Costa Rica is the main destination for migrants fleeing the political crisis in Nicaragua, but also seeking job opportunities and better living conditions
Text: Houston Castle Ford
Relations between Costa Rica and Nicaragua took an unexpected turn. President Daniel Ortega’s government withdrew its ambassador to San José, Duilio Hernández, on Tuesday after four years in office, local newspaper La Nación reported.
The information was also confirmed to the Voice of America by Costa Rican Foreign Minister Arnoldo André Tinoco through a text on WhatsApp, without giving details about the reasons that led to the measure.
The newspaper La Nación reported that Ortega would have appointed Valdrack Jaentschke as chargé d’affaires, who had recently been as extraordinary ambassador of Nicaragua in Honduras, for a short period of time.
Press reports indicate that Jaentschke has served small periods of time in various places representing Nicaragua, among them he has been ambassador to Antigua and Barbuda and Haiti.
Ortega’s decision comes less than a week after a group of left-wing Latin American parliamentarians tried to enter the border from Costa Rica to Nicaragua to corroborate the situation of the political prisoners, however, migration denied them passage.
“They put soldiers on the border and we have civil information that there is a military deployment; they transmit to the immigration police that we are denied entry and they tell us not to approach, there is an intimidating and threatening attitude of the dictatorship, we are facing a scandal of enormous proportions, “said deputy Mariano Rosa, coordinator of the Commission International to the digital medium Nicaragua Actual.
*Also read: Nicaragua, in addition to expelling religious, raises the number of closed NGOs to 958
Costa Rica without sending a diplomat
Recently, Rodrigo Chaves assumed the presidency of Costa Rica and, unlike his predecessor, Carlos Alvarado -who maintained a distant relationship with Managua-, stated that he was analyzing the possibility of sending a diplomat to Nicaragua, however, he later declined because the government de Ortega occupied the Managua headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS).
Costa Rica has been a key country for Nicaraguans fleeing the political crisis that the Central American country has been experiencing since 2018, but also for those seeking job opportunities.
Nicaraguans represent 92% of all refugee claims in Costa Rica. It is expected that by the end of 2022 there will be 80,000 Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica, according to data released by the director of Migration, Marlen Luna, in an appearance before legislators in which she revealed that the agency is “overwhelmed.”
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