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image source, Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS
Arturo McFields has been the Nicaraguan ambassador to the OAS since October 2021.
The Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Arturo McFields, left office this Wednesday following denouncing that the government of his country, headed by Daniel Ortega, is a “dictatorship.”
The Nicaraguan Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated in a statement that “Mr. Arturo McFields does not represent usfor which no statement of yours is valid”.
The Foreign Ministry indicated that the new representative of Nicaragua before the OAS is the ambassador Francisco Campbell Hooker.
For his part, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted on his Twitter account that McFields had resigned from the OAS, and congratulated him for having the courage to “give voice to the millions of Nicaraguan compatriots who are waiting for a return to democracy.
McFields, who was appointed by Ortega as the representative of the Central American country before the organization in October 2021, criticized his government in a virtual meeting of the Permanent Council.
“Denouncing the dictatorship of my country is not easy, but continuing to remain silent and defending the indefensible is impossible“, said.
“People inside the government and people outside the government are tired; Tired of the dictatorship and its actionsand there are going to be more and more who say ‘enough'”, he added.
“Since 2018, Nicaragua has become the only country in Central America where there are no printed newspapers, there is no freedom to publish a simple tweet, a comment on social networks. There are no human rights organizations. There is not one. There is no All were closed, expelled or closed. There are no independent political parties, there are no credible elections, there is no separation of powers, but powers that beMcFields said.
After knowing the message of McFields, the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry issued a statement in which it said that they did not recognize him as their ambassador.
“He does not represent us, for which no statement of his is valid,” reads the note, which ensures that the country’s ambassador to the OAS “duly accredited” is Francisco Campbell Hooker, current Nicaraguan ambassador to the US .
Imprisonment of opposition leaders
image source, Getty Images
Ortega has been in power in Nicaragua for 15 years.
Ortega began his fourth consecutive term in Nicaragua in January -the fifth in total- following elections questioned by the majority of the international community before the imprisonment of theopposition leaders.
He was elected president for the first time in 1984, lost power in the 1990 elections and in 2007 he was elected once more. Since then he has remained the head of state of Nicaragua.
After the last elections, held in 2021 and rejected by the OAS General Assembly for not having “democratic legitimacy”, Ortega announced his country’s departure from the American body.
The OAS withdrawal process takes two years from the time it is requested.
McFields said in his statement that days before Nicaragua announced his departure from the organization, he had a meeting with the Foreign Ministry and a team of presidential advisers in which he asked them to consider “releasing at least 20 elderly political prisoners and another 20 common criminals whose health deserved and deserves special consideration”.
“This would be, I told them, something humanitarian and politically intelligent. (…) Nobody listened to me. At that moment I was told: ‘We are not even going to take note of that comment because you know what can happen. And he remembers, right, the more you give him, the more he wants,'” the rep said.
McFields is a former journalist who has been working as a diplomat in Washington since 2011. He had assumed the ownership of the representation before the OAS shortly following the Permanent Assembly of that organization asked Ortega to release imprisoned political leaders.
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