Ortega coup against opposing municipalities

The Sandinista government takes by force five mayors’ offices governed by the Citizens for Freedom party and ousters their mayors in historically opposition bastions

Four Sandinista flags were raised this Monday morning simultaneously in four Nicaraguan town halls, after the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo carried out a de facto coup with armed police against these local governments located in the north of the country, in a historically oppositional area. The ruling party took over the chairs of the mayors in El Almendro, Murra, Yalí and El Cuá in an act that completely buried municipal autonomy in this Central American country and finished consolidating a single-party model, say analysts consulted by EL PAÍS. At night the siege was still maintained in the intervened town halls.

The four mayors were governed until this Monday by the Citizens for Freedom (CxL) party, a group that in August 2021 was outlawed by the Electoral Power, amid the repressive escalation unleashed by the presidential couple that led to its perpetuation in the power, after arresting all opposition presidential candidates and critical voices.

The Nicaraguan Institute for Municipal Development (Inifom) argued before the mayors that they were sacked because “the CxL party does not have legal status.” Immediately, the Inifom appointed new Sandinista authorities in the municipalities who, sheltered by policemen, raised the red and black flags to the astonishment of the citizens of these municipalities that are part of what is considered the old corridor of the Contras, the armed guerrilla that in the eighties and under the auspices of Ronald Reagan he fought the Sandinista Revolution.

“The police occupation of the premises and the illegal dismissal of the elected mayors under the banner of Citizens for Freedom is a very serious attack against the popular will and municipal autonomy,” Kitty Monterrey, president of CxL exiled in Costa, tells EL PAÍS. Delicious. “The mayors and councilors legitimately elected in 2017 in the CxL box are not party officials, they are municipal authorities elected by their citizens and they have demonstrated this during their administration.” These municipalities have been governed mainly by the opposition to Sandinismo and, despite the electoral fraud and the control over the Electoral Power, Ortega was never able to take control of them, until now that he managed to do so manu militari.

Silvio Prado, an expert in municipalism and a sociologist, called the argument given by Inifom “legalized”. “It is absurd, because a party is not a private company. When a party goes to the elections, if it obtains a certain number of votes, they are a mandate for those they represent. So, when authorities are elected, the mandate does not expire with the cancellation of the legal entity. There is no reason in the law of political parties, the Electoral Law of Nicaragua, that says that the mandate of the elected is extinguished for having lost the legal personality.