26 de noviembre 2024
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The total reform to Nicaragua's political constitution, establishing the figure of co-presidency, “crowns Rosario Murillo’s ambition to have total power and reflects the insecurity she always had in terms of holding both formal power and real power, leaving Daniel Ortega at a disadvantage,” says Dora María Téllez, former prisoner of conscience, historian and political activist.
The reform was labeled as “partial” by the regime, which allowed it to be approved by votes in two consecutive legislative sessions. It was passed in the first legislature on November 22 by a National Assembly controlled by FSLN representatives loyal to Ortega and Murillo. This process violated constitutional procedures that require the convening of a Constituent Assembly to approve a total reform to the Constitution, as proposed by Daniel Ortega.
In an interview with Esta Semana, Dora María Téllez analyzed the impact of the new “Chamuca” (a pejorative nickname for Rosario Murillo) Constitution, tailor-made by Murillo, which elevates to constitutional rank the totalitarian dictatorship that already exists in Nicaragua.
“Turning a familial dynastic dictatorship into a constitutional model, practically dismantling the political system outlined in the Constitution – although they had already killed it – will lead to the delegitimization of the political power held by Ortega and Murillo and will isolate them that much more” in the American continent, says Tellez.
Although Rosario Murillo proclaims that the reform is “building a future free of poverty,” Téllez predicts increased political instability. “They removed the independence of judicial decisions. They swept away all the fundamental, individual, and social rights of Nicaraguans. They are contributing to an even worse crisis,” she says.
Although the reform does not introduce substantive changes in the management of the economy, which was praised by the International Monetary Fund mission that visited Nicaragua from November 11 to 22, 2024, Téllez warns that the “model” is one of “family capitalism, but without guarantees for anyone. They eliminated legal guarantees for property, individual rights, and collective protections. Nicaragua is a country where foreign investors need to understand they have to pay huge bribes to the co-presidents to have any kind of stability, and when someone pays them a bigger bribe, they will be left with nothing. That is the reality that not only foreign investors but Nicaraguan investors will face.”
A formula for Central America
The new “Chamuca” Constitution establishes a new popularly elected position of co-presidency divided into two positions with equal powers. Does this resolve the family dispute for the dynastic succession between Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo?
This crowns Rosario Murillo's great ambition to have total power and for that power to have a formal underpinning. As long as she was vice president she was always formally one, two, or three percent below Daniel Ortega, although the reality is that she has had enormous power.
This reform leaves her both with total power and formal power. Daniel Ortega can now just spend his time watching television, while Rosario Murillo holds total and formal power.
This whole thing reveals the insecurity that Rosario Murillo has always had regarding holding formal positions. It has never been enough for her to just have real power, she needs to have all the formal paraphernalia around her. So now the one who is at a real disadvantage is Daniel Ortega. He has suffered a substantial loss of power, and he is not going to recover it, either. It's not that he will cease to be co-president overnight, but to put it simply, this is a clear confession that he lost power and that the correlation of forces has favored Rosario Murillo, who has been getting all her ducks in a row for this moment.
Why has Ortega never given Murillo the chance to run for office and become president, and instead had to formalize this co-presidency?
Daniel Ortega knows that the moment he stops holding the presidency, he’s finished. Even Rosario Murillo herself would have gotten rid of him. So, he preferred to go for this co-presidency model, in which he still holds some position, which is a way to defend himself from Rosario Murillo's total power ambition, but he acknowledges that he no longer has power—he is left only with a symbolic role.
Daniel has never been willing to give up power, not until he dies. He’s not like Fidel Castro, who handed over power to Raúl Castro and went home to wear pajamas. No, Daniel will be at home in his pajamas, but he will keep a position that allows him to move around and make calls to the head of the army, who will answer less and less, while Rosario Murillo will get more and more of the army’s attention.
This formula has no precedent in the history of dictatorships in Latin America. The Somoza dictatorship was considered a “sultanate,” an extremely individualized regime. But the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship goes even further. The Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, has described it as a “matrimonial dictatorship.” What are the international implications of elevating the nature of a family dictatorship to constitutional rank?
It's a complete delegitimization – turning a family dynastic dictatorship into a constitutional model, practically eliminating the political system that was outlined in the Constitution, even though they had already killed it. Everything they were already doing de facto they are now turning into constitutional articles and they're doing even worse things than [the co-presidency].
This isn't China, which can do whatever it wants with the political system it has. It's not even like North Korea which has nuclear warheads. This is Nicaragua, which has no economic power. The regime is a family oligarchy and it is also located in Latin America, in the continent of the Americas.
But an additional problem that international organizations have is that in Central America –in Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica– they're watching to see what happens with the constitutional reform in Nicaragua. Because if [the president of El Salvador] Bukele sees that nothing happens, he will follow that path, and the Hondurans will do the same. The president of Honduras and her husband [Manuel] Zelaya are going down that road. Authoritarianism and dictatorship have not been discarded in Central America, quite the opposite: This [reform] is a test run that they are going to pay attention to. Everyone is clear that a barrier must be put up, a wall must be put up against the Ortega-Murillo pretensions of having a legalized dictatorship with the backing of a totally obscene Constitution.
No one is celebrating co-president Murillo with more instability to come
What impact does this have on the regime’s support base? You just mentioned the Army, the Army chief, the Police, the Sandinista party, public employees. What does it mean for the nature of the dictatorship to be so openly displayed as a family-run, dynastic regime?
The very fact of having proposed this reform reveals Rosario Murillo's political insecurity. Humberto Ortega said that Rosario Murillo doesn't have the political possibilities to successfully succeed Daniel Ortega. He recommended that Daniel Ortega opt for a transition to democracy, and that he should set up a dialogue and go to elections, either before 2026 or in 2026. This reform [of the Constitution] goes in exactly the opposite direction, but for the same reason. Rosario Murillo feels that she can succeed Daniel Ortega, but she's also clear that politically she doesn't have the support base that Daniel Ortega has had, so she has to resort to legalizing a dictatorship that would be completely in her hands.
Municipal autonomy has been left completely liquidated. It already had been destroyed, but now it's completely eliminated. University autonomy is completely gone. They had already put the gun to its head; now it's dead.
We have a regime that says: “Power is exercised by the people through the presidency,” which means Rosario Murillo, and it goes on from there. What's going to happen? Well, things will continue to erode and there will continue to be contradictions.
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, protected by this new constitutional framework, are going to cause real disasters in Nicaragua that are going to take their own people down with them, as they have already been doing. They are going for massive layoffs in the universities, they are going for massive cutbacks in the government. They are going to make a total mess of the mayor's offices and municipal governments. They've already practically eliminated the autonomy of the Caribbean Coast and they're threatening community lands. They're creating something called “special development regimes,” which are the territories they're going to hand over to the Chinese, or to some mining company, or to some other companies they'll end up handing pieces of Nicaragua over to.
Does this model being formalized in the constitution have any advantages for the long-term relationships with China and Russia?
The fact is that the Chinese negotiate with political regimes all over the world. The Chinese don't care whether there's a dictatorship or a democracy. They do business with whoever they can do business with. They sell and they buy. Right now they're with this project to build a huge port in Peru, and this is a government that is in deep political crisis, but they don't care. Xi Jiping also sat down with (Javier) Milei, who is from the extreme right in Argentina, and he's doing business with Argentina. So with the Chinese I think the relationship is basically going to be the same.
With the Russians, there could be problems if Putin comes to an agreement with the Trump Administration on Ukraine. That could result in the U.S. administration telling him, “Okay, now get your stuff out of Central America. Take away that spy base and get your hands off this area. Stop buying oil from Venezuela, get your hands off all that.” So the dictatorship might even lose out on this round.
But in any case, Putin is not decisive [for Nicaragua]. There's no economic aid, there's no great commercial relationship. What there is is a subordination of Nicaragua to Russia's geostrategic interests, lending it territory for espionage and intelligence bases.
There has been no sign of celebration in Nicaragua over the announcement that Rosario Murillo is now, or will become, co-president. Can the Ortega-Murillo family be guaranteed a dynasty just because their Constitution now provides for it? Or could this generate some new source of political instability?
The fact is everything they're doing only creates more and more instability. The level of threats to absolutely everyone is high. They removed the [prohibition] of torture, they removed everything about [international] human rights conventions. The country no longer has any commitment to human rights. They removed the independence of judges’ decisions. They swept away all the fundamental, individual and social rights of Nicaraguans. They’re contributing to an even deeper crisis.
Not only has there been no celebration of Rosario Murillo's ascension to the co-presidency, but the constitutional reform is being approved in record time. It's already been approved.
What we're seeing is an unnecessary rush job, because they could perfectly well have tried to make it look like they were consulting different social sectors, but they didn't do any of that. This rush tells me that they know perfectly well that they are introducing these constitutional reforms in defiance of what the majority of the Nicaraguan people think is good or what they need.
Family capitalism, but with no guarantees
At the same time, there's no substantive change in the economic model. Nicaragua continues to be a private economy, this existing extortion regime is now legitimized. They're even imposing a law threatening banks to accept the accounts of those sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury. But there's no fundamental change in the economic relationships.
They believe in a model of authoritarian capitalism, of an oligarchy enriched with the funds, the money, and the possibilities that all this gives them to control Nicaragua. They like the capitalist model of operation and they're not going to step on their own toes by prohibiting private property, or any other such thing.
The level of legal –constitutional– power that is now in the hands of the co-presidency can simply grab any property and say: “This one goes and this one stays, this one I give to the Chinese and this one I give to a company.”
The conditions of this new constitution are such that no right remains standing. From the moment that the text of that big mess of a tome says that the courts of justice are coordinated by the Head of State, which is the Presidency –the two co-presidents–, anyone can understand that there are no conditions to do business in Nicaragua, because if they want to turn you around, they turn you around. If they want to make you pay, they make you pay. And if they want to take your property, they take it away from you.
There is no longer any legal guarantee that can protect or defend anyone. It’s family capitalism but with no protections for anyone.
So the absence of legal security or rule of law has now been formalized in the constitution.
Totally, because they eliminated all the articles that had to do with legal guarantees. All of them. They eliminated everything that has to do with legal guarantees to property, individual guarantees, collective guarantees, not to mention the political party system, which no longer exists. That also no longer exists.
Nicaragua is a country where foreign investors have to be clear that they have to pay huge bribes to the co-presidents in order to have some kind of stability, and that when someone else pays them a bigger bribe, they will be left with nothing. That is the reality that not only foreign investors, but Nicaraguans investors as well, are going to face.
They've announced that this great constitutional reform is to solve the poverty of the Nicaraguan people, but I don't see anything that will lower the cost of living. There is nothing that will improve the condition of the Nicaraguan people.
This whole thing has to do with power. What they want to solve is the power of Rosario Murillo, who feels insecure that if Daniel Ortega can't continue, that she doesn't have a big enough bat in her hand to hit over the head anyone who opposes her. That's why they're racing like this to approve such a massive constitutional reform, with such absurd things in it. This is a dictatorship that has taken off its mask. It used to be able to manage things with its mask on. They have now taken it off completely and they're going around with complete shamelessnes.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by our staff. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
