Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his socialist Sandinista party have betrayed the principles of the Sandinista Revolution, former Sandinista Vice President Sergio Ramirez told a crowd of approximately 100 students and community members gathered in Filene Auditorium on Monday. Ramirez left the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1995 to found the reformist Sandinista Renovation Movement, and is currently serving as a guest professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
Ramirez served as vice president of Nicaragua alongside then-President Ortega in the 1980s after the Sandinista Revolution led to the overthrow of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Ramirez credited the old Sandinista party for being one of the few revolutionary regimes to embrace democracy and voluntarily give up power after it lost the 1990 presidential election.
Since then, however, Ramirez said the Sandinista party has strayed from its revolutionary principles, sinking into corruption a decline that he said has only escalated since Ortega was once again elected president in 2006.
"What has become of the revolution?" Ramirez said. "A traveler would be forced to wonder if there has been any revolution in my country. There are no lasting markers other than the increasingly confused rhetoric of the [Sandinistas]."
Ramirez said there is an emerging divide within the leftist movement in Latin America. On one side are leftist leaders such as President Lula da Silva of Brazil who have embraced democracy, while others, such as President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Ortega, continue to hold onto power through undemocratic means.
Ramirez spoke against the increasing totalitarianism of both Chavez and Ortega, quoting da Silva as saying that a great mistake of the Left was to create an artificial distinction between bourgeois democracy and proletariat democracy that allowed leftist leaders to obscure the loss of meaningful democratic institutions.
Slowly but surely, Ramirez said, Ortega is doing away with democratic constraints on his power and is leading Nicaragua back into dictatorship. Ortega's path to power resulted from a corrupt pact between Ortega and Arnoldo Aleman, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, he said.
Ramirez said that Ortega and Aleman, who was later indicted for corruption, agreed to divide power between their respective parties and change the constitution to allow the president to win an election with a plurality vote of 35 percent.
This change paved the way for Ortega to win the presidential election in 2006 with just 37 percent of the vote, according to Ramirez. Since then, Ortega has continued to erode democratic institutions by transferring power to citizen councils that he controls and by expanding the country's Supreme Court to 17 members in order to pack it with his supporters.
When Ortega could not win enough support from the legislature to amend the country's constitution to do away with term limits, he used the Supreme Court to declare the "constitution unconstitutional," Ramirez said.
The lack of democratic accountability has led to the increasing corruption of the Ortega family and of the Sandinista party, Ramirez said. For instance, he said the Ortega administration recently signed an oil deal with Chavez worth $500 million money which will go directly into a corporation controlled by the Ortega family, Ramirez said, instead of being used to pay down the country's deficit or build the nation's infrastructure.
Long after the revolution, the country remains mired in poverty as the Ortega administration increasingly resembles the Somoza dictatorship, he said. Ramirez called for the people of Nicaragua to demand that their government return to the basic principles of the Sandinista revolutionaries who risked and lost their lives for democracy and equality.
"We need to ask if this Sandinista party is the Sandinista that fought and won the revolution," he said. "Is it the same party that stormed Somoza's palace with humble men?"
