US says it will use regional body to isolate Nicaragua

The United States will use the Organization of American States (OAS) to isolate the Nicaraguan government over constitutional changes that have “gutted what was left” of democracy there.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the move in a statement on Wednesday, saying Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo were waging a “war on democracy” that “threatens our hemisphere’s stability and prosperity”.

The US would use an upcoming meeting of the OAS to urge countries in the hemisphere to stop doing “business as usual” with Nicaragua, he said.

Rubio’s comments come after Nicaraguan lawmakers on Tuesday passed a constitutional reform ‌package that largely ⁠bans opposition parties from participating in elections and extends the presidential term from six ⁠to seven years, an initiative that had previously drawn criticism ⁠from the US and other countries ⁠in the region.

Last month, the OAS decided to convene a meeting over the situation in Nicaragua, declaring that it was “a problem of an urgent nature and of common interest to the American States”.

Nicaragua said it had withdrawn from the regional body in 2022, after it repeatedly criticised the Ortega government’s human rights record. At the time, Nicaragua’s foreign minister lauded the withdrawal by saying the country was no longer part “of all the deceitful mechanisms of this monstrosity, the so-called Permanent Council, so-called commissions, so-called meetings, so-called Summit of the Americas”. The withdrawal fully went into effect in 2023.

The Washington-based OAS was founded with US backing in 1948 to promote international cooperation in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela, under former President Nicolas Maduro, began the process of its withdrawal in 2017 after the body criticised his government’s handling of political unrest. Maduro’s foreign minister at the time, Delcy Rodriguez, called the OAS an “interventionist coalition” led by the US.

In July, Nicaragua’s Ortega government sent a draft constitutional reform package to lawmakers that it said would exclude “traitors” and “coup-plotting” opposition members from elections, and extend the presidential term from six to seven “renewable” years. It would also dissolve political parties that received funding from abroad.

“There won’t be ⁠⁠any more elections here for them to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega said after the changes were proposed, speaking during an event commemorating the 1979 Sandinista revolution that first brought him into power.

Ortega, a former Marxist rebel, helped overthrow the US-backed right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. He led the post-revolutionary military government in Nicaragua until 1985, when he became president of the country, a role he held until 1990. In 2007, Ortega returned to power and is currently the longest-serving leader in the Western Hemisphere.

More than 300 people were killed in a crackdown after student-led protests against Ortega’s government in 2018. Ortega then jailed political opponents and journalists, eventually sending hundreds of them into exile and stripping them of their Nicaraguan citizenship. At least 200 of those sent into exile settled in the US.