U.S. sanctions on Nicaragua seen as `hypocrisy'
By Andrés Oppenheimer
The Miami Herald, December 18, 2008
The European Union and United States' decisions to suspend foreign aid to Nicaragua because of apparent fraud in recent municipal elections is a welcome move, but raises a thorny question: whether we're picking on tiny Nicaragua while looking the other way when oil-rich Venezuela and other countries breach democratic freedoms. U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Robert Callahan announced earlier this week that Washington will withdraw $175 million in Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) aid to that country unless President Daniel Ortega' solves the dispute with opposition parties over the results of the Nov. 9 elections. Nicaragua's leftist government claims to have won in the capital, Managua, and most other cities. But the opposition, the Roman Catholic Church and several international organizations, including the Carter Center, have questioned the official results and are demanding a transparent review of the ballots. Earlier, the European Union had suspended an estimated $31.7 million in aid to Nicaragua in connection with the municipal elections fraud charges. For Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, foreign aid amounts to about half the country's entire export income, and is crucial to funding anti-poverty programs. In Venezuela, meantime, opposition politicians are scratching their heads while reading the news from Nicaragua. Why haven't rich countries done anything when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recently vetoed nearly 300 opposition politicians, including some of the most popular ones, from running in Venezuela's Nov. 23 regional elections? Or when Chávez closed the pro-opposition RCTV television network, they ask.
`DOSE OF HYPOCRISY'
''There is a high dose of hypocrisy in the way the United States and Europe deal with these issues, and it hurts their image,'' said Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, a Venezuelan former opposition presidential candidate, in a telephone interview from Caracas. ``If Europe and the United States defend basic principles, they should do it all over.'' Rich countries should consider using their oil purchases from Venezuela as a tool to press Chávez to respect fundamental freedoms, much like Chávez uses his country's oil exports for political purposes, he said. If Venezuela's opposition wins some elections, it's because it can sometimes overcome the government's giant fraud machine, he added. In Bolivia, opposition politicians and leading newspapers charge that leftist President Evo Morales' government engaged in widespread fraud in the Aug. 10 national referendum, and that Morales routinely circumvents the laws in his quest for a new constitution that would allow him to stay in power indefinitely. The Bush administration earlier this year suspended some anti-drug related trade preferences with Bolivia, after Morales' expulsion of the U.S. ambassador. But other U.S. aid programs remain in place. ''In Bolivia, there's electoral fraud,'' says Manfred Reyes Villa, a former governor of the Cochabamba state, who is considering running for president next year. ``Why does Washington take actions against Nicaragua, and not Bolivia?'' Manuel Orozco, a Central American expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, a middle-of-the-road think tank, says Nicaragua has been the Latin American country where democracy deteriorated the most in 2008, followed by Bolivia. ''At least in Venezuela you had some more credible election results,'' he said. U.S. officials reject comparisons between U.S. reactions to allegations of fraud in Nicaragua and other countries. ''We don't lump countries together,'' says U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heide Bronke Fulton. ''Of those countries that you mention, Nicaragua is the only one with an MCC compact whereby the country commits itself to seventeen concrete policy areas, including respecting political freedoms,'' Fulton said.
My opinion: At a time when most Latin American leaders are moving away from the collective defense of democracy in the region -- just this week, they gave a hero's welcome at a summit in Brazil to Cuba's military ruler Raúl Castro, whose regime hasn't allowed a free election in five decades -- it's hard not to support the U.S. and European decisions to pressure Nicaragua to conduct a credible vote count.
TWO-TIER U.S. POLICY?
But I wonder whether the U.S. and European governments are pursuing a two-tier policy, demanding clean elections in smaller countries, while accepting ''tolerable fraud'' in bigger ones. I hope the incoming Obama administration uses some of its reservoir of international prestige to inspire the region to resume the collective defense of democracy under the 2001 Inter-American Charter, across the board, under the umbrella of international institutions. If we are seen as just demanding democracy in smaller countries, like Nicaragua, nobody will take us seriously.
See article in Spanish: http://www.thedialogue.org/page.cfm?pageID=32&pubID=1755&s=