- Atahualpa Amerise @atareports
- BBC News World
February 17, 2023
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Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, President and Vice President of Nicaragua.
The government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo this week completed its latest offensive against critical voices inside and outside Nicaragua.
94 dissidents – including writer Gioconda Belli and Auxiliary Bishop of Managua Silvio Báez – have been accused by prosecutors of “treason” and have “lost their civil rights forever” in a court ruling announced on Wednesday.
The authorities they stripped them of their Nicaraguan citizenship and confiscated their property in the country.
Days earlier, 222 detained opponents were also declared stateless and deported to the United States.
Among them are the five candidates for the 2021 presidential election, which Ortega won ahead of the start of his fifth term with his main jailed rivals, fourth in a row and second with his wife as vice president.
very different reactions
International organizations and human rights defenders have warned about this in recent years the authoritarian tendency of the Ortega and Murillo regimes.
However, also in other Latin American countries few have spoken on Ortega’s new offensive against the opposition.
As a matter of fact, the diversity of reactions from left-wing governments in the region is striking: from the silence of Brazil and Argentina to the frontal condemnation of Chile, past the moderation of Colombia and the ambiguity of Mexico.
Among the leaders in the region, it is undoubtedly the Chilean who has spoken out most openly and forcefully.
“The events of the last few weeks show that every day more it is a totalitarian dictatorship where any kind of dissidence is prosecuted,” said Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola in a televised speech.
He assured that “Nicaragua has more than 280 political prisoners” and “222 of them were exiled last week”.
The Foreign Minister also signed an opinion column in which she accused the Ortega y Murillo government of various human rights violations.
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The Chancellor of the Boric government, Antonia Urrejola, has bluntly condemned human rights violations in Nicaragua.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric did not personally rule over Nicaragua on that occasion, although he has previously done so.
At the end of January, during his speech at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires, he called for the release of “opponents who are still being detained in an unworthy manner” in Nicaragua.
AMLO’s ambiguity and Colombia’s ‘soft judgement’
The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador responded to various questions on the subject from the international media with a statement.
“Mexico immediately followed up the situation of Nicaraguans deported from Nicaragua,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) said.
They asserted that “according to one of their main principles of foreign policy,” the Mexican government “will be careful to respect and protect the human rights of this group of people, including their rights to nationality, and not to be arbitrarily deprived of them”.
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Ambiguity about the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua is a constant in López Obrador’s government.
Mexico’s position has been ambiguous since the political crisis that began with the 2018 social outburst in Nicaragua deepened in 2021 with disputed elections and the massive incarceration of opponents.
López Obrador’s executive usually invokes it the principle of non-interference in foreign policy, legitimized in the country’s constitution.
For its part, the Colombian government also spoke with a statement from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which it said its “worry about the decision to also deprive another 94 citizens of their Nicaraguan citizenship”.
“These actions violate the right to citizenship enshrined in a number of international legal instruments, including but not limited to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights, a treaty to which Nicaragua is a party,” he said.
He assured that the executive branch, headed by Gustavo Petro, is “closely following the decisions of the government of the Republic of Nicaragua regarding an important group of people detained in this country”.
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Petro has sought to mend relations with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua since taking power in August 2022.
Finally Bogotá called “create standards of trust that contribute to national reconciliation, Respect for the rule of law and the well-being of the Nicaraguan people”.
On the other hand, the Colombian government described the release of the 222 jailed opposition figures who were deported to the United States on Thursday 16th as “an important step in the national dialogue”.
Since Petro took over the Colombian presidency in August 2022, relations between his government and Nicaragua’s, which had deteriorated sharply since the phase of his predecessor Iván Duque, have improved.
This is despite the dispute that both countries have over the sovereignty of the waters around the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, which has recently caused friction and is in the hands of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Condemnation of Ecuador and silence of Brazil and Argentina
Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement “condemning” the deprivation of citizenship and confiscation of assets from opponents in Nicaragua.
He called the measure a “legal aberration” that “violates the principles that govern the lives of nations and human rights.”
“We call for rectification release of political prisoners and bring this country back to a democratic life”
Contrary to all these reactions, other governments in the region are choosing to remain silent for the time being.
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Lula and Alberto Fernández have chosen not to comment on recent events in Nicaragua for the time being.
Below are those of Brazil and Argentinathat until the time of publication of this article Officially, they have not commented about the latest events in Nicaragua.
With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva taking power in January this year, the Brazilian executive expressed its intention to normalize relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and reverse the distancing experienced during conservative Jair Bolsonaro’s previous term.
Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, on the other hand, declared in an interview with La Folha de Sao Paulo in mid-January that Nicaragua was “not” a democracy and assured that Brazil condemned the human rights violations in the country.
In the case of Argentina, President Alberto Fernández recently showed what many saw as a sign of support for the regimes of Daniel Ortega, Miguel Díaz Canel and Nicolás Maduro, assuring at the recent CELAC summit that “everyone who is here is from was chosen among them peoples”.
Cuba and Venezuela, Nicaragua’s main allies in the region, have also not formally settled on the matter.
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