The Nicaraguan dictator is named Daniel Ortega. Since 2017, he has had his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice-dictator. The pair is heavy barbell. Since assuming the presidency for the second time, after a lapse of 17 years, Ortega has spared no effort to perpetuate himself in power. He was president from 1979 to 1990 and since he was elected in 2006 he has never accepted any kind of possibility that any mortal will replace him. Last Sunday, the couple won another election. Or rather, a mock election. After ordering the arrest of all competitors, Ortega and Murillo celebrated the victory that had an echo in Brazil. The PT released a note in which he hailed the Nicaraguan elections as “a great popular and democratic manifestation of this brother country”.
PT solidarity took a hit. Very bad. How can the party that presents itself as the savior of democracy in Brazil be a guarantor of a full dictatorship, installed without any kind of dissimulation, by a comrade at all hours? Not even the typical brazenness of an expressive part of the left that sees democratic normality in the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela was enough to relativize what Ortega and Murillo have become. We are less than a year away from the presidential election and by congratulating a friendly dictator, the PT put its own face and that of former president Lula out of the window. Right in the sunlight. In addition to avexing militancy, cuddling also takes votes.
The PT’s solution was to delete the note and say that it had not been authorized by the leadership. PT president, federal deputy Gleisi Hoffmann, posted on Twitter that the party’s leadership had nothing to do with it. The “do not authorize” should not be read as disagreeing with the content of the support to Ortega. What the PT wants to say is that the note was inopportune, because, after all, why expose itself transparently when a presidential election is approaching and the party tries to sell itself as a party that is the guardian of democracy?
here is the whole from the statement by Gleisi Hoffmann: “Note on elections in Nicaragua ñ was submitted to the party leadership. PT’s position in relation to any country is the defense of the self-determination of peoples, against external interference and respect for democracy, by the government and opposition. Our priority is to debate Brazil with the Brazilian people”.
At no time did the PT president classify Ortega’s actions as dictatorial or undemocratic. He spoke of “self-determination” and “respect for democracy”. Despite having reduced the author of the note, the PT’s secretary of International Relations, to the level of a mad intern, Gleisi Hoffmann said nothing that would change the content of the note he wrote and then she had it hidden.
And it couldn’t be different.
In July 2017, Gleisi Hoffmann went to Managua – the capital of Nicaragua – to participate in the São Paulo Forum meeting. In your speech, she thanked “the comrades of the Sandinista National Liberation Front for sponsoring this meeting and we salute the most recent electoral triumphs of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua”. In addition to the already classic declarations of love for the Cuban regime, the PT member did not forget to melt for Nicolás Maduro: “The PT expresses its support and solidarity with the PSUV government, its allies and President Nicolás Maduro in the face of the violent offensive by the right against the government of Venezuela”.
While Gleisi Hoffmann and other senior PT members fraternized with Ortega, Maduro and the entire dinosaur park of the Latin American left, in Venezuela the people were the protagonists of long days of street protests against the regime. PSUV and Maduro were collecting, at the time she was speaking, the infamous brand of 124 dead people by the repression of the Chavez state and parastatal apparatus. A balance of 2 thousand injured and more than 5,400 prisoners. But for the PT it was a “violent offensive by the right against the Venezuelan government”. Is this being a democracy lover?
In 2018, when Ortega sank Nicaragua for good in the mire of authoritarianism, the people also took to the streets. The Nicaraguan was even more brutal than his Venezuelan counterpart. your police forces killed 328 people and injured another 2,000. More than a hundred journalists were forced to live in exile. But there are people who think this is a struggle with imperialism.
The PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, Lula and their satellites – such as Psol and Guilherme Boulos – remained firm and silent. Just as Venezuela was a democracy because Maduro had been elected, things seemed to be going very well in Ortega’s Nicaragua. Lula only said that he gave advice to Ortega not to “renounce democracy” very recently, by the way, after he broke his face in justifying the police repression promoted by the Cuban regime in the protests registered on the island last July.
Another one who decided to take a little bit of Ortega away is Boulos. When asked about the fact that Daniel Ortega arrested the opponents and mounted a covert election, he said the following: “I do not see that the process that is taking place in Nicaragua is democratic. In fact, the serial imprisonment of opponents for very questionable arguments, with very questionable accusations to make an electoral victory viable, was something that we denounced here in Brazil when they arrested Lula in a process (…) for Bolsonaro to win an election. In the same way that I did not consider that action democratic, I do not consider Nicaragua democratic”. Uhuuuu… what a breakthrough.
Only no.
The psolist has not changed. The step he apparently took forward in acknowledging that Ortega’s actions are undemocratic was nullified by the other ten he took back. In justifying the support that members of the PSOL give to Nicaragua as a result of an “internal diversity” that “shows the strength and democracy of the party” it is a shame.
Boulos got worse. In a sinuous way, he seeks a parallel between Brazil and Nicaragua that only exists in the minds of those who – out of love or interest – are incapable of calling things by the name they have. Nicaragua is a dictatorship. For him, when Ortega sent seven rival candidates to jail to get them out of the election, he did something identical to what happened in Brazil when Lula was arrested, in the scope of the Car Wash. The hardest part is that he paid media training to make these atrocities look smart.
In June, when Ortega began the harassment of opposing pre-candidates, this column dealt with the topic and a photo. If we count in it the number of people who were exiled, imprisoned, persecuted and killed by some of the characters present in it, the numbers would be chilling.
Dealing only with Maduro and Ortega – and the protests, in 2017, in Venezuela, and in 2018, in Nicaragua –, we reached the balance of 452 dead and 7.4 thousand prisoners. If Lula, Boulos and Dilma, who pose in the same photo, looked at them with this number in their heads, they would see that they are part of a horrific portrait. From a photograph in which Democracy is not present.
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