Link to Article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/5/us-secures-release-of-135-political-prisoners-from-nicaragua
A hundred and thirty five political prisoners, including religious leaders and students, arrested by the Nicaraguan government have been freed this past week due to requests and pressure from the U.S government. In a statement on Thursday, the 5th of September, U.S National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said that the number of prisoners in Nicaragua number somewhere in the thousands. This comes due to a series of multi-year crackdowns made by the newly re-elected President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. The 135 prisoners freed by request of the U.S. government were sent to neighboring Guatemala, and are free to relocate elsewhere, including the U.S. The Guatemalan government, and president, Bernardo Arevalo, confirmed this report as the formerly detained Nicaraguans landed in Guatemala early in the morning on thursday.
Sullivan continues in his statement to entail that no individual should be put behind bars for attempts to practice their religious beliefs or their fundamental rights of expression and association. Going on to call out President Ortega and his wife, and vice president, Rosario Murillo, for their “authoritarian” esque rule of the Nicaraguan government. In recent years this has been a recurring platform, as the Ortega administration has received various reprimands on the international stage for its human rights violations and crackdowns against dissenters of the Ortega administration and government.
From a personal perspective, I believe that should the situation continue in Nicaragua, it could set a bad precedent in the region as the various governmental police crackdowns has been a recurring situation in various Centro-American states in the past few years. Whilst some are doing it more fairly and democratically than others, certain governments, like Nicaragua, are doing so without cause and without reprieve—arresting those who they believe to be of dissent. I believe in some regard that this has only come from a continued rise in rampant corruption and crime in Centro-America as of late, primarily due to the rise in the volume of drug and human trafficking to and from the region.
Whilst the U.S remains to be an apparent voice of reason against the Ortega administration and the Nicaraguan government underneath him, the Nicaraguans are seemingly relentlessly continuing their efforts, with upwards of 4,000 organizations and dissenting groups legally banned by the Nicaraguan government. America looks to continue fighting for the freedoms of varying arrested dissenters and now prisoners of the Nicaraguan government. Outside of nation-states disagreeing on the forms of human rights and the violations involved, the United Nations has come out with concerns over the subjects of human rights violations in Nicaragua, believing that it will continue if new law proposals over prosecution of foreign individuals passes in the government.
This relates to class in different ways, where two nation-states’ governments are debating over established conventions and human rights laws constructed by various international treaties and IGOs, like the United Nations. It shows in a way how much the effect of international governmental organizations and the treaties organized by them have an effect on conventional politics.