Fabrizio Casari, 24 de junio 2023
Next June 26th will be the 37th anniversary of the judgment of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, condemning the United States for its terrorist war against Nicaragua and ordered it to pay the Central American country US$17bn in reparations. In these 37 years, Washington has never accepted the ruling of the highest international legal instance.
Beyond these instrumental legal considerations, there is a political truth: accepting the ruling would imply recognizing the United States as one nation among all the others, that is, obliged to respect international law and the institutions designated to protect it. Irreconcilable with the status of "exceptionality" they have assigned to themselves in their Constitution and in the criminal actions that have characterized their 247 years of existence, in fact 231 years of wars and millions of victims sacrificed for the affirmation of an insane, Darwinian and exclusionary model.
To those who are reading this today, it may seem strange that an International Court of Justice condemns the United States for Nicaragua's complaint. The biblical narrative of David versus Goliath helps with symbolic identification, but it is, in fact, only symbolic. Given the facts of the case, the Court had no choice but to sentence the guilty to pay reparations to the innocent, it was impossible to rule otherwise. It condemned in law the actions of the United States in Nicaragua, the criminal terror of a giant against a small and innocent country.
Legal history, as always happens, is the daughter of political history, because there is no doctrine that dispenses with the context in which it is applied or with the protagonists and their reasons. Well, if we want to divide the story in two, we can start with the legal part and then move on to the political part.
The legal history of aggression and resistance is contained in a few dates: April 9th 1984, when Nicaragua filed its lawsuit; May 10th of the same year, when the Court issued its first partial judgment, in which it requested the temporary suspension of U.S. hostilities until the trial was held; January 18th 1985, when the United States warned the Court that it would not participate in the merits of the case, ignoring the jurisdiction of the Court in the case, and to which it would not attribute any validity; June 26th 1986, when the Court issues its final judgment, contained in no fewer than 833 pages.
The absolute value of the sentence and its context
This is a sentence of historical significance, because it rules clearly on the use of force in international relations and on the expansive interpretations of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, which expand the scope of the concept of voluntary self-defense.
The Tribunal, for the first time in its 40 years of existence, examined the background of the legitimacy of the use of force by a superpower in its zone of influence and reiterated, in this specific case, that the US argument, alleging the need for intervention against Nicaragua for helping the guerrillas in El Salvador, was not sustained. Because even assuming, but without conceding, that such activity had existed, that is, that it had been the responsibility of the Nicaraguan government and not of individual citizens of any other country, the US aggression was of such magnitude that it could not be justified as a reaction based on the legal principles of proportionality and reasonableness.
Finally, the Court declared the United States guilty both for its own direct activity and for that of the contras, enlisted by the US or by its allies, since the ruling blamed the United States for the genesis and development of all the military and paramilitary forms of its undeclared war against Managua.
Politically, it is timely to tell this story to those who weren't around then. It was the 1980s, the world was discovering disco dancing and punk, but Nicaragua danced to its own music. It was building a country and, after decades of guerrilla warfare and 50,000 deaths, Sandinismo believed it had settled its accounts with history. But it was not to be. The United States wanted to repair the failure of its system of domination in America: in 20 years they had lost first Cuba and then Nicaragua, Duarte's Salvador seemed in the balance while Ríos Montt's Guatemala was practically pacified.
The newly elected Ronald Reagan, a balding actor, with vulgar humor and brutish ideas, decided that, like in one of his bad movies, the good guys would come in and bury the bad guys, who were bad because they disobeyed the good guys. From the moment he took power, he imposed a series of coercive measures, even knowing very well the country's dire socio-economic situation. Nicaragua was rich in enthusiasm but poor in dollars; the state coffers had been completely plundered by the dynasty which had fled and its loyalists.
Precisely this was what the White House was counting on, thinking that economic pressure, embargos, blocking loans, would make reconstruction impossible and put in check the liberating ardor that circulated through the veins, through the streets and even through the sky of the new Nicaragua. However, despite all that, the Nicaraguans did not think for a moment about giving in, about giving up the values, dreams and projects that had cost so much sacrifice, in exchange for good neighborly relations, which in the language of the Anglo-Saxon terrorists means surrender. It was not enough to have fought and won, they had to fight all over again to win.
The infamous war
The CIA recruited the remnants of Somoza's National Guard, to which it added mercenaries from all military latitudes, who flocked to the new El Dorado of death, located first in Honduras and then in Costa Rica. An armed aggression began, accompanied by an economic embargo that turned Nicaragua into a warning for those who disobeyed the empire and, at the same time, into an example for those who wanted to resist it.
The United States acted on the political and diplomatic fronts without any restraint and engaged in conspiratorial, terrorist and criminal actions, devoid of any hint of ethics and or the optics of the conflict. They violated international law and their own US laws, financing with drugs and weapons what they could no secure from public funds. To do this, they hired Colombian cartels along with US and Nicaraguan drug traffickers who joined the Salvadoran and Honduran military in trafficking. Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Webb called it the Dark Alliance in his book on the issue.
Nicaragua, innocent of any guilt, endured a ruthless war that the gringos waged without even having the courage to declare it. It was an asymmetrical war because it was fought with unequal resources, which did no good in the end only because they were balanced by a similarly unequal heroism, by the military and organizational wisdom of those who risked their lives to save their land. Sandinista Nicaragua offered a military lesson to the United States and its armed gangs. Never, not for a minute, could the Contras take a city, the key points of its economy or any of its defensive structure.
From the mountains of Nicaragua to The Hague it was a battle that Managua won on every front. Nicaragua openly challenged the United States to answer for its criminal policy before the highest seat of international jurisprudence: the International Court of Justice in The Hague, an organ of the United Nations. Sandinismo showed that it could change from olive green into black togas and was able to denounce, argue and convince based on its reasons. The political weight of the United States, its ability to influence judges, did not change the fate of a trial which, as rarely happens, combined historical truth and procedural truth. The articulated function of the verdict was meticulous and relentless, proof against any opportunist interpretation. It reaffirmed what constitutes the premise of all testimony: the truth, only the truth, nothing but the truth.
The United States, which considers the truth to be one of the worst threats to all the historical-political manipulation Hollywood fictions make of its imperial exploits, did not accept the verdict and did not compensate Nicaragua. They did not recognize the ruling of an international legal institution of which they are part at the highest level, such as the UN Security Council. And it is as paradoxical as it is emblematic of Washington's black history that the Security Council is in charge of enforcing the judgments of the International Court of Justice. Therefore, paradoxically, the United States does not recognize the body whose resolutions it is supposed to enforce. Imperial schizophrenia.
As if in a play by Pirandello, the United States played two roles simultaneously: that of the criminals and that of the ones who should have arrested them. This oxymoron of justice, this ethical disgrace, contains all the cowardice and arrogance of a country unworthy of leading the international community, among other things for not being able to set an example of respectful behavior to the norms they themselves have subscribed and to the international institutions they themselves claim to represent.
The White House claims the extraterritoriality of its jurisdiction and its courts, it wants to judge without being judged. Without having the right to do so, it sets itself up as a court to judge the whole world with no right of appeal, but it does not respect the judges elected by the international community it claims to to lead (domination and plunder are uncool terms they prefer to avoid).
The rejection of a judgment of the International Court of Justice, 37 years later, is the refusal to meet obligations which the rest of the world recognizes as proper and inescapable in a society of nations based on coexistence among equals. But the United States recognizes neither its obligations nor the rule of Law. All they insist on is that they dominate and everyone else obeys. This model of atomic feudalism is one Nicaragua has always rejected and one which. now. many more are willing to challenge.