Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega accused the United States on Thursday of causing a “crisis in the world” and predicted a “wave of immigrants” due to the sanctions that Washington imposes against governments singled out for human rights violations, as has been the case. from Nicaragua.
“Then they are there complaining about the immigrants, well, keep imposing sanctions and more immigrants will go to the United States,” the president snapped during the 43rd anniversary of the Ministry of the Interior.
Ortega’s statements come four days after President Joe Biden sanction Nicaraguan gold and modify executive order 13,851, which also opens the possibility of imposing more measures on other economic sectors in Managua.
Critics of the president claim that Ortega’s statements are political “blackmail”, instead of offering a solution to the crisis that the country has been experiencing since April 2018, when anti-government protests arose.
“Ortega is using the threat of the migratory weapon as a kind of blackmail against the United States,” he assures the voice of america the former Costa Rican diplomat Eduardo Ulibarri.
Sanctions on gold “cannot have a very direct effect because the migratory waves are not produced by the induction of a regime, but by the deterioration of the living conditions of the countries and those of Nicaragua have been deteriorating for a long time” , said.
More than 164,000 Nicaraguans have crossed the US border
The political crisis in Nicaragua has forced thousands of migrants to leave the country. During fiscal year 2022, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded arrests of 164,600 Nicaraguans.
At a general level, the CBP registered a record of 2.7 million migrant arrests, however, after recent measures by Washington to apply Title 42 to expel Venezuelans to Mexico, the number of people in the place decreased.
Title 42 is one of the border restrictions between Mexico and the United States put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Under this public health measure, the United States expels people to Mexico or their countries of origin.
However, Ortega said that as much as the United States “wants to close the doors, there are no doors that can be closed to immigrants, because immigrants are a force, a force that has the right, has the moral to go open the doors of the one who is closing them, who is denying them the right to work in their countries”.
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