely on legalistic or bureaucratic methods to hobble civil society,” including tax investigations and funding restrictions. “And because the drive against associational rights is conducted largely without violence, it evokes little notice from the outside world.”

The report notes that organized labor has experienced severe constraints on associational rights since the end of the Cold War, not least in Latin America where it confronts a range of challenges, from right-wing death squads in Colombia to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez’s “tried and true Marxist tactic of establishing parallel unions in an effort to bring the labor movement under his political control.” 

Related news:

• The “closing of political space” in Ethiopia was raised on a recent trip to Addis Ababa by David J. Kramer, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He drew attention to a draft legislation on civil society organizations that will impose a 10 % threshold of foreign financing and 30% cap on administrative overhead. “Restrictions on the kinds of activities that would be affected by this legislation - basically, any organizations that are considered foreign or receive foreign financing that engage in human rights issues or issues dealing with the rights of women or the rights of children or the disabled, or conflict resolution - all of those things would be at risk under this legislation,” he noted.  
• Idasa, the Southern African democracy group, has called for the release of Mario Masuku, leader of Swaziland’s banned Pudemo party who was detained three days ago under anti-terrorism legislation. Masuku has played a “leading role in promoting democracy and free political association and activity,” Idasa notes.

President Daniel Ortega’s growing authoritarianism has prompted even former Sandinistas to express their concern. But now street clashes following last week’s municipal elections have left Nicaragua’s “fledgling institutional democracy struggling for its life”:

The last time rival political forces fought one another street by street for control of the Nicaraguan capital was three decades ago, in July 1979, at the culmination of the Sandinista insurrection that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. This week, the streets of Managua were once again aflame amid the boom of mortar rounds, as the Sandinistas and their rivals battled for control - but it was the erstwhile revolutionary movement that now stands accused of being a dictatorship.

The political polarization is also evident in virtual confrontations on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The elections were marred by widespread abuses and the opposition has called for a recount. “Unless there is a proper recount, an ugly precedent for Latin America will have been set,” states The Economist. Not least for Venezuela where state and local elections take place later this month.

• Last week’s terrorist bombings in Somaliland claimed the lives of 31 people, including Hussein Mohamed Farah, formerly an officer of the Institute for Practical Research and Training, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
• David DeCaires, “one of Guyana’s extraordinary leaders“, and the founder and editor of its leading independent newspaper has died of complications following a heart attack. DeCaires broke the state media when he helped establish the Stabroek News in 1986 with a $110,000 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy. He has since contested the Guyanese government’s abuse of public advertising for politically-punitive purposes. 
• You will find the testimony of independent Cuban labor leader Pedro Pablo ÁlvarezRamos testimony (in Spanish) tothe OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights here. It lasts approximately 46 minutes.

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.