Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) summit in Caracas, April 24, 2024. Photo: Juan Barreto, AFP.
By Richard Balzano – Aug. 21, 2026
“Crackdown.” “Democratic backsliding.” “Authoritarian grip.” Journalists persecuted, opposition parties crushed—and now, according to the latest eruption from the Western press, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has abolished elections.
The peripheral left offers another interpretation: Ortega is preventing U.S.-backed political organizations implicated in subversion from participating in elections, while Nicaragua has restricted media organizations with subversive ties to Washington amid ongoing U.S. hostility. Whether one approves is beside the point. Nicaragua is behaving as though the United States poses a threat to Nicaraguan sovereignty. How could they possibly have gotten that idea?
First, the elections. During his July 19th address commemorating the Sandinista Revolution, Ortega declared that the era of parties “installed by the Yankees” returning to government was over: “There will be no more elections, there will be no more [elections] through which they can try to seize the government, seize power.” He immediately called for laws erecting a “wall” or “block” against golpistas and vendepatrias—coup plotters and traitors—adding that “no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they will not succeed.” Western headlines performed emergency surgery and emerged clutching: “There will be no elections.” The missing words alter the diagnosis. Nicaragua will hold elections, and perhaps candidates with ties to Washington will not be allowed to participate—that doesn’t seem all that radical given the context.
Ortega’s crackdown on journalism deserves reconsideration. Western accounts and institutions describe Nicaraguan journalists being persecuted, but few ask what those journalists were actually doing. Journalists “silenced” by Ortega hardly constituted some pristine Fourth Estate floating above Nicaraguan politics. Washington poured millions of dollars through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and allied institutions into an opposition-media ecosystem, much of it routed through organizations such as the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, supporting and training journalists and outlets including 100% Noticias and others embedded in the anti-Sandinista milieu. The Chamorro network itself straddled journalism, NGOs and opposition politics, while during the 2018 upheaval sections of this media apparatus did considerably more than observe from the press gallery: 100% Noticias broadcast sympathetically from the opposition tranques,* provided anti-government activists a national platform, and its director Miguel Mora openly advocated a “Noriega-style” intervention to remove Ortega. When the government investigated foreign collusion, it closed outlets and prosecuted some of the figures involved. Western accounts largely began the story there, but foreign financing disappears, political participation becomes journalism, organizations intertwined with the opposition become merely “independent media,” and a confrontation between the Nicaraguan state and a U.S.-supported political-media apparatus is transformed into a familiar dictatorial repression narrative.
Nicaragua has good reason to take American meddling seriously. During the Banana Wars, U.S. Marines occupied the country for much of 1912–33 in what historian Greg Grandin called the United States’ “first Third World quagmire,” until resistance leader Augusto Sandino won a war of attrition, sending occupation forces packing. Washington has a legacy of leaving poor institutions behind in the wake of its occupations, and the Nicaraguan national guard was one of them, serving as the primary instrument of repression in the succeeding decades. Sandino was murdered by National Guard leader Somoza, and the Somoza dynasty followed: four decades of kleptocratic anticommunist family dictatorship.
A civil war unfolded in which Sandinista revolutionaries took power in 1979, at which time they committed an unforgivable crime of improving people’s lives. Literacy campaigns, healthcare, education, agrarian reform: resources began flowing toward ordinary Nicaraguans. Oxfam called Nicaragua exceptional for its government’s commitment to improving the people’s condition and encouraging their participation in development, and gave Washington’s nightmare its proper name: “the threat of a good example.” That a poor country might successfully direct resources toward peasants instead of oligarchs and foreign capital, and that neighboring peasants would notice, was considered a U.S. national security threat.
Washington set about making the example fail by financing the torturous Contra insurgency, plastering the media with disinformation, and squeezing Nicaragua economically. Washington mined Nicaraguan harbors, and when the International Court of Justice found the U.S. in violation of international law and liable for reparations, the U.S. quit the ICJ, vindicating long held suspicions that international law and human rights institutions were designed to police the Global South, not the other way around. Meanwhile, Nicaragua diverted enormous resources from social development into fighting a U.S.-sponsored war, while continuing to make payments on odious debts inherited from the Somozas, to the detriment of ordinary Nicaraguans. In 1990, battered Nicaraguans voted the Sandinistas out, and they left quietly. Daniel Ortega, a first-generation Sandinista revolutionary, returned sixteen years later through the ballot box.
All of which vanishes when Nicaragua appears in American media. Occupation becomes ancient history; the Contras become Cold War trivia; foreign financing becomes philanthropy; regime-change organizations become “civil society”; Washington-funded media become “independent”; and golpistas become merely “opposition politicians.”
Remember Russiagate? Americans raged that foreign interference represented an existential assault on democracy. Americans will not tolerate journalists taking money from foreign governments (except Israel) to disseminate stories cultivated by foreign intelligence agencies (except Mossad). Are we that drunk on American exceptionalism, and historically amnesic, that we believe it’s okay when we do it abroad? Americans reserve for themselves an unlimited right to vigilance while demanding extraordinary political permeability from countries whose sovereignty Washington has repeatedly violated. Post-colonial nations subjected to occupation, proxy wars, sanctions, coups and continuing foreign interference must tolerate foreign-funded journalism, NGOs and Trojan-horse political parties catering to classes enriched by the colonial economic order—or be declared authoritarian for exercising the vigilance necessary to preserve their sovereignty. The State Department cries “authoritarianism,” and well-intentioned folks in the imperial core who value a (relatively) free press and some semblance of (oligarchic) electoral democracy are too quick to believe it. Try running an American television network on CCP money while publicly calling for Putin to conduct a “Noriega-style operation” in Washington, and see how philosophical the State Department becomes about press freedom.
Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.
