The electoral crossroads of November that Latin America will draw

America Editorial, Oct 30 (EFE) .- Latin America faces a decisive November with an electoral cocktail in which five countries -Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile and Honduras- are at stake to maintain the current political course or take a turn.
The month will open and close with two presidential elections in Central America: some very controversial in Nicaragua, where the re-election of Daniel Ortega seems assured, and others in which Hondurans will choose the successor to the controversial government of Juan Orlando Hernández, flooded by corruption.
In between, attention will shift to South America. Argentina’s legislatures are presented as a pulse of the opposition to the weakened government of Alberto Fernández, while Chile will renew its Parliament and choose the future president, although it will probably need a second round in December. In Venezuela, meanwhile, the opposition will go to regional and local elections after four years of absence from the polls.
SUNDAY 7: NICARAGUA, IN LA MIRA
The first date is undoubtedly the most controversial.
Next Sunday, Sandinista Daniel Ortega will seek his third consecutive reelection in a process of “extreme concern” surrounded by a “climate of repression,” according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), or “a malicious plan to end the democracy ”, according to the Nicaraguan Observatory Urnas Abiertas.
Criticisms joined by the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), the UN and the European Union when they warn of a progressive political and social deterioration in the country, particularly since the popular outbreak against Ortega in 2018, described by the Government as an attempted coup and that left hundreds of protesters dead, imprisoned or missing.
After the elections “poverty will continue the same, development has stopped. Ironically, Daniel Ortega is following the same path as his archenemies, the Somozas (…), Nicaragua has been in dictatorship and family dynasties for longer than in democracy, ”the Latin American professor at Georgetown University, Eric Langer, warns Efe.
And furthermore, according to this expert, “there is no consistent US policy towards Latin America”, with a Biden Administration focused on winning the 2022 elections, and the only interest that the region offers to achieve that goal is to contain immigration, something in which Nicaragua lacks specific weight.
Ortega’s victory is taken for granted, particularly due to the circumstances in which the voting takes place: seven presidential candidates and thirty opposition leaders have been arrested for “treason,” while observers from the OAS and the European Union have resigned to participate due to the lack of conditions to carry out their work.
“The only way that is going to change is if there is a violent revolt against him,” considers Langer, a situation that Gerardo Sánchez, a professor at the Center for Research and Economics of Mexico (CIDE), considers unlikely to occur.
After the 2018 protests, the Government enacted in 2019 “a series of laws, clearly unconstitutional and in violation of human rights, which basically allow the arrest of opponents for expressing their position against the Government,” this investigator tells Efe. This has caused “a very understandable paralysis of the opposition” to Ortega, who on the other hand is disintegrated.
“Without a firm and clear political leadership and with the threat of government repression, social mobilization has been very worn out. As long as the opposition does not find a way to unify, to present a political project in the face of what is already being seen as a dictatorship, there will not be a change, ”says Sánchez.
SUNDAY 14: ARGENTINA, MORE IN THE TOMORROW THAN TODAY
More than worrying about maintaining the majority in Congress, the Kirchnerist government of Alberto Fernández is thinking of maintaining power after the presidential elections of 2023, and this despite the importance of the next elections, in which 127 of the 257 will be renewed seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 24 of the 72 in the Senate.
It is a task that does not look easy after the results of the primaries held in September, in which the ruling Front of All was surpassed by the opposition bloc Together for Change.
“The safest thing is that they will lose control of Congress, which would lead them to lose control of budget allocation, in the middle of a process of restructuring foreign debt. (…) This would give the Fernández government a very limited margin of maneuver, ”says the CIDE research professor.
After promising that they will correct what they did wrong; reshaping the cabinet by imposition of the all-powerful vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, extending social plans and raising the minimum wage, the Government faces the electoral appointment weighed down by the economic recession, the galloping deficit, an inflation that borders on 53% and a questioned management of the pandemic that so far has claimed the lives of almost 116,000 Argentines.
SUNDAY 21: FROM VENEZUELAN PULSE TO THE FIRST CHILEAN ROUND
The third weekend of the month, the attention will be divided between the north and the south of the region.
Venezuelans are called to regional and local elections to which the bulk of the opposition, including the sector led by Juan Guaidó, will attend for the first time since 2017, after his absence in the 2018 presidential elections and the 2020 parliamentary elections, which He “handed over” to Chavismo 92% of Parliament.
President Nicolás Maduro asked at the start of the electoral campaign this Thursday, to prepare for a “great victory for democracy”, while the opposition leader and two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles urged to vote “against the disaster of Maduro and those incapable of doing so. accompany ”.
The elections will take place in very delicate circumstances for Chavismo, after the recent extradition to the United States of Colombian businessman Alex Saab, alleged figurehead of Maduro, and a second and imminent extradition to the United States, from Spain, of former General Hugo Armando “el Pollo” Carvajal.
The elections “come at a very important time, because the talks between the government and the opposition seemed to advance apace in Mexico City”, and although the extraditions “are busting the dialogue, the underlying causes that led to it are still there” , considers Professor Gerardo Sánchez.
“The Maduro government is desperate to break the international siege that has been raised against it, (…) and the opposition has realized that it cannot rely solely on the support of the United States to achieve regime change” he adds.
At the other extreme, Chile will attend a presidential election full of uncertainty and thinking about December 19, when it will almost certainly have to go to a second round.
The worn-out president Sebastián Piñera, who cannot stand for reelection, faces the scandal caused by the revelations of Pandora’s papers with a political trial that could lead to his dismissal; a social crisis unleashed in 2019 and preparations to draft a new Constitution. His legacy hangs over the aspirations of the seven candidates, none of whom have a chance of being elected in the first round, according to polls.
Those most likely to go to the “ballot” do not belong to the political coalitions that have governed the country since the end of the dictatorship in 1990. They are the 35-year-old ex-left student leader Gabriel Boric, who is ahead in the polls, and the far-right José Antonio Kast. A close fight in a momentous election for a country that has been in political turmoil for two years.
“The Chilean political model has worn out in the last ten years almost completely, and that is why it is good to have a new Constitution, because that of (Augusto) Pinochet (dictator between 1973 and 1990) could no longer hold out,” says Professor Eric Langer.
“But I do not see that the Constituent Convention is offering a new model or that the oligarchy has economic incentives to improve the social situation,” concludes the Georgetown University academic.
SUNDAY 28: CONTINUATION OF “DICTATORSHIP” VS COMMUNIST “THREAT”
In the eleventh elections that have been held since two decades of military regimes ended in 1981, Hondurans will vote on the 28th to choose, rather than a new president, a political model.
On the one hand, the continuation model of the current president is presented, the conservative Juan Orlando Hernández, re-elected in 2017 in what his opponents considered a “fraud” and an action typical of a “dictatorship, since a controversial decision of the Judicial Power made it possible what the Constitution prevented.
On the other, the opposition Xiomara Castro, from the Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre), the candidate with the most options among the fourteen opposition candidates who face the ruling Nasry Asfura. Castro’s chances have increased after his alliance with the leader of the National Opposition Union of Honduras (Unoh), Salvador Nasralla, one of Hernández’s biggest rivals, who declined to run in these elections.
All this within the wear and tear of three consecutive periods of the National Party and of a campaign in which the UN has shown concern about “disinformation” and “incitement to hatred and violence.” These actions include labeling Castro, wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, who was overthrown in 2009 for promoting constitutional reforms that the law did not allow, a communist “threat”.
“The big problem is that if Castro wins and takes the side of Nicaragua, Cuba or Venezuela, they do not have resources to help Honduras”, one of the poorest countries in the region, reflects Langer, who warns: “I suspect that she is going to want revenge for what happened to her husband and she is going to have problems with the military and with the United States. Sure”.
Edwin Álvarez Toro and Raquel Godos

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