Nicaragua: do what we want or else... [Scoop - Toni Solo]

Sunday, 29 June 2008, 10:12 pm - Scoop - Column: Toni Solo - Anyone stepping back from the recent hyped-up drama engineered by the minority right wing parties in Nicaragua and their overseas allies will see all the tell-tale signs of yet another instance of NATO country government intervention in the region. The national march led by the centre-right MRS party in Managua on Friday June 27th, heavily funded by grants from the US government and related quangos, attracted between 6,000 (police estimates) and 15,000 (march organizers' figure) participants. Opposition daily La Prensa reported that the march was "against hunger, the high cost of living, the "institutional dictatorship" and in defence of democracy".

The march followed last week's decision by the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) to cancel the legal status of two opposition parties, the centre-right Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS) and the Conservative Party. The CSE, a power independent of the executive, the judiciary and the legislature under Nicaragua's political constitution, judged that both those parties had failed to comply with the relevant electoral legislation. The MRS had been given almost 15 months to comply with its legal obligations, but did not do so. Article 173 of Nicaragua's political constitution states in paragraph 12 that the CSE has the authority to cancel or suspend the legal status of political parties that fail to comply with relevant electoral law. The CSE found that, with duly constituted departmental authorities in only 10 of the country's 16 departments and two autonomous regions, the MRS left itself in non-compliance with Nicaragua's electoral law and the party's own statutes.

Despite the CSE's forebearance and the legality of its ruling, the opposition and its supporters accused the electoral body of acting on political considerations at the behest of the leaders of the two main political parties in Nicaragua, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista. Among the opposition's supporters are the representatives of foreign development cooperation programmes in Nicaragua, the US government and foreign intellectuals like Eduardo Galeano and Noam Chomsky. The day after the CSE's decision was made, the foreign development cooperation programme representatives published a pronouncement in the country's two main daily newspapers questioning the CSE's ruling.

The pronouncement alleged that the decision of the CSE was open to question because it was based on an electoral law they thought left too much to the discretion of the CSE magistrates. The statement argued that this called into question the development of democratic governance in Nicaragua. This, it noted, suggested possible lack of compliance by the Nicaraguan government with the terms of relevant development cooperation agreements. The pronouncement ended with an avowal that the development cooperation community would monitor developments closely.

The blatantly presumptuous neocolonial sub-text could hardly be clearer - "do what we want, or else..." The list of countries supporting that pronouncement consists almost entirely of NATO member countries from the European Union along with Canada and also multilateral bodies like the IMF and the World Bank controlled by NATO countries. Among the countries drafting the pronouncement, only Sweden and Switzerland are not NATO members. Switzerland is merely home to some of the NATO country's most important banks, grown fat on developing country "debt" while Sweden's corporate profile could hardly be more closely identified with its European Union NATO-country partners.

For the complete article, go to: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0806/S00397.htm