The new Miss Universe is a Nicaraguan; that country's people are exuberant; the government, not so much

 A case of national cognitive dissonance if there ever was one:

Nicaragua’s increasingly isolated and repressive government thought it had scored a rare public-relations victory last week,” reported the Associated Press. Why did Daniel Ortega and his gang think that? Because Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios, won the Miss Universe pageant. That is something for a dictatorship to take advantage of.

But there was a problem: Apparently, Señorita Palacios had taken part in pro-democracy demonstrations when a student.

In celebration of her victory in the pageant, Nicaraguans took to the streets, but not in the way the government would have wanted. As the AP said, they waved “the blue-and-white national flag, as opposed to Ortega’s red-and-black Sandinista banner.”

I’m glad that the Sandinistas have their own flag, their own symbol, leaving the national flag to other Nicaraguans.

Further from that AP report:

Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo lashed out Wednesday at opposition social-media sites — many run from exile — that celebrated Palacios’ win as a victory for the opposition.

“In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering,” Murillo said.

Dictatorships want a nation to have no life outside the dictatorship itself. Remember the slogan of Mussolini and his gang: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Félix Maradiaga is a Nicaraguan democracy leader and a former political prisoner. With other prisoners, he was released earlier this year. They were exiled to the United States, by plane. Let me quote from a piece I wrote about Maradiaga and his ordeal:

The plane was a charter from Omni Air Transport. When it took off, the prisoners — now ex-prisoners — sang the national anthem. And prayed. The moment was “bittersweet,” says Maradiaga. Sweet, because they were out of prison. Bitter, because it would be some time before they were allowed to return to their homeland. (If ever?)

Note something about the national anthem: It is illegal to sing it in Nicaragua. It is also illegal to raise the national flag. Why? Because the dictatorship sees both the anthem and the flag as symbols of the opposition.

Can't sing their actual national anthem or fly their actual national flag, because the Sandinistas want to supplant them with their own brand logo.

I found this noteworthy because the 1979 (highjacked) revolution in Nicaragua, and its impact on US policy toward Central America, was the issue that catalyzed my conversion experience. In the early 1980s, I was a clueless and aimless sort-of left-leaner. But I was taking an increasing interest in world affairs, and I became curious as to just what the Sandinistas were all about. So I read Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. 

Shortly thereafter, I had occasion to hear a presentation by a guy from our local "peace fellowship" who had just returned from a "fact-finding' mission to Nicaragua and El Salvador. He unfailingly toed the Reagan-is-supporting-the-bad-guys-in-the-region line. I squirmed in my seat, awaiting the chance to bring some clarity to the Q&A session.

When the presenter called on me, I said, "Mister, you're leaving out the important part of the story. The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a hardcore Marxist-Leninist organization, and has been since its late-1950s founding by Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge. The same is true for the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which, fortunately, has not so far taken over that country."

Gasps and looks of disbelief went up from those seated around me. They couldn't handle the injection of some reality into the proceedings. 

Of course, in the ensuing years, Daniel Ortega lost his gamble that the FSLN could win a fair and Internationally monitored election. Violeta Chamorro, the matriarch of the family that published La Prensa, the newpaper that had opposed the Samoza dictatorship and then the Sandinista regime, became Nicaragua's president. The country's fortunes rose and fell over the years, and in 2007, Ortega again assumed the presidency. But since then, the true nature of his ideology has been too on-display for the peaceniks to make gestures of support toward. He's universally seen as being on the level of Venezuela's Maduro and the regime in Cuba. 

Anyway, congratulations to Ms. Palacios. May she inspire her fellow Nicaraguan citizens to hold steadfast in their resistance to the grim nonsense their government has imposed. 

 

Nicaragua: following Venezuela into the depths of ruin

Hugely important article right now at National Review by Jay Nordlinger on the current state of society, culture and politics in Nicaragua.

Actually, there are two NRO Nordlinger pieces about this published so far this month.

A key figure in both of them is Felix Maradiaga, whose personal story is as compelling as anything I've come across in some time:

Felix Maradiaga was born in 1976, three years before the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. His family was like the country at large in that it was split, politically: Some were pro-Sandinista, some were anti-. “My mother was very resentful of the revolution, particularly in its attack on the private sector and private property. She was a schoolteacher but also an entrepreneur. My father was an idealist” — someone who had suffered under two dictatorships: that of Somoza in his home country, Nicaragua, and that of Pinochet in Chile.

He died in 1985, in an accident. Then, the Sandinistas took away the family’s property. When Felix was twelve, he was confronted with a choice: join the Sandinista army or join the Contras. Either way, he was going to be conscripted into the country’s civil war. At this point, his mother made the most difficult decision a mother can make, as Felix says: She sent him away.

Twelve-year-old Felix joined a group of Central Americans traveling north. In Texas, he asked for asylum. He was placed with a foster family — Nicaraguan Americans — in Florida. They cared for him for two years. In 1990, when democracy came to Nicaragua, he went home. And he wanted to do whatever he could to ensure that Nicaragua never experienced civil war again.

He studied political science. In due course, he was at Harvard and Yale. When protests broke out in Nicaragua last April, the regime made a bogeyman of Maradiaga: He was the mastermind, he was a CIA stooge, he was causing all this disruption and destruction. Maradiaga dodged a few assassination attempts. Then, along with some colleagues, he was beaten to a pulp by an orteguista gang. He had his teeth knocked out, for example. He could not stay alive in Nicaragua much longer. So, with great reluctance, he joined the 80,000 others in exile.

He's not alone. The Ortega regime is doing a lot of this kind of thing:

Paramilitaries roam the country, looking for enemies of the state. These thugs are, if anything, worse than the “official” thugs. The Sandinista Youth are a particular menace. We have seen these situations in other times, in other places, such as the Duvaliers’ Haiti and the Castros’ Cuba.

The Ortegas and their lieutenants routinely denounce their opponents as “bloodsuckers” and “vampires.” (Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela, uses just this language, especially “vampires.” In Cuba, the Castroites have always called their opponents “worms.”) They also denounce reports by human-rights groups as “noticias falsas,” or “fake news.”

Another key figure in Nordlinger's latest piece about this is Edepcia Dubon:

. . . [She is] a former legislator. “I never thought I would be an exile,” she says. Last May, she traveled to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. On her way, she stopped in Miami and met with her fellow Nicaraguans. She also gave interviews, including to CNN. This got the attention of Laureano Ortega Murillo, the singer, who issued a tweet. He called Dubón an enemy of the state, basically — which made it too dangerous for her to return home.

She was born in the 1980s and named after one of her grandmothers (now deceased). Is there another Edipcia in the world? Edipcia Dubón does not know of any. Politically, her family was split, just like the country at large: Some were pro-Sandinista and some were anti-. Her father was pro-. He had come from a humble background. Was Edipcia herself pro-? “Sí, claro,” she says — “Yes, for sure.” Her uncle was a Sandinista soldier. The Sandinista soldiers who came to visit the Dubón farm were very kind to her.

“When I was little,” says Edipcia, “I slept in a T-shirt that had a heart on it and said, ‘I love Daniel Ortega.’” The memory of it makes her weep. We stop talking for a bit.

Young Edipcia, her dad, and many others had great hopes for the Sandinistas. The poor needed a fair shake. They needed literacy and opportunity. They had been kept down for so long. But Ortega’s government turned out to be a corrupt dictatorship — yet another one — and Edipcia and her dad both fell away.
In college, she studied economics, because she wanted to attack poverty: Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. She joined a party called the Sandinista Renovation Movement and ran for office. She was elected a deputy in the National Assembly. She would serve less than five years.

Defeated? Not exactly. In July 2016, she and other deputies met with Luis Almagro, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States. Their purpose was to discuss the breakdown of democracy in Nicaragua. In a speech, Ortega called them “rats.” Ten days later, Dubón learned from television that she and 25 other deputies had been expelled from the Assembly. Just like that.
She was subject to physical attacks and death threats. As we talk in Mexico City, she notes that something has changed in Nicaragua (one of many things): Women are being targeted, as never before. Among the hundreds of political prisoners are at least 77 women.

“It’s like there’s a war,” says Edipcia, about the situation overall. “But there is no war.” Every day, there are murders, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torturings — the whole repertoire of a tyrannical regime. Nicaragua is a theater of violence.

Some background is in order. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1961 by Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge. As a teen in 1957, Fonseca had won a scholarship from a leftist organization to visit the Soviet Union. He came back singing its praises, Walter Duranty-style, as the model for humanity's future. The group started staging guerrilla attacks and attracted two young brothers, Daniel and Humberto Ortega.

The FSLN was explicitly Marxist-Leninist from the outset. All its official documents from 1961 onward make that plain.

Resentment built in Nicaraguan society over the years toward the regime of the Somoza family, which had ruled the country since the 1930s. (The 1930s rebel who was the FSLN's namesake, Cesar Augusto Sandino, was assassinated by the Nicaraguan National Guard during a politically tumultuous period during which Juan Batista Sacasa was president and Anastasia Somoza was head of the National Guard.) 

In 1979, a broad-based coalition of forces including the business community (represented by Adolfo Calero and Alfonso Robelo), the conservative wing of the Catholic church, and the FSLN toppled the then-current president, a Somoza. The non-Sandinista elements of this coalition tried to maintain equal weight within the new government, but were quickly elbowed aside. Comandantes of the FSLN flew to Cuba and then the USSR, making clear to the world what their foreign-policy alignment was going to look like.

The FSLN also quickly lent its support to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which was waging civil war against that country's succession of unstable governments.

How do I know all this arcane history?

It figures into my personal conversion story.

In the mid-1980s, I was a silly young man, running a manufacturing company that my father had founded. It was a position for which I was completely unqualified. I'd majored in English in college, and I was basically a dope-addled hedonist, stuffing my regret at not seriously pursuing my musical aspirations.

I was aimless. The argument could be made that I was a poster boy of privilege.

I was attending the local Unitarian "fellowship." (The Unitarians don't call their congregations churches.)

We didn't have a minister as such, and so we brought in speakers from various community organizations to indoctrinate the attendees in various facets of social justice.

A guy from the local "peace fellowship" had just returned from a "fact-finding mission" to Central America. I forget who sponsored his little sojourn. Anyway, he gave the spiel you'd expect. "I was there. I met with peasants. I can tell you the Reagan foreign policy is imperialistic and immoral."

I'd started reading the op-ed pages in theWall Street Journal and the Indianapolis Star, which led me to check out the book-length works of some of the columnists I was encountering (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak), which led me to the book Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. 

So by the time I heard the peace-fellowship guy's presentation, I knew enough to know the was peddling lies, and I called him on it during the Q&A. 

I astonished myself. I was defending Reagan's foreign policy. 

But something had been stirred within me. There was no turning back. 

I eventually left the manufacturing world, got a master's degree in history and became president of the Indiana Council on World Affairs. I also, through some tangential connections I was making, had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Soviet Union in 1990. 

But my main purpose in bringing up all this backstory is to point out the spiritual rot in American leftism. 

The impetus driving that peace-fellowship guy is still at work, causing Democrats like AOC to obfuscate when called upon to unequivocally denounce the despair that characterizes present-day Venezuela. 

And I'd bet you a dollar to a doughnut that the likes of her would also waffle if pressed about what's going on in Nicaragua. 

The Left is comprised of two basic levels: those who want to believe in "the vision" so badly they will swallow all manner of outrageous lies about everything, and the stratum that knows it's all a lie, but knows that those lies are how it gets and maintains power.

It's how leftism works in Venezuela, Nicaragua, post-America, and wherever you live. 

Mr. Maradiaga and Ms. Dubon can tell you all about it.

John Bolton is a national treasure

What a refreshing change from the days when the Most Equal Comrade was orchestrating post-America's decline:

“Members of this administration will never take a picture in front of Che Guevara…Under this administration we will no longer appease dictators and despots near our shores in this hemisphere. We will not reward firing squads, torturers, and murderers …… The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – has finally met its match.”

“This Troika of Tyranny (the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua)– this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere,” Bolton said. “The United States looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall… The Troika will crumble.”

 

That's John Bolton yesterday, in a speech he gave in Miami announcing new sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

The Cold War may have ended in 1991, but the specter of Marx has continued to haunt our hemisphere.

There are some bad actors in the world that the US has to deal with for strategic reasons (think Saudi Arabia), but not this collection of hostile regimes.

John Bolton understands a fundamental truth about foreign policy: When a regime plainly states that it regards the US as the enemy, take it seriously.

Nicaragua appears to be going the way of Venezuela

Usurping democratic institutions, snuffing out political opposition, paramilitary gangs associated with the ruling party, economic activity in the capital city grinding to a halt . . . sound familiar?

But this isn't about Maduro and Caracas. This is Nicaragua in June 2018:

A surge of violence has snuffed out economic activity and dimmed prospects to peacefully resolve a political crisis here that began as a protest against tax increases and turned into a revolt against Nicaragua’s longtime leader Daniel Ortega.

Since mid-April, more than 100 people have been killed in confrontations with police during mass protests and what human-rights groups say are paramilitary gangs aligned with Mr. Ortega’s government.

Among them were 15 people killed at a peaceful Mother’s Day protest march last month in Managua and 11 people by paramilitary groups and police in the predominantly indigenous city of Masaya this past weekend, including a 15-year-old protester who witnesses say was executed by a policewoman. 

On Tuesday, violence flared in the quaint colonial city of Granada, home to hundreds of American retirees.

“We are going through very dark days,” said Humberto Belli, a former education minister. “The people are out in the street demanding that Ortega leave, but he has shown an unexpected ability to kill. We see more blood every day—three, four, five people killed on a daily basis. This has no end.”

The upcoming generation is not pleased:

. . . many Nicaraguans say they are fed up with Mr. Ortega and his wife, the unpopular Vice President Rosario Murillo, who they say have usurped democratic institutions and snuffed out political opposition. Government plans to confiscate large tracts of land to build a commercial waterway to rival the Panama Canal have cost the Ortegas rural support.

“Managua and the country are no longer calm. Ortega has to go now,” said Claudia Guillén, a 19-year-old university student.

And Managua apparently is nearly a ghost town:

The country’s capital of Managua, a sprawling city of modest malls, street vendors and office towers mixed with open pastures, is now largely deserted. Shops are closed and vandalized. Few people venture out at night. Walls are covered with graffiti calling Mr. Ortega a murderer. A group of police officers stand guard by a monument to the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, erected by Mr. Ortega, after protesters tried to knock it down during recent demonstrations.

Throughout Nicaragua, barricades have sprung up, blocking roads and snarling traffic, and making the key Pan American highway that links many of the country’s cities impassable. Tourism has been hit hard, hotel managers say, with occupancies at major hotels plunging and some international airlines paring back flights. 

“Economic activity has plummeted. People fear leaving their homes,” said Pamela Vanega, a waitress at a restaurant in one of Managua’s largest malls. 

Analysts say the surge in violence has set back any hope of a peaceful resolution. A dialogue between Mr. Ortega’s government and the opposition, sponsored by the influential Catholic Church, has been shelved. Nicaragua’s business class, which until recently worked closely with Mr. Ortega, is demanding new elections.

“My sense is that the situation will continue to deteriorate and the government will continue its repression,” said Eric Farnsworth, who heads the Washington office of think tank Council of the Americas. 

This is the second go-around for tyranny and economic ruin under Ortega. He was the most visible face among the nine members of the Directorate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a hardcore Marxist-Leninist party / guerrilla force founded in 1961. The FSLN staged attacks of various kinds throughout the next 18 years. By 1979, it was part of a broad coalition of forces, including the business community, the Chamorro family that ran La Prensa, the most prominent newspaper in the country, and the Catholic Church (at least that part of it that wasn't ate up with liberation theology), that opposed the regime of Anastasio Somoza.  The FSLN quickly broke its good faith with the coalition's other elements and usurped the revolution that toppled Somoza. After seizing total power, the new government quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and Cuba. It never was able to win majority support - in fact, the country was wracked by civil war throughout the 1980s - and Ortega lost to Violetta Chamorro in a presidential election in 1990.

But now, even former fellow Sandinistas are chafing at what Ortega is doing. Even his own brother. And Ortega's wacko wife seems to be playing an outsized role in the deteriorating situation:

Four former top Sandinista generals have been prominent participants in the anti-Ortega marches. Mr. Ortega’s brother, Humberto, a former Sandinista defense minister, has publicly expressed concern about how Mr. Ortega is managing the crisis.

Last month, the spokesman for Nicaragua’s army told news agency AFP that the army “would not repress” antigovernment protesters. 

The crisis comes just weeks before Mr. Ortega is scheduled to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista revolution. The reclusive Mr. Ortega usually gives a speech as tens of thousands of Sandinista supporters march in a parade.

Ms. Murillo is widely believed to be the power behind the throne in Nicaragua. Analysts say she has alienated many of Mr. Ortega’s old Sandinista comrades who resent her sway over him. Ms. Murillo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

An esoteric poet and believer of mystic spiritualism and religious syncretism, the eccentric Ms. Murillo always wears a multitude of turquoise rings. She is responsible for putting up about 140 “Trees of Life”—metal structures painted in vivid colors which light up at night across Managua. 

The structures, derisively called “Chayopalos,” slang for “Rosario sticks,” have become a favorite target of protesters. Many have been torn down or burned over the past two months.

“What has become clear is that the Ortegas highly personalized brand of governance has served to focus the personal repudiation and deep frustration of various sectors with them,” said John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama. 

So now we have yet another Latin American basket case in our neighborhood.