PT would do well to adopt a critical stance against Ortega – 03/11/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

The 1979 Nicaraguan revolution was the revolution of the generation in which the PT was founded.

In his interview for my book about the PT, José Dirceu said that, in the 1980s, Lula said that Genoino, then still a radical Marxist, should know “Nicaragua and Sweden”. Today, it may seem like an odd pairing, but at the time, it wasn’t: in different ways, the more combative social democracy and the Sandinistas represented the hope that socialism and democracy could live together. In 1988, the physicist Luiz Pinguelli Rosa wrote in the PT magazine Theory and Debate that Nicaragua represented an experiment with “pluralism, mixed economy and non-alignment”. In the 1980s, the PT sent doctors to Nicaragua to help with the country’s reconstruction effort. Young PT members volunteered to help literacy efforts in Nicaragua.

Sandinista democracy was never perfect, as can be seen in the book “The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy”, by Katherine Hoyt. But many of the imperfections of the Sandinista model could be attributed, with some reason, to the US-sponsored civil war.

The Sandinistas also had several family resemblances to the PT, such as the strong presence of progressive Catholics in their midst. In Nicaragua, there were guerrilla priests who eventually became minister-priests, creating a serious conflict with the Vatican. Meanwhile, PT Frei Betto was trying, with very limited success, to bring together Catholics and Communists in Cuba.

The best proof that there was more democracy in Sandinista Nicaragua than in the vast majority of post-revolutionary governments is that, in 1990, the Sandinistas lost the elections and went home. They reorganized themselves as a democratic party and went through important splits. Great Sandinista leaders, such as the writer and former vice president Sergio Ramírez (author of the great “Adiós, Muchachos”) broke with the leadership of Daniel Ortega, who governed Nicaragua between the victory of the revolution and the defeat of 1990.

Since 2018, Ortega seems to have regretted going home in 1990. He began an authoritarian escalation that already has hundreds of victims, including a Brazilian student. Several of his guerrilla companions, like Ramírez himself, are among those being persecuted. In a particularly cowardly move, oppositionists were stripped of Nicaraguan citizenship.

Like other countries, Brazil offered citizenship to the persecuted last week. However, the Lula government refused to sign a declaration against Ortega at the UN.

The PT still seems to be trying to keep in the same boat what the scholar Jorge Lanzaro called “Creole social democracy” (Chilean PS, Uruguayan Frente Amplío, PT itself), and the various versions of “Bolivarianism”, including authoritarian ones. This can become more and more difficult. Authoritarian failures take an electoral toll on the democratic parties that support them.

The PT would do well to adopt an openly critical stance against the Ortega dictatorship, as did the PSB and PT leaders like Tarso Genro and Alberto Cantalice last week, as well as new progressive leaders on the continent, like Chile’s Boric and Colombia’s Petro.

Ortega is no longer a socialist, he is no longer democratic, and Sandinismo only seems to have inherited defects.

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