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Open Letter from Sergio Ramirez to President Lula da Silva

Ortega has abolished elections. Do not deny Nicaragua the right to choose freely—the same right that could make you president of Brazil for a fourth time.

From El Pais of Spain

HAVANA TIMES – The last time we saw each other was many years ago, on the occasion of the first congress of the Sandinista Front, held in Managua in July 1991, when you gave a speech at the opening session. It was a speech I will never forget, and it helped those of us who were seeking to consolidate a democratic current within a party that had just suffered an electoral defeat that brought the revolution to an end.

In that speech, you said that the left’s mistake was to insist on distinguishing between proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy, when there was only one kind of democracy: one in which power was determined by the votes of the citizens.

Daniel Ortega and the doctrinaire hardliners who supported him, and who proclaimed that it had been a mistake to surrender revolutionary power in elections held “under the blackmail of Yankee imperialism,” did not like what you had to say. I remember that Edmundo JarquIn, who was with me among the reformists, called me that night to tell me that the hardliners had left you alone at the hotel. So we went to get you and took you to Edmundo’s house, where we spent long hours talking about the future of the left in Latin America, which had to be democratic, or it would........

© Havana Times