Back in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, communism held sway over a significant fraction of the globe. In addition to those countries forcibly incorporated into the USSR itself, and its vassal Warsaw Pact states in eastern Europe, communism also had many “franchises for totalitarianism” scattered throughout the world, with client states in Vietnam, Mozambique, etc. One of the closest to America was in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas went about rapidly communizing the country, killing thousands, censoring the press, suppressing the Catholic Church, ushering in hyperinflation (P.J. O’Rourke: “We exchanged $480 for 4,080,000 Cordobas, which filled an Adidas gym bag…You probably have to take economics at Moscow U. two or three times to make cash worth this little.”), and committing ethnic cleansing against the Miskito, Suma and Rama indians. Running the entire show was Comandante Daniel Ortega, until pressure from the Reagan-doctrine backed “Contras” and the Organization of American States, forced the Sandinistas into holding a fair election in which they were promptly kicked out of power.
Out of office for 17 years, Ortega’s Sandinistas managed to regain power in 2007, and since then they’re gotten up to their old tricks, albeit in a lower-key, “we’re no longer backed by Soviet money” way.
Lately, however, the mask has slipped, and the Sandinistas are killing protesters against their regime:
The protest on Wednesday capped six weeks of what has been described as a national rebellion against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The government has denied responsibility for any of the deaths and insists that it is the victim of a vast conspiracy….
“The demonstration was peaceful,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a negotiator on the national dialogue committee. “There were children there. It was a peaceful manifestation that ended up with people shot in the head and killed deliberately by snipers.”
Guillermina Zapata, 63, said protesters had told her that the bullet that hit her son, Francisco Javier Reyes Zapata, 34, came from a sharpshooter perched on the top of the national baseball stadium. Mr. Reyes was struck in the eye and died, she said.
“They have to go,” Ms. Zapata said of the president [Ortega] and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president. “He is a murderer, and a murderer cannot continue to govern Nicaragua. They have to leave. I believe that dialogue is no longer an option. That’s sitting down to talk with the devil, who is killing the people.”
And, of course, the classic socialist mismanagement of the economy. “David Zywieck, the Bishop of Siuna, a mining town in northeast Nicaragua, said pharmacies are short on medicine, building materials like tools and cement are in short supply and people are running out of sugar, flour, milk and cooking oil. Gasoline has also become scarce and more expensive.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A half-million protestors showed up in the streets of Managua to protest the Sandinista regime, a staggering amount for a country of six million people.
Here’s a brief video recap of the situation:
All that time out of office evidently didn’t quench Ortega’s thirst for absolute power. Once a brutal communist scumbag, always a brutal communist scumbag…
Tags: Communism, Daniel Ortega, Foreign Policy, Nicaragua, Sandinista, video
[…] Daniel Ortega Is STILL A Brutal Communist Scumbag Out of office for 17 years, Ortega’s Sandinistas managed to regain power in 2007, and since then they’re gotten up to their old tricks, albeit in a lower-key, “we’re no longer backed by Soviet money” way. […]
Reagan was right – forty years ago. He would still be right today. There will be little mainstream coverage as most of the useful idiots running media are the same useful idiots that opposed the anti-communist policies then.
Over the past few months, websites of various persuasion have suggested in all seriousness that, given its historic record and ongoing ruination of everything it touches, “socialism” should be declared a “crime against humanity” with commensurate consequences.
Of course, this begs the question: “Who will make the ‘declaration’?” This is Juvenal’s “quis custodiet” conundrum (Satires, c. AD 115)… since the crapiulent collectivist Statists of this world are universally sociopathic egomaniacs, the duty falls on outsiders’ “direct action”. But how, once conscience-less State actors “eliminate” all opposition (“One bullet, no problem,” as Djugashvili used to say)?
A disarmed people march like sheep into Lenin-Stalin-Hitler’s abattoir. Lamb shanks in Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, anyone?
I have long hoped tha college friends who supported the Sandinistas would morally grow up. We called these supporters “the Sandalistas,” and they were ubiquitous, many of them otherwise perfectly nice people.
But no, they never changed, and have only moved farther left, into domestic totalitarianism and resistance to democracy, along with the rest of the Democratic Party.
Like Ortega himself, they have not improved with age.