Written By: Justin K.P.
Marco Rubio has began ramping up the hawkish rhetoric towards Nicaragua and its Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, by falsely claiming that Ortega said he would cancel elections.
“The Trump Administration and the international community will not stand by as the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship deepens repression at home and manufactures instability that threatens U.S. national security. Ortega’s pledge to abolish elections in Nicaragua proves his cowardice and fear of the Nicaraguan people’s will,” Rubio said on X.
In an official State Department press release, Rubio wrote:
Daniel Ortega’s declaration that under his family’s dictatorship Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare their true authoritarian nature. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo have abandoned even the pretense of popular consent.
The Nicaraguan people have the right to choose their own leaders through democratic elections. The United States calls on the international community to join forces to demonstrate to the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship that it cannot expect to maintain business as usual with other nations when it is thwarting the basic tenets of our democratic hemisphere.
Virtually every mainstream media outlet, from NPR to Reuters to The New York Times to Fox News, has repeated the claim that Daniel Ortega called to end elections in Nicaragua.
But a look at his actual speech shows that this was taken out of context, and Ortega was actually talking about cracking down on CIA interference and coup plotting in Nicaragua.
The mainstream media took a quote of Daniel Ortega, “there won’t be any more elections here,” to imply he is cancelling elections, while in reality, he was stating that U.S. government-backed opposition figures who took part in coup attempts at the behest of the CIA will be barred from elections, not that elections will be cancelled altogether in the country.
In context, Ortega, referring to the CIA backed opposition in Washington, said “Don’t think that just because there’s no war we’re at peace... No! They’re constantly conspiring, organizing, looking for a way to create political parties so that in an election they’re supposed to hold, those parties will win. And here this is the end of the history of parties installed by the Yankees, installed by the Somoza regime supporters, ever coming back to power” and referenced the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua where the opposition “orchestrated the coup d’etat, using funds from the United States to bring in young people and adults, to prepare them, train them, arm them, and overthrow the legitimate government of the Sandinista Front.”
In context, Ortega was actually saying that these U.S. backed coup plotters will not be allowed to run in Nicaraguan elections saying, “They’d love to win elections so they can profit from selling off the schools. But they can forget it. There won’t be any more elections here, no more elections for them to try and seize the government, to seize power … We are going to work, with the National Assembly and the relevant organizations, on the laws, because we need to create laws that will put up a wall, a barrier, against the coup-plotters, against those who sell off their country, and no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t succeed! They won’t succeed! They won’t succeed!”
In context, he was referring to laws to prevent U.S. interference in Nicaragua, not cancelling elections in the country all together.
As journalist Ben Norton noted, “Ortega was saying that ‘there will be no more elections’ for these coup-plotting right-wing political parties that are funded by the US government” not that the country will not hold elections.
And it’s not exactly like there aren’t legitimate reasons for Nicaragua to be concerned about CIA interference in Nicaragua.
In 2018, the U.S. deep state attempted to repeat the same playbook it used to overthrow the Ukrainian government in 2014, funding violent riots designed to overthrow the government.
Benjamin Waddell, a journalist supporting the opposition in Nicaragua, even acknowledged at the time that the National Endowment for Democracy, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, helped lay “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.
Waddell noted, “Since 2014, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) … has spent $4.1 million on projects in Nicaragua. Projects funded by NED have focused on strengthening civil society, improving accountability and governance, fostering a culture of human rights, and reinforcing democratic ideals and values … the NED has funded 54 projects in Nicaragua between 2014 and 2017” admitting that “it is now quite evident that the U.S. government actively helped build the political space and capacity in Nicaraguan society for the social uprising that is currently unfolding”.
Many of the U.S. funded NGO’s and media outlets explicitly called on people to carry out a coup in Nicaragua during the 2018 insurrection.
As journalist Max Blumenthal reported :
When the socialist-oriented Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua through democratic elections in 2006, Washington began pouring tens of millions of dollars into the creation, training, and funding of right-wing opposition groups in the Central American nation.
Millions of dollars have flowed from the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, into the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista groups.
These US-funded organizations were at the heart of a failed coup d’etat that ravaged Nicaragua in 2018, leading to hundreds of deaths and destabilizing the country.
Specifically, the opposition outlet 100% Noticias, which was sponsored by USAID, explicitly “wished for a US invasion” to “remove its elected president, Daniel Ortega” and put out messaging during the coup claiming that “President Ortega had already given up and was fleeing the country, and that leftist Sandinista supporters were also going to be forced into exile or face legal persecution” calling for the United States “to orchestrate a coup against President Ortega or invade to overthrow him through a Panama-style operation” and “urged anti-Sandinista forces to storm the presidential residence, kill the president, die by the hundreds doing so, and hang his body in public.”
The U.S. government-funded coup attempt led to violence in the country as well.
Writing about the coup attempt while reporting on the ground, journalist John Perry wrote, “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters; shops were ransacked; most businesses and all banks and schools were closed. The main secondary school for 3,700 pupils was burnt out twice. The police station was under siege for 45 days, so no police were on patrol. No cars or taxis could use the streets; passing the barricades on foot involved being checked by youths with weapons and on occasion threatened. Dissent was met with violence (before the barricades went up, I took part in a “peace” march which was pelted with stones). At first protesters had homemade mortars, but later many acquired more serious weapons such as AK-47s; paid troublemakers manned the barricades at night-time. A police official captured nearby was tortured and then killed, his body burnt at a barricade.”
The U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro wa preceded by decades of similar interference from cutouts of the CIA like NED and USAID.
CIA cutouts poured millions into opposition politicians such as Maria Corina Machado and Jaun Guiado ,who openly called for starvation sanctions on Venezuela and U.S. military intervention in the country, and took part in multiple failed coup attempts.
Professor Jeffery Sachs, and the UN, documented that in Venezuela “the United States funded civil society groups actively engaged in anti-government protests , notably in 2014” and writing about the 2014 NED, USAID fuelled protests, journalist Michelle Ellner noted, “Those weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear”.
Seeing that this eventually culminated in the illegal kidnapping of the Venezuelan head of state by the Trump administration, it should really come as no surprise that similar interference in Nicaragua would be a more serious concern of the Murillo-Ortega government.
But because Nicaragua wants to crack down on CIA interference within the country, the Marco Rubio State Department, aided by the mainstream media, has cooked up a lie that Nicaragua is cancelling elections in order to justify further sanctions and U.S. aggression towards Nicaragua.
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Apparently, nowadays everything threatens the US’s national security, but what happens within its borders