The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo canceled this Tuesday, October 18, the appointment of the Nicaraguan agent before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Carlos José Argüello Gómez, as Nicaraguan ambassador to the Government of the Netherlands. The decision was made 18 days after his government broke off diplomatic relations with the Netherlands after accusing it of maintaining an “interfering, interventionist and neo-colonialist” position.
Argüello Gómez was appointed Nicaraguan ambassador to the Netherlands in April 2000, during the Arnoldo Alemán administration (1997-2002), and has held the position ever since.
Through another presidential agreement published in La Gaceta, Official Gazette, Ortega decided to appoint the Nicaraguan agent before the ICJ as permanent representative of Nicaragua with the rank of extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador before international organizations, based in the Netherlands.
In other words, Argüello Gómez, who was decorated in November 2013 with the Gold Medal of Honor by the Nicaraguan National Assembly in recognition of his contribution to national sovereignty, will remain in The Hague, headquarters of the ICJ.
The Nicaraguan agent in the ICJ has a doctorate in Law since 1970 and was the coordinator of the Legal Advice of the Government Board of National Reconstruction in the period of 1979-1980 and, later, he held various political, diplomatic and international court positions. of different type.
He has been in charge of the legal team of Nicaragua before the ICJ in the border cases with Honduras, Colombia and Costa Rica.
He was also part of the team that managed to get the ICJ to condemn, on June 27, 1986, the attacks with explosives against ports and other facilities in Nicaragua, carried out in the midst of the civil war and financed by the United States, for which Washington was sentenced to pay a million dollar compensation.
Relocate other diplomats
On the other hand, through a ministerial agreement, the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry annulled the appointment of Sherly Aurora Noguera Miranda as Minister Counselor of the Nicaraguan Embassy in the Netherlands.
Likewise, it annulled the appointments of Kassandra Estafanía Gómez Pineda and Édgar Javier Aguilar Quiñonez in their positions of first secretary with consular and administrative functions, and honorary technical attaché of the Nicaraguan embassy in the Netherlands, respectively.
Both Noguera Miranda and Gómez Pineda were appointed as representatives of the Permanent Mission of Nicaragua to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based in The Hague, the Netherlands.
On September 30, the Government of Nicaragua communicated to the Government of the Netherlands its “decision to immediately discontinue diplomatic relations”, given “the repeated interventionist, interventionist and neo-colonialist position of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.”
Ortega said, during a speech at a police parade, that Foreign Minister Denis Moncada Colindres told the Dutch ambassador to Central America, Christine Pirenne, that “we do not want relations with that interventionist government!” A few hours later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the decision to “immediately discontinue diplomatic relations”, while calling the Dutch representation “neo-colonial” and “pro-imperial”.
The dictator also revealed in his speech that the representative of that country met on Thursday, September 29, with Moncada to inform him that they will not finance a medical care center on the Caribbean Coast, as they had promised years ago, which Ortega described as a act of “human misery” and disrespect to the country.
For his part, the Dutch chancellor, Wopke Hoekstra, lamented on his Twitter account the disproportionate decision of the regime and maintained that they took a firm position in the face of the deterioration of democratic structures and human rights violations in Nicaragua in reference to the decision to suspend their country’s contribution to the construction of a hospital in Nicaragua.
In this sense, he also regretted that the Nicaraguan Executive Power has chosen to end the ties between the two countries, since “a critical discussion is always better.”
“Other countries have also noted difficulties in maintaining an open dialogue with Nicaragua. We will discuss our next steps with the European Union”, reiterated the head of Dutch diplomacy.
Rupture hits private sector cooperation
With the breaking of diplomatic relations, the private sector of Nicaragua will lose its second largest bilateral aid worker of the last five years. Between 2017 and 2021, The Netherlands gave private sector companies some $175 million in loansaccording to data from the Central Bank of Nicaragua (BCN).
Loans provided by the Netherlands Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO) were aimed at companies in the energy sector, the manufacturing industry, financial intermediation and othersaccording to the external cooperation reports of the BCN reviewed by CONFIDENTIAL.
The FMO details on its website that the loans financed for Nicaragua were destined for companies, microfinance institutions, and NGOs, such as: Polaris Energy Nicaragua, MLR Forestal de Nicaragua, Comercializadora de Maní, Financiera Fama, Fondo de Desarrollo Local, Nitlapan-UCA, Seeds for Progress Foundation, among others.
