Democrat Golden Boy Daniel Ortega Turns Nicaragua Into Another Cuba
Democrat Golden Boy Daniel Ortega Turns Nicaragua Into Another Cuba
Few of Castro’s pupils have followed the tyrant’s instruction manual as faithfully and conscientiously.
By Humberto Fontova
“This (The FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago) is what happens in places like Nicaragua,” said Sen. Marco Rubio last week, “where, last year, every single person who ran against Daniel Ortega for President, every single person who put their name on the ballot, was arrested and is still in jail.”
“I was impressed by their (the Sandinistas’) intelligence and their sincerity; these are not political hacks, you know. They have very deep convictions… (Daniel) Ortega is an impressive guy.” (Bernie Sanders, Sept. 1985)
The most vital stanza of Daniel Ortega’s original Sandinista anthem (Latin American leftists catch an extra breath and sing it with all the fervor we use for ‘Ban-ner ..ye-et WA-A-VE!’) bashes the U.S. as “El E-NE-MIGO de la HU-MA-NI -DAD!) (the enemy of humanity!) The line was probably lifted from a Che Guevara speech. Naturally the authors of such an anthem stole the heart of many Democrats, including the majority leader, future speaker of the House, future secretary of State and current “special presidential envoy for Climate.”
OK, so Senator Rubio’s parallels about the FBI raid aren’t precise. But what he said about Nicaragua holds solid. In fact, according to a recent AP story: “200,000 Nicaraguans have fled the country since 2018, a mass exodus that includes at least 140 journalists…With virtually no independent media left inside the country and foreign reporters banned from entering, Nicaragua has become “an information black hole….Government propaganda is all that remains. The Ortega family and its allies own multiple television and radio channels that portray the United States as “the Yankee empire” and pro-democracy protesters as “coup plotters,” “terrorists” and “termites.”
Few of Fidel Castro’s pupils have followed his instruction manuals as conscientiously as has golden boy Daniel Ortega. Often times, however, Ortega’s own subjects failed to meet the rigorous torture and repression standards inculcated over the decades in Cuba’s by the KGB and STASI. So Cuban “security specialists” in the flesh were imported and—owning to their prowess in these matters—were the ones mostly responsible for quelling the mass protests that rocked Nicaragua back in the spring and summer of 2018.
Two hundred of these Cuban “specialists” were operating in Nicaragua, according to a report from back in June 2019 by Nicaragua’s own opposition paper La Prensa.
As you might guess, that type of reporting was not welcomed by the Ortega regime. And just this past month the VOA reported that “The persecution that the government of Daniel Ortega has directed against the staff of La Prensa has obliged staff to flee the country…Journalists, editors, photographers and other staff were forced to leave Nicaragua … in the last two weeks to protect their safety and freedom.”
Putin’s bluster earlier this year about “strengthening ties” with Cuba and Nicaragua in response to U.S. aid to Ukraine rang pretty hollow to those who follow these things. In fact, there was little room for “strengthening”—as these ties have been quite strong for decades now, and were made stronger well before Putin’s rape of Ukraine. To wit:
In 2016 Daniel Ortega “acquired” 50 new T-72B1 battle tanks from Russia, along with four Project 14310 Mirazh patrol boats, two Project 1241.8 Molniya missile boats and four Yak-130 planes. The term “acquired” is the proper usage here because reportedly there was no money exchanged between the Putin and Ortega regimes. Instead, Putin’s “honorarium”came in the form of Nicaraguan ports being opened for Russian ships and for the establishment in 2017 of a Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS). Naturally—despite the facilities’ electronic intelligence and cyber capabilities—both parties swear up and down they’re for “purely civil ends.”
You know things are bad when Daniel Ortega’s former “Sandalista” groupies start bashing him relentlessly and even calling for international sanctions against his regime. (“Yikes!” liberals must gasp. “An embargo?! Like the one against Cuba?!”)
You know things are especially bad when this bashing spills over to his (normally irreproachable for leftists) patrons and mentors Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. To wit:
“Daniel Ortega is following in the steps of the dictatorship in Cuba: get rid of anyone who denounces the human rights violations that are being committed; get rid of all the opposition; get rid of all the great leaders of the Catholic Church, all the journalists, and anyone speaking up, from farmers to politicians. I have been speaking out to foreign governments about the impact that Daniel Ortega is having by acting with total impunity; the fact that the international community is dragging its feet in imposing effective sanctions against his government; the fact that the world seems indifferent to what is happening in Nicaragua and the relentless oppression and persecution.”
That, amigos, issues from Nicaraguan-born Blanca Pérez-Mora Macías, more commonly known as Bianca Jagger, who back in the ’80s ranked among the Sandinista regime’s top international propagandists and benefactors—not that a senator named Joe Biden and another named John Kerry were exactly slouches in this respect.
Three different times (in 1984, 1986, 1987), then-Senator Joe Biden voted and lobbied against President Reagan’s attempts to help the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, who were desperately waging a lonely guerrilla war against the Soviet/Cuban colonization of their homeland by Daniel Ortega and his communist minions.
“Daniel Ortega is a misunderstood Democrat not a Marxist autocrat,” declared Sen. John Kerry on Capitol Hill, after a visit to the Cuban-Soviet satrapy of Nicaragua in an attempt to sabotage President Reagan’s anti-communist Central American foreign policy in 1985.)
But it was Bianca Jagger who undoubtedly staggered her friends and political allies when after “she went down to the demonstrations” in Nicaragua in spring of 2018, saw all the “marching, charging feet, boy,” declared that: “Ortega is worse than Somoza! He disarmed the Nicaraguan people and is now gunning them down!”