July 19 is a key date in Nicaragua’s calendar—the anniversary of the victory of its Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the overthrow of the vicious US-backed Somoza dictatorship that terrorized Nicaraguans for 43 years prior. Every year, huge crowds gather in celebrations across the country, culminating in a nationally broadcast speech by President Daniel Ortega. In recent years, Ortega has used the moment to discuss the country’s successes in the year prior, and lay out the agenda for the following year, while lauding not just the Sandinista Revolution’s triumph in 1979 but also the country’s resistance to the 2018 coup attempt—and lamenting the death and destruction it caused before peace was restored.

This July 19, while discussing that violence, Ortega proposed a blanket electoral ban on candidates who participated in fomenting the riots which plagued Nicaragua for months in a violent, US government-sponsored coup attempt that left hundreds dead:

There will be no elections like that again here—no more elections through which they can try cheating their way to government or cheat their way to taking power. We need to create laws that will put up a wall, a barrier, against the coup-plotters, against those who are traitors to their country. And no matter how much money the Yankees give them, they won’t succeed!

Even for casual observers, it was clear that the head of the Nicaraguan government was proposing restrictions on candidates funded and directed by a hostile foreign power situated in the US. But in corporate newsrooms across the country, editors pounced on the phrase “there will be no elections.”

Only days before Ortega’s speech, Trump railed against foreign interference in US elections, promising measures to protect their integrity.

Quoting the president’s statement completely out of context, The New York Times shrieked that Daniel Ortega planned to abolish elections completely, strengthening his “authoritarian grip” on the country. A headline in business journal Bloomberg blared: “Nicaragua’s Dictatorship Should Be Marco Rubio’s Next Problem.” Right on cue, Rubio issued a statement accusing the Nicaraguan government of “thwarting the basic tenets of our democratic hemisphere.”

At US legacy media outlets, clarification was sought not from the government or its supporters, but from right-wing apparatchiks financed and directed by Washington. The Times went to Felix Maradiaga, leader of an opposition group which “operates in secret in Nicaragua,” who claimed that “Ortega buried Nicaraguan democracy a long time ago.” Unmentioned by the NY Times was that Maradiaga is aligned with the far-right Atlas Network and was a key actor in the 2018 coup attempt, for which he received copious US funding.

As Max Blumenthal revealed in The Grayzone in 2018, the Yale-trained Maradiaga’s Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP) had received at least $260,000 from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy since 2014.

The BBC, falsely asserting that Nicaragua’s next elections were now “cancelled,” rolled out another opposition activist, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, who labelled Nicaragua “the North Korea of Latin America.” Chamorro and his oligarchic family have historically been the biggest recipients of US funding directed at regime change in Nicaragua and almost certainly still are.

During the 2018 coup, Juan Sebastián Chamorro promoted the strategy of erecting tranques, or roadblocks, where opposition hooligans kidnapped, brutalized, raped, and even killed common Nicaraguan citizens in a failed bid to strangle the country’s economy and ultimately take over its cities.

It’s no secret that Maradiaga and Chamorro are competing to be Washington’s favored candidate if regime change were to ever occur. Reuters described Maradiaga as a “presidential hopeful,” while Chamorro is joint author of a new Atlantic Council report calling for Washington to back his “transition plan” for Nicaragua. Opposition media put this pair at the top of a list of eight potential candidates.

Washington’s plans for regime change in Nicaragua are hardly a secret, either. The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee in February that his organization is funding media in Nicaragua with an eye to undermining its Sandinista government. Commenting on........

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