Nicaraguan dictator Somoza was supported by Canada.

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Written by: Daniel Xie

Following the defeat of the US/Canada-backed coup in Bolivia with the electoral victory of MAS and its presidential candidate Luis Arce, the Canadian Latin American Alliance (CLAA) has called on the Canadian government to both recognize the new Bolivian government and apologize to MAS and the Bolivian people for backing the outgoing coup government and the measures it took to maintain power against a MAS resurgence. The CLAA, in its statement regarding the victory of MAS and how Canada should respond, called on the Trudeau government to cease its “ideologically motivated positions vis-à-vis the hemisphere,” and commit to defending and respecting “the sovereignty and democratic will of people in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

However, both the Canadian government and the Organization of American States (OAS) have refused to heed these statements. Instead, the twitter handle of the Canadian embassy to Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua recently tweeted that Canada is calling on the Nicaraguan government to “restore basic freedoms and work with all parties for reforms for free and fair elections.” It further states that Canada is committed to working with its allies in the OAS to find a supposedly peaceful solution to the political crisis in Nicaragua.

The tweet by the Canadian embassy was framed in the context of a recent resolution by the OAS affirming a desire to push for the restoration of “democratic institutions” and restoring “human rights” in Nicaragua, and to urge the Nicaraguan government to accept OAS election observers during the next election. This indicates that the OAS, which has used the trumped-up pretext of electoral irregularities against the Morales government to facilitate its overthrow, is planning for similar attempts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua during its 2021 presidential elections.

To reinforce OAS dictates, Canada has maintained various sanctions on Nicaragua since July 21, 2019. These sanctions, enacted through the Special Economic Measures Act, include regulations prohibiting any person in Canada and any Canadian outside Canada from:

dealing in property, wherever situated, that is owned, held or controlled by listed persons or a person acting on behalf of a listed person;

entering into or facilitating any transaction related to a dealing prohibited by these Regulations;
providing any financial or related services in respect of a dealing prohibited by these Regulations;
making available any goods, wherever situated, to a listed person or a person acting on behalf of a listed person; and
providing any financial or other related services to or for the benefit of a listed person.

The justification for these sanctions provided by the Canadian government was the crackdown carried out by the Nicaraguan government in 2018 on anti-government protests. While the Trudeau government notes that there has been some recent progress in terms of dialogue between the Government of Nicaragua and opposition groups, combined with the release of political prisoners, the sanctions must still persist because human rights violations supposedly continue in Nicaragua.

The Recent History of US-led Regime Change Efforts in Nicaragua

What the Canadian government’s account of these events do not indicate however, is that these anti-government protests were part of a US-led attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government ruling in Nicaragua. Following the original Sandinista revolution in 1979, the US-backed right-wing death Squads, the Contras, launched an insurgency against the Sandinistas. When Ortega and the Sandinistas were re-elected in 2006, the US once again sought to overthrow the government, and in 2018 there was yet another attempt made to overthrow the Ortega government.

Pro-US anti-Ortega forces mobilized in response to opposition against the Nicaraguan government’s social security reforms. In June of 2018, leaders of the opposition met with representatives of the US government, such as senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, to discuss means to be used to topple the Ortega government with American support. Masked men employing homemade mortars and firearms established roadblocks that managed to do significant damage to the Nicaraguan economy, and also engaged in violence leading to the killing of at least 253 people.

When the initial 2018 protests failed to overthrow the government, the US government approved crushing sanctions through the Nicaraguan Investment and Conditionality Act, which gives the US president the authority to impose targeted sanctions on government officials, former officials, or people purportedly “acting on behalf of” the Nicaraguan government.

Following the 2019 coup against Morales in Bolivia, the US government doubled its efforts to overthrow the Ortega government through the imposition of further sanctions. The US government claimed that the Nicaraguan government constituted a national security threat to the United States, and used this claim as a pretext to strengthen currently existing sanctions. It is notable that the sanctions did not impact the Nicaraguan military, because the US government hopes that the army will fulfill the same role as the Bolivian army in overthrowing its elected government.

Apart from imposing new sanctions on the Nicaraguan government, both the US and the OAS also lobbied for the release of various “political prisoners” imprisoned by the Sandinista government. In reality, these “political prisoners” were right-wing extremists and criminals accused of rape and drug trafficking. Following the release of one of these right-wing extremists, there was an attempted terrorist attack using explosives and firearms. The pardoning of these prisoners under US and OAS pressure were controversial among leftists and progressives in Nicaragua, many of whom wanted such prisoners to serve their terms.

It may have been that the US was not just lobbying for the release of these violent prisoners into Nicaraguan society to destabilize it, but also to fragment any base of support the Sandinista government could draw upon. This was to be done through the alienation of the left from the Sandinista government by means of strong-arming them into taking unpopular measures such as the release of right-wing opposition figures and criminals the left would prefer to keep imprisoned.

With the outbreak of the coronavirus in Nicaragua, the US government and its allies in the Nicaraguan opposition have doubled their efforts even further. As soon as the COVID-19 outbreak started, the US House of Representatives immediately imposed new sanctions in the form of House Resolution 754. At the same time, while Nicaragua was much more prepared for the pandemic compared to the US (thanks to consultation with both China and Taiwan and a functioning public healthcare system), the US and the opposition spread rumours via fake Facebook accounts about how ill-prepared Nicaragua was for the coronavirus outbreak. It was claimed that the government was shutting everything down while using the coronavirus to consolidate authoritarian power. In reality, the scope of the quarantine was significantly more relaxed than the measures taken by the Chinese government (and those measures, it should be recognized, actually had the support of the Chinese population).

With presidential elections in Nicaragua set for 2021, US and OAS efforts to topple the Nicaraguan government thus far seem to have had the opposite effect. The Ortega government maintains a plurality of support in the population and the pro-US opposition is seen to be very unpopular. Despite these setbacks, the OAS and the opposition are poised to destabilize the government further through the continued backing of right-wing opposition figures and the imposition of further sanctions.

In tweeting concerns about “fair elections” in the 2021 Nicaraguan elections, echoed by the OAS, the Canadian government has once again demonstrated its willingness to be complicit in supporting further regime change attempts in Latin America. Yet, these efforts to enforce US dictates across Latin America have contributed to much destabilization in the region[OH1] , and alienated Canada further and further from the global community, which increasingly sees behind the illusionary facade of promoting peace and dialogue worldwide, while undermining elected governments. If the Trudeau government really values cooperation in building a more peaceful world as it claims, then it must reverse course on its pro-regime change, “US first” policy and build an independent foreign policy defending the sovereignty and democratic rights of the people in Latin America and the Caribbean – including those targeted by US-led regime change efforts.

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