On the eve that Nicaraguans go to the polls, this November 6 for the 2022 municipal votes, the electoral environment in Camoapa, department of Boaco, is nil. “There is nothing here”, “everything is silent”, he comments to CONFIDENTIAL a resident of the municipality.
Days ago, he recalls, the political parties “were screaming in the communities,” but here “it is already known that the PLC (Constitutionalist Liberal Party) is going to win,” he adds, confident that the Mayor’s Office of Camoapa, in central Nicaragua , it will not be another in which the ruling Sandinista Front will wave its flag after a concession from a collapsed Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), which has already ceded 92% of control of the territories.
The villager’s assessments are based on the experience of the 2017 municipal votes, when a coalition of parties and social organizations in Camoapa they defeated the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its fraud machine.
However, these are the first municipal votes since the sociopolitical landscape in Nicaragua changed after the brutal repression and massacre against the citizen protests of the April 2018 Rebellion, and the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has imposed a police state de facto, with more than 200 political prisoners, and went from forging electoral fraud to completely liquidating municipal autonomy, with the usurpation of 6 of the 18 mayoralties that in 2017 were not under his power.
FSLN controls 92% of Nicaragua’s 153 municipalities
In these municipal votes, the FSLN comes with control in 141 of 153 mayorships of the municipalities distributed in 15 departments and two autonomous regions on the Caribbean Coast. With that number of communes, the FSLN formally controls 92% of the country’s territories, while in others it has managed to get the mayors to bow to its interests, or it maintains politically intervened or headless communes.
Of the 141 mayoralties of the FSLN, 135 were assigned by the CSE in 2017 and another six mayorships were usurped in October 2020 and July 2022.
In addition, the CSE “given away” the mayor’s office of San Pedro de Lóvago, in the department of Chontales, to the then Citizens for Freedom (CxL) party, which the municipality did not accept. However, the candidate Humberto Ramón González was sworn in and remained in power, and is now the FSLN candidate for re-election in the municipal elections this Sunday.
The CSE also keeps the Mulukukú mayor’s office headless. In that North Caribbean municipality, the Police illegally kidnapped the mayor Apollonius Fargasmaking him one of the more than a thousand political prisoners for the 2018 protests. Fargas was amnestied in 2019 and returned to the commune, but less than a month later he was forced to resign and go into exile and the CSE has not admitted the attempts of the PLC for formalizing his relief.
In Wiwilí –the first of the usurped mayorships– after the dismissal of the mayor Reyna Esmeralda Hernandez Mairena, the Municipal Council approved the replacement of Deputy Mayor Manuel Blandón Zamora. However, Blandón was dismissed the same month by a court ruling along with some thirty other workers, and in his place the FSLN appointed a political operator.
Finally, in July 2022, the Sandinista Front assaulted military manual the mayor’s offices of El Cuá, which was administered by Isidro Irías; Santa María de Pantasma, by Óscar Gadea Tinoco; San Sebastián de Yalí, by Noel Moreno Talavera; Murra, by Francisco Luis Herrera; and El Almendro, by Reynaldo Galeano. All won in 2017 by the Ciudadanos por la Libertad (CxL) party, whose legal status was canceled in the run-up to the “election farce” of 2021.
Of the remaining ten mayoralties, nine are administered by the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) and one by the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN), two historical collaborators of the regime that in each election they help you feign the “normality” of a multiparty electoral process, despite the lack of guarantees and political competition. In exchange, the parties receive Millionaire refunds for a non-existent electoral campaignminimum fees and irrelevant charges at the expense of the public treasury.
The mayorships in which the FSLN does not govern
The municipal mayor’s offices that are not yet controlled by the FSLN and are managed by the PLC are:
- Camoapa, in charge of the mayor Gretcheng Martinez
- San José de los Remates, with Francisco Javier Urbina Jarquín
- Santo Domingo, administered by Mauricio Antonio Martínez Pérez
- La Trinidad, with Bismark Antonio Rayo Gámez
- Old City, with Luis Arturo Mairena Orellana
- Bocana de Paiwas, with Manuel Hurtado Rojas
- The Tortuguero, with Orlando Saballos Medina
- Wharf of the Oxen, with Juan José Duarte
- The Cross of the Rio Grande, with Juan Ramón Espinoza Jarquín
In Mulukukú and Wiwilí, after the departure of Apolonio Fargas, the municipal administration was assumed by the deputy mayor Silgia Lorena Gómez Ruiz, whom the CSE refused to swear in.
In addition, there is the mayor assigned to ALN:
- San Francisco de Cuapa, directed by Samuel Antonio Zelaya Meneses.
Liberal mayoral candidates do not seek re-election
Contrary to the ruling party, which in these municipal votes is recycling 118 of its mayors and deputy mayors eternal, of the mayors of the PLC only one aspires to re-election: Francisco Javier Urbina Jarquín, current mayor of San José de los Remates, in Boaco. The other ten do not appear on the lists of candidates for this November 6. Neither does the ALN.
The PLC candidates in the municipalities not controlled by the Sandinista Front are:
- Rosalina Robleto Arroliga, in Camoapa
- Santos Luis Orozco Mairena, in Santo Domingo
- Cristina Valdivia Ruiz, in La Trinidad
- Mauricio Hoyes Centeno, in Wiwilí
- Alfonso Ramón Marín Dávila, in Old City
- Miguel Ángel Juárez Garzón, in Mulukukú
- Ramón José Blanco Espinoza, in Bocana de Paiwas
- Francisco Alberto Solano Dávila, in El Tortuguero
- Maria Auxiliadora Amador Miranda, at Muelle de los Bueyes
- Karla Vanessa Tercero Obando, in La Cruz del Río Grande.
Meanwhile, the ALN that currently manages the mayor’s office of San Francisco de Cuapa, in Chontales, did not register any candidates in this municipality as it did in the rest of the department. So this will be one of the mayorships that will undoubtedly change parties.
Small town halls with anti-Sandinista history
The 12 mayoralties that the FSLN still does not formally control correspond to small municipalities with a rural majority. Five of them are located in the autonomous regions of the Caribbean Coast, where the most impoverished population of Nicaragua lives; three in the north of the country and four in the central region.
The State is obliged to “allocate a sufficient percentage of the General Budget of the Republic to the municipalities of the country, which will be distributed prioritizing the municipalities with less income capacity”, according to the Law of Budgetary Transfers to the Municipalities of Nicaragua, but During the municipal period that is about to end, the FSLN dictatorship has used municipal transfers to reward mayors from his party, and limit the flow of resources to municipalities that are outside his control.
In the 2022 budget, it is contemplated that the mayors of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), Citizens for Freedom (CxL) and the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN) receive a total of 146.8 million córdobas. While the municipalities of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) will take 3,249.2 million córdobas. But as of mid-May, some opposition municipalities still had not received their budget allocation.
