QCOSTARICA – In Nicaragua, the existence of an election court and the ritual exercise of suffrage are crude manipulations and a means for a totalitarian system to disguise itself as democracy, according to Óscar Arias, former two-time president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Two days before the elections in the neighboring country, Arias once again regretted the return of Nicaragua to a totalitarian regime.
“How frustrating it is sometimes to watch how history turns on its own axis. How frustrating it is to see how Nicaragua waits on the threshold of the return to democracy, and when trying to cross the threshold, it turns the door on its hinges, to go back to the same place where it was many decades ago,” said Arias in a opinion article earlier this week.
And the fact is that the Ortega regime imprisoned all of his political opponents, claiming that they were enemies of the State.
“In Nicaragua, the democratic bodies have disappeared. Only a few fans defend the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. A democrat, from the left or the right, must recognize that Nicaragua is a dictatorship in all its dimensions, where the separation of powers has disappeared, the leaders of the opposition are political prisoners and corruption has taken over the state. In Nicaragua, the dream of the Sandinista revolution stopped being a chimera and turned into an open nightmare,” said Arias.
Read more: Nicaragua’s Election A Farce of Democracy
Voting in Nicaragua will take place this Sunday, November 7.
If there were a ‘real’ opposition candidate in Nicaragua – the only opposing candidates or “collaborationist candidates”, as they are called, allowed to run have had a minimal presence in the election cycle – 65% of the voters in that country would vote for him or her and not for Ortega to a fourth consecutive term.
According to the CID Gallup poll, Ortega will obtain 19%, down from 33% in May, of the political support, while 16% do not know how he will do.
