By Kathleen Kern

Imagine that China became the world’s only superpower. Imagine that over the past century it had invaded the United States repeatedly and had run the government until Chinese citizens became uneasy with the label of “colonial power.” The Chinese then withdrew but installed a dictator — let’s call him Ford Rockefeller — who belonged to one of America’s richest families and had cooperated with Chinese colonial authorities. Rockefeller used the U.S. military and secret police to silence dissent, but Americans continued to resist.

Imagine that after earthquakes and hurricanes destroyed U.S. cities in the early 1970s, the international community, including China, sent millions of dollars for relief. Ford Rockefeller and his cronies pocketed the money, which outraged American business leaders. They joined forces with the dissidents and drove the Rockefeller family out of the country. The activists who had been in the vanguard of the resistance regrouped as the Washington Party.

The Chinese government sought to punish the Washingtonians for expelling the dictator who had catered to Chinese desires. It created, trained and provided supplies to a paramilitary group — dubbed “Rockefellows” by most Americans and “Freedom Fighters” by the Chinese. These paramilitaries attacked American civilians, targeting schools, hospitals and day-care centers. The misery and terror they created, along with the Chinese sanctions that destroyed the U.S. economy, convinced Americans who had supported the Washingtonians in a previous election to vote against them in the next.

But the Washingtonians did not go away. Over the years, they continued to build the influence of their political party. Many Americans, fed up with Chinese policies that impoverished them, rejoined the Washingtonians. So the Chinese government intervened again. The Chinese ambassador warned the Washingtonians that should they win the next elections and develop policies not advantageous to China, they might face economic consequences.

This imaginative exercise illustrates what Arnold Matlin — an activist who explained the complexities of the upcoming Nicaraguan election to me — has said: “What the U.S. government is doing in Nicaragua would be illegal if a foreign government tried to do it in the United States.”

U.S. administrations have been meddling with Nicaraguan sovereignty for more than a century. After years of almost openly running the government, the U.S. military installed the homicidal Anastasio Somoza as ruler and subsequently supported his son, called “the vampire dictator.”

The Sandinistas and their allies drove out Somoza Jr. in 1979. The U.S. punished them by arming the Contras, who wreaked havoc on civilian targets throughout the 1980s. The Nicaraguans, tired of war, voted out the Sandinistas in 1990.

Now the United States is again trying to manipulate Nicaragua’s electoral process. In April, U.S. Ambassador Trivelli offered to fund the primaries of conservative parties if they united around one candidate to defeat the Sandinistas. When these parties persisted in choosing their own candidates, he announced that Eduardo Montealegre — who had split from the Liberal Constitutional Party (confusingly, for outsiders, associated with the right-wing) — was “the” democratic choice for president, implying that all others were undemocratic. After Nicaraguans and internationals criticized this interference, he said he would support any government “with a sensible economic policy and who is ready to cooperate with the United States on security issues.” Nicaraguans understand that this stipulation is a threat.