When Nicaragua goes to the polls in November, it is worth considering how rare a flower democracy is in the land of Sandino, the heroic revolutionary who led the resistance against US occupation.
Consider the 1990 general election, nearly 60 years after the US withdrawal from Nicaragua. Confident of victory, Daniel Ortega’s leftist Sandinista government had prepared the biggest celebration the country could remember. But then the unimaginable happened. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of a newspaper editor assassinated during the Somoza dictatorship, had more votes than Ortega. The shock was palpable. How could it be that the Nicaraguan people would vote against their liberators, against the heroes who liberated them from the Somoza dictatorship?
Everything suggests that was the moment Ortega sensed power is not assured in a democracy.
