Nicaragua leaves US-controlled, coup-plotting OAS: ‘We are not a colony’
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government left the Organization of American States (OAS), condemning it as a US “instrument of interference” that organizes coups to “facilitate hegemony” in Latin America.
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government officially left the Organization of American States (OAS) on November 19, condemning the institution as a “colonialist entity” dominated by the United States.
The OAS, which is based in Washington, DC and receives the majority of its funding from the US government, is popularly known in Latin America as the “ministerio de las colonias yanquis” — the “Ministry of Yankee Colonies.”
The OAS has always been an arm of US geopolitical power in Latin America, but its current, notoriously corrupt Secretary-General Luis Almagro has shredded the organization’s credibility in recent years.
In 2019, the OAS helped to orchestrate a far-right military coup in Bolivia, overthrowing democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales by fabricating false claims of electoral fraud.
Following Washington’s lead, the OAS refused to recognize Nicaragua’s November 7, 2021 elections, seeking to launch a whole new coup attempt.
In an official letter to OAS chief Almagro, Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Denis Moncada called the OAS an “instrument of interference and intervention,” with the “mission to facilitate hegemony of the United States with its interventionism against the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
“Nicaragua has repeatedly expressed its condemnation and rejection of the interventionist actions of the OAS, defending its sovereignty,” Moncada said.
We are not “a colony of any power,” the Nicaraguan foreign minister declared, noting that the OAS is one of the “colonialist and neocolonialist entities” controlled by Washington.
The United States created the OAS in 1948, at the start of the first cold war, as an anti-socialist alliance of right-wing regimes. The founding meeting was held in Colombia and hosted by US Secretary of State George Marshall, a hard-line cold warrior.
One of the founding members of the OAS was the brutal Nicaraguan dictatorship of General Anastasio Somoza, whose US-sponsored dynastic regime killed, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of his countrymen.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID), a CIA cutout that Washington used to fund far-right Contra death squads in Nicaragua in the 1980s, admitted in its 2018 Congressional Budget Justification report that the OAS, “promotes U.S. political and economic interests in the Western Hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-U.S. countries such as Venezuela.”
Cuba’s revolutionary government was expelled from the OAS in 1962, and Venezuela’s leftist Chavista government withdrew in 2019.
The same year the OAS backed the far-right coup d’etat in Bolivia, it also recognized Washington’s coup puppet Juan Guaidó as so-called “president” of Venezuela. Although Guaidó controls virtually nothing inside the country, his US-appointed parallel coup regime fills Venezuela’s seat at the OAS.
After the US government orchestrated a military coup in Honduras in 2009, the OAS helped rubber-stamp the new undemocratic regime. It did the same after right-wing coups in Haiti.
And the OAS supported the US-backed destabilization operations in Brazil, where the Workers’ Party government was overthrown in a parliamentary soft coup, and leading presidential candidate Lula da Silva was imprisoned on false charges, handing far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro victory in the 2018 elections.
Nicaragua’s foreign minister announced that the country is leaving the OAS in front of a large portrait of Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan rebel who led a revolutionary guerrilla army that fought and successfully expelled the US military occupiers from his country in the 1920s and ’30s.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which overthrew Nicaragua’s US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and has governed the country since it returned to power through democratic elections in 2006, is inspired by the anti-imperialist legacy of General Sandino.
Nicaragua’s departure from the OAS comes at a time when many countries in the region are talking about replacing the organization with the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States (CELAC), which excludes the United States and Canada.
This September, CELAC held a historic summit in Mexico, where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared that the difference between CELAC and the OAS is the difference between Bolivarianism (Latin American integration) and Monroeism (US neocolonialism).
