Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, at the inauguration ceremony of the president’s new term in January. Photo: Capture
The scene looks like part of Woody Allen’s legendary “Bananas”. The 1971 film, which satirizes the Cuban revolution or any other of the vast region of the Latin American Costa Pobre.
Bananas takes place in a banana area called San Marcos, where a new dictator takes office, with all the trappings, the uniform is gilded and adorned with decorations, with bunches of badges.
A few hours ago in Nicaragua a group of militants from an official branch called the Sandinista Youth of Nicaragua, dressed in uniform, paraded in front of dictator Daniel Ortega and his extravagant wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, to “swear allegiance to them.”
According to the pagan prayer, they offered their “loyalty and heart in the strength of victories with the leadership of Commander Daniel and comrade Rosario, with the Sandinista National Liberation Front to continue changing Nicaragua on paths of hope and prosperity ever further”. .
Young they promised to be “disciplined protagonists of the Christian socialist and solidarity model”. Words. If Nicaragua has really changed, it is behind.
A mural with the image of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, in Managua. Photo: AFP
The retreat to a dictatorship on the mold of the two Somoza that Ortega helped fight but has become his references.
Bananas and dictatorships
In the style of the fictional general Vargas de Bananas, ready for all kinds of crime and abuse, Ortega has established himself without opponents in power after winning his fourth consecutive term in the presidential elections last November. after arresting the entire opposition colony or exile those he could not capture.
The Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, in an image of May 1962 in Asunción. Photo: REUTERS
Nicaragua is not just bananas. It is the restoration of the worst civic-military regimes that devastated the region before, during and after the decade of the 1970s.
In this sense Ortega recalls characters such as the obscure Paraguayan caudillo Alfredo Stroessner, a soldier who maintained total control over the population, with an interior minister, Sabino Montanaro, who was chasing political dissidence in the streets.
Stroessner ruled with bogus elections every five years in which he easily renewed his mandate.
With acts, moreover, in which people, mostly civil servants, all dressed the same way feudal space which was Stronism, they celebrated the general’s magnanimity.
The despot who, from time to time, in his residence at the Palacio López, seated in a large armchair on the ground floor, silently received a long line of poor people to lightly touch his head and comfort them.
CB
Marcelo Cantelmi
Source: Clarin
