Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
“President Daniel Ortega is a man full of much rage, much hatred” said Dora Maria Tellez, a former Nicaraguan guerrilla known as Comandante Dos for her role in the struggle against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Tellez was recently released from prison and expelled from the country by the dictatorship of her former comrade-in-arms Daniel Ortega, along with 220 other political prisoners, at the same time that their Nicaraguan citizenship was taken away.
Subsequently, Ortega also declared 94 other Nicaraguans living as refugees in various countries around the world deprived of their citizenship. International experts and human rights organizations recognize that the act of taking away a person’s citizenship is done with the intention of taking away his or her humanity, declaring him or her a “non-person”.
When the Cuban dictatorship sends its doctors to other countries, it sends them without their passports and without their medical degrees. This is done so that, if they try to escape, they cannot prove either their nationality or their profession. In other words, Cuban doctors are non-persons for the duration of their mission. The Nicaraguan dictatorship learned something from their Cuban colleagues.
Tellez also recounted the importance of Mexico breaking diplomatic relations with the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. It was an act in defense of human rights in the face of the illegitimacy of a dictatorship that imprisoned and murdered the citizens of his country. Tellez considered that the fact that Mexico severed diplomatic relations with Nicaragua at that time was crucial in bringing about the eventual collapse of the Somoza dictatorship.
She expressed her regret that the government of López Obrador has remained silent in the face of the terrorist nature of the government of Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo. She called on Mexico to return to the path of solidarity with the legitimate struggles of the peoples of Latin America. She explained how, since 2018, there have been more than 220 social fighters assassinated in the country, with thousands of compatriots imprisoned and more than half a million exiled outside Nicaragua, living in extreme conditions of precariousness and poverty. She expressed that a regime of terror reigns in Nicaragua.
The political prisoners expelled from Nicaragua arrived in the United States as a gesture of solidarity of that country with the fighters for democracy and freedom. And the Spanish government offered them Spanish citizenship in order to have a passport and be able to get jobs or travel, depending on the need. Those expelled from Nicaragua suffer additional reprisals: their possessions and property are expropriated, in addition to losing rights such as their pension despite having saved a lifetime of work for it.
In other times these expellees would have been received first by Mexico, giving them hope and life to continue their struggle, passport included. Tragically, today Mexico’s response is an ominous silence that endorses the repression in Nicaragua.
The Nicaraguan government’s harassment of its citizens outside the country has been oppressive. Embassies are in charge of snatching passports from citizens they consider “a danger” to their regime. Even now, all Nicaraguan citizens who wish to return to their country are required to apply for a visa at their nearest embassy to find out whether or not they will be granted the right to return to their country. Even the airlines have become complicit in the Nicaraguan government’s tactics by limiting access to Nicaraguan citizens to board their planes when they “have suspicions” about a passenger’s political affiliation. A vast network of official Nicaraguan espionage covers Central America and Mexico regarding the movements and activities of its citizens in the region.
There are even cases of Nicaraguan citizens who travel outside their country for work or tourism and were not allowed to return to the country without any explanation.
Carlos Loret de Mola reported a revealing link in the complicit relationship between the governments of Mexico and Nicaragua. He discovered that the Honorary Consul of Nicaragua “in the north of the country” was a minor and unimportant businessman until he obtained this “diplomatic” appointment. From that moment on, he became an immensely wealthy businessman favored by lavish contracts with the federal government. He has received 130 contracts totaling more than 3 billion pesos.
There is a presumption among national security intelligence circles, that a large part of that money goes directly to fill the saddlebags of the couple that doubles as Nicaragua’s dictatorship. Just as Mexico supports the Cuban dictatorship, paying billions of pesos for the “services” of supposed Cuban doctors, for vaccines that are useless for the new variants of Covid, and ballast for the Mayan train, apparently it also finances the Nicaraguan dictatorship via an unusual businessman-facade. At the end of the six-year term, we will surely learn of other ways in which Mexico has supported these two dictatorships and the Venezuelan one as well. In due time.
Nicaragua is part of the triad of dictatorships that claim to be “leftist” when they have absolutely nothing leftist, nor do they claim the traditional demands of popular causes. They are new and perverse ways of doing business for the leaders and their families, enriched without reserve.
And then there are the uncritical supporters of dictatorships, notoriously Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose government not only supports them but pretends to be their godfather. Mexico sends them money so they can maintain repressive control of their populations while their rulers do business.
López Obrador demonstrates that he is on the wrong side of history. He allies himself with dictatorships and rejects the freedom of the people. Does he dream the same for Mexico?
For the time being, Dora Maria Tellez’s description of Daniel Ortega as a man “full of much rage and much hate” also seems to describe the President of Mexico impeccably.
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