Minister for Foreign Affairs Denis Moncada Speech by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to the UN General Assembly September 26 We are living moments of the extinction of the imperialist, colonialist model, of looting and genocide whose greed has impacted Nature and our World. we demand that the United Nations enforce the mandate of the International Court of Justice of The Hague, which in 1986 sentenced the United States of America to indemnify Nicaragua, at least in part, the costs of the destruction, the permanent aggression, the pain and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of families, during the insane and vengeful war imposed on our Country and our People, in what was called the counterrevolution.
Sandino lives in each of these victories against nefarious and diabolical imperialism. Entire countries have been destroyed in this brutal scorched earth policy, which seeks to satisfy the beastly appetites of the Earth’s imperialists… Entire countries have been occupied, and their peoples sacrificed and massacred.
The aggressions that they arrogantly and haughtily call “sanctions” do not define us, nor do they intimidate us, nor do they disable us, nor do they bend us, nor do they lead us to sell out or surrender. We don’t know the word, surrender.
Summary transcript of the September 7 webinar: More Sanctions on Nicaragua? Not if we can stop them!
What is the US track record in Nicaragua and how has the country been impacted by sanctions imposed by the United States? Professor Rick Kohn, Erik Mar and Camila Escalante recently addressed these questions and discussed a current piece of legislation which is being considered by the US Congress and which, if passed, will impose new sanctions on Nicaragua.
Rick Kohn: The US has already imposed sanctions on Nicaragua, but they haven’t yet brought about the kind of hunger and poverty and suffering that some US policymakers think is necessary to overthrow the popular Nicaraguan government. So there is a new sanctions bill co-sponsored by Marco Rubio and Tim Kaine that will try to further depress the Nicaraguan economy, increase unemployment, decrease revenue for the government’s popular programs so the government will be less popular.
The stated goal is the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government and a “free and fair election” to replace Daniel Ortega. Another target is the repeal of the foreign agents law, a law in Nicaragua that prohibits foreign governments from funding its elections and requires the registration of lobbying activities on behalf of foreign governments. It’s very similar to US laws, but the bill’s authors demand that foreign governments be allowed to underwrite political parties in Nicaragua’s elections.
That’s why they call it the ‘sovereignty bill’, because all of the sanctions bills are ironically named. The foreign government they’re referring to, of course, that should be allowed to meddle in Nicaragua’s elections is the US government.
Even with these sanctions, the US is Nicaragua’s biggest trading partner currently followed by Mexico and Honduras. The new sanctions would be devastating to US trade with Nicaragua.
The new bill calls for suspension of Nicaragua’s participation in the Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). The US government will be ordered to review any benefits that Nicaragua might receive from the agreement.
Now, the task isn’t to evaluate whether Nicaragua has violated the agreement or not, but simply to indicate that they have. DR-CAFTA was signed before the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007.
Under Nicaragua’s previous neoliberal governments (1990-2006), poverty and hunger were not tackled and DR-CAFTA was simply exploitative. The intent was for US companies to sell government-subsidized food to Central America, increasing their dependence on the United States, while Central American countries would be permitted to export non-essential things back to the US. However, this has changed: today Nicaragua produces 90% of its own food, and it exports food to its neighbors, including Honduras, as well as exporting goods to the US more goods than it even imports.
Contrary to expectations, DR-CAFTA has become important to building Nicaragua’s economy, and it makes it possible to provide health care and education and other infrastructure for development. The US is targeting and pressuring other countries that are parties to the agreement in an effort to block trade with Nicaragua across the region. This would have severe consequences for all Central America. The US government would block US companies from importing two more leading export commodities from Nicaragua, coffee and beef. These fill a particular niche in the US market for sustainably produced commodities. Nicaragua is a leader in agroecology. Both large scale commercial and co-operative-based fairtrade coffee are produced using low impact, organic methods. Most of the beef for export is sustainably produced using grass fed systems with trees that capture more carbon than is admitted to the atmosphere.
And these sanctions on Nicaragua will shift US consumption to less sustainable sources with less favorable greenhouse gas impacts. More acutely, more important to Nicaraguans, it will cost them jobs and funding to provide for people’s needs. Moreover, the last round of sanctions aims to further restrict loans for economic development by also including the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), and force an end to contributions from Mexico, Taiwan, Argentina, Colombia, Spain and the Republic of Korea, which are all named in the bill. The US economic influence can devastatingly destroy a country by bullying its allies. Most other loans have been stopped already, so the CABEI has become vitally important for programs like reforestation and maintaining forests that help Nicaragua fight climate change.
The bill would also block the property rights of US citizens and permanent residents by outlawing them from investing in Nicaragua. If a US citizen or resident attempts to invest in a business or improve a residence in Nicaragua that they may own, they can be faced with a combination of civil and criminal penalties, including twice the value of the investment for a civil penalty and $1,000,000 in fines and 20 years in prison. Many US residents currently own property or businesses in Nicaragua and maintaining those assets might require further investment.
In addition, a proposed US sanction calls for greater propagandistic warfare against Nicaragua. For example, it requires the US government to find and disseminate examples of violations of religious freedom and examples of corruption. In fact, because of the link between the propaganda war and the economic or sanctions reinforce each other, the sanctions and propaganda are justified by propaganda, and the increased propaganda only confirms the need for more sanctions.
Although living conditions have been improving for most Nicaraguans over the past ten years, the sanctions aim to end that. What we see in the US sanctions – amounting to a blockade – imposed on against Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran could be the future for Nicaragua. What we saw in Nicaragua in the 1980s with the destabilization of the entire region could happen again.
In the 1980s there were severe US sanctions and a proxy war which resulted in immense suffering. Eventually, the Nicaraguan people did vote for a US backed neoliberal government, which did not improve conditions for most people in Nicaragua, which is why the Sandinistas were reelected.
The important thing to understand about these sanctions is that they are simply another escalation of war against the Nicaraguan people. And it is the intent for the US government to continue escalating sanctions and war until the Nicaraguan people give in and elect the government which the US government and corporations want.
Camila Escalante, on behalf of the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition: Since 2018, the NICA Act has been preventing the Nicaraguan government from accessing loans and financial and technical assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the World Bank.
At the World Bank, the United States vetoed a study of Nicaragua’s Dry Corridor which would have resulted in approximately $80 million in funding, directly impacting 800,000 people who live in that area. This is among the poorest regions of the country, with a populace highly dependent on subsistence agriculture in an area prone to drought. So much for the Bank’s slogan of reducing poverty and increasing shared prosperity.
At least 26 projects (of the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, Export–Import Bank of the United States [EXIMBANK], Korean Development Bank, and the European Investment Bank) have been impacted by the coercive measures, amounting to an overall loss of over $1.4 billion for Nicaragua in the 2018-2021 period compared to the previous period. The sectors impacted by these measures include: Development of Production on the Caribbean Coast; school lunch programs for vulnerable children; comprehensive child development programs; access to drinking water in rural areas; supply chains and programs to restructure production.
The US can allege, with little or no evidence that Nicaraguan government officials are human rights offenders with no recourse for Nicaragua or its supporters to appeal or contest the charges. It can then impose the Global Magnitsky Act, which since 2018 has been used to impose arbitrary sanctions on more than 60 government officials, State institutions, and the national government, hindering their ability to procure supplies internationally.
The United States, together with the Lima Group, paralyzed important projects at the IDB that were in Nicaragua’s portfolio to be funded, such as the La Esperanza-Wapí Road and the Bilwi Wharf (a wooden wharf that was destroyed by the hurricanes of 2020 and is an important public good for communities in the Caribbean Coast). This maneuver by the United States at the IDB was supposedly because the Country Strategy had expired in 2017 – but that was only because the United States had vetoed the updated Strategy! As a result, more than $1 billion did not reach the Nicaraguan people, despite the fact that it has been one of the Bank’s best clients. Between 2010 and 2017, Nicaragua took out $1.124 billion in IDB loans. In contrast, from 2018-2022, only $43 million in loans were approved – in other words, an average annual loss of over $131 million, or a decrease of over 93% for those 5 years.
Those lost resources would have allowed Nicaragua to build 265 kilometers of roads and four hospitals (approximately $62 million each), and to improve drinking water systems in two Department capitals.
Since 2021 the RENACER Act has been used to try to reduce Nicaragua’s benefits from the US-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), with an ultimate goal of removing Nicaraguan products from the Agreement.
In 2021, Nicaragua exported almost half a million metric tons of sugar, half of it to the US under DR-CAFTA. Then the US began to block part of Nicaragua’s exports, despite its legal commitment to buy from Nicaragua under the WTO’s Uruguay Round (1995). By July 2022, Nicaragua was excluded from the list of countries qualified for low-duty sugar exports to the US.
The United States and its allies have restricted the entry of foreign investment in Nicaragua through intimidation and disinformation to limit investments by foreign companies and/or investors, primarily from the United States.
The State Department’s website dissuades tourists from visiting Nicaragua by spreading deliberate misinformation, such as that the country is unsafe and unstable, when in fact it has one of the lowest crime rates in all of the Americas, with only 7.19 homicides per 100,000 population, compared to 11.26 in Costa Rica and over three times that rate in other neighboring countries. That website also says that the healthcare system fell apart due to COVID, when in fact the country had one of the lowest excess death rates in the Americas due to the pandemic, and thanks to robust investment in public health, its hospitals were not overwhelmed.
In 2020, instead of receiving donations of ventilators, vaccines, supplies, and medications from the US as did other Central American countries, the Nicaraguan people faced illegal coercive measures and price gouging.
Minimal financial support came from multilateral organizations only at the end of 2020 after two major hurricanes hit Nicaragua, but conditions were imposed such as requiring “predetermined” agencies to serve as fund administrators, which caused delays in the procurement processes and high overhead costs. And in 2021 Nicaragua was one of the few countries in the Americas that could not benefit from US vaccine supplies. Instead, US-funded media outlets spread disinformation exaggerating the number of COVID deaths in the country, seeking to undermine citizens’ confidence in the government’s response to the pandemic.
Finally, we must be aware of the impact of the escalated US campaign to turn Nicaragua’s neighbors against her. The United States is not a member of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), but it is pressuring the other Central American countries and other regional member countries to shut Nicaragua out of CABEI funding. And the US cannot unilaterally kick Nicaragua out of the CAFTA agreement, so it is pressuring the Central American countries and the Dominican Republic to exclude Nicaragua. Nicaragua has had cordial relations with all of these countries, regardless of ideology. In fact, the solidarity now between the Nicaraguan government and Xiomara Castro’s administration in Honduras, as well as between the people of the two countries, is quite strong. The US is trying to undermine this.
Erik Mar: One of the most common forms of sanctions are individual ones which freeze any assets that those individuals might have abroad and restrict their travel. The sanctions also extend to the immediate nuclear family of those individuals. Take the case of Sadrach Zelodón Rocha, who was sanctioned along with his wife. He is the mayor of Matagalpa, and in December 2022, was sanctioned along with his vice mayor, Yohaira Hernández Chirino.
We [Erik and John Perry] submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the British government which imposed the sanctions, and which followed US sanctions imposed in November of 2021. We submitted a number of questions, the most important one being: What was the evidence? They delayed and hemmed and hawed, and when they released their answers, they were evasive and vague. Essentially, they said the sanctions were based on human rights violations committed by those two individuals in 2018. They didn’t say specifically which reports formed the evidentiary basis for that. They didn’t say specifically what the human rights violations were.
Since they didn’t provide any specific report and since they said the evidence was restricted to what had happened in 2018, I decided to take the best known report, which was by the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, a 500-page report released by the Organization of American States in December of 2019. Outside Nicaragua, it is considered to be the most exhaustive and complete documentation of the human rights violations charges against individuals in 2018. Of the 500 pages, about 12 were dedicated to what had happened in Matagalpa in May 2018.
I went through those, and I contacted people I know to ask about what had happened. I decided not to question any of what the report had presented, even though much is disputed. I wanted to kind of take the worst-case scenario and just see the evidence.
As it turned out, one of the two people sanctioned, Yohaira Hernández, isn’t even mentioned at all in the report. I did a Google search and I couldn’t find any reports in which she was mentioned. So there was literally zero evidence against her to justify the sanctions imposed on her and her family.
In the case of Sadrach, the evidence was just astoundingly weak. It was circumstantial at best. The photographic evidence which they produced allegedly showed him leading what they called “shock groups”. But, for example, one photo of the “shock groups” included a woman in shorts and sandals, which isn’t exactly what you would expect for somebody who was about to engage in violence against protesters.
All of the cases they cited of individuals who were wounded or killed, none of them could have been attributed to Sadrach. Those who were caught didn’t even attempt to make that connection. Consequently, the evidence against him was simply one of assertion and backed up with virtually zero hard evidence. So that was pretty illuminating, I thought.
And it is my guess that if somebody were to do the same for many of the other individuals who had been sanctioned, they would find much the same kind of results.
The obvious place to go with this is to open up a legal case against the UK (and possibly US) government. It would be pretty much a slam dunk in the case of Yohaira, because there’s no evidence against her to justify the sanctions. But even in the case of Sadrach, it seems legally that it would be a very easy case to win.
Events
September 23 – November 18: virtual course, Ben Linder Solidarity School, 9 week class (two hours a week) Topics include: Nicaragua and the Sandinista Revolution; History and current context of Latin America and US imperialism; ATC and peasant organizations / social movements; Food Sovereignty and Agroecology; Solidarity and Internationalism.
October 21-22: (Madrid) Encuentro Sandinista de Solidaridad con Nicaragua Organizations from different parts of the Spanish state in the Sandinista Meeting of Solidarity with Nicaragua.
January 27, 2024: Latin America conference in London 18th annual conference in solidarity with Latin American progressive movements.
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Upcoming Delegations to Nicaragua
Casa Ben Linder delegations January 6-14, January 20-February 1, and February 10-19; Advances & Autonomy Brigade: Rights of Indigenous & Afrodescendant Peoples on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast
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Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition: nicasolidarity.net Our monthly zoom meetings: second Monday of the month (October 9), 2:30 PM ET
Email NicaraguaSolidarityCoalition@gmail.com in advance to request Zoom access for the meeting, or to make other inquiries.
Organizations: Apply for coalition membership here This is an important way to increase the influence of our coalition work, as our membership list grows.
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Other Valuable Resources from Our Members & Partners:
Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group
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