What We're Watching: Nicaragua's sham election

Nicaragua's fake vote. At the tail end of this week Nicaragua will hold a presidential "election." We're putting that in quotation marks because President Daniel Ortega, who has ruled the Central American country with a tight fist since 2011, has eliminated any serious (and even unserious) competition. He controls the electoral authorities, and since June, his goons have arrested at least a dozen prominent opposition figures. But things haven't been smooth sailing for Ortega, who led the left-wing Sandinistas during Nicaragua's bloody civil war in the 1980s and has since reinvented himself as a business-friendly devout Catholic. Back in 2018 a botched social security reform prompted protests that quickly spiraled into a challenge to his authoritarian rule. Although he crushed the uprising with brute force, rumblings of discontent continue. What's more, the US and other partners in the region are already readying a new round of sanctions in response to what will certainly be a sham vote on Sunday.