Skip links

Nicaragua bleeds, but the U.N. looks the other way

At long last, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has spoken out about the killing of at least 264 people in Nicaragua’s anti-government protests over the past three months. But his statement, in addition to being long overdue, is pitiful.

In a statement issued by a spokesperson, Guterres said that he is “deeply concerned” about “the continuing and intensifying violence in Nicaragua,” as well as by the July 9 attack against that country’s mediators from the Catholic Church. He also called on “all parties” to refrain from using violence.

But, shamefully, he didn’t say that the overwhelming majority of the killings were carried out by President Daniel Ortega’s regime.

All major human-rights organization agree that the bulk of the violence comes from one side — Ortega’s police and the paramilitary goons it protects. The Organization of American States’ Inter-American Human Rights Commission puts the number of dead since April 18 at 264, while Nicaragua’s Pro-Human Rights Association puts the figure at 309 people and thousands of wounded.

When I asked Paulo Abrao, head of the OAS Human Rights Commission, how many deaths were caused by pro-government forces, he said that it’s more than 90 percent of the total.

“There are some police and pro-government people among the dead, but it’s a small percentage. At the most, it’s 15 or 16 people,” he said.

Ortega, a leftist populist who is borrowing a page from Venezuela’s late Hugo Chávez, has co-opted all of his country’s independent institutions, has been in power since 2007. He was last re-elected in a questionable election in 2016.

Ortega and his powerful wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, claim that the protests are being carried out by “coup-plotters” and “terrorists.”

Read more at Miami Herald. 

Share with Friends: