Ortega has a simple plan to win Nicaragua’s election in November: Ban the opposition candidates | Opinion

In an earlier version of this article, it was mistakenly stated that former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro had passed away.

Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel Ortega is taking no chances in his effort to be re-elected for a fourth term in November: He not only has stacked the electoral tribunal with loyalists — he also has effectively barred the most popular opposition presidential hopefuls from running for office.

On June 1, Ortega’s rubber-stamp attorney general’s office announced charges of “abusive management and ideological falsehood” along with “money laundering” against independent presidential hopeful Cristiana Chamorro. She is the daughter of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and, according to a recent poll, the most popular opposition figure in the country.

The announcement came only hours after Chamorro had officially presented her bid to win the opposition nomination in the Nov. 7 elections. It effectively bars her from running for president.

In recent weeks, Ortega had placed three other leading presidential hopefuls under house arrest or constant police surveillance. The three candidates — Félix Madariaga, Juan Sebastián Chamorro and Medardo Mairena — also are seeking to lead a united opposition ticket in November.

On Wednesday, as I was writing this, police broke into Violeta Chamorro’s house with an order for her arrest. Three hours after the raid, she still being held inside her home, with international human-rights groups calling for her release.

The charges against Chamorro are laughable. She is accused in connection with her role as head of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, perhaps the most prestigious press-freedom advocacy group in Nicaragua. Like other civic groups, it was forced to suspend its operations in February after the Ortega regime placed huge fines on civic groups that receive foreign funding.

The night before police raided her home, I asked Chamorro in an extended telephone interview about the chances that Ortega will allow a reasonably competitive election in November.

“It’s going to be very hard,” Chamorro told me. “The Organization of American States’ deadline for Ortega to reform electoral laws has already passed, and what he did was to create an even more partisan and illegitimate electoral council.”

In addition, “Government repression has gotten worse. They froze my bank accounts, they are following me everywhere, they put two of my aides in jail and they have summoned 25 journalists to testify against me,” she said.

Chamorro told me she was running for the opposition nomination as an independent because she wanted to unite anti-Ortega parties behind a single candidate. In recent elections, the opposition ran with several candidates, fragmenting the anti-Ortega vote.

Now, after the massive 2018 street demonstrations in which Ortega’s paramilitary goons killed about 300 opposition protesters, the opposition may unite “because Ortega has become a big monster,” she told me.

Ortega seems ready to steal the coming elections even more blatantly than he did the last one. The Nicaraguan constitution originally barred him from serving two consecutive terms, but he has changed it to stay in power indefinitely.

And, judging from what Ortega told me when I last interviewed him at his home in Managua in 2018, he probably cares very little about being called an autocrat. When I asked him whether it bothers him to be called a “dictator,” he shrugged and said without a trace of annoyance, “The truth is that I’m used to being called a lot of things, ever since I was a young man.”

Following Ortega’s last fraudulent re-election in 2016, the U.S. government passed the 2018 Nica Act law, which restricts U.S. loans to Nicaragua until the country takes effective steps toward holding free elections.

But economic sanctions don’t seem to matter much to Ortega. Nicaragua has a record high $3.4 billion in international reserves, enough to withstand foreign economic sanctions for at least a year.

The Biden administration should take it a step further and push for congressional approval of the RENACER bill, presented in March by Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey. It would expand existing sanctions and, more important, ask intelligence agencies to collect information about corruption by Ortega and his family.

Ortega may care very little about economic or diplomatic sanctions, but he may not want to be publicly embarrassed in front Nicaraguans about his children’s corrupt business deals. That could hurt him politically. The RENACER legislation could be an additional, and much-needed, way to coerce him to restore a semblance of democracy in Nicaragua.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 8 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera