The president of the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr., described the voting this Sunday in Nicaragua as “a pantomime that was neither free nor fair,” while announcing that his Government will use all economic and diplomatic tools, in coordination with other members of the international community, to hold Daniel Ortega’s regime accountable for its abuses.
In a statement about “The mock elections” of the Central American country, Biden denounced Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, current vice president and spokeswoman for the regime, as autocrats who rule the country with a style not different from that used by the Somoza family, which the same Sandinista ruler helped overthrow 40 years ago. when I was a guerrilla.
The declaration of the Democratic leader occurs when criticism of a process considered a farce by sectors critical of Ortega multiplies in the international community, but also when Biden, according to US legislative sources, would have in his office to sign the Renacer Act, which toughens sanctions against the Nicaraguan dictatorship.
This legislative norm provides new tools to sanction Ortega and his group, for the refusal to offer free elections to Nicaraguans, but also puts under supervision the international credits to which the country accesses with multilateral organizations and raises the review on the Nicaragua’s participation in the free trade agreement of the United States, Central America and the Dominican Republic.
Although Biden does not refer specifically to the case of the Renacer Law, which has already completed its path through Congress on November 3, he exposes his position on the abuses committed by Ortega.
“The arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates, and the blocking of political party participation manipulated the outcome long before election day. They shut down independent media, locked up journalists and members of the private sector, and intimidated civil society organizations into closing their doors, ”Biden lamented.
The US president affirmed that he supports the inalienable right to democratic self-determination of the Nicaraguan people and of any other country in the hemisphere where popular sovereignty is compromised by the erosion of democratic norms, the suffocation of civic space and the violations of fundamental laws. .
“The Inter-American Democratic Charter obliges the hemisphere to defend the democratic rights of the Nicaraguan people. We call on the Ortega-Murillo regime to take immediate action to restore democracy in Nicaragua and to immediately and unconditionally release those unjustly imprisoned for speaking out against abuses and calling for the right of Nicaraguans to vote in elections. free and fair, “he ordered.
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