No Pasaran: The Sequel

It is pretty ironic timing: in the USA, voters go to the polls to vote against Bush Jnr., while down in little Nicaragua, Bush Snr.'s old foe Daniel Ortega makes an election come-back.

What's really funny, however, is that two decades later it is still the same faces, the same names, the same gang of criminals clinging to power in Washington.

For anyone who doesn't know their history:

Ortega led a 1979 revolution against dictator Anastasio Somoza and then fought US-backed Contra rebels in a vicious civil war in the 1980s... Some 30,000 people were killed in the Contra war and a US economic embargo caused chaos, helping to wreck the Sandinistas' ambitious education and health programs.

Chris Floyd wonders how Bush Jnr. will make Nicaragua pay for its disobedience:

What will happen now? It's obvious: the Bush II administration -- which is clotted with many of the same Constitution-hating state terrorists who threw in with druglords and Islamic extremists during the Contra War -- has already announced its intention to resume the old economic terrorism against the wretchedly poor people of Nicaragua. American officials stated plainly that trade restrictions and cutbacks, if not cut-offs, in U.S. aid were in the cards if the Nicaraguans exercised their democratic rights in favor of the Sandinistas. They even sent Oliver North down to tour the country before the election -- the clearest possible signal for the rabble to get in line, rather like having Frank Nitti drive through the neighborhood to remind the shopkeepers to pay up their protection money to Al Capone.

The only question remaining is whether the Iran-Contra criminal gang now restored to the White House will be content with economic sabatoge of the Nicaraguan government. After all, this time Ortega will have the backing of Venezeula's Hugo Chavez, who has promised cheap oil and other economic benefits to the Sandinistas. The Washington squeeze play won't be quite as effective this time around. So will they move on to more physical methods of destabilization? Will they sponsor another mass-murdering civil war? Or will it be confined to covert ops?

Nicaragua trails only Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The last thing they need is US economic sanctions, or US military harrassment. They voted for their leader democratically: let them make their own way in the world, unhindered by the blinkered ideologues in Washington.