Sergio Ramirez: Venezuela needs our attention, but so do dictatorships-in-waiting Nicaragua and Bolivia, by Andres Oppenheimer

While the world is watching Venezuela’s descent into a full blown dictatorship, scant attention has been paid to the slow-motion disappearance of democracy in two other countries: Nicaragua and Bolivia. If they continue on their present course, they may soon be called Latin America’s emerging dictatorships.

The erosion of basic freedoms in these two countries came to mind this week when I interviewed Sergio Ramirez, the Nicaraguan writer and former Sandinista vice president who, on Nov. 16, was awarded the Spanish Royal Academy’s coveted Cervantes literary prize — considered the Nobel literature award of the Spanish-speaking world.

Ramirez, whom I have known since his days in the Sandinista government in the 1980s, became disillusioned with the increasingly totalitarian bent of his leftist comrades and broke ranks with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in the early 1990s. In 1996, Ramirez ran for president as leader of a democratic leftist party he founded, and — after losing that election — quit his political career to become a full-time writer and journalist.

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