by Toni Solo
30 October 2006 ZNet
Critical comment on the Nicaraguan election campaign has tended to neglect the nitty gritty of life for the country’s impoverished majority. The closer the November 5th election looms the nastier the campaign becomes. Attacks have focused on the Unida Nicaragua Triunfa coalition led by the FSLN and its presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. From across the political spectrum the barrage seems almost choreographed, so closely do the various blasts follow the US State Department’s aggressive anti-FSLN line. Especially vociferous are local US embassy representatives, led by ambassador Paul Trivelli from his diplomatic Castle of Despond in Managua’s Batahola district. For its part, the FSLN-led coalition refuses to react, focusing on its message of reconciliation. Its restraint seems to have paid off. Its lead in all the opinion polls is on or above 10%. With between 32 to 37 per cent voter preferences in the latest opinion polls, they need 35% and an advantage of 5% over the nearest rival to win the presidency on the first round.
A recent attack from poet Ernesto Cardenal(1), one of the Sandinista Revolution’s sacred cows now aligned with the centrist Movimiento de Renovacion Sandinista party, regurgitates the standard line, reserving especial venom for Unida Nicaragua Triunfa’s presidential candidate Daniel Ortega. Alongside poisonous personal attacks from former colleagues, Ortega faces demonization by TV and radio from longstanding enemies on the right. TV spots for the Right’s leading candidate, the Alianza Liberal Nicaraguense’s Eduardo Montealegre, end with a red stamp landing across footage of Ortega. The stamp reads “Peligro” – “Danger!” This is identical to the television campaign Mexico’s PAN government and institutions waged against progressive candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The ALN’s rival right wing Partido Liberal Constitucionalista party runs fierce attacks painting Ortega as a warmonger. All this is in addition to declarations from US government representatives and political figures like Congressman Dan Burton (2) condemning Ortega as undemocratic, corrupt and incompetent.
One is tempted to allegorise the US inspired campaign against the FSLN-led coalition as an effort to build an archipelago of dismal Castles of Forgetting with thought-dungeons across Nicaragua’s political landscape – a psychological Guantanamo-Bagram-Diego Garcia to contain and torment “worst-of-the-worst” political sympathies and memories. Sometimes the structures are modelled on Bluebeard’s Castle(3) with secret rooms, full of skeletons and rotten body parts, inside which the servant-voters are forbidden to look. Other variants incorporate elements of Axel’s Castle(4), where heroic, noble-managerial politicians live pure, unsullied ideal lives. Outside, all around them, servant-voters slave to pay off domestic and foreign debt so as to ensure the non-nose-picking, non-farting aristocracy within the castle’s luxurious precincts live untroubled by want or need.
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