Russia in Central America, Again The Kremlin is up to its old tricks in Daniel Ortega’s corrupt Nicaragua. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-in-central-america-again-1531074911
Sometimes it seems that Central America is unwilling or unable to make the connection between strong institutions and a free and just society. The privation in the northern triangle—Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—that has sent thousands of migrants to the U.S. border in search of work and a better life is ultimately the result of failed institutions.
The bloody upheaval in Nicaragua is another case in point. Since April 19 more than 300 people have been killed while protesting against strongman Daniel Ortega, according to local human-rights groups. The U.S. Treasury last week imposed sanctions on three Ortega henchmen—the national police commissioner and a Sandinista Youth official for human-rights violations, and the head of Nicaragua’s state-owned oil company for corruption.
Central America is strategically important to enemies of the U.S., and Russia’s role is particularly notable. It has a large and secretive satellite compound at the edge of the Nejapa lagoon on the outskirts of Managua, and its Interior Ministry has a large “police training center” in the capital’s Las Colinas neighborhood. The Soviet Union was an Ortega ally in the 1980s, and Russia today has every incentive to help him prosper as a dictator.
Nicaragua hasn’t had a fair, transparent national vote since the one that brought Mr. Ortega to power in 2006. He and his unpopular wife Rosario Murillo, now Nicaragua’s richest couple, are often called “the new Somozas,” a reference to the ruling family Mr. Ortega’s Sandinista movement removed in 1979.
When it’s all over except for carting away the dead, as in Venezuela, U.S. diplomats and legislators are good at tsk-tsking abuses of power. But when something can still be done about it, they are mostly AWOL and sometimes complicit. Witness U.S. funding of the U.N.’s International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG.
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