by John Perry

In the dying days of his administration, President Biden must have needed a reminder by his officials on November 22. He had to decide whether Nicaragua still poses an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. Presumably he agreed that it does, because he renewed its status as a “national security threat” for a further year, repeating the designation that first began under the last Trump presidency.

As figures from the Latin America Security and Defense Network show, this “threat” comes from a state which spends less of its national income on defense than almost any other country in the hemisphere. It even spends slightly less than neighboring Costa Rica, which has no army. Its total national income (GDP) is the equivalent of a small US city. Its seven million people have the second lowest income per capita in the region.

What “unusual and extraordinary threat” does Nicaragua pose to a country with 50 times its population and the world’s biggest military budget, whose southern border is in any case nearly 2,000 miles away? According to the White House press release, the first threat is the Nicaraguan government’s “violent response” to a coup attempt that took place over six years ago and was, it omits to mention, instigated by the US. This attempted justification turns the story of what happened on its head. The uprising that shook Nicaragua lasted roughly three months, resulted officially in 251 deaths (including 22 police officers; others put the total deaths as higher) and over 2,000 injured. It allegedly “caused $1 billion in economic damages,” and led to an economic collapse. (After years of continuous growth, GDP fell by 3.4% in 2018). What other government would not have responded to such a damaging attack on its country?

In Washington’s view, further “threats” arise because Nicaragua’s government is “undermining democracy”, using “indiscriminate violence” against its citizens and destabilizing its economy through “corruption”. Quite apart from the fact that these are gross distortions of reality in Nicaragua and are in any case blatantly hypocritical, nothing in the press release shows how – even if true – these conditions could present any threat to the US, let alone an “unusual and extraordinary” one.

Or could it be something else? Recently, in response to Nicaragua’s support for Palestinian liberation, the Israeli regime has made allegations that “radical Iranian forces and terror groups operate freely” in the country, again with no evidence, presumably hoping to encourage Washington to add Nicaragua to the list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. However, this is not mentioned in the White House press release.

Nevertheless, perhaps Nicaragua’s “threat” to the US comes from its international relations? General Laura Richardson, until recently the head of the US Southern Command, put the blame for Russia’s “malign activities” in the region on its links with Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. Nicaragua’s growing relationship with China is also seen as a problematic, with Taiwan warning that China’s planned deep-water port for Bluefields in Nicaragua will be its “naval outpost” in Central America. However, Nicaragua is hardly alone in developing close links with major powers seen by Washington as key adversaries. Peru’s Chinese-built port is also viewed as a threat by General Richardson. Many other countries in the region, including Brazil, now have close ties with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. In part, the drive behind these links is a desire to be less dependent on the US and insure against its economic sanctions.

Of course, if any country is showing threatening behavior here, it is the US itself. Its sponsoring of the 2018 coup attempt involved the US embassy in Managua and funding from bodies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, which (as they boasted at the time) trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the coup. Washington has been trying to undermine Nicaragua’s Sandinista government since the moment it returned to power in 2007. It has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the outcomes of democratic elections, scores of Nicaraguan officials have been sanctioned, development loans via bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been blocked for the last six years, Nicaragua’s government has been falsely accused of “preying on migrants”, and its people have been encouraged to migrate to the US. The State Department advises tourists not to visit a country which, according to an international Gallup poll, is “the most peaceful place on earth”.

Nicaragua has suffered 17 years of continuous bullying by its near neighbor but this, of course, is only a short episode in a history of US intervention that began in 1854 when US warships were sent to threaten Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Later it included two decades of the country’s occupation by US Marines, Washington’s support for the Somoza dictatorship for four more decades and then, under the Reagan administration, its sponsoring of the “Contra” war which cost 30,000 Nicaraguan lives in the 1980s. Reparations ordered by the World Court for the economic damage caused by that war were, of course, never paid.

So, not only is Washington the guilty party in terms of threatening behavior, but Biden’s declaration and his administration’s policies towards Nicaragua augment this by labelling Nicaragua as a pariah state, which holds “pantomime” elections and where its people flee “communism” and “political persecution”. This labelling is, of course, then repeated by corporate media.

In 2025, Nicaragua can expect new threats from Washington. Marco Rubio is penciled in as the Trump administration’s Secretary of State, acting as Trump’s “sharpshooter” against governments such as those in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. One target is likely to be the remittances sent by migrants in the US. As in neighboring Central American countries, they account for a quarter of Nicaragua’s national income, and could soon fall both because Trump plans to tax them and because he promises to deport large tranches of those migrants, who will return, jobless, to their home countries.

Those searching for evidence of the “threat” which the country poses to US interests might usefully look at developments in Nicaragua itself. For example, a recent report by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) showed that it is one of the countries in the region that invests most, proportionate to its population, in public health services. Health care is free in Nicaragua and it has by far the largest number of public hospitals in Central America, many of them recently built or modernized. ECLAC’s figures show that life expectancy in Nicaragua is one of the longest in Latin America, despite its income per capita being among the lowest. ECLAC showed that Nicaragua spends a high proportion of its national budget on social investment, and this is reflected not only in comprehensive health care, but in its advances in education, social housing, transport, electricity and drinking water coverage and its transition to renewable energy. The Sandinista government’s current plan to reduce poverty shows that its initial efforts led to it falling from 48.3 per cent of Nicaraguans in 2005 to 24.9 per cent in 2016. Clearly those who planned the 2018 coup attempt saw the “threat” presented by improved public services, since their violence deliberately targeted town halls, health centers, universities, schools and facilities for pregnant women (casas maternas).

In 1985, at the height of the Contra war, the aid agency Oxfam published a book entitled Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? At the time, Nicaragua’s achievements in raising literacy levels, improving food security and bringing public services to remote rural areas were legendary, but necessarily much limited by a US trade embargo and the US-funded attacks on health and education facilities and their workers. Perhaps in 2024, after a popularly elected government has had 17 years to develop public services and reduce poverty, with results obvious to all, Nicaragua really is the “good example” that Washington finds so threatening.