A littler more than one year ago I wrote about the electoral takeover of the central American nation of Nicaragua by ex-Marxist José Daniel Ortega Saavedra. At the time I was criticized by some of my colleagues as being alarmist, that good old Ortega was now a nice guy.
But this week The Washington Post reported from Managua: "The U.S. Embassy has been accused of counterrevolutionary subversion. A nervous Catholic Church is appealing for calm. The opposition party is crying electoral fraud, while roaming gangs armed with clubs are attacking marchers. The mayor here has called it anarchy. And everyone is asking: What is President Daniel Ortega after?
"This sounds more like the Central America of the 1980s. But Ortega, the former Marxist revolutionary comandante who returned to the president's office in 2006, is at the center of a chaotic new struggle. Critics charge that he and Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America, are marching backward, away from relatively peaceful, transparent, democratic elections to ones that are violent, shady and stolen."
Stolen Elections
What has happened, from all reliable reports, is that Ortega and his Sandinistas have stolen the Nov. 9th elections and fixed the results in their favor for 146 mayoralties, including that of Managua, the capital.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front and Ortega, its leader, are trying to consolidate his dictatorial power and enhance his standing as a founder of the "pink tide" of left-leaning governments flowing across Latin America. In the months leading to the vote, Ortega and the Sandinistas cracked down on their critics and revived old antagonisms against the United States.
Reliable Test
Over the past 10 years, we at The Sovereign Society have devised a reliable system to evaluate offshore jurisdictions. When doing our due diligence, we consider the nation's government and political stability, the judicial system, and the availability of legal entities such as trusts, financial privacy laws and taxes.
All of the other factors become meaningless, however, if the country's government lacks stability in general. Or worse: The country is openly hostile to free-market economics and the freedom of foreigners who do business there.
Anti-Freedom
Since 2006 when Ortega won election his radical leftist government has been openly hostile to capitalism and property rights.
Before he made a miraculous return to power as president, José Daniel Ortega Saavedra was a washed up extreme leftist. He won in the 2006 rigged election with less than 35% of the votes cast. But before that, he spent his previous term as president (1985-90) dragging Nicaragua into the Communist orbit of Cuba's Fidel Castro. His first term was characterized by Communist policies, seizing private property, economic suffering, repression of internal dissent, and hostility towards the United States.
Birds of a Feather
Since his 2006 return to power President, Ortega has paled around with the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's radical president Hugo Chavez. Ortega again has embraced Fidel Castro as his hero.
Land grabs were part of Ortega's socialist policies in the past. He restricted trading, boosted public spending and took over banks and supermarkets. At the time, President Ronald Reagan, called Ortega "a little dictator,'' and ordered a blockade of Nicaragua and funded the Contra rebels.
Minority Government
Today's Sandinistas are a diluted power, struggling to uphold socialist ideals in a country that has one of the highest degrees of income inequality in the world, where half the population lives below the poverty line. Many Sandinista supporters, including much of the diminished middle class and many intellectuals, have decamped for other parties. Ortega's old comrades are now his most vociferous critics.
All of which proves my predictions – that you should stay away from Nicaragua for very good reasons!
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