The Ortega-Murillo dynasty is doing the far right and imperialism a favour.
Dictator Daniel Ortega’s announcement on 19 July that ‘there will be no more elections so that they (the opposition) cannot try to seize the government or seize power’ is the most cynical admission that his government is moving towards establishing a monarchical-style regime, in partnership with his wife, Rosario Murillo.
Since returning to power in 2007, the Ortega-Murillo government has dismantled the judicial and institutional apparatus to bring it under its control. It has taken control of strategic sectors of the economy and established absolute capitalist power through the criminal repression of social protest, attacks on human rights, the persecution of those who have accused Daniel Ortega of rape or sexual harassment, and the criminalisation of therapeutic abortion in cases of rape. In addition to electoral fraud, the criminalisation of opposition candidates and the purge of the Sandinista ranks – in the purest totalitarian style – of historic leaders of the revolution such as Mónica Baltodano, Dora María Téllez, Herty Lewites, Sergio Ramírez, Ernesto Cardenal, Víctor Hugo Tinoco, Gioconda Belli and Carlos Mejía Godoy, amongst many others.
Nothing could be further removed from today’s Nicaragua and its authoritarian government than the great armed revolution of 1979, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza and established a people’s government in the country, standing up to the interests of US imperialism and carrying out significant democratic, social and gender reforms.
Contrary to what the defenders of the Ortega-Murillo regime’s atrocities claim, these anti-electoral measures are not designed to shield institutions of popular power—based on the self-organisation of workers and the people—from bourgeois reaction and imperialism. They serve merely to consolidate oligarchic power in the service of the market. Against this power, for years now, every form of popular resistance has been legitimate, and it is necessary to oppose it with an independent social force in order to fight even for the most basic democratic rights.
Even more seriously: the decree ending elections does US imperialism under Trump a huge favour, by providing the neo-fascist with a supposedly ‘democratic’ pretext to attack Nicaragua, the region and the whole of Latin America. This latest step in the country’s regime’s drift towards authoritarianism erodes the political and social conditions—both locally and regionally—needed to confront a new US military intervention on Latin American soil, as might eventually occur against the Ortega-Murillo government itself, within the framework of the ‘Shield of the Americas’ and the Trump administration’s announced crusade against everything it considers to be the ‘far left’.
The Fourth International joins the various statements issued by sectors of the Latin American and Caribbean left and progressive movement, which have now taken a stand against the dictatorial regime of the Ortega-Murillo duo and are expressing their support for the Nicaraguan people in resistance. A possible imperialist aggression cannot be used as a pretext to justify any dictatorship. On the contrary: the path to effective anti-imperialist struggle lies in the most democratic participation and organisation of workers, peasants, women, indigenous peoples and the masses. The struggle for national sovereignty and socialism cannot be waged and brought to victory unless it is linked to the broadest democratic self-organisation of those who resist.
Long live the resistance of the Nicaraguan people against the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship!
No imperialist intervention in Latin America!
Statement by the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
24 July 2026