Nicaragua’s Sandinista government withdrew from and expelled the coup-supporting Organization of American States (OAS), denouncing it as a “deceitful agency of the State Department of yankee imperialism” and US “Ministry of the Colonies.”
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Published on Multipolarista, Apr 27, 2022
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Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has expelled the Organization of American States (OAS), calling it “one of the US State Department’s political instruments of intervention and domination.”
Managua also declared its immediate withdrawal from the organization, stating clearly, “Nicaragua is not a colony of anyone, therefore it is not part of the Ministry of the Colonies.”
The OAS was founded by the United States in 1948, at the beginning of the first cold war, as a coalition of right-wing anti-communist countries in the Americas. Among its founding members was Nicaragua’s US-backed military dictatorship, run by the brutal Somoza dynasty.
The OAS is based in Washington, and still today receives the majority of its funding from the US government.
In Latin America, the OAS has earned an infamous reputation for supporting numerous coups d’etat, including the violent overthrow of Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales in 2019.
In November 2021, Nicaragua announced its decision to leave the OAS, after the US-dominated body refused to recognize the Sandinista Front’s victory in the elections earlier that month.
This initiated a formal withdrawal process that would have taken two years. But in a fiery speech on April 24, Foreign Minister Denis Moncada declared that Nicaragua was leaving the OAS immediately, blasting it as a “deceitful agency of the State Department of yankee imperialism.”
“The people and government of Nicaragua have not recognized and do not recognize this instrument of colonial administration, which does not at any time represent the sovereign union of Our America and the Caribbean, and that, on the contrary, is an instrument of yankee imperialism, to violate rights and independence, supporting and promoting interventions and invasions, legitimizing coups d’etat in various forms and modes,” Moncada said.
“We will not have any presence at all in the organizations of that diabolical instrument of the badly named OAS,” he added, referring to the organization’s officials as “employees of the Yankee State Department.”
By denouncing the OAS as the “Yankee Ministry of the Colonies,” Moncada was referencing a phrase famously coined by Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.
Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962, while US-backed right-wing dictatorships were welcomed in the organization.
In 2017, Venezuela’s elected Chavista government announced its decision to leave the OAS as well, condemning the organization for supporting violent US-backed coup attempts.
The OAS then went on to recognize US-appointed coup leader Juan Guaidó as supposed “interim president” of Venezuela, despite the fact that he never won a single vote in a presidential election.
Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Moncada affirmed in his April 24 speech, “By denouncing and rejecting that infernal mechanism, from which we are leaving immediately with absolute dignity, we ratify, definitively, our respect, affection, and recognition of heroic Cuba and Venezuela, and the peoples that bravely wage their struggles, and that have accompanied us and accompany us in the battles that they have fought and fight for justice, the peoples’ rights, sovereignty, dignity, and peace.”
