Ben Norton: The Nicaragua “Cancelled Elections” Story Is A Lie | with Radhika Desai

Ben Norton provides some Latin American history that you probably will not get anywhere else easily.

Did Nicaragua really just abolish elections, as headlines from the New York Times to the BBC to the UN claimed last week? I am joined by journalist Ben Norton, host of the Geopolitical Economy Report YouTube channel, and fresh from Managua’s 47th anniversary celebrations of the Sandinista Revolution, to separate fact from a deliberately distorted quote. Ben explains that Co-President Daniel Ortega’s speech, stripped of context, was not a renunciation of elections but a sovereign measure barring foreign-funded parties from contesting them, following the stolen election in Honduras and Gustavo Petro’s accusations of US-Israeli interference in Colombia. We trace this back through the Contra war and neoliberal privatisations to Nicaragua’s present accomplishments like free healthcare and education, low crime, and Chinese-backed infrastructure, as Marco Rubio names Nicaragua next in line after Venezuela and Cuba.