Page 2, 26th October 1984
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Fighting for free elections
Nicaragua is set to go to the polls on November 4. Gary MacEoin explains some of the Reagan 'red herrings' which are clouding the central issues.
FOR A S\IALL country concentratint., on repelling the world's etcatest power Nicaragua is devoting extraordinary effort to the elections scheduled for Sunday week.
In spite of the imminent threat of civil war • there is no censorship of political views; the seven parties who have entered candidates hold public meetings, have equal time on radio and TV, advertise extensively in newspapers and on billboards.
But President Reagan is extremely unhappy about these elections. There are two reasons, he says, why they will not express the will of Nicaragua's three million people.
Somoza's ex-National Guard, now ravaging the economy with CIA-supplied arms from CIAprotected bases in Honduras, is excluded from participating and voting. Arturo Cruz, spokesman for the big business interests opposed to social change, has refused to run, claiming that the elections are rigged.
Reagan's interest is fascinating. Although seven parties, some to the left and others to the right of the Government of National Reconstruction, are running (one on a platform almost indistinguishable from that of Cruz), he dismissed the elections as fraudulent and as "Sovietstyle sham elections" immediately after they were announced and before the electoral law had been promulgated.
Up to that point he had been protesting the failure to hold elections since Somoza was ejected in 1979. Actually, the United States took much longer to hold elections. Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in 1781 effectively ended the War of Independence. Congress was not elected until 1789.
Reagan hailed elections in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 as proof of a restoration of democracy. In 1982, the popular opposition had been eliminated before the elections by the murder of the leading politicians as they met in a Catholic college.
In 1984, the presidential choices were Jose Napoleon Duarte and Robert d'Aubuisson. Duarte is further to the right than the Republican Party in the United States or the Christian Democrats in Germany.
While, it is alleged, d'Aubuisson was one of the planners of the assassination of Archbishop Romero.
Civil war in El Salvador prevented a proper registration of potential electors, more than a fifth of whom besides are in political exile. In Nicaragua, on the contrary, in spite of the Contra raids from Honduras, a national register has been successfully compiled. "The electoral laws and the registration part of the electoral process can safely and accurately be judged as of the highest standards," Meyer Browstone told me after he had spent a month studying registration and preparations for the elections. A professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Canada, Brownstone has drafted electoral law in Canada and studied electoral law in Jamaica and Tanzania. he is chairman of Oxfam-Canada.
The Cruz boycott and the Reagan protests would seem to spring from the same source. They fear that Nicaragua wilt eive an overwhelming majority to the Sandinistas, an endorsement of their programme to develop a mixed economy with a preferential option for the poor and free of the external controls hitherto exercised by United States business and government.
Crux in fact never intended to run. The leaders of the Fourparty Democratic C'o-ordinator, which he headed, told the Washington Post last July that they never seriously considered participating.
All they sought was to embarrass the Nicaraguan Government by creating the impression that it was refusing to accept their conditions, which included accepting as a legitimate opposition the contras who were trying to overthrow the regime by force.
Nothing short of landing the marines to supervise the elections, as they did in 1922 (paving the way for the dictatorship of the Somozas), can now prevent an expression of the will of the Nicaraguan people on November 4. Many in Nicaragua and in the United States have feared this would happen.
Three recent happenings make it unlikely: the rapid progress of the Contadora peace proposals; President Duarte's meeting with opposition leaders in El Salvador; and Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega's warning at the United Nations that the United States was massing forces for an invasion.
In this international context, the spotlight of world opinion must surely force restraint on warmongers.
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