By Atilio A. Boron on November 9, 2021
The rigorous commentators of the political process in Nicaragua have not spared any criticism to disqualify yesterday’s electoral process. President Joe Biden was blunt: he said the whole thing was a “pantomime” and that the election “was neither free nor fair, and certainly not democratic.” He reproduces, curiously, the criticisms that millions of people in the United States, followers of Donald Trump, pour on the presidential election that elevated him to the White House. He should be more careful in seeing the speck in someone else’s eye, especially when in less than a year the rate of popular disapproval of his administration rose from 35 to 51 percent. And also if it is proven that the democratic credentials of the U.S. leader are quite fragile.
As a senator, he supported his country’s criminal military adventures in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, in the latter case in violation of a UN Security Council resolution. As vice president he accompanied Obama’s policies, which included bloody interventions in Syria and Libya, where Washington-sponsored “freedom fighters” lynched Muammar Qaddafi. And he condoned with his silence the coup attempts in Bolivia in 2008 and Ecuador in 2010, while supporting the “institutional coup” against Mel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, the one that ousted Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012 and the Brazilian “pantomime” of impeachment against Dilma Rousseff in 2015-2016. Add to the above his support for the attempts of political and social destabilization in Cuba (Operation ZunZuneo) in 2014, so it will be concluded that we are not exactly in the presence of a holy man who embodies the most pristine essence of democratic values. The speaker is a politician of the empire who says what suits his interests and nothing more.
To the above should be added some considerations regarding the Nicaraguan elections, which are indispensable even in their brevity. In the first place, when judging a political or, more narrowly, an electoral process, it is not a minor fact to discern whether the country in question is living in a situation of normality or not. For didactic purposes, let us suppose what would happen if the United States were harassed and attacked by a power a hundred times more powerful in economic, political and military terms, and subjected to an endless and suffocating series of economic, diplomatic and all kinds of sanctions. The functioning of its democracy would certainly be profoundly affected and anomalous situations would arise from the point of view of the normative purity of democratic theory. The country of the North never experienced such a situation, but Nicaragua (as well as Cuba and Venezuela) suffered from the very triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. To pretend that the elections in the land of Sandino would take place in the same way as in a bucolic Swiss canton, ignoring the deranged role of the harassment, blockade and sanctions imposed by the United States, reveals an inability to grasp the specificities of the historical process or else a malevolent complicity with an aberrant practice within the framework of international law such as the stubborn American interventionism.
Secondly, it is surprising that the White House hierarch disqualifies the Nicaraguan government but remains silent about the “exemplary Colombian democracy” so extolled by the official spokesman of the empire, Mario Vargas Llosa. According to the news agency Deutsche Welle , unsuspected of Chavist sympathies, “more than 900 social leaders were assassinated since 2016” without the White House and its colonized media and political spokesmen throughout Latin America opening their mouths to condemn the genocide perpetrated by the Duque regime even once. Between January and August 2021 there have been 143 victims of the model Colombian democracy, an average of one murder every other day. How is it possible to condemn the imperfect Nicaraguan democracy and sustain and endorse the endless slaughter produced by the U.S.-friendly governments in Colombia. This double standard is enough to morally disqualify Nicaragua’s critics. If they do not want to condemn the Colombian government, the only decent thing they can do is to keep quiet, if they still have any decency left.
Finally, we must remember that the first great theoretician of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had no illusions about the viability of his proposal. More than once he remarked that “perfect democracy can only exist in a society of angels”, and societies are made up of protean, selfish, rarely virtuous and often dim-witted subjects. One of the Founding Fathers of the American nation (and fourth president of the United States) James Madison, inspired by the Genevan wrote in his celebrated Federalist No. 51 that “if men were angels no government would be necessary.” Since men (and women) are not angels no democracy functions in full accord with the stipulations of the theory, neither in the United States nor in Europe and even less so when a country is suffocated by external aggression. And that sometimes means that the choice facing the citizenry is not between a cast of virtuous and angelic people but between beings of flesh and blood, children of their biographies, their neuroses, delusions and fantasies, always dominated by their passions and their interests. Faced with this reality, the rationality attributed to voters and candidates is undermined and confusion arises. How to make the right choice? Fortunately, there is an infallible compass, especially in Latin America: if the empire demonizes one of the candidates, that one is the good one, or, in any case, the least bad one. Because there are no angels in this field of Mars that is politics. Max Weber remembered it when he defined it as “the war of opposing gods.” The rest is lyricism.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English