Among them are the five candidates in the 2021 presidential elections, which Ortega won with his main contenders jailed before starting his fifth term, the fourth in a row and the second with his wife as vice president.

International organizations and human rights organizations have warned in recent years against the authoritarian drift of the Ortega and Murillo regime.

The same is true for other Latin American countries, although only a few have spoken on Ortega’s new offensive against the opposition.

Actually, the diversity of reactions from left-wing governments in the region is striking: from the silence -for the moment- of Brazil and Argentina to the frontal condemnation of Chile, through the moderation of Colombia and the ambiguity of Mexico.

Among the executives of the region, it is undoubtedly the Chilean who expressed himself with the most openness and force.

“The events of recent weeks show that every day more, it’s a totalitarian dictatorship where any type of dissent is persecuted,” Foreign Minister Antonia Urrejola said in a televised speech.

He assured that “Nicaragua has more than 280 political prisoners” and “222 of them were exiled last week”.

The Chancellor also signed an opinion column in which he accused the Ortega y Murillo government of various human rights violations.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric did not personally rule on Nicaragua on this occasion, although he has done so before.

At the end of January, he had demanded the release of “opponents still unworthily detained” in Nicaragua during his speech at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador responded to the various questions on this subject from the international media with a statement.

“Mexico quickly followed the situation of the Nicaraguans expelled from Nicaragua,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) said.

They assured that, “according to one of its great principles of foreign policy, the Mexican government”I will be carefull to respect and protect the human rights of this group of people, including their rights to nationality, and not to be arbitrarily deprived of them”.

Since the political crisis that began with the 2018 social breakdown in Nicaragua worsened in 2021 with the disputed elections and the mass imprisonment of opponents, Mexico’s position has been ambiguous.

López Obrador’s executive usually invokes the principle of non-intervention in foreign policy, legitimized in the country’s constitution.

For its part, the Colombian government also expressed itself with a press release from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which expressed its “anxiety about the decision to also withdraw Nicaraguan nationality from 94 other citizens”.

“These measures violate the right to nationality, provided for in a set of international legal instruments, including, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights, a treaty to which the Nicaragua is a state party,” he said. .

He assured that the executive headed by Gustavo Petro “closely follows the decisions of the government of the Republic of Nicaragua concerning a large group of people detained in this country”.

Finally, Bogotá made an appeal to “generate confidence-building measures that contribute to national reconciliation, respect for the rule of law and the well-being of the Nicaraguan people”.

On the other hand, the Colombian government described the release of the 222 opponents imprisoned and deported to the United States on Thursday 16 as “an important step for the national dialogue”.

Since Petro took over the Colombian presidency in August 2022, relations between his government and that of Nicaragua, much degraded since the step of his predecessor Iván Duque, have improved.

This is despite the dispute that the two countries have over the sovereignty of the waters surrounding the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, which has caused recent friction and is in the hands of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued a statement in which it “condemns” the withdrawal of nationality and the confiscation of the assets of opponents in Nicaragua.

He described the measure as a “legal aberration” which “goes against the principles that govern the life of nations and human rights”.

“We call for rectification, release political prisoners and bring this country back to democratic life”

Contrary to all these reactions, other governments in the region are opting for silence for the time being.

Among them are those of Brazil and Argentinaonly until the time of publishing this article They did not officially declare on the latest events in Nicaragua.

With the coming to power of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in January this year, the Brazilian executive expressed its intention to normalize relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, reversing the distancing under the previous administration of the conservative Jair Bolsonaro.

Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, however, declared in mid-January in an interview with La Folha de Sao Paulo that Nicaragua “is not” a democracy and assured that Brazil condemns the human rights violations that occur in the country.

In the case of Argentina, its President Alberto Fernández recently gave what many saw as a show of support for the regimes of Daniel Ortega, Miguel Díaz Canel and Nicolás Maduro by assuring at the recent CELAC summit that “all those who are here have been chosen by their peoples”.

Cuba and Venezuela, Nicaragua’s main allies in the region, have also not officially ruled on the issue.

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