The Revealer: A Variation on Old Themes

A daily review of religion and the press

A Variation on Old Themes

28 November 2006

The U.S. press, still overwhlemed by the specter of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, missed the rhetoric of faith and reconciliation that dominated Nicaragua's recent presidential election.

By Nora Connor

The midterm elections in the U.S. weren't the only ones loaded with the rhetoric of faith, but if you've been reading the newspaper, you could be forgiven for thinking that Nicaragua's presidential election, which took place on November 5, was all about the Cold War. In reporting on former president (1985-1990) and revolutionary Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega's campaign, major papers invariably led with Ortega's past role as Marxist foil to Reagan's Contras and went on to ponder the likelihood of a reprise. With the specter of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez -- assigned Ortega’s old part as red devil in mainstream media narratives -- haunting the coverage, these stories had more to do with Washington and Caracas than with Nicaragua. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Ortega's win would "bolster populist forces in Latin America led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez"; the New York Times described it as "another gain for leftists in Latin America"; and the Washington Post insisted that the Ortega victory was "an embarrassing setback for the Bush administration."

To be sure, Ortega's past is fair game for U.S. reporters. But any embarrassment suffered by the Bush administration over the election is due more to its own farcical pre-election maneuvering than any coherent leftist vision still harbored by President Ortega. The evidence for his latent radicalism is thin (the Chicago Tribune offered as evidence a speech in which Ortega "skewered the three presidents who followed him in office for not tackling the country's core problems of illiteracy, hunger and unemployment"), but nearly every story describes Ortega’s agenda as one conservatives should love: the protection of private property, the expansion of “free trade” agreements, the improvement of conditions for Nicaraguan business, and "reconciliation" between political factions within the country.

It's the "reconciliation" that's the interesting part of the President-elect's platform. As practiced by Ortega, who failed in three consecutive attempts to win back the presidency after his 1990 loss to Violeta Chamorro, Ortega’s reconciliation appears to consist of abandoning vision and principles. Most of the accounts outline the series of deals Ortega cut with former political enemies, particularly with ex-Contra running mate Jaime Morales and "el pacto," in which Ortega allied with former right-wing president Arnoldo Alemán, tailoring election rules to favor the Sandinista (FSLN) party. But in the popular news narrative, what may be Ortega's most cynical alliance -- with retired cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo -- was mere billboard dressing, or at most evidence that Ortega can't be trusted. He "has also become openly religious" (emphasis mine), or he "got a politically beneficial blessing from his old foe." He asked voters to pray with him at campaign stops, and "these days he talks more on the stump about God than the proletariat." So potentially un-Marxist is the Ortega of 2006, the Times informs us, he "even pushed through a bill to ban abortion recently, in part to attract Catholic support."

Mesmerized by Chavez and his sulfur, the press mostly failed to notice the heavy odor of frankincense. The abortion ban is actually a revision of Nicaragua's penal code, and makes the country's abortion laws even stricter by eliminating clauses permitting abortions in cases of rape, incest, threat to the mother's life or lethal birth defects of a fetus. Shortly after Ortega's "reconciliation" with the cardinal was complete, Sandinista ministers in the National Assembly reversed themselves and voted for the change. Though suspicious about the sincerity of Ortega's religious awakening, no U.S. paper examined in depth the political implications of the alliance with Obando y Bravo, though it was reported in the Times (London) that the new friendship provided Ortega access to the president of the country's electoral commission and other politically powerful former Contra leaders. Comments on Ortega's willingness to trade on the lives of Nicaraguan women were restricted to mid-October or post-election stories on the law itself.

So what if Ortega is lying through his teeth when he praises God? If you live in Nicaragua and end up with an ectopic pregnancy, you now get to choose between risking death by not aborting and risking death by having an illegal abortion, but you will have no choice about going to prison. Forget the God Gap -- if ever an election called for reporting on religion in politics, this was it. Obando y Bravo is one of a very few in Nicaragua who rival Ortega for political longevity -- in the 1970s he maintained connections with both the Catholic hierarchy and the rural "popular churches" while opposing the Somoza regime, and was made a cardinal in 1985 thanks to his criticism of the Sandinistas and Ortega. In the only reported piece on the elections to catch this nuance of life and politics in Nicaragua, the Christian Science Monitor's Sara Miller Llana describes how the retired cardinal has been building a new constituency amid the bickering political parties, taking advantage of the steadily increasing numbers of evangelical Protestants in Nicaragua to fashion a socially conservative front. Of an October rally in support of the tightened abortion ban, the first instance of serious cooperation between the country’s Catholics and evangelicals, Roberto Rojas of the National Council of Evangelical Pastors of Nicaragua told Llana, "It made us realize how much power we have together." This trend is likely to have serious consequences in Nicaragua, and it deserves more attention. We get it: Chavez has oil and doesn’t like the U.S. It’s a shame, though, that the U.S. press is so entertained by the mutual posturing between Caracas and Washington that actual power politics in any country in between the two becomes reducible to a variation on its themes.

Nora Connor is a graduate student in NYU's Department of Journalism.