The complicit silence of the Spanish left that supported the communist regime of Nicaragua

Yesterday we saw Daniel Ortega's announcement that there will be no more elections in Nicaragua, not even with the usual fraud.

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This scandalous announcement has been met with absolute silence from the Spanish left, including parties that supported the regime in recent years, such as the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), to which two ministers in Pedro Sánchez's government belong: Yolanda Díaz and Sira Rego. Neither of them has said anything about Ortega's announcement, which definitively ends any semblance of democracy. Enrique Santiago, a member of parliament for the far-left organization Sumar (one of the two partners in Pedro Sánchez's coalition government) and general secretary of the PCE, has also remained silent.

On February 3, 2020, the general secretary of the PCE published this photo showing Enrique Santiago and Remedios García Albert, secretary of solidarity for the PCE, alongside Nicaraguan minister Paul Oquist, who died in 2021. "We continue to strengthen solidarity with Latin America to fight against the US imperialist offensive," Enrique Santiago stated to justify his support for the Nicaraguan dictatorship.

A few months later, on December 16, 2020, leaders of the far-left coalition Unidas Podemos, which was then the electoral brand of Sánchez's government partners, met with the then Nicaraguan ambassador to Spain, Carlos Midence, a meeting that the PCE justified with praise for that dictatorship and without saying anything at all about his brutal repression against the 2018 protests, with hundreds dead. In the photo, we see Enrique Santiago on the right, along with fellow Sumar deputy Gerardo Pisarello (who has also remained silent on Ortega's recent announcement). On the left, we see Antón Gómez-Reino Varela and Lucía Muñoz Dalda, then deputies for Unidas Podemos. They, too, have yet to comment on Ortega's announcement.

On November 9, 2021, the PCE published this message on its Twitter account congratulating the Sandinista Front, Ortega's party, for its latest electoral fraud, which we can now say were the last elections held in the country. The European Union condemned this electoral farce carried out through the "systematic imprisonment, harassment, and intimidation" of opponents and journalists, but the PCE had no qualms about whitewashing this farce, as it also did with the electoral farces of the dictatorships of Belarus and Venezuela in 2020 and 2024, respectively. This indicates what the PCE considers a legitimate electoral process when its allies are in power.

In January 2022, the PCE insisted on supporting the Ortega dictatorship, wishing him "all the best" on his inauguration and, once again, without making the slightest mention of the serious human rights violations by that regime. The PCE has also remained silent on Ortega's announcement banning elections in Nicaragua. It's safe to assume the PCE won't find this objectionable, given its unwavering support for one-party regimes like Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam, countries where communist parties have been in power for more than half a century without ever having held free and democratic elections. These are the same Spanish communists who frequently call all democrats who do not subscribe to the dogmas of the left "fascists", communists who now maintain a complicit silence regarding the Ortega dictatorship.

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Main photo: Partido Comunista de España.