What Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega Actually Said
Becca Renk Foster: Meddling through Mistranslation: U.S. interferes in Nicaragua’s elections The U.S. has kicked off a campaign to meddle in Nicaragua’s elections by falsely announcing Nicaragua will no longer hold elections. On July 19th, in a speech to 70,000 gathered in Managua to mark the 47th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, Nicaraguan co-president Daniel Ortega made reference to U.S.-backed opposition groups.
“They wish that they could have elections so that they could make money off of schools,” he said, recalling that during previous administrations, government officials charged for ostensibly free public services. “But they can forget that. There will no longer be elections here, there will no longer be elections here for them to capture the government and trap the people.”
The next morning, The New York Times chose to run the headline, “Nicaraguan Leader Says He Plans to Abolish Elections.” A version of this inaccurate headline was repeated around the world in an orchestrated manner, unusual for a country that rarely makes international news.
Jill Clark-Gollub, who holds a master’s degree in translation and interpretation and is certified to interpret in the U.S. federal courts, stated that Daniel Ortega “is a speaker who takes pauses and uses repetition as an oratory style. To cut him off before he finishes the sentence, as if he were saying that there would never be any elections again, seems to me a deliberate distortion of his message. If an interpreter did this in a professional context, they would be subject to disciplinary action.”
This purposeful misinterpretation of Ortega’s meaning seems to have kickstarted the very campaign of meddling in Nicaragua’s internal affairs that Ortega was warning about in his speech. Blatant U.S. meddling in Nicaragua’s elections and internal affairs didn’t end when the FSLN overthrew Somoza in 1979. Following the triumph of the Revolution, the U.S. organized and funded the “contra” counter revolutionary forces, resulting in 50,000 dead over 10 years; the U.S. forced Nicaraguans to choose between continued war and the U.S. candidate in 1990 elections; and ran the country de facto during 16 years of neoliberal governments.
Despite continued U.S. interventionism, the FSLN won elections in 2006 and has stayed in power since, winning three subsequent elections and garnering 76% of the vote in 2021. In fact, any legitimate opposition to the Sandinista party will have to present an exceptionally strong platform to compete with ruling party achievements over the past 19 years which include 50 new hospitals and free universal healthcare; free education, including university; 5,000 kilometers of new roads; 4-5% annual GDP growth; Nicaragua is one of the safest countries in the region. Given the quality of life for the average Nicaraguan today, it’s no wonder that recent polls show Ortega enjoying an 88.5% approval rating.
The Dissident: Mainstream Media Repeats Marco Rubio’s Lies About Nicaragua In an official State Department press release, Rubio wrote: “Daniel Ortega’s declaration that under his family’s dictatorship Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature.” Virtually every mainstream media outlet, from NPR to Reuters to The New York Times to Fox News, has repeated the claim that Daniel Ortega is ending elections in Nicaragua.
But a look at his actual speech shows that this was taken out of context, and Ortega was actually talking about cracking down on CIA interference and coup plotting in Nicaragua.
The mainstream media took a quote of Daniel Ortega, “there won’t be any more elections here,” to imply he is cancelling elections, while in reality, he was stating that U.S. government-backed opposition figures who took part in coup attempts at the behest of the CIA will be barred from elections, not that elections will be cancelled altogether in the country.
As journalist Max Blumenthal reported: “When the socialist-oriented Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua through democratic elections in 2006, Washington began pouring tens of millions of dollars into the creation, training, and funding of right-wing opposition groups in the Central American nation. Millions of dollars have flowed from the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, into the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista groups. These US-funded organizations were at the heart of a failed coup d’etat that ravaged Nicaragua in 2018, leading to hundreds of deaths and destabilizing the country.”
But because Nicaragua wants to crack down on CIA interference within the country, the Marco Rubio State Department, aided by the mainstream media, has cooked up a lie that Nicaragua is cancelling elections in order to justify further sanctions and U.S. aggression towards Nicaragua.
.
New McCarthyite Campaign launched by Secretary of State
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said “if there were more countries like Israel, the world would be a safer and better place” and that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are “enemies of humanity.”
Ten lies told by Secretary of State Rubio at his Anti-Left Summit, the Ministerial Meeting on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism By the Media Observatory of the Cuban news outlet Cubadebate.
1. “Governments [in the US] refused to address the violence of 2020.”
2. “All these crimes are organized left-wing terrorism.”
3. “Antifa is a coordinated global terrorist network.”
4. “Iran coordinates leftist groups around the world.”
5. “Cuba built the Western far left.”
6. “93% of the attacks in the West were from the far left.”
7. “Immigration directly imports terrorism.”
8. “The protests almost brought the United States to its knees.”
9. “The worst [of the world] rebel against the best.”
10. “We must crush this evil forever.”
[A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.” The Secretary of State in his speech described leftists as driven by “poisonous resentment,” an “encroaching darkness,” and “enemies of civilization” who “despise the West because the West is great.” He vowed to “dismantle these networks brick by brick” and declared it “time to crush this evil forever.”]
Truthout: As Trump Threatens Invasion, Admin Releases Report Vilifying Cuba and the Left The 99-page report is entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It argues that, since the rise of Fidel Castro and left-wing revolutionary thought in the Caribbean country in the 1950s and ‘60s, the country’s brand of left-wing politics “now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony both within and beyond the West.” Though Cuba itself is a “failed state,” the report says, its political project has still spread to the point of threatening “Western civilization itself.” The ultimate goal for the small island state is “conquering the neighboring United States.”
Common Dreams: ‘McCarthyite’ Rubio Report Ripped as Attempt to Justify Trump Invasion of Cuba Basically plagiarizing Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist 1950s hysteria, the report says: “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”
Code Pink, in response said, “The report attempts to paint the tiny island as a threat but says nothing about the US blockade that starves and punishes 10 million people…We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s McCarthyism, plain and simple. CodePink is currently under investigation by the Treasury Department simply for bringing medical supplies to serve children’s hospitals in Cuba. We live in a world where, sadly, the people delivering medicine—not those who are enforcing the policies that deprive Cubans of medicine, food, fuel, and electricity—are under investigation.”
US Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), who recently traveled to Cuba to hear firsthand accounts of the humanitarian crisis, said that “Secretary Rubio’s deranged ‘analysis’ leaves out the fact that for more than six decades, the United States’ policies have destabilized our neighbors in Latin America—including Cuba—through sanctions, embargoes, military coups, land control, and colonization…Today, the Trump Department of State, led by Rubio, continues that imperialist tradition while doing what authoritarians do by criminalizing dissent…US foreign policy is responsible for death, destruction, and destabilization. We can change that.”
.
US “Front groups and Fellow Travelers” named in the State Department’s Cuba Report:
Code Pink
The People’s Forum
National Network on Cuba
Democratic Socialists of America
Breakthrough News
National Lawyers Guild
Venceremos Brigade
Hasan Piker
Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls
Isra Hirsi, daughter of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani
Amy Goodman
Communist Party USA
George Floyd riots
Antifa
Black Panthers
anti-ICE collectives
socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations
Cuba-U.S. “sister city” partnerships
Black Alliance for Peace
IFCO-Pastors for Peace
Jericho Movement
Equality for Flatbush
Claudia Jones School
Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees
Viva Palestina
Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Robert Williams, LeRoi Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur
Black Lives Matter movement
George Galloway
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Stop Cop City
Standing Rock protesters
Neville Roy Singham
Manolo De Los Santos
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, who wrote ‘The Vagina Monologues.’
Leonardo Flores
Paul Larudee
Sandinistas, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Hugo Chavez
Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers; even Barack Obama gets mention.
former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
former Spanish deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias
Congresswoman Maxine Waters
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass
Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective
.
Upcoming Events
July 28, 1:30 pm ET webinar: Venezuela Solidarity Campaign: Emergency in Venezuela – End all sanctions, give back the gold! Despite the earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela, a thousand US sanctions on Venezuela remain in place and Britain’s theft of Venezuela’s gold continues. Speakers: Fravia Marquez, advisor to Venezuela’s National Assembly & spokesperson for the Cumbé Afro-Descendant Movement. Gerdul Gutierrez, Secretary of International Relations of the CSBT (Venezuela’s trade unions); María Páez Victor, Venezuelan Sociologist; Jeremy Corbyn MP; Francisco Dominguez (VSC) & Kate Hudson (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
July 30 (noon ET) webinar: Stopping U.S. Aggression Against Cuba This seminar will analyze the illegality of the U.S. threats to invade Cuba and change its government, the illegal U.S. blockade against Cuba, and steps the international community can take to prevent and punish U.S. aggression against Cuba. Speakers: Vladimir Mora Fonseca: Legal Adviser to Permanent Mission of Cuba to the UN; Alexis Ginarte Gato: President of National Union of Cuban Jurists; Carlos Villán Durán: Professor of International Human Rights Law, President of Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law; moderated by Marjorie Cohn
September 3, 10, 17, 23: Governing from Below: Nicaragua During the Neoliberal Years Following the loss of the elections in 1990, Nicaragua’s Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) vowed to “govern from below.” Over the next 16 years the FSLN worked closely with its grassroots base through unions, student groups, and social movements to influence the national government and eventually return to power. The FSLN’s experiences in opposition to neoliberal governance provide important lessons for activists around the world working to effect change.
.
Donate for Venezuela Earthquake Relief and Cuba Medical Aid:
DSA International Committee Venezuela Earthquake Relief Fund
https://venezuelanoestasola.com/#dinero
Code Pink emergency solidarity fund
Peoples Forum: Donate to Earthquake Relief for Venezuela
Venceremos Brigade and the National Network on Cuba Centenary of Fidel Brigade to Cuba Help them bring $100,000 of medical aid to Cuba, donate here.
.
Delegations to Cuba, Nicaragua:
Upcoming Delegations to Nicaragua: 2027 Casa Ben Linder Nicaragua Tours
Feb 13-19 Bird Brigade – birding in Solentiname and Rio San Juan
March 6-14 Power and Protagonism: Women in Nicaragua – meet with women in leadership roles – cooperatives, labor unions, peasant feminists, and artisans to explore gender equity in Nicaragua
April 22-30 Light and Legacy: Ben Linder Brigade – Commemorate 40 years since the assassination of U.S. solidarity worker Ben Linder by U.S.-funded contra forces
May 21-June 1 Mayo Ya – Cultural tour to the Southern Autonomous Region of the Caribbean Coast, which is the heart of Nicaragua’s Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities.
Cuba – Video: Yes You can Travel to Cuba
Chicago ALBA Solidarity 