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The opposition of nicaragua agrees to a union to stand up to Daniel Ortega’s Analysis. Something more than nepotism
The drive lasted 15 months. In October 2018 the two great currents in the opposition to president Daniel Ortega, who were formed following the suppression of the protests from April of that year demanded the end of the mandate of the sandinista, announced with drums that are joined to face up to Ortega through a grand coalition. The idea was to pressure the regime to return to the dialog and achieve an advance of the elections. But soon surfaced the differences between the Civic Alliance —that between their ranks is bringing together a sector of entrepreneurs— and the National Unity Blue and White (UNAB), formed by dozens of organizations of the civil society. These advocate for a national strike general, most actions in the streets and hold a speech against the elites. The others are more likely to maintain international diplomatic pressure to demand reforms to the country’s president Daniel Ortega. At the end, like a marriage that was born evil, the two agencies announced their separation, giving a ball of oxygen to a Ortega desperate for the sanctions that the united States has imposed against its Government, but maintains control of the State and the unity of his party, the Sandinista Front.
Representatives of the UNAB and the Alliance to explain —without much conviction— that it is an “amicable separation” and that, paradoxically, will continue to work to achieve unity against Ortega, but each agency by your side. From the sidewalk of nicaraguans fed up with almost two years of crisis, the disintegration of the unity is experienced as a betrayal, because look at the members of both agencies more engaged in defending their interests, attacking each other, they work together to solve the nightmare in Nicaragua has left 328 people dead by the ambition of Ortega to cling to power and close to negotiating a peaceful resolution to the crisis. “I can only deduce that the interest of the majority of nicaraguans is to get out of the butcher [Ortega]. Do not share most of the organizations of the Unit, and substitute their narrow interests,” wrote Alonso, a user from Twitter. “While the people suffer from these opponents they take all your time”, he added at the same network Joseph. Another user wrote: “The goal is unique: to remove a dictatorship and find out how to build a country where the rights of all citizens”. The comments are part of the responses to a tweet posted by the student Harley Morales, exintegrante of the Alliance, tried to explain the reasons for the separation.
What is certain is that during the last year there have been many complaints and little progress in the unit. From UNAB is pressed to the Alliance for the convening of a stop undefined, as a form of extreme pressure to hit the Government. The members of this body blamed the entrepreneurs and the economic elite of their lack of political commitment in the actions against the regime, and complain bitterly in the networks that these prefer to keep their income at the expense of the democracy and the freedom of the central american country. The other side looks with suspicion at their now-former allies, many of them militant social activists. The entrepreneurs of the Alliance fear the economic consequences of a shutdown indefinite on the already weakened economy of the country, although in the past have supported three strikes partial, and many of them have suffered the reprisals of the Government, through forfeitures, to support the protests. Within the Civic Alliance there are also students, peasants, feminists, intellectuals, and trade unionists. The pressure main the focus in the international campaigns to achieve external pressures that cornered the regime. “There are a lot of crazy people within the UNAB”, says a source from the Alliance, who asks not to be quoted. “It is people immature, which exacerbates the conflict. From the Alliance we are very cautious”.
The announcement of his estrangement has grabbed the attention of the nicaraguan press, which was hit by the censorship, persecution, assault and confiscation of essay part of the regime of Ortega. “It is not a separation by lawsuits internal. It was agreed to do this to define the roles that each one has to form the grand coalition opposition”, said The newspaper la Prensa, the most important of Nicaragua, Violeta Granera, a member of the UNAB. “The supposed separation between the extinct and failed Civic Alliance and the UNAB is not new, has always existed, that have not wanted to make public before it is anything else. When no values are shared it is natural the inability to join”, wrote the activist Yaser Morazán in statements collected by the middle independent Artículo66.com. José Pallais, of the Civic Alliance, was more specific in a statement to the journal as Confidential: “There is a set path, there are trade-offs and negotiated documents, which were suspended and not moved in last December, because the Political Council of the [UNAB] not have the permission of its General Assembly”. The separation, in any case, given that in a year pre-election, when the opposition must be strengthened if you want to achieve a win at the elections scheduled for 2021, with a Ortega hit politically, but who stands as the strong man of Nicaragua.
