The regime of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and his wife and “co-president,” Rosario Murillo, moved on February 16 to strip nearly 100 dissidents of their citizenship and to confiscate their property.
Elvira Cuadra, a Nicaraguan sociologist, was one of them. Cuadra’s name appears as number 38, just after internationally renowned writer Gioconda Belli.
“It was no longer a surprise for me,” she tells The Progressive in a call from Costa Rica, where she has resided since 2018. Her property in Nicaragua was seized, and her citizenship was revoked.
She cites the regime’s release and explusion a few days prior of 222 dissidents, journalists, and student activists who had been jailed following 2018’s mass protests against the increasingly authoritarian government.
Yet, the scope of these expropriations is unprecedented in the history of Latin America. It represents another concerning escalation in the consolidation of Ortega’s authoritarian regime in the Central American country that has led to a deterioration of human rights and repression.
“I am greatly surprised by the level of perversity that [things] have reached,” Cuadra says. “We have completely returned to the Middle Ages, where the great monarch decides who may or may not be within the city and who forces people to leave.”
Ortega, a former leader of the Sandinista (FSLN) guerrilla army that successfully ousted former dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, has held the presidency since he was re-elected in 2007 after a seventeen-year hiatus. Since returning to office, he has become more like the dictator he helped to overthrow, quickly consolidating power around his family.
In 2011 and again in 2014, Ortega made changes to the country’s constitution, including removing a provision that barred him from consecutive reelection, a move that is increasingly common in the region. And in 2017, Ortega appointed Murillo to be his vice president, although she was later named his “co-president.” Eight of their Nine children also benefit from State contracts in the family’s businesses, including running most of the country’s television news networks.
“We have completely returned to the Middle Ages, where the great monarch decides who may or may not be within the city and who forces people to leave.”
By April 2018, widespread protests broke out against the regime, and Ortega responded to the unrest with a heavy hand. More than 350 protesters were killed by military and paramilitary groups . The repression sparked an international outcry. Many of those who were stripped of their citizenship status had participated in the 2018 protests, while others had been candidates in the last presidential election in 2021, running against Ortega.
In the lead up to Nicaragua’s presidential election in 2021 and after he won a third consecutive term, Ortega has escalated attacks on his opposition.
At least forty-six opposition figures, including seven presidential candidates, were arbitrarily arrested by the Ortega regime ahead of the campaign. Since taking office, he has also escalated his attacks on the Catholic Church and on numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), forcing hundreds to close.
In spite of his increasingly authoritarian actions, leftists and progressives across the hemisphere have defended the Sandinista regime because of Ortega’s reputation for progressivism and his part in the revolution. Any critique of the regime is painted as a symptom of U.S. imperialism.
Yet experts say Ortega’s track record is clear.
“Daniel Ortega is not really a leftwing leader and much less a progressive,” Cuadra says. “He really is a person of authoritarian nature. And deep down he promotes an authoritarian project of a dynastic nature, that is … intended to ensure family succession.”
The United Nations denounced Nicaragua’s move to expropriate those it called “traitors,” calling it illegal.
But the Biden Administration seemed to welcome Nicaragua’s first round of deportations as a foot in the door to further negotiations. The group of 222 political prisoners were sent to Washington D.C., in the United States.
“The release of these individuals, one of whom is a U.S. citizen, by the government of Nicaragua marks a constructive step towards addressing human rights abuses in the country and opens the door to further dialogue between the United States and Nicaragua regarding issues of concern,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The United States granted humanitarian parole to this first group, allowing individuals to remain in the country for two years. Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina have all offered refuge to the others from both groups who were also stripped of their citizenship.
But the use of humanitarian parole by the United States in these cases belies the other problems that this new legal hurdle is creating.
“They’ve enacted this humanitarian parole to try to ease the pressure on the border, however, from a human rights perspective, it’s double talk because it’s closing the door.”
“They’ve enacted this humanitarian parole to try to ease the pressure on the border, however, from a human rights perspective, it’s double talk because it’s closing the door,” Astrid Carolina Montealegre, a U.S.-based immigration attorney, tells The Progressive. “It’s not providing asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution an option to present their asylum cases at the port of entry, which is what international law states.”
Even as it grants parole to one set of Nicaraguan prisoners, the Biden Administration has implemented new measures—through its expansion of the early pandemic-era Title 42—at the U.S. border with Mexico that target Nicaraguans arriving there. The Administration has also restricted applications for asylum by those who have crossed multiple borders.
“It is not fair, if you’re a Nicaraguan, you cannot go to the Mexican Border [which would mean crossing at least three borders] and ask for asylum,” Montealegre says. “It’s essentially shutting them out of the process. It is denying them their right to seek asylum because they’re not allowed to come to the United States and seek asylum at the border.”
Plus, those still in Nicaragua are not able to apply for the process if they do not have a passport. And the regime is not issuing passports to anyone who has been involved in protests, leaving them without any protection.
Cuadra had already applied for asylum in Costa Rica, where she resides.
What Ortega has done is virtually unprecedented in the modern era. Citizenship is a fundamental right, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights and other international conventions, including the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights, of which Nicaragua is a signatory.
“We’ve never seen it done in this magnitude,” Montealegre says. “And stripping somebody of their citizenship is considered one of the worst human rights violations that a government can do, because that’s a basic protection.”
While the Ortega regime announced it would remove citizenship for the dissidents on its list, that lawmakers had not yet approved the first steps in reforming the country’s own constitution. Now a proposed reform has been approved that allows the country to strip “traitors to the homeland” of their nationality.
Most governments in the region have remained silent or merely expressed concern, but President Gabriel Boric in Chile denounced the move outright, tweeting “The dictator does not know that the homeland is carried in his heart and in his actions, and is not deprived by decree.”
Chile, of course, has a history of weaponizing expropriation against dissidents during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a coup d’etat against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.
In 1976, the Chilean dictatorship stripped citizenship from Orlando Letelier del Solar, who had served as Allende’s Minister of Foreign Relations. Letelier was living in exile at the time in the United States where he was assassinated by a car bomb on September 21, 1976. The killer was identified as an agent of Pinochet’s secret police.
In 1977, the Chilean dictatorship stripped union activist Ernesto Araneda of his citizenship as well. Other countries, like Brazil, prohibited dissidents from entering national territory after being sent into exile during the 70s. But no other country has taken measures like this on the scale that the Ortega/Murillo regime has.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been diplomatic silence from Nicaragua’s neighbors. Many other Central American governments have made recent efforts to consolidate power around the executive branch, including the ending of presidential term limits in Honduras and El Salvador.
“Central America is undergoing a quite accelerated turn towards new forms of authoritarianism and of militarism,” Cuadra says. “Nicaragua has obviously set the tone for the rest of the countries in the region. There are very similar patterns, particularly in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and even in Costa Rica, which had always been considered the most stable democracy in the region.”
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Publish date : 2023-03-10 03:00:00
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