Nicaragua Court Opens Way For Daniel Ortega Re - Election

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

October 20, 2009
Nicaragua Court Opens Way For Daniel Ortega Re - Election
By REUTERS
Filed at 2:23 a.m. ET

MANAGUA (Reuters) - Nicaragua's Supreme Court lifted a constitutional barrier on Monday to President Daniel Ortega seeking re-election, opening the way to the leftist running for another term in the 2011 election.

The court's constitutional arm issued a ruling blocking restrictions on a president running for another term, following a petition from Ortega and a group of mayors last week, and the country's electoral court said it would comply with the move.

The Supreme Court ruling requires formal approval by 16 state judges but the head of the constitutional courtroom, Francisco Rosales, said the ruling was expected to stand.

The move by the country's highest legal power means Ortega could run as a candidate in the 2011 presidential election without having to seek national assembly backing to change the constitution or hold a public referendum on the issue.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/10/20/world/interna...

[David__77]

1. I think that term limits are anti-democratic.

That said, democracy isn't always a good thing.

I hope that the FSLN remains in office regardless, and that it rectifies its right-wing errors of the past 20 years.

[arcos]

3. As long as Ortega leads the FSLN, it will never rectify its errors...

To me, this is terrible news. It will hinder, once again, much needed renovation in Nicaragua's "left". And I say "left", because Ortega is a leftist in name only, his basic interest is himself, like his arch-frienemy Arnoldo Alemán or any other right winger.

It's a shame.

[WriteDown]

7. You nailed it...

I have spent a lot of time in Nicaragua and you are right on the money. I think its one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

[ronnie624]

8. You should write an essay.

The insights offered by your expertise on Nicaragua's political dynamic would be absolutely fascinating, no doubt.

[WriteDown]

9. Sure.....

I was mostly there for the reptiles though. I could write an essay on my adventures collecting though.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face

President Ronald Reagan and Nicaragua
excerpted from the book
Lying for Empire
How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face
by David Model
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

~snip~
When the Sandinistas took power, the educational system in Nicaragua was one of the poorest in Latin America. Limited spending on education and severe poverty forced many children into the labour market before their education was complete. By the time Somoza went into exile only 65 percent of primary school-age children were enrolled in school and only 22 percent of those who attended primary school completed the full six years. In rural areas, most secondary schools had only one or two grades and there was a 75 percent illiteracy rate. To improve the educational system, the Sandinistas doubled the proportion of GNP spent on primary and secondary schools, increased the number of teachers, and built more schools. Using volunteer teachers, the Sandinista government succeeded in reducing the illiteracy rate from 50 percent of the population to 23 percent. Enrollment in colleges skyrocketed from 11,142 students in 1978 to 38,570 in 1985.
Health care was a disaster under the Somoza regime with many Nicaraguans having limited or no access to modern health care. The Sandinistas completely restructured the entire health care system by spending substantially more on health care, increasing the number of students entering medical school from 100 to 500, building five new hospitals, and building 363 primary health care clinics.
The Sandinistas, who had themselves been victims of the brutal dictatorship of Somoza, were determined to construct new political institutions and to introduce a new constitution which guaranteed human rights.
The new Minister of the Interior, Tomás Borge Martinez, was committed to eliminating human rights abuses and as a start he allowed all people imprisoned by Somoza to be given a fair trial. As an urgent priority, the Sandinistas wrote and passed a new provisional constitution called the Fundamental Statute of the Republic of Nicaragua which guaranteed human rights, equal justice under the law, the right to free expression, and the abolition of torture.
To replace the National Guard, the Sandinistas created the Sandinista People's Army and a new police force. The goal of the Sandinistas was to build a well-equipped professional military.
An important step toward democratization was the creation of mass organizations representing most popular interests such the Sandinista Workers' Federation representing labour unions, the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Nicaraguan Women's Association, and the National Union of Farmers and Cattlemen.
All these progressive measures were interpreted by the new American President, Ronald Reagan, as symptoms of communism requiring immediate action by the United States. David Womble, in The CIA in Nicaragua stated that:
In January 1981 Ronald Reagan took office under a Republican platform which asserted that "...it deplores the Marxist Sandinista take-over of Nicaragua" and he greatly expanded the CIA's guerilla warfare and sabotage campaigns. In November 1981 Reagan authorized a covert plan for $19 million to help the Argentina dictatorship train a guerilla force operating from camps in Honduras to attack Nicaragua.
William in Killing Hope wrote that:
The President moved quickly to cut off virtually all j.. forms of assistance to the Sandinistas, the opening salvos of his war against their revolution. The American whale, yet again, felt threatened by a minnow in the Caribbean.
p179
To overthrow what George Shultz, former Secretary of State, referred to as a "cancer right here on our land mass," the United States decided to create a surrogate guerilla force, feigning to be Nicaraguans, to rise up against the evil communist government in Managua. The alternative, an invasion by American forces, was ruled out for fear of a backlash from the American public who were not quite over the Vietnam War. The CIA covertly created a paramilitary force known as the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) or the Contras, many of whom were former members of Somoza's National Guard. By 1983, there were between 16,000 and 20,000 Contra troops who were operating along the Honduran border and from bases in Costa Rica.
The purpose of the Contras was not to defeat the Sandinista army in battle but to use terrorist tactics to destroy infrastructure, health, and educational services. Their intention was not to confront Sandinistas but to blow up bridges, power plants, oil pipelines, ports, schools, health clinics, grain silos, irrigation projects, and farmhouses. The underlying purpose of these acts of terrorism was to destroy the morale of the Nicaraguan people and to force the Nicaraguan government to divert a high proportion of its budget to defence as discussed in detail below. Diverting government resources to the war, forcing the Sandinistas to cut back on their reform programs, had a considerable negative impact on the people of Nicaragua. David Womble., in The CIA in Nicaragua, discussing the atrocities of the Contras called attention to:
Witness For Peace, an American Protestant watchdog body, collected a list of Contra atrocities in one year, which include murder, the rape of two girls in their homes, torture of men, maiming of children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, amputating the genitals of people of both sexes, scraping the skin off the face, pouring acid on the face, breaking the toes and fingers of an 18 year old boy, and summary executions. These were the people Ronald Reagan called the "freedom fighters" and the "moral equivalent of our founding fathers."
The Contras were trained by the CIA in terrorist warfare and were provided with a manual of instruction which encouraged the use of violence against civilians. According to William Blum, in Killing Hope:
The CIA manual, entitled Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare gave advice on such niceties as political assassination, blackmailing ordinary citizens, mob violence, kidnapping, and blowing up public buildings. Upon entering a town, it said, "establish a public tribunal" where the guerillas can "shame, ridicule and humiliate" Sandinistas and their sympathizers by "shouting jeers and slogans".

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Reaga...

[cali]

4. unjrecced. Ortega is a pig who considers women nothing but expendable

ith these laws, Ortega has betrayed the women who fought for democracy
Nicaragua's abortion ban was a cynical move in a feverish election by a president desperate to pacify the religious right

By

There are no exceptions. Under Nicaragua's anti-abortion laws, even a pregnancy that cannot possibly result in a viable baby – an anencephalic or ectopic one – has to be carried to its limits. A woman who gets pregnant through an act of rape or incest has to have the baby; and the deeper you delve into the horrors enumerated in this week's Amnesty International report, the more inhumane it gets: 77% of rape cases involve girls under 17; between 2005 and 2007, 16% of those crimes resulted in pregnancy, and the great majority of those pregnancies were in girls of between 10 and 14, at which age obstetric complications are very common. It's a double violation, first by an individual, then by the state, made all the more grotesque when you consider that the reason the births are so treacherous is that these girls are simply too small and young to be pregnant in the first place.

A pregnant woman with cancer has to have the baby first, then treatment for the cancer, no matter what the risk to her chances of survival. Doctors, facing a prison sentence for any involvement in abortion, have become unwilling even to treat a woman having a spontaneous miscarriage. It's a situation that, truthfully, I think even many anti-abortion campaigners would find sickening, and we don't need to rehearse here the arguments for a woman's right to choose.

We can usefully, though, look at why on earth this would happen in Nicaragua. Although it is nominally 96% Catholic, the government is independent and secular. The current president, Daniel Ortega (who also governed from 1985 to 1990), is a lifelong Sandinista, a socialist, a man whose first term as president saw 31% of the executive positions and 27% of leadership positions occupied by women.

Ortega is no political caveman, blundering through women's rights as if these arguments were new and strange to him. The feminist element in the original Sandinista revolution of the late 1970s was vocal and much like any other first-wave women's movement anywhere in the world. Esther Major, the author of the Amnesty report, recaps: "They fought under the banner of democracy in the country, in the home and in the bed. Most of the activists agreed that the revolution only really brought in democracy in the country, not in the home, nor in the bed." Whether or not its aims were met, we can assume from this that Ortega knows the precepts of equality, and has chosen, for political expedience, to betray them.

snip

http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/2...

[Peace Patriot]

5. No surprise, I guess, to find Rotters and the Grimes promulgating OUTRIGHT, KNOWING LIES

but we should not get used to it and fail to note it.

"Central America is locked in its worst political crisis in decades after Honduras toppled and exiled President Manuel Zelaya in June after that country's Supreme Court said his bid to seek support for lifting term limits was illegal."--from the OP

Manuel Zelaya DID ***NOT*** "SEEK SUPPORT FOR LIFTING TERM LIMITS!!!!!!!!!!!

Here is the entire resolution that he proposed:

"Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?"

Further, this proposed ADVISORY vote of the people has widespread support in Honduras and came from the labor unions and other grass roots groups. Zelaya was championing this effort to begin badly needed fundamental in Honduras on their behalf. The proposal could not have extended his term of office!, and, given that it was a mere advisory vote, would have taken years to be implemented, if ever. The fascist coupsters in Honduras have LIED about this, and Rotters and the Grimes (which is publishing this Rotters rot) contrives the sentence to ENDORSE the LIE.

Jeez this makes me mad!

Not that proposing changing the presidential term limit in Honduras would be a bad idea. It would be a good idea. The Honduran Constitution was written by Reagan's murderous henchmen and limits the president to ONE term (4 years) in order to prevent any president from gaining sufficient power to challenge the rule of the "ten families" and the military (and by extension, US global corporate predators and the Pentagon). It furthermore contains a provision forbidding any Honduran citizen from even DISCUSSING changing the term limit--in direct contradiction of the Constitution's guarantee of free speech.

The oligarchy LIED that Zelaya had violated this prohibition and that is the basis on which they shot up his house, kidnapped him at gunpoint, put him on a plane with blackened windows and dumped him in Costa Rica, and declared martial law and SUSPENDED ALL CIVIL RIGHTS guaranteed by the Constitution--and shut down the media, and started killing, torturing, raping, beating up, tear-gassing and arresting anyone who protested. They made up his "crimes" after they did this. He never advocated lifting the term limit--although it would have been a quite sensible suggestion!

Oscar Arias recently said that Honduras' Constitution is "the worst in the world." It should be reformed! It has fostered a political system in which the majority of people in Honduras have no say in their government in the poorest country in Latin America. And that is the real reason why the oligarchy ousted Zelaya--that and their getting the okay from the corpo/fascists here--John McCain, Jim DeMint, John Negroponte, James Baker and the Bushwhack moles in the Pentagon, the State Dept. and the CIA, who told them they could get away with it.

-------------

So, if Rotters, the Grimes, the Associated Pukes and all the rest of them would outright lie about this--after lying about the WMDs in Iraq--what else are the outright lying about?

[WriteDown]

6. Can't let a little thing like the constitution get in the way....

Pathetic. I need to contact my friends in Nicaragua.

[Flaneur]

10. I think the Contras all moved to Miami.

[ronnie624]

11. Lol. n/t

[WriteDown]

12. I take it that you've never been to Nicaragua.

I love the posters from afar.

[arcos]

13. They didn't. In fact, one is the current Vicepresident of Nicaragua. nt