Commentaries

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211038541

21

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 241, Vol. 48 No. 6, November 2021, 21–33

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

Commentaries

Salvador Martí i Puig

University of Girona, Spain

From 2007 to 2018 Daniel Ortega managed to set up a regime of a corporate

nature that brought together the interests of big national capital, the Church,

and the country’s poorest sectors in the guise of a liberal democracy. As Cruz-

Feliciano has so clearly stated, Ortega’s political artifact, blessed with the

approval of the U.S. administration, exploded in April 2018, generating the

most intense wave of protests of the twenty-first century. The spark was the

reform of the pension system, but several groups—mostly urban middle-class

youth and social movement leaders—quickly joined the protest and challenged

the entire regime, above all for its arbitrary, repressive, and patrimonial nature.

Cruz-Feliciano’s excellent text suggests a need for asking three questions.

The first is why Ortega’s opposition has been unable to produce any inclusive,

popular, and positive discourse or proposal for more than a decade. The oppo-

sition has denounced the lack of transparency and caudillismo of Ortega’s

regime but has only proposed a general “return” to liberal democracy (begun

in 1990 with privatizations and neoliberalism) in a country where the rights

laid down in the Constitution are merely nominal. The opposition has never

discussed what economic policies it wants to promote or how the gains from

promised growth will be distributed. Nor has it indicated whether it is going

to maintain or reform targeted social policies that, despite being clientelist,

represent significant aid for hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans. Moreover,

the opposition has generated a violently anti-Sandinista discourse when part

of its social base belonged to the FSLN before being swallowed up by Ortega.

Added to all this is its excessive dependence on the international community,

an element that, in the eyes of many, portrays it as an elitist political platform

and a traitor to the homeland.

The second question we could ask is to what extent the COVID-19 health

crisis has helped stabilize the Ortega-Murillo regime since the 2018 crisis. A

mixture of repression and fear of contagion (in a context where the government

was remiss) finally broke up a negative coalition that was broad-based but not

very united. Protesting in the street is one thing and competing in the political

arena quite another. When the mobilizations ceased (out of fatigue and fear and

avoidance of contagion), political leaders emerged who were willing to negoti-

ate electoral formulas and quotas of power within the framework of an elec-

toral administration controlled by the FSLN. The latest government moves (as

of mid-June 2021)—driving forward repressive legislation and arresting poten-

tial candidates—show that the November elections will not be competitive.

The third question is what the future of the regime might be once it has won

the authoritarian 2021 elections. Obviously, we do not know if, in Ortega’s

fourth consecutive term of office, his government will manage to rebuild the

alliance it had with big capital or if conditions for another social uprising are

1038541LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211038541Latin American PerspectivesMartí i Puig / COMMENTARY

research-article2021