By Alternativa Anticapitalista
“Nicaraguans have the right to move and take up residence in any part of the national territory; to enter and leave the country freely”
Nicaraguan Constitution. Article 31.
Less than a month ago, at the height of the pandemic, the Ortega Murillo dictatorship denied the entry of around 500 Nicaraguan migrants who were stranded for more than 10 days on the Peñas Blancas border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, police forces also blocked the entry of migrants trying to return to the country, in the worst conditions. This situation is compounded by the dictatorship’s refusal to guarantee the timely assisted return of around 160 Nicaraguans who are stranded in the Cayman Islands, and 800 more who ,until very recently, were able to enter through Panama; and 80 who are returning from Guatemala. This implies a violation of the fundamental rights of migrants that the State of Nicaragua has assumed under international, constitutional and domestic law, and represents an exception for the flows of Nicaraguan migrants and refugees to Costa Rica.
Although migratory flows between the two countries have a long history, the recent episode is different because of its profile and particular condition: the majority of returned migrants are opponents of the Ortega dictatorship, young men and women of working age, many with higher education; activists from the peasant movement, indigenous people and Afro-descendants from areas affected by the Ortega repression. In short, they are refugees or asylum seekers in other countries, along with hundreds of other irregular economic migrants who, faced with the worsening of the precariousness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the high levels of unemployment and lack of opportunities for integration, decided to return to Nicaragua, whose government violently closed the border.
Ortega’s “retaining wall” [1] on Nicaragua’s southern and northern borders is related to the practice of his entire migration policy since his return to power, which shows a systematic disregard for the fundamental rights of Nicaraguan citizens and mainly of migrants, especially those who are most dispossessed. This is an unprecedented situation in the history of migration between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and it also confirms the contradictory discourse of a “Christian, socialist and supportive” Ortega that does not allow its citizens to return in vulnerable conditions, but invites those who have the capital to invest and European tourists on cruise ships, and prioritizes private profits and not the life of migrants and circulation in return . The FSLN is not Socialist! And as a society inside and outside of Nicaragua we must demand from the Ortega government: Let them in! and also demand him to guarantee that the COVID-19 tests are carried out, free of charge and accompanied by immediate humanitarian attention.
Costa Rica’s answer, how far does it go?
With the outbreak of the socio-political crisis and due to the excessive repression by the Orteguista dictatorship and all its institutions, more than 150,000 people have left Nicaragua in exile. Their main destination has been Costa Rica, a country that since April 2018 has received some 80,000 Nicaraguan asylum seekers, adding to the thousands of migrants who, for economic reasons, were already in an irregular situation in the neighbouring country to the south. So far, the Costa Rican government’s response to the recent crisis has been to provide humanitarian and aid assistance, supported by the solidarity of the Nicaraguan diaspora living in these areas, as well as human rights organizations. However, the central government has not yet developed effective programs that provide comprehensive responses with all the necessary conditions and guarantees of protection.
The President of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, has taken measures to assist those Nicaraguans who remain in Costa Rican territory and who present a negative test of COVID-19; these measures have been facilitated and carried out by the Arias Foundation, an NGO with a director accused of sexual abuse. Migrants who test positive for COVID-19 must be placed in mandatory quarantine at a shelter in the border area. While this humanitarian and assistance-based approach resolves the immediate crisis, it does not call for recognition of the structural causes that lead to return, nor of the exclusionary policies that perpetuate the exploitation of Nicaraguan migrants by both Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and is therefore not a long-term solution to the refugee and returnee crisis.
The Nicaraguan working-migrant class contributes a significant part of the Gross Domestic Product to Nicaragua and Costa Rica [2], for example contributing 10.1% of Nicaragua’s GDP in 2017 through remittances. In Costa Rica, Nicaraguan migrants and workers contributed 12% of the GDP in 2018, mainly in the agricultural, care and construction industries. Despite this, in neither country are they guaranteed universal access to health, or quality social security. The political will of both governments, like many others, is focused on preserving the privileges of pharmaceutical companies, the privatized, outsourced health system and big capital. As long as this does not change, it will continue to be an urgent need to respond with all the conditions and inputs for healthcare that will make it possible to safeguard the lives of citizens during this pandemic, caused in turn by the general decomposition of the capitalist system.
Health is a right, not a privilege, regardless of our immigration status or in which territory we find ourselves. It is the duty of all states to ensure the safe return of their citizens, even those who today present symptoms and contagion of COVID-19, perhaps even more so, because of their need for immediate medical attention.
Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala: Governments and Capitalist Complicity
For its part, the government of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras, a country that expels its own people (10% of the population of Honduras are migrants[3]), has created a retaining wall against Nicaraguan returnees from Guatemala. Every Nicaraguan who approaches Honduran borders is not allowed to transit through the country unless they have an entry permit issued by the Nicaraguan government.
It so happens that, as of July 22, 2020, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health, by ministerial decree 358-2020, indicates that: “all travelers must present a negative result of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR-rt) test in real time for COVID-19, carried out in a period of no more than 72 hours before entering the country. This test can cost up to 160 dollars, a figure that most returned migrants cannot afford, and as a result they are forced to remain stranded in conditions of total vulnerability on the Aguas Calientes border with Honduras, without any of the two Central American governments assuming responsibility.
In hindsight: the first group of Nicas to encounter this retaining wall were 92 labor migrants who attempted to return from El Salvador in April 2020 [4] The second group of 44 people, 38 of them exiled to Guatemala [5] encountered a different wall, the one imposed by Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras: after spending two weeks on the Aguas Calientes border between Guatemala and Honduras, most managed to transit back to Nicaragua. However, some did not obtain Ortega’s “return permit”, and on August 1, 64-year-old José Herrero Osorio, infected with COVID-19 and an elderly man with diabetes, died in Chiquimula, Guatemala, on the border with Honduras.
In this way, the JOH government in Honduras serves as an ally to Ortega, blocking the passage of returnees during the pandemic, in the same way that it has tried to block the caravans of Honduran migrants before. JOH and Ortega’s actions are an attack on human dignity. Presidents who – discursively – call themselves opposites in their political spectra, are allied to exclude and violate the rights of Central American migrants. These classist and exclusionary policies force migrants to remain in inhumane conditions of overcrowding and hunger, exposed to unhealthy conditions that increase the risk of contracting COVID-19. Faced with this situation, people have articulated forms of solidarity to support each other humanely at the borders.
Ortega the Capitalist: Migratory Necropolitics
“Everyone has the right to freedom of circulation and residence within the territory of the State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Universal Declaration of Human Rights . 13
Let’s not get confused: The political practice of the Ortega government, and its institutions since 2007, is clearly capitalist, extractive, patriarchal and colonialist; its migration policies are no exception. Although Nicaragua has Law No. 761 on migration with a focus on human rights, the Ortega regime has established a deathly policy that violates fundamental human rights. This directly affects migrants and refugees on Nicaraguan territory, and more recently exiled Nicaraguans who tried to return to their country.
Some concrete examples of this policy are the denial of entry to hundreds of Cuban, Haitian and extra-continental migrants since 2015 [6]; and the physical, psychological and sexual violence that the regime’s “security” forces have exercised against migrants in transit through Nicaragua, and also the criminalization of the solidarity actions of the Nicaraguan people who supported them. Here are more examples: the death by drowning of 8 migrants of African descent not yet identified in Lake Cocibolca in 2016[7], the murder of Cameroonian migrant Mbang Atanga Azhefor by the army in 2017[8], the police attack on the community of El Tamarindo, Carazo for helping migrants abandoned by “coyotes” on the beach[9]; or the case of teacher Nilamar Alemán, who was arrested and sentenced for providing humanitarian assistance to a migrant of Congolese origin and her minor daughter while they were transiting through Nicaragua, to the north[10]. In addition to this, there are more silent systemic violations, such as the fact that Nicaragua has practically stopped granting refugee status to applicants from northern Central America since 2016, even though this goes against its responsibilities to the international community.
[11] All these examples are precedents of the current situation and make it clear that Ortega has served as a “retaining wall” in the service of the United States, and that as a good capitalist he seeks to satisfy the interests of these northern imperialist bosses, and other geopolitical powers in the region, in order to maintain economic and political benefits for his own government. Very similar to the anti-immigrant policies implemented in the north of Central America and Mexico, to dismantle the migrant caravans in 2018 made up of more than 4000 migrants on foot [12]; to prevent them from reaching the US according to Trump’s demands [13].
Ortega insists on maintaining his false “Christian, socialist and solidarity” discourse, but in practice it strengthens the dynamics of the most brutal capitalism, which predisposes the lives of citizens and migrants. For example, in 2019 it launched a deceptive “Assisted Voluntary Return Program”[14] that supposedly guaranteed security conditions for migrants and refugees who had left the country in 2018. However, the conditions then and now contradict the possibility of returning to a country governed by the dictatorship’s paramilitarism, persecution and permanent siege, political imprisonment, excessive police violence, selective cold-blooded murder, high cost of living and unemployment, in a Nicaragua where the lives of its citizens are worthless, only to be exploited as cheap labour by the companies and industries of big capital.
In Nicaragua, more than 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (Nicaragua’s GDP was US$12.5 billion in 2019) comes from remittances, and these were the only positive macroeconomic indicators in 2019 [15]. Therefore, while its internal policies legitimize and promote labor exploitation at the hands of national and foreign capital, the Ortega government continues to benefit from the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, especially those in irregular conditions, in order to obtain the profits from the exploitation of the people, with family fragmentation and uprooting in between.
UNAB and ACJD: functional reformers of the regime
A few weeks ago, UNAB promoted aid campaigns for returning Nicaraguans, proposing denunciations to international bodies that have so far failed to do anything substantial against Ortega, in addition to channelling donations from Nicaraguans in the national territory and the diaspora to buy evidence and other humanitarian assistance, and to resolve the immediate needs of those who encounter the migratory obstacle in their transit. In view of the precariousness and urgent need to provide assistance to the migrant caravans, transitory solutions are provided, but without proposals to address the structural causes that lead these migrants to attempt to return under the harshest conditions of State repression and abandonment.
There are more than 80,000 Nicaraguans in Costa Rica alone, it is not sustainable to feed the profits of governments, local pharmaceutical companies and private transnationals that acquire the inputs for the development and production of PCR-rt tests at very low cost or donated by the CABEI, and then sell them for several times their value/cost of production, the Ortega government in Nicaragua represents the most cynical example of this situation.
The core solution to face this pandemic must be the generation of public policies that provide in-depth responses and propose to organize at all levels against systemic violence and inequality. We are a vulnerable region for the capitalist policies of national bourgeois states. Let us promote a plan to mobilize the Central American peoples, who are precarious and marginalized, so that Ortega, and other current rulers, do not continue to profit from the needs of the people, and open the door to all migrants who want to return to their country. While this is happening, the governments of the countries must respond by guaranteeing dignified conditions and rights to our Nicaraguan brothers and sisters.
Let’s organize international struggle and action!
From Alternativa Anticapitalista, we argue that the struggle of the oppressed peoples of Central America and the world are interconnected, and that our processes of struggle must also be united, which is why it is urgent to call for coordinated international resistance, which does not go through institutional bureaucracies. We emphasize that national and transnational political and economic elites have organized to perpetuate our oppression, and in the face of this:
We denounce the international and regional organizations that are Ortega’s accomplices – SICA, PARLACEN, OAS, and the governments of the region – for their lax position that favors the perpetuation of the dictatorial regime in Nicaragua.
We call on the peoples of Central America and the world to publicly express their solidarity with the struggle of the Nicaraguan people, and to denounce by all possible means the systematic violations of the Ortega dictatorship against the people of Nicaragua, and now especially to denounce the violence against the refugees who are trying to return without decent conditions to enter the country.
We call for the activation of a militant internationalist organization to defeat these governments that exploit us and leave us at the mercy of a virus, which in the face of capitalist voracity has become a pandemic. For the broadest unity in action throughout Central America. In this solidarity lies our struggle.
It is urgent to promote the creation of Emergency Committees that democratically discuss plans of action and decision making to guarantee all the conditions and resources necessary in the face of the pandemic, in every hospital and workplace, neighborhoods, communities, markets, educational centers and other spaces of interaction.
From the International Socialist League and our organization for the region, Alternativa Anticapitalista, in view of the prevailing need to organize ourselves under the broadest class, worker and student solidarity, with an overcoming program to achieve that the Central American governments provide the COVID-19 tests for free, ensure safe transit for migrants and people seeking refuge, and all the conditions for necessary health care. Let us fight for the implementation of a Single Health System, under the control of health workers and doctors, that is made available to all citizens, with a budget based on cutting the link with the IMF and the non-payment of the foreign debt. Health is not a business, it is a basic human right.
1] Results of the alleged “Retaining Wall” against Organized Crime in Nicaragua https://www.lavozdelsandinismo.com/nicaragua/2019-10-03/nicaragua-destaca-en-onu-resultados-de-estrategia-muro-de-contencion/
Migrants trapped in the “retaining wall” in Nicaragua https://rebelion.org/migrantes-atrapados-en-muro-de-contencion-de-nicaragua/
[2] Sources: https://www.efe.com/efe/america/economia/remesas-de-ee-uu-hacia-nicaragua-crecieron-un-11-5-en-2017/20000011-3550813, https://www.ameliarueda.com/nota/inmigrantes-aportan-12-por-ciento-pib-costa-rica-estudio-ocde
[3] https://datosmacro.expansion.com/demografia/migracion/emigracion/honduras
Main violence generating forced displacement
[4] https://confidencial.com.ni/regimen-de-ortega-impide-retorno-al-pais-a-92-nicas-varados-en-el-salvador/
5] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3227757020636565 44 Nicaraguan migrants stranded on the Guatemalan-Honduran border https://www.prensalibre.com/guatemala/migrantes/salida-de-nicaraguenses-evidencia-pocas-condiciones-de-asilo-en-guatemala/
Nicaraguan refugees leave Guatemala with few conditions of asylum
[6] https://www.univision.com/especial/migrantesdeotromundo/pasos-prohibidos/senderos-clandestinos-hacia-nicaragua.html
[7] https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/08/03/america/1470177870_529872.html
[8] https://www.laprensa.com.ni/2017/12/22/nacionales/2350257-costa-rica-vincula-camerunes
[9] https://confidencial.com.ni/antimotines-reprimen-comunidad-auxiliar-migrantes/
[10] https://confidencial.com.ni/nilamar-aleman-el-coraje-de-la-maestra-solidaria/
11] Personal communication with Immigration Lawyer. 2018.
12] https://rosanjose.iom.int/site/es/blog/las-caravanas-migrantes-explicadas
[13] http://lis-isl.org/2018/11/01/centroamerica-la-caravana-migrante-desafia-las-amenazas-de-trump/
[14] https://www.sandinistak.org/2019/04/15/programa-grun-sobre-retorno-voluntario-asistido-de-nicaraguenses-en-el-exterior/
[15] https://confidencial.com.ni/el-impacto-de-la-pandemia-sobre-las-remesas-en-nicaragua-y-america-latina/