Longtime Nicaraguan communist dictator Daniel Ortega has abandoned any remaining pretensions to republican governance, announcing that elections in Nicaragua will no longer take place. The leader, who has been a dominant figure since the 1979 Sandinista revolution and has held the presidency for two decades without interruption, declared this week that electoral processes are permanently over.
Since returning to power in 2007, Ortega has rewritten Nicaragua’s constitution and transformed himself — alongside his wife Rosario Murillo, whom he appointed co-president — into a near-absolute dictator with total control over the legislature and judiciary.
In 2018, Ortega violently suppressed hundreds of protesters demanding freedom. Since then, he has governed Nicaragua with an iron fist. As much of Latin America has moved away from Marxism and socialism, Nicaragua has deepened its slide into totalitarianism, a trajectory reminiscent of Cuba’s for seven decades. Ortega’s latest move is the next step in a process that, if unchallenged, could lead to concentration camps, forced collectivization, mass starvation, and widespread suffering.
