This Wednesday, August 26, during her daily rant broadcast across state media outlets, co-dictator Rosario Murillo asserted that the Army and police forces serve as the ultimate guarantee of the regime’s survival.
In preceding days, top military and police brass participated in a staged consultation process surrounding the sweeping, totalitarian constitutional reforms slated for decree this September. Beyond endorsing the package, leadership reiterated their unwavering loyalty to the dictatorship and their total obedience to the co-dictators.
Dictatorships —whatever form they take— are political regimes anchored not in social consensus or the free, informed, and conscious will of voters, but in armed force and police-military repression.
For this reason, whenever military forces withdraw their backing from a dictator for any reason, the entire regime collapses, dragging all its supporting pillars down with it. History offers abundant precedents.
To cite just two examples: in Portugal, the four-decade-long fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar crumbled when the military withdrew its support and joined citizens taking to the streets for freedom and democracy. Similarly, in Romania, the ruthless communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu collapsed at Christmas in 1989 after the army turned its back on him to support the Romanian people’s civic struggle. Ceaușescu and his despotic, widely reviled wife, Elena, were executed by the very soldiers who had previously sworn eternal allegiance to them.
Nicaragua experienced the opposite dynamic, yet one equally instructive in demonstrating that military power is a decisive factor in either sustaining a dictatorship or securing its overthrow. That painful lesson came during the popular uprising of April 2018 —a movement that might have ended the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship had the military withdrawn its backing, as the public urged it to do.
Today, Nicaraguan opposition leaders and sharp-eyed political analysts appear to grasp the military’s vital role in driving democratic change in Nicaragua. Rather than launching blind attacks against the armed forces, they recognize that —even as the institution remains loyal and continues to prop up the dictatorship— its stance is pivotal.
In this context, exiled Nicaraguan political leader Juan Sebastián Chamorro remarked to journalist Fabián Medina in an interview with the international news outlet Infobae that «military personnel who have not been involved in committing crimes, human rights violations, or crimes against humanity could play an important role. The same applies to police forces.» Chamorro emphasized that «the military can serve as a factor of stability.»
Likewise, political analysts Luis Rivas and Manuel Orozco cautioned in an op-ed published this Thursday in LA PRENSA —titled «The Perils of a Planned Succession»— that «although the military and police publicly display loyalty [to co-dictator Rosario Murillo], numerous senior officials are known to harbor private misgivings about her leadership.» They added that «it is highly probable that Nicaragua’s future… will be decided when those who control the state’s coercive apparatus determine whether continuity [under Rosario Murillo] represents stability or chaos.»
It is also no coincidence that the 12 center-right political parties and movements that recently drafted a comprehensive blueprint for an «Orderly Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy» have approached the military issue with great care. Their proposal limits its scope on the matter to two transitional milestones: a «purge and restructuring of the Nicaraguan Armed Forces, including the appointment of a new military leadership,» alongside a «purge and restructuring of the National Police, including the appointment of new police leadership.»
This prudence is well-founded. While nothing can be guaranteed, the armed forces could prove decisive in opening a path toward a democratic transition in Nicaragua in the near future.
Given the depth of accumulated political experience and the lessons learned from regional transitions, there is no reason to act rashly when handling an issue as sensitive as this.
