Ortega’s spacy idea isn’t funny. It’s a distraction from the dictator’s abuse of the Nicaraguan people | Opinion

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s leftist dictator, has announced his intention to create a “National Secretariat for Outer Space Affairs, the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.” GIven that Nicaragua is one of the world’s poorest countries, many people find it funny.

But I’m not amused.

Ortega’s initiative is part of a growing pattern of Latin American dictators ,who have ordered mass killings and tortured dissidents, but periodically come up with outlandish proposals to capture the headlines and divert attention from their human-rights violations. This is a case in point.

They want the world to see them as colorful tropical leaders, rather than as ruthless tyrants. They want to be seen as those exotic strongmen from Gabriel García Marquez’s “magic realism” novels, rather than as serial human-rights abusers.

Ortega sent a bill to create the new cabinet-level Outer Space Affairs Secretariat to his rubber-stamping National Assembly on Jan. 28. The bill says that Nicaragua needs the proposed agency “to defend its supreme national interests and search for opportunities to which, as a country, we must aspire.”

It only took a few hours for social media in Nicaragua to fill up with memes making fun of Ortega’s latest interest in celestial bodies.

A friend sent me a meme showing a photo-shopped picture of Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo — Ortega’s wife, who, according to many, is the one who runs the government — as stars of the Netflix TV series “Lost in Space.” Another meme shows the president and first lady dressed as Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, of the “Star Wars” movies, ready for an inter-galactic battle.

This is not the first time that Ortega has made headlines with an outer-space project. In 2012, he announced construction of the Nicasat-2 satellite, which he said would be “the first Central American satellite.” It never materialized.

Among his other grandiose, but more earthly, projects was his announcement in 2013 that he had signed a deal with a Chinese firm to build a $40-billion inter-oceanic canal. It never got started.

Like Ortega, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro periodically makes weird announcements. As recently as on Jan. 24, Maduro said that Venezuela had discovered “magic droplets” named Carvativir that supposedly “have shown a 100 percent effectiveness” in eliminating COVID-19. No credible scientific group has approved of Maduro’s magic drops.

Nicaragua’s opposition leader Juan Sebastian Chamorro told me in a telephone interview that Ortega’s outer-space secretariat may have been Murillo’s idea. “She is very esoteric,” he said.

However, it’s more likely an effort to divert the conversation from the regime’s latest repressive measures, Chamorro said.

Ortega has been in power since 2007, despite a law that prohibited Nicaraguan presidents from running for two consecutive terms. He is scheduled to run for a fourth term in the Nov. 7 elections. He has long stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists, banned several opposition parties and changed the constitution to allow his indefinite re-election.

In 2018, at least 325 people were killed — most of them by Ortega’s death squads — when Nicaraguans took to the streets in massive anti-government protests, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

That same year, at an interview at his home in Nicaragua, Ortega told me with a straight face that human-rights groups were “inventing” their casualty figures and offered to have a dialogue with the opposition to agree on conditions for the 2021 elections.

But Ortega has further clamped down on the opposition ever since. In December, he passed a law that allows him to declare opposition leaders “traitors to the homeland” and ban them from running in the upcoming elections.

Another recent law gives the regime extraordinary powers to arrest people who criticize the government on social media.

“A lot of very serious things have happened over the past six weeks,” Chamorro told me. “This idea to create an outer space secretariat could be an effort to shift attention away from the latest measures.”

Indeed, we shouldn’t be laughing at Ortega’s bizarre idea. Democracies around the world should demand that he allow this year’s elections to be free, with trustworthy election authorities and credible international observers. And if Ortega refuses, the world’s democracies should respond with increasingly stronger sanctions.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show at 8 p.m. E.T. Sunday on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera