The assault military manual executed by the Police of the Ortega regime to the Mayor’s Office of Santa María de Pantasma, which until July 2 was directed by the mayor of Citizens for Freedom (CxL), Óscar Gadea, is part of the totalitarian escalation of Daniel Ortega who sends a message to officials and citizens, that they can do what they want and that “they are all in my hands”, specialists in municipalism agreed.
“What matters is control, maintaining power, then, it is a measure of force that tells the population, the authorities: I can do whatever I want, because there is no excuse, none… The Government has flagrantly violated and shamefully the laws, because they have occupied the Police to evict, to seize the government from someone who had legitimately won it in the elections”, valued the sociologist and municipalist, Silvio Prado.
The Nicaraguan Institute for Municipal Development (INIFOM) justified the blow to municipal autonomy by arguing that CxL does not have legal status and imposed the Ortega supporters Carmen Obando as the new mayor; Melvin Zelaya, as Vice Mayor and Lourdes González as Secretary of the Municipal Council. However, for specialists, there is no legitimacy in this move by the regime, and the only thing it has shown is that they can take power by way of law and fact.
Prado considers that the Government is not interested in having credibility before a population that represses every day and, rather, is willing to do whatever it takes to consolidate its power. “This government cannot be judged with the same parameters that a democratic government would be judged,” said the analyst.
Read: Pantasma, or the final blow to municipal self-government
The deployment of riot police stationed outside the Pantasma mayor’s office, and with the main accesses to the commune blocked, also has an intimidating purpose for the population, says another municipalism expert from Urnas Abiertas, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
“They made that decision in this electoral year so that people know that they are interested in dismantling all opposition mayors and above all, this emblematic one, which is from Pantasma,” the expert valued. This municipality, founded 33 years ago, had never been in the hands of the Sandinista Front, but they feared that it could happen at any moment.
Gadea acknowledged in an interview with Esta Semana and Confidencial broadcast on Sunday, June 26, the risk that the Police took over the mayor’s office by force, as happened in 2020, with that of Wiwilí, held by the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC).
The risk of the domino effect
In August 2021, just four days after the Ortega regime stripped CxL of its legal status, Inifom warned three mayors from that party that “be careful”. After the capture of the mayor of Pantasma, CONFIDENTIAL He tried to communicate with the rest of the authorities of the now five mayoralties out of a total of six that CxL won in the 2017 elections, but received no response.
The former president of CxL, Kitty Monterrey, said that at this time she was not giving interviews about what happened in Pantasma. On June 28, Monterrey expressed to CONFIDENTIAL that the votes next November were a mere formality for the FSLN to take over all the mayor’s offices in Nicaragua.
For specialist Prado, what happened in Pantasma “perfectly” can be replicated in the rest of the opposition mayors because there is no municipal autonomy and they have already acted against the law. In addition, he sends a message to the other local governments opposed to the Sandinista Front to “be quiet.”
The other municipalist doubts that the Government will consider assaulting the rest of the opposition mayors, because that would leave the electoral process next November without legitimacy, which has already been accused of replicating the “farce” of the 2021 general elections, when Ortega won power with its main competitors imprisoned and with the disjointed opposition, after a wave of imprisonments.
The Urnas Abiertas researcher values that the capture of Pantasma sends a clear message: “that by force, they – the Government – are going to try to fight that mayor’s office, which everyone knows, which is opposition,” he said.
an invitation to abstentionism
Former mayor Gadea assured that there was enormous pressure from the population of Pantasma for the mayor’s office to remain in the hands of the opposition. However, with the forced takeover by the Sandinista Front, another of the messages they send is that “you should not go to vote,” says Prado.
“It is an appeal by the Government to abstain because if the people are going to vote for a Government that can be removed by force, why go to vote”, questioned the sociologist.
In the 2017 elections, the FSLN won 135 mayorships from the 153 municipalities. The PLC was left with twelve – now 11 due to the fact that Wiwilí was taken by force by the Sandinista Front in 2020 -, CxL (five) and ALN (one). In those elections, abstention reached a record level of 80%, according to records from different observer organizations; a situation that could be repeated in these next elections, and on a larger scale, mainly, in municipalities such as Pantasma, which have been characterized by being in opposition and located in the corridor of the contras, considers the municipalist of Urnas Abiertas.
He adds that the bet of the Sandinista Front, which currently dominates the 90% of mayorsis to reach almost the entire national territory, granting a small margin to the collaborationist parties.
Olga Valle, a researcher at Urnas Abiertas, said in an interview with Esta Semana that different forms of political violence persist in the country, such as siege and harassment. She also stressed that there are no conditions for the development of an electoral process and therefore, next November will be “just as illegitimate, just as fraudulent as the one we experienced last year.”
“What we are seeing is that possibly this totalitarian escalation will manifest itself in an attempt to take over, now yes, the 153 mayoralties that exist in the country”, and that they have been harshly punished since before, with drastic reductions in the municipal transfers, he noted.
