Daniel Ortega’s regime announced a series of meetings to talk with unidentified “diverse sectors” about economic issues, ignoring the national demand for the release of political prisoners and the end of the police state that prevents the exercise of public freedoms. Nicaraguans since September 2018, according to a circular issued by Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s wife, vice president and spokeswoman for the regime, to which she had access CONFIDENTIAL.
Murillo also assured on Wednesday, January 19, that they are organizing meetings in which the “government ministries and entities prepare to tour the country,” and said that next week (that is, this week) they will announce the meeting schedule, although until Now no further details have been revealed.
“We are about to start cycles, stages of meetings with representative and leading sectors of the Nicaraguan economy, that economy of ours that is familiar, that is creative, associative, community in all aspects. We are already organizing meetings at different times of this year of progress in the fight against poverty, to exchange more between us”, said Murillo in his midday intervention.
The announcement by the regime’s spokeswoman and her proposals in the circular entitled “Unity for prosperity, homeland, work and peace”, shared on social networks by sources linked to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), show that the issue of The meetings will be contributions to the “powerful, family economy, protagonist, creative, fraternal, complementary and supportive” model that exists in Nicaragua according to the regime.
According to that document, some issues are the Human Development Plan between 2022 and 2027; the goals, challenges and challenges of the productive sectors, technical education, the family health model and the management of the covid-19 pandemic; a national consumption plan of which they have a draft since May 8 of last year; infrastructure and “sovereign and citizen security as a guarantee of stability for prosperity”.
Murillo alternated the announcement with attacks on representatives of the Catholic Church, to defend his family political project, which they consider inspired by God.
“Sometimes we hear, we see, some late and backward, still with forecasts tailored to their dreams… Fierce, destructive, terrorists! But they are less and less. Because Christ Jesus lives here”, attacked the vice president on January 24.
The Ortega of the “clean slate”
The initiative on these talks of an economic nature occurs two weeks after the scandalous inauguration of Ortega and Murillo, marked by the international denunciation of illegitimacy, after the November votes carried out without guarantees after the elimination of the political competition for the imprisonment of seven opposition candidates.
“Believing that Ortega is going to call for a dialogue is a mistake. Basically it is against what he is proposing, which is that there be absolute normality in the country,” says Eliseo Núñez, a former opposition deputy.
Last October, days before the November votes, the head of the Assembly’s economic commission, deputy Wálmaro Gutiérrez, one of those closest to Ortega and also sanctioned by U.SHe assured that there would be a “great national dialogue”.
For Eliseo Núñez, in reality with these meetings announced by the executive with the productive sectors, there is an attempt to reactivate the sectoral tables that were part of the defunct model of dialogue and consensus, through which the executive reached an understanding with the large business community among 2009 and 2018.
However, Núñez points out that the difference is that now the talks are with a group of businessmen that the FSLN has been forming and that are related to it in different areas of the economy.
For the former legislator, this is the reading that Ortega gives to the “clean slate”, after the 2018 massacre, which he spoke about on January 10 in his inaugural speech. “There is no dialogue,” insisted the analyst.
“Sectors that lend themselves” will participate
Jesús Tefel, a member of the opposition Blue and White National Unity (UNAB), believes that Ortega’s “monologue” will announce the economic plans for his new illegitimate term, in which the regime is isolated.
“In this new mandate, they (Ortega and Murillo) want to demonstrate that they can install an economic model that works. They have no dialogue, nor do they have the will to establish a negotiation that resolves Nicaragua’s problems, and then they are going to propose what they are going to do with sectors that lend themselves to playing the game of validating them as a legitimate government in exchange for obtaining some kind of of profit,” says Tefel.
A third analyst, who knows the productive sector, explained to CONFIDENTIAL, on condition of anonymity, that Murillo’s proposal does not fit with the concept of dialogue, which would imply that several interlocutors expose their ideas with absolute freedom, and what they are actually imposing is their verticalism, he added.
Nor does the source consider that the Executive will sit down with independent sectors and recalled that, in the repression that began last May, the State imprisoned a former president of COSEP (José Adán Aguerri), another in office and his vice president (Michael Healy and Álvaro Vargas), and a representative of the banking sector (Luis Rivas).
Sources linked to the chambers of the Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Cosep) indicated that they do not have any information about these meetings.
“I do not see that there is (in these conversations) a representative COSEP of the private sector or independent unions sitting down with them, comparsa sectors related to the regime or co-opted by them will go. This effort by the regime to meet among themselves will fall on deaf ears and will not give them legitimacy because they intend to ignore that there will be great absentees and they are the ones who make up the economic, productive, student and social fabric of the Nicaraguan nation,” the expert predicted.
For a real dialogue to take place, he adds, there should be no political prisoners, no lack of access to justice, no impunity, and these are characteristics of the current political system.
Since 2018, when the crisis broke out, Ortega accepted a national dialoguebut an agenda of political reforms was never discussed and it led to the “clean-up operation”, which left hundreds dead. Then there was another attempt at dialogue with the Civic Alliance in 2019, sponsored by big businessmen, but Ortega did not comply with the agreements and maintained the repression that culminated in the annulment of the electoral process.
