Friday, April 23, 2010

To answer the question: Leftist thugocracy is also Obama's goal

Leftist thugocracy in Nicaragua: Will Washington notice?
Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista thugocracy has spent the last several years systematically dismantling Nicaragua’s democracy. Now it has given a whole new meaning to the term “judicial activism.”
On Tuesday, two Supreme Court justices appointed by Ortega led a violent demonstration outside a Managua hotel where opposition members of Congress were trying to meet. The legislators are seeking to overturn a decree by Ortega illegally extending the judges’ terms. As Justices Rafael Solis and Armengol Cuadra headed a mob outside the Holiday Inn hotel, photographs taken by the Associated Press showed masked militants firing homemade mortars and rockets.
Reporters on the scene asked Solis about the criminal mischief he was overseeing. Opined the justice: “The owners have insurance.”
Absurd as this may sound, such travesties have become par for the course since Ortega returned as Nicaragua’s president three years ago. The former Marxist dictator is deeply unpopular; he won only 38 percent of the vote in the last election. But he and his Sandinista party managed to corruptly manipulate the Congress and courts in order to regain power. Since then Ortega has used fraud and force -- like Tuesday’s demonstration -- to fortify his position. The justices whose terms he illegally extended issued a ruling several months ago overturning a constitutional limit on presidential terms, which could allow Ortega to remain in office indefinitely.
During the 1980s Ortega’s consolidation of power was regarded as deeply threatening by the Reagan administration, which sponsored an armed insurgency against the Sandinistas even after a prohibition by Congress. Now the strongman’s antics go virtually unnoticed in Washington, where the Obama administration has been largely indifferent to the spread of leftist authoritarianism from Venezuela to Ecuador, Bolivia and Central America.
Nicaraguans, meanwhile, say it’s getting hard to tell the difference between the Ortega regime of 2010 and the dictatorship of decades ago. By that they don’t mean the Marxist revolutionaries who seized power in 1977. They mean Anastasio Somoza, the strongman Ortega fought against -- and whom he now increasingly resembles.
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