Juana Francisca Rugama is a candidate for councilor in the municipality of San Dionisio, in northern Nicaragua. She participates in the municipal elections that are held this Sunday in the Central American country. The problem is that Juana Francisca never actually registered as a candidate for the council for the Independent Liberal Party (PLI), one of the comparsa groups of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to simulate competition in a process marked by repression. She is just a sample of what will happen. These municipal elections not only mean that the Sandinista Front is going to consolidate total control in almost 95% of the country’s 153 municipalities, but also reaffirm the decadence of the electoral system, which has allowed the presidential couple to perpetuate themselves in power.
According to the independent electoral observatory Urnas Abiertas, there are more than a thousand false candidates in the municipal In other words, these are cases of identity usurpation resorted to by parties that pretend to be the opposition to fill the electoral lists. Open Ballot Boxes has collected 1,158 testimonies of usurpation that come from 33 municipalities and seven departments. The parties that resorted to this tactic are the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), the Alliance for the Republic (APRE), the Independent Liberal Party (PLI) and the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN). This maneuver violates the Personal Data Protection Law, whose article six stipulates that “the owner of the data must give consent for the delivery of the data, by himself or by his legal representative or proxy, unless the law provides otherwise within of reasonable limits.
Juana Francisca Rugama would never run for office for one fundamental reason: she would not endorse “an electoral farce” after her son, student leader Levis Josué Artola Rugama, was a political prisoner and now lives in exile in Canada. “We deny that candidacy. We demand respect for our family and we denounce the Supreme Electoral Council, the PLI and José Asencio Flores for the usurpation of my mother’s identity”, denounced the young man.
In addition to this irregular practice, the electoral climate is non-existent in Nicaragua. These elections are the most “inconsequential in history” since municipalism exists, electoral experts agree. First, because they occur at a time of maximum repression and consolidation of a single party scheme. The background to these local elections was the 2021 general election, when Ortega and Murillo arrested all the presidential candidates, dissolved the opposition parties and declared themselves winners. Second, last July, the regime struck a blow against the five mayoralties governed by the opposition: it raided the administrations of these historic anti-Sandinista strongholds by police and deposed the mayors.
That movement ended up destroying the few expectations of an election with competition and highlighted the citizen’s indifference to the process. The latest survey by the CID Gallup firm, conducted between September 26 and October 10, reveals that 52% of those surveyed said they would not vote in the municipal elections. Something in line with the percentage of participation in the general elections of 2021, when abstention was 81.5%.
“It will definitely be one of the processes with less citizen participation. There is total mistrust of the process promoted by an electoral authority co-opted by the ruling party. Also due to the lack of competition, the absence of democratic conditions that allow for a truly free process. Therefore, it is possible that we will see figures similar to what happened last year,” Olga Valle, director of Open Polls, told EL PAÍS.
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No one knows about the elections
In the streets of the different municipalities there is little propaganda from the political parties and the mayoral candidates for the collaborationist parties are hardly known. The closures of the campaign by the Sandinista Front were carried out without massive calls, and were limited to caravans of vehicles. “There are people who don’t even know that there are elections,” says a citizen of Pantasma, a municipality in Jinotega whose mayor, Óscar Gadea, was deposed by police force.
The Government tries to cover up the apathy to the process with public resources. State workers have been going through the streets of different municipalities for weeks to verify the militants of the Sandinista party with lists. In neighborhoods of Managua, Masaya and León, state workers have carried out these verifications in recent weeks, as part of a strategy to control the Sandinista “hard vote”, even though no participating political party represents competition in the voting.
A worker from the Ministry of Health (Minsa) said that the order to verify the Sandinista militants was carried out on weekends, even until 10 at night. “In addition to the pressure we have at work, because there are fewer workers, this search and seduce the Sandinistas so that they will vote in the elections,” said this worker from a health center in District V of Managua to the media. Divergent.
The National Assembly, dominated by the presidential couple, recently approved a law that allows Nicaraguans to go to the polls with an expired ID. For some experts, this new provision seeks to disguise the abstentionism that would mark the day and motivate supporters with several expired identity cards to vote.
The Electoral Power said the day before that “Nicaragua is ready for the civic party.” However, in the last two months the interest of citizens has been in the Immigration and Immigration offices requesting a passport to leave Nicaragua. These are dramatic images of people camping out from dawn to obtain a document processing quota, and that end up in stampedes when the dependency opens its doors.
According to data from the General Directorate of Migration and Immigration (DGME) of Nicaragua, only in September 2022, that institution delivered 23,614 passports nationwide, which is the month with the highest demand for this service so far this year. The increase in requests for this travel document began between May and June 2021, when the regime unleashed a hunt against opponents. For example, in the first months of that year, passport deliveries ranged between 1,000 and 2,000 per month. With the intensification of the repression, the services reached 15,000 and, since then, behavior has remained above that figure.
According to the results of the AmericasBarometer, a comparative study between the countries of the region, presented last August by Lapop, a research laboratory based at Vanderbilt University, United States, more than half of Nicaraguans intends to migrate. Among the reasons why they plan to migrate, the first, according to 53% of those consulted, is the lack of economic opportunities. The second, (for 21%) is the lack of educational opportunities.
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