Latin America's long slide into tyranny

National Post, 28 November 2021

The “re-election” of Daniel Ortega earlier this month in Nicaragua is the most dramatic example of Latin America’s sliding backwards.

The 1980s were known as Latin America’s “lost decade”. Nevertheless, out of that mess a better future emerged.

The last ten years have returned pain and pauperization to our hemisphere. Whether the future might be better is in doubt.

The “re-election” of Daniel Ortega earlier this month in Nicaragua is the most dramatic example of Latin America’s sliding backwards. Ortega was a young dictator in the 1980s in a region rife with authoritarians of all sorts. Political power was corrupt; human rights abuses abundant.

Ortega, the Sandinista leader who was a key figure in the overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1979, was Nicaragua’s president throughout the 1980s, a time of high conflict during the Cold War proxy conflicts in Central America. He was surprisingly defeated in the 1990 presidential election, a symbol then that the lost decade was ending. Ortega ran again for president in 1996 and 2001 before winning election in 2006. He has remained in office since, returning to his 1980s repression tactics. His re-election as president this month was made easier by the fact that he had imprisoned his main opposition rivals. It has been recognized by no credible authority as legitimate.

The repression of the 1980s led to debt defaults, hyperinflation, resultant austerity, a contraction in real wages, and stagnant economic growth. Guerilla wars raged throughout and civil liberties were crushed.

Remarkably, out of all that agony a better continent emerged, symbolically led by Violeta Chamorro’s defeat of Ortega in 1990. The authoritarian regimes of the 1980s were replaced with democratically legitimate rulers, and transfer of power at the ballot box returned. All the dictators were gone, save for the Castros in Cuba. A pro-market “Washington Consensus” restored a measure of economic stability and growth, not without bumps along the way. But the hyperinflation and debt defaults were in the past. So too were the midnight knocks at the door as paramilitaries went hunting.

Ortega’s 2021 “re-election” caps off another decade which Latin America lost ground. The dictators are back.

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