Pants on fire: Gioconda Belli's fraud-squad

A more transparent example of persistent deceit and falsehood would be hard to find than the current campaign attempting to discredit Nicaragua's municipal elections of November 9th. The controversy makes little sense in isolation. It is the latest phase of a long disinformation campaign, begun even before Nicaragua's presidential elections of 2006. It is also part of the wider campaign by the United States and its European accomplices to undermine Latin American regional integration processes threatening their power and influence and that of their allies among the local regional elites.

This is especially true of the countries making up the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas - ALBA - led by Venezuela and Cuba. In that alliance, Nicaragua and Honduras are the weakest countries because they are the countries where the US government sponsored opposition have most chance of reversing the progressive and radical aspects of the ALBA integration initiative. In Nicaragua, the drift in popular support from the right and centre-right to the Sandinista-led FSLN government has been emphatic. The response in terms of hysteria and falsehood from the Nicaraguan opposition parties, faced with ever-dwindling national credibility, has been fierce, desperate and consummately fake.

Among the leading figures accusing Nicaragua's electoral authorities of having rigged the November municipal elections is Gioconda Belli, the award winning novelist. She has followed Sergio Ramirez, another world-famous novelist, in claiming the elections were fraudulent. Ramirez's mixture of deceit and falsehood - that votes were stolen, that observers were not permitted, that the electoral authority is corrupt - was effectively exposed by the President of Nicaragua's Supreme Electoral Council on CNN's widely followed "Arestigüi" current affairs programme in Spanish. Ignoring Roberto Rivas' exposéof Ramirez as a shameless fake, Gioconda Belli broadly repeated the same deceits and falsehoods in a response to an article by Benjamín Forcano that she wrote to El País on December 12th .

Belli's response tries to compare the municipal elections of 2008 with the fraudulent presidential elections of 1996. She suggests that those elections, won by an alliance of right wing parties - the Liberal Alliance - were unaffected by widely acknowledged fraud, whereas the latest municipal elections, by contrast, were. The point of Belli's fakery is to suggest something even worse happened in the recent municipal elections. The facts contradict Belli's untruth.

She falsely asserts that the dumping of over 30% of ballots in the capital city Managua in 1996 would not have affected the overall result. In doing so she contradicts the opinion of Roberto Rivas. Who should one believe - Belli, the parti-pris fiction writer, or Rivas, a member of Nicaragua's Supreme Electoral Council at the time of the 1996 election? A fact that neither Belli nor her fellow social democrat fraud-squad members acknowledge is that one of their number, Rosa Marina Zelaya, was president of the CSE in 1996.

In a recent interview, Roberto Rivas recounted, without mentioning the names, how in 1996 Zelaya presided over dodgy electoral shenanigans to make sure her husband, Jorge Samper, was assigned a seat in the National Assembly. At the time both Samper and Zelaya were supporters of Sergio Ramirez's Movimiento Renovador Sandinista. That shameful episode is one of numerous facts individuals like Belli skim over in their desperate efforts to pervert the truth and mislead as wide an international public as possible. After having anti-democratically filched dozens of FSLN deputies in the previous legislative period, Ramirez' MRS was punished in 1996 by getting wiped out electorally, winning barely 5% of the national vote. They have never done much better since.

Whereas Belli puts thoroughly deceitful spin on the events of over a decade ago, she is downright dishonest about Nicaragua's recent municipal elections in November. Her response to Forcano's article makes the following false claims:

• the electoral authorities failed to include results from 600 voting stations in Managua - but they did
• the opposition PLC were not adequately notified in advance of a recount in Managua - but it was
• the recount could not possibly have been accomplished in the time stated by the electoral authority - but it was

Anyone who has followed the controversy in the local media will note that the logic applied by Belli and her fraud-squad accomplices is impossible to falsify because she and her fraud-squad accuse the Supreme Electoral Council of being corrupt. They pit their own faithless allegations - supported by artificially concocted data stripped of the relevant legal and administrative context - against the results as presented by the municipal, departmental and national electoral authorities. The fraud-squad present no hard genuinely falsifiable evidence. Their case depends entirely on high volume, high profile media repetition for its effect.

Where Belli most closely follows Sergio Ramirez's bare-faced falsity is on the issue of election observers. She alleges that "impartial observers" were barred from the recount. She offers no evidence for that. The electoral authority did refuse accreditation for the elections to two opposition-aligned election monitoring groups funded by USAID that had for months accused the Supreme Electoral Council of being corrupt. These seem to be the "impartial observers" Belli refers to.

Belli states outright that experienced, qualified and competent international observers were absent from the elections. She refers to the presence of just one group that she alleges was biased because, she argues, it was created by the Venezuelan government. She also states that this group was inexperienced. She is referring to the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA), a group made up of representatives from electoral authorities across Latin America.

CEELA's members are election professionals whose work is precisely to organize and supervise elections. These are the people Belli suggests are too inexperienced to have supervised Nicaragua's municipal elections competently. When she suggests that CEELA is a tool of Hugo Chavez she is asking people to ignore the presence in the CEELA delegation of individuals like Colombia's former Minister of Justice, Guillermo Reyes, by no means a left-winger and certainly no chavista.

Belli complements that crass dishonesty by deliberately omitting the fact that three other important groups of election observers participated in monitoring the elections of November 9th. These were:

• The Tikal Protocol group of election specialists from Central America and the Caribbean,
• The Quito Protocol group of election specialists from all over South America
• a group of observers from Mexico's Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TRIFE)

In total these groups numbered well over 120 individuals all of whom follow professional careers in the electoral authorities of their respective countries. It is completely dishonest of Belli to omit any mention of the presence of these observers and the fact that they vouched for the fairness and transparency of the electoral process of November 9th.

Dishonesty and deceit are the hallmark of Sergio and Gioconda's fraud-squad antics. They have become so accustomed to misrepresenting the facts, they seem no longer to notice they are doing it. In 2008, Belli was trying to claim the political group she supports, the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, and the anti-government events it organized, did not get funding from the US government and its quasi-non-governmental spawn like the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute.

But the MRS has received money directly from the IRI. A member organization of the MRS, the Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres, was found out recently, after an investigation by the public prosecutor's office, to have received money under the table from governments of the Budget Support Group, a foreign donor-country body in Nicaragua that blatantly supports the country's political opposition. Likewise groups organizing anti-government events on which the MRS piggy-backed - like the Movimiento por Nicaragua - depend heavily on funding from the US government and its quasi non-governmental front organizations.

Another deception the MRS fraud squad has sustained is the one about the MRS losing its legal status as a political party as a result of government persecution. MRS leaders like Dora Maria Tellez deliberately and dishonestly obscured the fact that it was their current political allies, the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista, who initiated the administrative process that led to the demise of the MRS as a legally constituted political party. The political logic of the MRS' consensual euthanasia was twofold.

Firstly, the move created a bogus crisis of democracy that would enable individuals like Dora Maria Tellez to claim, falsely, that she and her party were victims of government persecution. Secondly, the move enabled the right and centre-right to form a united opposition giving their consensus candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, a clear run against the FSLN in the capital Managua. It did them no good, Montealegre, a hopelessly uninspiring candidate, still lost by a mile. Gioconda Belli, Sergio Ramirez, Dora Maria Tellez and their colleagues have worked systematically to deceive public opinion in Nicaragua and abroad about that result.

Nationally, where majority popular opinion is against them, they have failed. So far the PLC elite in the National Assembly and the Ramirez-Belli-Tellez fraud-squad have been unable to mobilise mass opinion in the country. To date their campaign inside Nicaragua remains the flailing PR media campaign of a politically marooned elite. Internationally, their campaign of deceit has enjoyed much greater success. They and their foreign backers seem to be banking on being able to manipulate the effects of the international economic crisis so as to turn opinion in Nicaragua sharply against the FSLN.

The political and moral failure of Nicaragua's right and centre-right political parties is likely to deepen through 2009. With presidential elections soon in El Salvador and later in the year in Honduras, one can expect yet more foreign intervention on behalf of right wing and social democrat movements in Central America. The US and European governments are struggling to prevent in Central America the kind of debacle experienced by their regional proxies in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

toni writes for tortillaconsal.com

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