The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, confirmed this week that he is more alone than ever in the region, after consolidating the Central American country as an authoritarian regime. The democratic Latin American left, which until not long ago was still sympathetic to the actions of the Sandinista regime, is increasingly belligerent against Ortega and his wife and vice president Rosario Murillo.
The latest example is the dialectical confrontations of the last few hours between Ortega and the leftist presidents of Chile and Colombia, Gabriel Boric and Gustavo Petro, one of which has already escalated into a diplomatic conflict. After Ortega’s personal disqualifications, Boric even called the Nicaraguan leader a “dictator” and he responded by calling him a “pinochetito.”
The brawl, which has already lasted two days, began on Monday when Ortega disqualified the Carabineros, the Chilean militarized police, during an act of tribute in Managua to the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, whose overthrow and death marked fifty years ago. 11 of September. “The Chilean Carabineros are not like the Nicaraguan police. They are trained for mass murder, trained to murder the people,” said Ortega.
Following these statements, the Chilean Foreign Ministry presented a note of diplomatic protest to the Nicaraguan government and for this purpose summoned the Nicaraguan chargé d’affaires in Santiago on Tuesday, which Boric confirmed this Wednesday, attacking the Central American president. “Yesterday the dictator Ortega insulted the Carabineros institution of Chile,” said the Chilean leader, precisely during an act of delivery of new police vehicles to the Carabineros.
On Tuesday, Ortega had already responded to the Chilean diplomatic rebuke. “Boric, you are a pinochetito,” Ortega said. “Now, as if he were stung by what I said yesterday, the truth is that the Chilean military and the police have been murderers, that they murdered an entire people, an entire project fifty years ago, when they carried out the coup d’état. against the heroic martyr president Salvador Allende. “They are criminals,” he insisted. “They have been upset because I said they are criminals,” reiterated Ortega, who assured that “Chile is not a democracy.” “Chile is still chained to the laws that Pinochet left, it is still chained to imperialism,” he said.
Boric had already been very critical of Ortega, even since the electoral campaign that took him to the La Moneda palace in 2022. Last February, the leftist ruler offered residency and Chilean nationality to the 317 Nicaraguan opponents – most of them imprisoned. until then – whom the Ortega government banished and stripped of their nationality. Among these was the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, who accepted the Chilean passport.
And it was precisely because of Belli that Ortega has also engaged in a crude controversy with Petro, after on Tuesday the leftist Colombian president expressed his solidarity with the poet, who denounced that the Sandinista authorities confiscated her residence in Managua on Monday. Petro compared Ortega to General Pinochet when he was in Chile to participate in the commemoration of the fifty years since the overthrow of Salvador Allende.
“All my solidarity for Gioconda Belli, poet of the Nicaraguan resistance against Somoza, now persecuted by Ortega. What a paradox! Here, in Chile, I visit the houses of Chilean poets whose homes were raided and murdered by the dictatorship and Ortega does the same as Pinochet,” Petro tweeted on the X network.
Shortly after, on Tuesday night, Ortega reacted against Petro, mentioning his time as a guerrilla in the extinct M-19 movement and accusing him of being a traitor.
“Petro (is) a shame for those who fought in the guerrilla movement that he led, for those who gave their lives in the guerrilla movement that he led, he has betrayed that blood,” said Ortega, adding that Petro has put Colombia ” at the service of the Yankees” and that today it is “a failed State where students, teachers, and peasants are murdered every day.”
Ortega and Murillo now only have the support in Latin America of the other two authoritarian regimes in the region, Cuba and Venezuela.
