latin american essays maclas

The 2000 municipal elections, separated for the first time from national
elections, gave the Sandinistas control of most major municipalities, including
Managua. This result put the FSLN in a strong position going into the national
polls in 2001. The PLC nominated Alemán’s Vice President, the prominent
businessman Enrique Bolaños, while the FSLN again nominated Daniel Ortega.
Bolaños won an easy victory with 56 percent of the vote to Ortega’s 42 percent,
although Ortega received a higher voting percentage than in the preceding
elections of 1990 and 1996, and increased his total votes by 37.6 percent.
Bolaños also had the highest percentage ever received by an anti-Sandinista
candidate, and increased his vote count over Alemán’s by 35.8 percent. The
party system was polarizing: besides the PLC and FSLN, only the Conservatives
received any representation in the Assembly (Nohlen 2005, 498).
Although presidential systems tend toward bipolarity because of the
inherent winner-take-all character of presidential elections, this tendency was
emphatically reinforced not only by the Ortega-Alemán pact, but also by the
direct intervention of the United States in Nicaraguan politics. It has been a
constant of U.S. policy since the Reagan years to oppose Sandinista control of
the Nicaraguan government, and to do so when necessary in a highly public
manner. Public intimidation of the Nicaraguan electorate by U.S. ambassadors
and senior State Department officials is such a normal occurrence that it no
longer produces public expressions of outrage. The U.S. embassy has
consistently pressured the anti-Sandinista forces to cooperate and to support a
single candidate, and has made it absolutely clear that a Sandinista victory would
lead to severe economic consequences.
A new element of U.S. policy under the current George W. Bush
Administration (200l-2009) has been the rejection of Alemán because of his
egregious corruption. The Embassy encouraged the newly elected Bolaños to
prosecute Alemán, an initiative that ultimately succeeded (with Sandinista help)
in removing his immunity from prosecution (as an ex officio deputy), followed by
conviction and house arrest. It appears that the Bush Administration was
embarrassed by its association with Alemán, and sought to have Bolaños take
over the PLC. But Alemán proved to have a much firmer grasp on his party than
either the Embassy or Bolaños expected. Thus most of Bolaños’ term was taken
up by a constitutional crisis between the President (with a small number of
supporters in the Assembly) and an informal coalition between Alemán’s PLC and
Ortega’s FSLN. Only toward the end of 2005 did the Sandinistas shift to provide
some support for Bolaños.
Approaching the elections of November 2006, the Bush Administration
thus found itself in the awkward position of having backed the main loser in the
current political struggle. It still wanted to block a Sandinista victory, but it also
needed to block the PLC, which was still controlled by Alemán. The former
strategy of blocking the Sandinistas by promoting unity among the anti-
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