Stella Calloni, TeleSur, June 16th 2021
https://www.telesurtv.net/opinion/La-OEA-golpista-pide-apoyo-para-derro… 2021
The Organization of American States (OAS), which has promoted coups in various Latin American countries with the open support of its Secretary General Luis Almagro, is now trying to apply the so-called "Democratic Charter" to Nicaragua, in a desperate effort to counter the revelations in numerous official United States documents about Washington's real involvement in the bloody armed coup attempt in 2018, in that country.
At the moment, the government of Democrat president Joe Biden, who maintains his predecessor Donald Trump's brutal policies in Latin America and in the world, continues to apply sanctions to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, resulting in very serious violations of the rights of peoples and human rights that ought to be complied with universally, aggravated by the scourge of the pandemic now afflicting humanity.
This has made very evident who the enemies of humanity are, such as those large wealthy countries that are hoarding vaccines, and whose phamaceutical laboratories refuse to share their advances and their patents something that is, from any point of view, criminal. The United States ignored the request of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, urging the suspension of conflicts and all warlike actions so as to facilitate protection for the peoples of the world given the need to address the pandemic. Entrenched behind their borders, the powerful countries continue their policy of colonial wars and of political, economic and military interference, especially in their project to recolonize Latin America and the Caribbean.
At a historical juncture where, due to the emergence of other world powers such as China and the Russian Federation, which negotiate respecting the sovereignty of the world's peoples, the United States and its main partners Israel, Great Britain and the subjugated governments of a once proud Europe, are trying to suffocate and strangle our peoples, implement their 21st Century project and recolonize us.
They are abusing the popular will in every one of our countries, with a counterinsurgent war of low intensity, but of extreme violence, threatening military invasions whereever governments and peoples resist total submission as 21st Century colonies, imposed as a substitute for the National Security dictatorships , now the National Security "democracies", whose most important example is Colombia, their "Israel" in Latin America.
However, we are witnessing the heroic resistance of our peoples rising up against injustice and misery, the results of dependence, after having shown in the first decade of this 21st century, what a United Latin America, as envisioned by our 19th century independence heroes, can do.
None of this matters to a capitalism now in a state of savagery, precisely because it is undergoing the greatest crisis of its history.
If the blockades by means of which they are trying to force our peoples to surrender through hunger and the need for survival were not already already serious enough, every day a new coercive measure is issued, without understanding that the cruelty of their violence is going to accelerate their own collapse.
The United States is currently trying to produce not only a new coup d'état in Peru, taking advantage of the electoral context there, but also in Nicaragua, a "countrylet" as they say in Central America, which was among the very first victims of their imperial expansion towards our region.
That same Nicaragua, which more than once drove them out, as did that formidable peasant army of "free men" who in the 1930s frightened off the powerful, even then, US air force with hunting shotguns.
Augusto César Sandino stayed so alive in the memory of the people that, in 1979, after a new war of liberation in totally asymmetric conditions against the powerful empire, he finally returned with the triumph of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the overthrow of the last tyrant of the Somoza family, who had been in power, imposed by the United States.
The triumphant revolution of the FSLN, which astonished the world in July 1979, then had to endure a counterinsurgency war of a cruelty that not only produced terrorist attacks condemned the world over, but also thousands of deaths in Sandinista Nicaragua.
This quick glance back to the past brings us to the elections held by the FSLN in 1990, shortly after one of the most sinister and cowardly actions of the United States, the invasion of Panamá in the early morning of December 20th 1989, with all the forces of its Southern Command, which then still occupied the Canal Zone, of such tragic memory for Latin Americans.
But there was resistance, even with enormous inequality such a confrontation involved, in an military attack which the United States used to test its weapons like the Nazis did in Guernica, Spain.
I witnessed that invasion, just as I also witnessed the final Sandinista insurrection when on July 19, 1979, with the country's entire people in the streets, with very inferior weapons compared to those that Washington had provided to their dictator, they heroically won the war.
The 1990 elections were held when Nicaragua had already suffered more than 50,000 victims of the US "dirty", "covert war" and with the very present example of the invasion of Panama and its thousands of victims, which posed an obvious threat to the suffering Nicaraguan people, who had won the bloody and unequal war imposed by the US.
Of course, Washington was not only acting militarily. Ronald Reagan's new creation in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was also tried out in Panama, together with the current USAID (the former, dreaded AID International Agency for Development), was in charge of forming opposition alliances. In Panama, the Civil Crusade, which called for and supported the invasion of their own country and, in Nicaragua, the National Opposition Union (UNO) which united all the opposition parties to the Sandinista Front in 1990. Both were headquartered in Washington,
Today all the right-wing alliances in the continent have been created under the control of foundations like the NED, which can well be called the "social face" of the CIA, and which together with hundreds of of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have invaded Our America and continue invading the continent, playing a leading role distributing of millions of dollars destined to support coups d'état, and to co-opt judicial structures, or create mass media, controlled by the Pentagon, as the weapon of aggression that they really are, among various other "investments".
The coup d'état in Nicaragua, 2021
Right now Nicaragua is a target, because it has presented a challenge ever since Daniel Ortega's government, after returning to office in 2007, was again re-elected by the Nicaraguan people in 2016 with over 70% of votes, after having produced a profound change in favor of Nicaragua's people that was self-evident to everyone.
And now we are almost in the same situation as we were in the 1990's, after the current alliance of Nicaragua's pro-imperialist right wing opposition failed in their 2018 coup attempt, when mercenaries and lumpen groups committed crimes against humanity, but were again depicted by the US government as "freedom fighters", the pretentious name Ronald Reagan gave Nicaragua's Contra murderers and terrorists in the 80's.
In 2018 they applied in Nicaragua the model of the counterrevolutionary, criminal "guarimbas" of Venezuela, using the cover of supposed student demonstrations, as a screen for mercenary shock forces that killed dozens of Sandinista police and civilians.
As usual, as always happens in our countries where the Pentagon and the US intelligence agencies control 98 percent of the (mis)information circulating in the world, they have an army of well-paid media mercenaries who portrayed Ortega as a bloodthirsty dictator, while their "good guys" terrorized the population with brutal crimes. There are more than enough recordings and videos depicting this reality, nor can Nicaragua's opposition explain the armed clashes if there were not weapons on both sides.
From the start of the events in Nicaragua they contrived a "student protest" motif very similar to what was attempted by Leopoldo Lopez in Venezuela in 2017, concealing armed mercenary shock forces capable of atrocious killing.
Many people were killed in Nicaragua, some doused with gasoline and burned by opposition mercenaries before a terrified population. The groups of armed masked men in various parts of the country, confronting and killing numerous police officers, were not throwing stones, but firing bullets, leaving a trail of dead and wounded.
They also burned a number of buildings, among them the National Rural Savings and Loans, a bank of the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA), a cooperative bank with hundreds of thousands of members, and the same day they burned the headquarters of the Ministry of Family, Community and Cooperative Economy.
Dozens of buildings, even a house with the family still inside, were burned down, as well as radio stations opposed to the coup and dozens of community radio stations, causing severe damage to universities, colleges and health centers created by the Government. It was of no benefit to President Ortega to burn key buildings of his own administration or the houses of his officials' families or to murder people after torturing and publicly beating them, as the mercenaries did in different parts of the country, sadistically killing those who fell into their hands. The "democratic" opposition has no plausible explanation for all this violence.
A state of confusion and chaos prevailed with the media networks of the hegemonic power telling the story backwards all over the world, showing how the criminal power of mendacious news media is no different from the criminal power of security forces shooting unarmed people, controlling them at gunpoint.
These facts were investigated by U.S. journalists like Max Blumenthal, who have exposed the role of entities like USAID, Freedom House, and the NED, funding Nicaraguan NGOs openly calling for the overthrow of President Ortega.
According to Blumenthal, USAID, allocated for Nicaragua in 2017 the sum of US$5.2 million, "with most of the funds going to training for civil society and media organizations" . In June, the leaders of M19, the student group that started the anti-government protests and "sought to supplant Nicaragua's National Students Federation, traveled to Washington to meet with the US ultra-right, including figures such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ileana Ros Lethinem, Cuban Americans and Republican representatives linked to the terrorism that has long plagued Cuba and Latin America. They also met with Mark Green, director of USAID, who expressed his support for them against the Sandinista government. The trip was paid for by Freedom House," as Blumenthal denounced and demonstrated.
He emphasized that the M19, begun in April of 2018, was neither spontaneous nor the fruit of "discontent" against Ortega. "The Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy, directed by Felix Madariaga, organizer of the M19 and one of the main spokespersons against Sandinismo, received US$260,000 from the US National Endowment for Democracy", Blumenthal denounced based on his investigations. He cited that the Hagamos Democracia organization, of Luciano García, a recognized opponent of Sandinismo, had also received US$525,000 from the NED since 2014 and in 2017 distributed US$1 million to various organizations of the so-called "civil society" demanding Ortega's resignation, namely: CENIDH (US$111,000), Center for Private Enterprise (US$239,000), International Republican Institute (US$150,000), Ibero-American Culture Foundation (US$79,000), FUNIDES (US$40,000), among others. (Source: NED on line)
"In 2017, the NED allocated $305,000 to anonymous groups in Nicaragua, for what they call "democracy promotion", meaning, the organization of counterrevolution and anti-Sandinista subversion" highlighting the role they play in the Fourth Generation War in Latin America." It also appeared to help the then Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS), which mobilized and hired itself out to be used by the CIA, to try and influence leftist sectors allied to Sandinismo in years gone by.
Now the Ortega government was alerted to another attempt by the reorganized right-wing forcesat a coup or some other maneuver to overthrow him. "The U.S. government has spent years cultivating a right-wing media network in Nicaragua that was central to the violent coup attempt in 2018. This network is now under investigation by the Nicaraguan government for allegations of money laundering" notes US journalist Ben Norton .
Currently at the head of the new coup is the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation for Reconciliation and Democracy, "which is central to Washington's massive financial, technical and logistical support for the Nicaraguan opposition, acting as what the CIA calls a "pass through": a third-party organization that serves as an apparently independent channel for US government funding to foreign political groups and media outlets.
In an intelligence document, cited by Blumenthal, the words "transition regime" are used 102 times indicating that a new government will be installed by the United States and also calling for a purge of members of the Army and Police, "so it is obvious what the USAID wants to do", when "more than US$75 million were sent by this organization to the Chamorro Foundation". Referring to the opposition media network, he gave as an example the sensationalist media channel "100% Noticias", pointing out that it is financed by USAID via the Chamorro Foundation.
He recalled that the director and founder of this US-financed channel, Miguel Mora, declared in an interview that he wanted the US army to invade Nicaragua, violently remove the elected Sandinista Front party from power and capture President Daniel Ortega, referring to Washington's invasion of Panama in 1989.
The NED, which was responsible for the 1990 election victory of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and financed her electoral campaign and which constantly interferes in many countries around the world, especially in Latin America, declared on its own web site, with pride, that "we prepared the bases for the insurrection in Nicaragua with violence and blockades" also boastfully claiming "responsibility for the coup d'état".
That is the context in which the OAS and its Secretary General Luis Almagro, denounced by several governments as the "person directly responsible" for Latin America's 21st century coups, are preparing yet one more,