14ymedio, Franklin Villavicencio, Managua, 31 January 2019 — Fernando Zamora, general secretary of the National Liberation Party of Costa Rica — a movement that promoted the expulsion of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) from the Socialist International (SI) — stated that the human rights violations committed by the Government of Nicaragua was one of the main reasons for its expulsion in the ranks of the SI, an international organization that brings together 140 Socialist, Labor and Social Democratic parties from around the world.
“We were able to determine that the FSLN was undoubtedly violating the human rights of Nicaraguan citizens, and even of the journalists themselves,” Zamora said in an interview for the program Esta Noche, with Carlos F. Chamorro. “We are witnesses of the exiles, who have told us their reality,” he reiterated.
On Tuesday, over a hundred political parties that make up the SI decided, in a Council in the Dominican Republic, to expel the FSLN for its responsibility for the repression exercised against demonstrators who oppose the regime, and for the support it provides to the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, the main figures of the party.
The motion was presented by the Natural Law Party (PLN), in August, and emerged “as a clamor from the bases of the party,” Zamora said. “They began to demand that we, as leaders, should start doing things to denounce to the world what was happening in Nicaragua.”
In a letter signed by Jorge Pattonni Sáenz, president of the Costa Rican party, it was detailed that “the Government of Nicaragua and in this way its source of inspiration and political organization, the FSLN, violated the rights to life, to personal integrity, health, personal freedom, assembly and association, freedom of expression and access to justice for hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, this being unacceptable and reprehensible from every point of view for our Party and for the fraternal parties of the Socialist International.”
The countries that make up the SI ethics committee determined that the FSLN did not represent democratic values. According to Zamora, there was a consensus among the majority of political movements that voted, especially in Europe. Days before the expulsion, a mission of the European Parliament had arrived in the country to verify the political crisis, which has been going on for nine months. Through a preliminary report, they discarded the hypothesis of a coup d’etat that the regime insists upon.
With regards to the allegations on the part of the FSLN delegate, the Magistrate Francisco Rosales of the Supreme Court of Justice, at the meeting of the SI, remained firm about the discourse of an attempted coup d’etat that the Ortega government is alleging. “They are outdated arguments not only in Nicaragua, but also in the case of Venezuela,” commented the general secretary of the PLN.
The Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), was also one of the first to speak minutes after the deliberation.
“The Council of the Socialist International in the Dominican Republic has decided to expel the FSLN from the organization for the violations of Human Rights and the democratic values committed by the (Daniel) Ortega regime in Nicaragua.Socialism is incompatible with tyranny,” it wrote in its Twitter account.
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