Black Alliance for Peace Statement, November 4, 2021
The Black Alliance for Peace condemns the efforts of Congress to manipulate the electoral process in Nicaragua through illegal sanctions, subversion and the coordination of a deliberate misinformation campaign meant to delegitimize the country’s elections even before they take place.
As part of that effort the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “RENACER ACT” 387-35 that is meant to impose more sanctions on the country’s President Daniel Ortega but is really a punitive act against the Nicaraguan people for continuing to support their own political project.
“It is white supremacist, colonial hubris that on the same day that the so-called progressives in the House of Representatives indicated they might abandon their insistence on passing the minimum human rights provisions in the Build Back Better legislation, those same progressives voted to impose more economic sanctions on the second poorest country in the region that, despite its poverty, guarantees universal healthcare and free education, two human rights guarantees that workers in the U.S. are still denied,” states Ajamu Baraka, BAP’s National Organizer
On November 7th, the people of Nicaragua will go to the polls to reaffirm the commitment to their revolutionary democratic project, a project that began in 1979 when the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) defeated a vicious, neocolonial, gangster regime of Anastasio Somoza that was put in power by the United States only to have those efforts reversed by a U.S. imposed counterrevolutionary war that resulted in the electoral defeat of the FSLN in 1990.
With the return of the FSLN to power in 2007, it once again became a target for U.S. aggression and electoral subversion. The U.S. and its European allies questioned the legitimacy of the FSLN despite its overwhelming electoral victories that the U.S. characterized as fraudulent.
Therefore, since it is impossible to get fair and accurate information on Nicaragua from the propaganda organs pretending to be news outlets in the U.S. The Alliance is sending a delegation to observe the process for itself and report back to its membership and the Black communities across the U.S.
Netfa Freeman, member of BAP’s Coordinating Committee who will be on the delegation provided the explanation for why BAP is involved with the process in Nicaragua in the article, “Why Black Revolutionaries Must Stand with the People of Nicaragua,” that “for Black revolutionaries, committed to People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs), that center decolonial self-determination, social justice and socialism, support for these struggles was not an issue of “solidarity” but of a common struggle.”
The U.S. should concentrate on reversing the genocidal policies in the U.S. that has resulted in hundred of thousands of unnecessary deaths from conditions and consequences of Covid in Black and Brown communities and the anti-democratic practices of economic elites that have been systematically looting the public coffers since the economic collapse of 2008-09.
But instead, the U.S. meddles in the internal affairs of countries around the world confirming its international reputation as the number one threat to international peace and number one violator of human rights on the planet.
The “democratic” fascism that the U.S. oligarchy imposes on global South nations is both flagrant and insidious, knowing no geographic boundaries. Instead of repression, BAP demands that the U.S. state adhere to international law and respect the sovereignty of Nicaragua and its right to self-determination. By cooperating with the people of Nicaragua, U.S. authorities just might learn something about human rights and civilization.
*Featured Image: Sandinista followers gather at the Juan Pablo II plaza, to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Managua, Nicaragua, Thursday, July 19th, 2018. (AP Photos/Cristobal Venegas)