Somewhere outside Havana, Fidel Castro is trying to relax into his long life's twilight, perhaps wondering if he shouldn't have quit smoking a couple of decades earlier...or just kept it up, and ended this frustrating decline to unaccustomed frailty more quickly. In Caracas, Hugo Chavez has pulled out his multicolored chessboard of the Americas, where he amuses himself by ticking off entire countries as "Pro-USA," "Pro-Hugo" and "Pussy Non-Aligned Assholes Like Lula." I imagine him rubbing his sausage hands together above the slender land bridge of Central America and laughing maniacally, "MWAHAHAHAHA," as the Nicaraguan election results roll in.

And this chilly San José morning, rising clear and light above gently roiling Volcán Poás, must be beatifically illuminating Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, winner of the Nobel-Peace-Prize exception to a clear constitutional prohibition on second presidential terms (leave it to Costa Rica to have a typically Latin American-style collision between constitutional democracy and the cult of personality, and end up with the Archangel of the Central American Cold War as head of state), looking nervously northward. "Holy f#cking f#ck," he must be saying. "Here we f#cking go again."

With 16% of votes counted at press time - 8am here in Atlanta - Daniel Ortega has 40.04% of the vote, exactly 5.04% more than he needs to avoid the runoff election that would deliver him another certain defeat.


"Son, when we had our revolution, Che and I had to walk uphill for 50 kilometers just to get to the three or four rusty old Kalishinikovs that waffling potato farmer Khrushchev saw fit to give us. You just don't know how good you've got it."

Wait - only 35%? Doesn't a candidate usually need a majority vote to win an election? Not in Nicaragua. Nope, in 2000, when conservative Liberal President Arnoldo Alemán got busted for embezzling US$1.3 million in public funds (he actually stole much more; only US$1.3 million still had his fingerprints on it), he and Daniel decided to make a deal. Ortega's Sandinista loyalists - not to be confused with awesome independent Sandinistas like opposition candidate Edmundo Jarquín - controlled the court system. And Arnoldo needed a few judges on his side.

So they made a deal, "The Pact," which among other sleazy provisions made it possible for a presidential candidate to win an election with only 35% of the vote, provided he or she had a clear 5% lead over the second most popular candidate - effectively limiting Nicaragua to a US-style, two-party system. And right now, the USA's favorite candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, is clocking in with only 33.29% of the vote.

I bet someone in Washington is wishing that they'd sent some of those Diebold voting machines down to Managua right about now!

Anyway, for your reading pleasure, here's the best and most beautifully written piece I've found about the elections, from stunning warrior-poet Gioconda Belli. Just an excerpt:

"...it was the Liberal party's spokesman and legislative candidate, Enrique Quiñonez, who in a TV show he hosts, alerted people to the presence of the number of the beast, 666, in Ortega's campaign. On charts especially drawn for the occasion, he asked people to count the letters in Ortega's campaign slogan and in his vice-presidential candidate's name: Jaime Morales Carazo. Both have 18 letters: 666, he intoned ominously. Daniel Ortega's signature, he went on, if one looks carefully at the way he writes the letter D, the pen stroke he draws beneath his name, the date ... it's 666 again ... and so forth."

And you thought the USA had a patent on cheeseball negative campaign ads. Nope. It seems like everyone in the world is smelling sulfur this year.

 

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