MEXICO CITY\u00a0\u2014\u00a0President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua is the longest-serving leader in the Americas, having abolished term limits shortly after taking office nearly two decades ago. <\/p>\n
The former guerrilla fighter has violently crushed protests and closed churches, universities, nonprofits and newsrooms.<\/a> Ahead of the most recent presidential vote, in 2021, he eliminated the competition by throwing<\/a> his most credible challengers in jail.<\/p>\n So when Ortega, 80, marked the 47th anniversary of his leftist movement\u2019s revolution last week by declaring that \u201cthere will never be elections here again,\u201d<\/a> few Nicaraguans were surprised. If anything, some hoped that Ortega\u2019s brazen decree might draw renewed attention to a country that many feel has been forgotten even as it sinks deeper into authoritarianism.<\/p>\n Nicaraguans \u201clive in a state of terror,\u201d said Dora Mar\u00eda Tellez, a prominent Ortega critic who was imprisoned for nearly two years before she was stripped of her nationality and forced into exile in 2023. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, whom Ortega named co-president last year, have such a strong grip on power, Tellez said, \u201cthat true democratic transition will require intense external pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n Many Nicaraguans have long hoped that Washington would help apply that pressure. Some cheered the stunning U.S. capture<\/a> of Venezuela\u2019s authoritarian leader, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, and support the ongoing<\/a> White House campaign against Cuba\u2019s communist leadership.<\/p>\n But even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio strongly condemned Ortega\u2019s election decree last week, saying that \u201cthe Trump administration and the international community will not stand by as the … dictatorship deepens,\u201d there is little evidence that the White House is ready to intervene directly in Nicaragua. <\/p>\n Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the hemisphere after Haiti, lacks the reserves of oil and rare earth minerals that made Venezuela an attractive target for President Trump, said Kai Thaler, professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara. <\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the fact that Nicaraguan migrants in the United States are a smaller and less powerful force than Cuban Americans, many of whom have lobbied Washington for decades to isolate and overthrow Havana\u2019s leaders. <\/p>\n \u201cRegime change in Cuba is a much bigger priority for the U.S. government because of people like Marco Rubio<\/a> and Ted Cruz, who are themselves part of Cuban diaspora,\u201d Thaler said.<\/p>\n Manuel Orozco, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue, said another reason is the perception that Nicaragua, despite widespread political repression and poverty, is relatively stable.<\/p>\n Remittances from abroad help anchor the economy, accounting for nearly a third of the gross domestic product. The last major pro-democracy movement was squelched in 2018, when police and pro-government paramilitary groups killed 362 protesters in what the United Nations said<\/a> amounted to crimes against humanity. <\/p>\n \u201cIn general, foreign policy is reactive, not proactive,\u201d said Orozco, who noted that Trump has his hands full with Venezuela, where a democratic transition remains uncertain, and Iran, where the U.S. war has cost more than $37 billion and shows no sign of ending.<\/p>\n Ortega has forged close ties with Iran and China and has long criticized the U.S. for intervening in Nicaragua\u2019s affairs. In his speech last week, he said the days of \u201cparties backed by the Yankees\u201d were over. <\/p>\n He has been a prominent figure in Nicaragua since the 1970s, when his army of Sandinista revolutionaries helped topple Anastasio Somoza, a right-wing dictator backed by the U.S. whose family controlled the country for four decades, enriching itself even as most Nicaraguans lived in poverty.<\/p>\n Ortega first served as president in the 1980s during a bloody civil war that pitted the Sandinistas against U.S.-funded Contra rebels. He was voted out in 1990 and returned to power in 2007.<\/p>\n