tortilla con sal

To understand what has been happening all week following the local elections here, one has to go back to Colin Powell's visit to Managua early in 2003 when he bullied then President Enrique Bolaños into breaking off his political arrangement with the FSLN. More on that in a moment.

First a quick comment on the transparently fake ploy the PLC opposition have tried on to justify their rejection of the election results. They have set up a web site on which they have posted electoral tally sheets from Managua's voting which they allege prove there was fraud. But when they had the chance to present those same documents at a recount organized by the Supreme Electoral Council they refused to present them. Their lame excuse was that the documentation was in a bank vault they could not get access to at the time. Their Keystone Cops behaviour has made them look ridiculous in Nicaragua, while US ambassador Max Sennett - oops - Robert J Callahan struggles hard to keep a straight face, as he directs the antics of his frog-prince leading man Eduardo Montealegre.

So what could explain the farcical burlesque we have witnessed over the last few days? Well, nothing more or less than an old-fashioned power struggle between two Liberal movement caudillos for the remains of their defeated political project. Here, the US embassy plays a vital role as it tries to enforce its proprietary intellectual rights over the Nicaraguan Right.

When Colin Powell slapped Enrique Bolaños on the wrist and told him to stop being so buddy-buddy with Daniel Ortega, Powell played right into the hands of the FSLN strategists. The nitty gritty is that the US backed Bolaños, because the real caudillo of Nicaragua's right-wing Liberal Alliance, Arnoldo Aleman, refused to do what the US told him. So the US government allowed Bolaños to work with the FSLN to dump Aleman in jail for corruption.

Once that had been achieved Colin Powell then told Bolaños to stop working with the FSLN, but Powell and his foolish colleagues didn't realise that by doing so they made it possible for the FSLN to make a deal with Arnoldo Alemán that fatally undermined President Bolaños and hugely divided the Liberal Alliance. So when the 2006 presidential elections came along the Liberal Alliance was divided. The successor to Bolaños as US favourite was Eduardo Montealegre. But the FSLN won the 2006 presidential election hands down, easily beating Eduardo Montealegre, while Arnoldo Aleman showed that he still controlled the PLC which constitutes about half of what used to be the Liberal Alliance.

Subsequently, when the Montealegre wing of the Liberal movement tried to insist on its leadership going into the municipal election campaign, other Liberal movement mastodons like Arnoldo Aleman and Eliseo Nuñez Sr. ran rings round them. Montealegre ended up having to negotiate with Arnoldo Aleman so as to provide a united slate of candidates for the municipal elections. It's possible that disagreements around that issue led to the curious change of ambassadors when Robert J Callahan took over from Paul Trivelli when the Bush regime only had six months left to run. Trivelli had categorically refused to deal with Arnoldo Aleman.

But once it became clear that only a deal between Montealegre and Aleman would make a united Liberal slate possible, the US government had to swallow hard and try to undo the presumptuous "we don't need Aleman" arrogance of Colin Powell. Now, in the aftermath of a devastating defeat for the Liberal political movement, the US government is trying once again to impose its candidate - Eduardo Montealegre - as the leader of the Liberal movement in Nicaragua. They need Montealegre to go through the motions of crying fraud and continuing to cry fraud so as to prevent people in the Liberal movement from being convinced by Arnoldo Aleman arguing "Montealegre's failed twice now, I'm the LIberal movement's only hope."

If one surveys the Liberal political movement now only a couple of candidates stand out as potential unifiers who may satisfy both the pro-US wing of the movement, led until now by Montealegre, and the nationalist "nobody-pushes-us-around" wing led by Arnoldo Aleman. Those candidates are WIlfredo Navarro and Yamileth Bonilla. If the US embassy can see past its ideological blinkers, they are likely to start now persuading Montealegre to take a back seat and also appeasing Arnoldo Aleman somehow, so as to permit people like Navarro and Bonilla - potential candidates untainted by electoral defeat or corruption - into leadership.

That is likely to be the only way the Liberal movement can get itself into some kind of coherent working order. But it is probably much too late now. No matter what the Liberal movement or its US handlers do, the FSLN has demonstrated the convincing national appeal of its political programme. Even in the current unfavourable international economic circumstances, barring unforeseen political catastrophe, unless the FSLN makes some terrible mistakes between now and 2011, they will win the 2011 presidential elections.