Richard Kohn, NicaNotes,
https://afgj.org/es-LA/nicanotes-07-27-2023
The Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) has financed
water projects, housing, sustainable energy, reforestation, roads and bridges
in Nicaragua. The proposed new sanctions would cut off these loans. (Photo: CABEI)
When Joe Biden was a Senator in the 1980s, he distanced himself from his Democratic colleagues like Senator John Kerry who criticized the Reagan Administration for orchestrating the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles and weapons to Iran to raise money for the terrorists (contras) the US had organized to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. The bulk of the blame was cast on advisors like Elliot Abrams. “I’m not angry with the president,” Biden said during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987. “I think his action was one from the heart. I think his action was not one that was political. I think his action was not one done with any malevolence.” To Biden and Reagan, it seems that the devastation caused in the US and the Middle East was worth it to bring about the destruction of farms, schools, health clinics, and people in Nicaragua.
Eventually, after tens of thousands of deaths and horrendous suffering, the Nicaraguan people voted in a US-backed government to end the war and economic embargo. Nicaragua has had several elected governments since those days, eventually returning the Sandinistas to power in 2007. The Trump Administration resumed intervention in Nicaragua to try to overthrow the Sandinistas, but Biden has escalated sanctions and psychological warfare much more, and this time so far most of his Democratic colleagues are sticking with him.
Now, Senator Tim Kaine has joined Senator Marco Rubio to propose a new round of sanctions and psychological operations against Nicaragua until “regime change” is achieved. Existing sanctions against Nicaragua have slowed the economic growth from what it would have been, but the authors of US policy understand the Nicaraguan population will not readily give up on their democracy or the social programs the Sandinistas instituted. It will take a concerted effort to cause the sort of poverty and violence needed for “regime change” in Nicaragua, and there are no signs that either party of the US regime has any qualms about imposing that sort of violence.
The Trump Administration imposed sanctions on Nicaragua starting in 2018, and Biden has renewed them annually since then. In addition, Biden signed the RENACER Act in 2021 which uses the oversized influence of the US over the World Bank and the IMF to prevent Nicaragua from receiving financing for development projects even though both institutions have reported that the Nicaraguan government is highly effective in using received funds for their intended purposes. The Act also forces the US Government to report abuses by the Nicaraguan government and report on their “cooperation” with Russia. Biden also banned imports of two of Nicaragua’s biggest export commodities: sugar and gold.
Even with these sanctions, the US is Nicaragua’s biggest trading partner followed by Mexico and Honduras. Nicaragua exports more to the US than it imports, but trade is still important in both directions. Because of these sanctions, China has begun sending exports to Nicaragua, but because of current and proposed sanctions, trade with China and other countries will need to increase substantially and quickly if the Nicaraguan economy is to remain stable. The increasing sanctions will likely slow the Nicaraguan economy, as well as that of other Central American countries they trade with, and migration to the US for those seeking jobs has already started to increase because of the sanctions imposed.
The latest round of sanctions would be devastating to US trade with Nicaragua. The new bill calls for suspension of Nicaragua’s participation in the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). But such a suspension could only occur by mutual agreement among all the countries that signed it, which is unlikely unless extreme pressure is placed on these countries, thereby disrupting harmony in the entire region. Under these new sanctions, the US government would be ordered to review any benefits that Nicaragua might be receiving from the agreement and describe violations by Nicaragua. It should be obvious that the US cannot accept “free trade” that benefits Nicaragua. The bill does not charge staffers with “evaluating” whether Nicaragua has violated the agreement or not, nor does it provide any evidence that they have, but rather it uses the more prescriptive language to “report” how Nicaragua is in violation.
DR-CAFTA was signed before the Sandinistas returned to power and initially, under the neo-liberal government, poverty and hunger were not reduced by the agreement. The intent was for US companies to sell government subsidized food to Central America, increasing its dependence on the US, and Central American countries would be permitted to export non-essential goods and resources to the US. However, today Nicaragua produces 90% of its own food and exports additional food to its neighbors, as well as exports more goods to the US than it imports. The DR-CAFTA is important to building Nicaragua’s economy and makes it possible to provide healthcare and education and other infrastructure for development.
The US government would be ordered to end imports of two more leading export commodities from Nicaragua: coffee and beef. Nicaraguan coffee and beef exports fill a particular niche in the US market for sustainably produced commodities. Nicaragua is a leader in agroecology. Both large-scale commercial and cooperative-based fair-trade coffee are produced using low-impact multi-culture and organic methods. Most of the beef for export is also sustainably produced using grass-fed systems with trees that capture more carbon than is emitted to the atmosphere. These sanctions on Nicaragua will shift US consumption to less sustainable countries with less favorable greenhouse gas impacts. More acutely important to Nicaraguans, it will cost them jobs and the revenue needed to fund social programs.
Moreover, the latest round of sanctions aims to further restrict loans for economic development by mandating that the US oppose loans to Nicaragua from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), and that the US pressure Bank members Taiwan, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, and the Republic of Korea to join the US in ending this support for Nicaragua’s development. United States’ dominance of the world economy allows it to devastate a targeted country by bullying its “allies.” In addition to stopping any new funding, the bill also insists on increased scrutiny of all projects and requires that projects be carried out by non-governmental entities. This could possibly mean that even existing projects could be halted so that the ongoing efforts at constructing hospitals and roads could go to waste, leaving half-built structures to visibly remind Nicaraguans of the power of the US government.
The bill would also block the property rights of US citizens and permanent residents by outlawing any investment by them in Nicaragua. If a US citizen or resident attempts to invest in a business or improve a residence in Nicaragua, they could face a combination of civil and criminal penalties including paying twice the value of the investment, a million dollars in fines, and 20 years in prison. Many US residents currently own property or businesses in Nicaragua and maintaining those assets would likely require further investment.
This item is surprising given past US-government defense of Nicaraguan land-owning oligarchs. After the 1979 insurrection, the Sandinista-led government gave abandoned farms to peasant farmers. Many of the large landowners had fled to the US where they were welcomed, and many were given US citizenship. The US then demanded these new US citizens be given their land back, and most were accommodated by receiving equivalent land from the Nicaraguan government. Today they remain US citizens with land investments in Nicaragua. While the US government purports to be supporting wealthy Nicaraguan exiles by trying to overthrow “communist” governments, it will be directly prohibiting them from investing in their own property, and from exporting goods to the US. The US does not seem to care about harming these ideological allies, as long as the sanctions trickle down to cause far greater hardship to the poor and working-class Nicaraguans that support the government.
The additional proposed US sanctions also call for greater propagandistic warfare against Nicaragua. It orders the government to find violations of religious freedom and corruption, and indeed the US government will find whatever it is required to find whether it exists or not. It calls on Nicaragua to have free and fair elections to “replace the Ortega administration”. Anyone who has observed Nicaraguan elections, as I have, will attest that the elections were free and fair and President Ortega is very popular. Thus, any election requiring his replacement, when it is not what the population wants, could not be a free or fair election.
It calls for a “cessation of violence by police,” referring to the police in Nicaragua, most of whom don’t usually carry weapons. The bill will do nothing about the police in the US who kill about 600 of us each year.
The bill calls for a repeal of laws such as the Foreign Agents Law, a recent law in Nicaragua that prohibits foreign governments from funding its elections and requires registration of lobbying activities on behalf of foreign governments. The US Congress does not seem to be interested in repealing the similar and more restrictive US Espionage Act (enacted in 1917), US Foreign Agents Registration Act (enacted in 1938), or the US Patriot Act (Enacted in 2001), all employed recently to allegedly prevent foreign or domestic influence on the US government.
Claims against Nicaragua are:
1) That it arrested people who attempted a US-backed coup against Nicaragua in 2018, and who planned another attempt in 2021. Nicaragua arrested people for various offenses that are also crimes in the US and for which many more people were arrested in the US for far less violence in association with the Jan. 2021 protests in Washington DC.
2) That it has persecuted the Catholic church by arresting some clergy who contributed to violence against the Nicaraguan people. The US and Europe have not “persecuted” members of the Church for crimes such as child abuse, kidnapping, murder, but in a democracy this sort of “persecution” might be expected.
3) That it provides verbal support to Russia and is establishing ties with China. Few countries outside of NATO support the US-NATO actions against Russia, so Nicaragua has quite a lot of company in this regard. Of course, a small country like Nicaragua has little it can do to provide any sort of material support to either side in a distant conflict in Europe. Nicaragua did recently adopt a one-China policy recognizing mainland China and establishing more trade with China, just as the US has done since the mid-1970s.
The impetus for the new more draconian sanctions against the people of Nicaragua is that the country poses an extraordinary threat to the security of the United States. This is one of the only true statements in the new bill. Although Nicaragua clearly does not impose a military threat and it is not at all a threat to the people of the United States, it has provided free publicly funded healthcare to all its citizens, free education from pre-school through graduate school, it has eliminated hunger, and greatly reduced poverty. While it has achieved these triumphs, the economy grew consistently and even the wealthy have benefitted. This is a dangerous refutation of the propaganda sold to the US public. We are told that providing services to the population is unaffordable in the richest country in the world, and if our government provided these things, the economy would collapse. The example Nicaragua provides is very dangerous indeed, not to the people of the US, but to the ruling US regime; therefore, the reality of Nicaragua must be obscured and negated.
The Nicaraguan people overwhelmingly support their government. The US elite understand this fact, but they simplistically believe it is only because of the strong economy and social programs. They believe that if US sanctions weaken the Nicaraguan economy, support for the Sandinistas will weaken. US policymakers fail to understand that the Nicaraguan people have developed a sophisticated understanding of the world and they have learned to advocate for what they deserve. It is a population that won’t readily accept being ruled by oligarchs or foreign powers anymore, and which sees through the trickery and propaganda that so effectively controls the US population. Moreover, overthrowing the Nicaraguan government should not be the aim of US policy. We should learn from Nicaragua while also opposing the US government’s aggression against it.
* Rick Kohn is a professor at the University of Maryland and member of Friends of Latin America. Every fall he offers a seminar course titled “Sustainable Agriculture and Environment in Nicaragua” which also includes a travel-study experience in Nicaragua