The recent election of the new political council of the opposition platform Unión Nacional Azul y Blanco (UNAB) has caused claims and challenges from several members and now former members. The representative of the Nicaraguan Union of Self-Conveners (UNA), Santiago Urbina, was the most voted person in the election of the political council of the UNAB, held on March 5 and 6. Five days later, however, his organization decided to withdraw from the platform, vacating two seats that Urbina and Jonathan Duarte, another UNA member, had obtained.
The resignation of the UNA was made official on Friday, March 11 through a letter addressed to the UNAB citizen assembly, in which —among other things— they complain about the organizational bureaucracy and point out that they have lost confidence.
“It is unfortunate that we invest more time in internal organization work and leave urgent actions aside. The Blue and White National Unity has become a huge pyre of regulations that does not connect with the feelings of the Nicaraguan people and their daily problems,” reads the letter from the UNA. “With all our regret, we have considered it necessary to continue our work in parallel… but not within a structure that we feel wears us down and takes away our capacity for action,” they add.
Simultaneous to the resignation of the UNA, the departmental delegation of the UNAB in Jinotega he withdrew from the organization, arguing lack of transparency in the election of the political council and vacating a seat they had obtained within the political council.
“We have analyzed and discussed the development of this process and we have concluded that it did not have the transparency and legality that we all expected… Our fight continues to be for democracy and we cannot allow the organization to which we belong to replicate the bad practices that We criticize the regime so much, as it has been shown that we do not share those ethical principles and values of transparency, honesty and commitment to real change, our department and its municipalities have agreed to withdraw membership from this organization,” the statement said.
UNAB will meet again
Given the resignations and accusations, the UNAB citizen assembly will meet again this Tuesday, March 15, at 9:00 am in order to ratify the political Council, either with the nine elected members that still remain or by electing the replacement of the three members who resigned, explained UNAB’s communications officer, Olama Hurtado.
The process of internal elections of the UNAB began last December with the formation of the electoral council and the approval of the regulations. There were 18 candidates representing the youth and student sectors, the North and South Caribbean Coast, civil society organizations and the political sector, as well as the territorial structures, from which 12 members were chosen.
This process “we have not been able to do it in the most open way possible, as we have done in previous years, due to a security issue,” Hurtado said. “It was decided not to make every detail so public due to a risk factor, not only for the candidates but also for the members of the electoral committee, who have suffered persecution. Even a person who wanted to run, before the process began, was held for almost a day and that caused a lot of fear,” he added.
Juan Diego Barberena, current member of the political council of the UNAB, explained that after the votes a period of challenges began that ended on Friday, March 11, but due to the resignations it has not been possible to disclose the final results.
Barberena also indicated that last Sunday the supposed resignation of the Broad Front for Democracy (FAD), an organization that obtained two seats within the political council of the UNAN, was known; however, he clarified that the resignation was presented by people who belonged to the FAD at some point, but who are not currently part of its membership.
The FAD is a political alliance that emerged after the disintegration of the National Coalition for Democracy, in 2016, but which later dispersed and in 2018 joined the UNAB, Barberena said. “In such a way that these people who (now) proclaim themselves representatives of the FAD are part of a group that had renounced membership,” she stressed.
