"Worms, vampires, and bloodsuckers" (Worse than deplorables?)

We hear a lot about Venezuela these days, but how is our old friend Daniel Ortega doing down in Nicaragua? Jay Norlinger writes in National Review,

...As the chavista regime in Venezuela began to slip, economically, so did Ortega. The petro-dollars did not flow so freely. In April of last year, Ortega announced social-welfare cuts and tax increases. Citizens, especially students, protested in the streets — and the regime fired on them. “Once the students saw their friends killed, and others tortured,” says Felix Maradiaga, “the protests were no longer about economic reform. They were about the Ortega Issue.”

Paramilitaries roam the country, looking for enemies of the state. These thugs are, if anything, worse than the “official” thugs. The Sandinista Youth are a particular menace. We have seen these situations in other times, in other places, such as the Duvaliers’ Haiti and the Castros’ Cuba.

The Ortegas and their lieutenants routinely denounce their opponents as “bloodsuckers” and “vampires.” (Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela, uses just this language, especially “vampires.” In Cuba, the Castroites have always called their opponents “worms.”) They also denounce reports by human-rights groups as “noticias falsas,” or “fake news.”

...Here in Mexico City, at a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum, journalists and activists from Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are comparing notes. It seems — astonishingly — that there is now less room for free expression in Nicaragua than there is in those other two despotisms. Protests in Nicaragua are illegal. So are tweets critical of the regime. So is the singing of the national anthem. So is the raising of the national flag. (Those last two acts are interpreted as anti-Ortega.)

...Then there is the matter of exile. More than 80,000 people have fled the country, half of them to Costa Rica.

...Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti.

...“In Nicaragua, there is a dictatorship. And the people of Nicaragua are working very hard against it. They are working to reestablish a democratic space. They are fighting for the right to decide what kind of country we want to live in. For the release of all political prisoners. For the disarmament of paramilitary groups. For civil rights and liberties. Even though we are human beings, people who get caught by the police are treated worse than animals.” Finally, “no one wants to leave his country. The people who have left, have left to save their lives.”

Read more here.