The United States warns in the OAS that the elections in Nicaragua are a sham

USA affirmed that the elections in Nicaragua next Sunday are a sham of the government of Daniel Ortega, during a session this Wednesday of the Organization of American States (OAS).

The November 7 elections “have lost all credibility and are nothing more than a farce,” affirmed the representative of the United States Bradley A. Freden on the occasion of the presentation of the last report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) before the Permanent Council of the OAS.

Ortega, who has been in office for 14 years, is running for office with his wife Rosario Murillo in front of five right-wing parties practically unknown to Nicaraguans.

The opposition has been excluded: seven presidential candidates are in detention and three parties have been outlawed.

Washington calls on the OAS to continue mobilizing so that Managua faces “real consequences” for “ignoring” the multiple resolutions calling for democracy and respect for human rights in the Central American country.

A few days before the elections, the president of the IACHR, Antonia Urrejola, affirmed that the electoral process “does not comply with inter-American standards to guarantee free, fair, transparent and pluralistic elections.”

“The concentration of power by the Executive has made it easier for Nicaragua to become a de facto police state” in a country in which “all institutions respond to the decisions of the Executive,” Urrejola assured when presenting the report made public to the OAS In the past week.

Nicaragua asked for the floor at the beginning of the Permanent Council to state the reasons why it decided not to intervene later during the session.

Michael Campbell, who spoke on behalf of his country, made a plea against the report, which he called “an evil, manipulative and notoriously biased script.”

It “gives form,” he added, “to the excuse to attack and justify intervening policies and actions” whose fundamental objective is “above all to separate the Nicaraguan population from its government to install a de facto government.”

The Nicaraguan government considers that the mass demonstrations of 2018, which demanded the resignation of Ortega and resulted in 328 deaths, 1,614 detainees and more than 100,000 exiles, according to the IACHR, were an attempted coup against Ortega.

In addition to the United States, in this session only Costa Rica, Uruguay and Canada have asked to speak, which considers that the electoral results “are illegitimate.”

For Costa Rica, the IACHR report recalls that “the greatest current danger for the democracies of the region is not an abrupt breakdown of the constitutional order but rather a gradual erosion of democratic safeguards that can lead to an authoritarian regime even if it is elected through popular elections ”.