OAS Meets Thursday in Special Session on Nicaragua

The 34 member states will consider a proposal to create a special commision for Nicaragua, something Daniel Ortega has already dismissed.  

HAVANA TIMES – The Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) will address this Thursday at 10:00 a.m. ET a draft resolution sponsored by eight countries, which pursues the creation of a “special commission” for Nicaragua, reported dpa news.

The extraordinary session was convened Tuesday at the request of those eight countries, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the United States, Mexico and Peru.

The draft resolution indicates that the mandate of that commission “will be to contribute to the search for peaceful and sustainable solutions to the situation that is registered in Nicaragua.”

They are the same countries who promoted the resolution approved on July 18, by a vote of 21-3, in which the OAS asked President Daniel Ortega to hold early elections.

Somewhere between 300 and 450 persons have died in Nicaragua, according to documentation figures from human rights organizations, in the context of protests against the Ortega-Murillo government.

The protests began on April 18 after an unpopular social security reform decree by Ortega, to which the president responded with deadly repression. Days later Ortega repealed the reform, also by decree, but the protests and increased repression escalated quickly. Demonstrators upped the ante demanding Ortega leave office.

Nicaragua’s political opposition denounced fraud in the municipal elections of 2008 and in the presidential elections of 2011. In the 2016 elections, in which Ortega was re-elected with 72.5 percent of the vote, the main opposition alliance was banned from participating.