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<h1 class="reader-title">Open Letter to Amnesty International by
a Former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience</h1>
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<div class="pane-content">13/06/2018 </div>
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<p>Through this letter I express my unequivocal
condemnation of Amnesty International with
regards to the destabilizing role it has played
in Nicaragua, my country of birth.</p>
<p>I open this letter quoting <a
href="http://www.phap.org/speaker-profiles/1156">Donatella
Rovera</a>, who at the time this quote was
made had been one of Amnesty International’s
field investigators for more than 20 years:</p>
<p>“Conflict situations create highly politicized
and polarized environments (…). Players and
interested parties go to extraordinary lengths
to manipulate or manufacture “evidence” for both
internal and external consumption. A recent,
though by no means the only, example is provided
by the Syrian conflict in what is often referred
to as the “YouTube war,” with a myriad
techniques employed to manipulate video footage
of incidents which occurred at other times in
other places – including in other countries –
and present them as “proof” of atrocities
committed by one or the other parties to the
conflict in Syria.”</p>
<p>Ms. Rovera’s remarks, made in 2014, properly
describe the situation of Nicaragua today, where
even the preamble of the crisis was manipulated
to generate rejection of the Nicaraguan
government. Amnesty International’s maliciously
titled report, <em>Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s
Strategy to Repress Protest, </em>could be
dismantled point by point, but doing so requires
precious time that the Nicaraguan people don’t
have, therefore I will concentrate on two main
points:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>The report completely lacks neutrality and;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Amnesty International’s role is
contributing to the chaos in which the
nation finds itself.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The operating narrative, agreed-upon by the
local opposition and the corporate western
media, is as follows: That president Ortega
sought to cut 5 percent from retirees’ monthly
retirement checks, and that he was going to
increase contributions, made by employees and
employers, into the social security system. The
reforms sparked protests, the response to which
was a government-ordered genocide of peaceful
protestors, more than 60, mostly students. A day
or two after that, the Nicaraguan government
would wait until nightfall to send its police
force out in order to decimate the Nicaraguan
population, night after night, city by city, in
the process destroying its own public buildings
and killing its own police force, to then
culminate its murderous rampage with a Mothers’
Day massacre, and so on.</p>
<p>While the above narrative is not uniformly
expressed by all anti-government actors, the
unifying elements are that the government is
committing genocide, and that the president and
vice-president must go.</p>
<p>Amnesty International’s assertions are mostly
based on either testimony by anti-government
witnesses and victims, or the uncorroborated and
highly manipulated information emitted by
U.S.-financed anti-government media outlets, and
non-profit organizations, collectively known as
“civil society.”</p>
<p>The three main media organizations cited by the
report: Confidencial, 100% Noticias, and La
Prensa, are sworn enemies of the Ortega
government; most of these opposition news media
organizations, along with some, if not all, of
the main non-profits cited by the report, are
funded by the United States, through
organizations like the National Democratic
Institute (NDI) and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED), which has been characterized by
retired U.S. Congressman, Ron Paul, as:</p>
<p>"… an organization that uses US tax money to
actually subvert democracy, by showering funding
on favored political parties or movements
overseas. It underwrites color-coded ‘people’s
revolutions’ overseas that look more like pages
out of Lenin’s writings on stealing power than
genuine indigenous democratic movements."</p>
<p>Amnesty’s report heavily relies on <em>100%
Noticias</em>, an anti-government news outlet
that has aired manipulated and inflammatory
material to generate hatred against the
Nicaraguan government, including footage of <em>peaceful
</em>protesters, unaware of the fact that the
protesters were carrying pistols, rifles, and
were shooting at police officers during
incidents reported by the network as acts of
police repression of opposition marches. On
Mothers’ Day, 100% Noticias reported the
purported shooting of unarmed protesters by
police shooters, including an incident in which
a young man’s brains were spilling out of his
skull. The network followed the report with a
photograph that Ms. Rovera would refer to as an
incident “…which occurred at other times in
other places.” The picture included in the
report was quickly met on social media by links
to past online articles depicting the same
image.</p>
<p>One of the sources (footnote #77) cited to
corroborate the alleged denial of medical care
at state hospitals to patients injured at
opposition events –one of the main accusations
repeated and reaffirmed by Amnesty
International- is a press conference published
by <em>La Prensa</em>, in which the Chief of
Surgery denies claims that he had been fired, or
that hospital officials had denied care to
protesters at the beginning of the conflict. “I
repeat,” he is heard saying, “as the chief of
surgery, I repeat [the] order: to take care of,
I will be clear, to take care of the entire
population that comes here, without
investigating anything at all.” In other words,
one of Amnesty International’s own sources
contradicts one of its report’s main claims.</p>
<p>The above-mentioned examples of manipulated and
manufactured evidence, to borrow the words of
Amnesty’s own investigator, are just a small
sample, but they capture the essence of this
modality of U.S.-sponsored regime change. The
report feeds on claims from those on one side of
the conflict, and relies on deeply corrupted
evidence; it ultimately helps create the mirage
of a genocidal state, in turn generating more
antigovernment sentiment locally and abroad, and
paving the way for ever more aggressive foreign
intervention.</p>
<p><strong>A different narrative</strong></p>
<p>The original reforms to social security were
not proposed by the Sandinista government, but
by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
they were supported by an influential business
group, known as COSEP. They included raising the
retirement age from 60 to 65 and doubling the
number of quotas necessary to get full social
security from 750 to 1500. Among the impacted
retirees, approximately 53,000, are the families
of combatants who died in the armed conflict of
the 1980s, from both the Sandinista army and the
“Contras,” the mercenary army financed by the
United States government in the 1980s, around
the same time the NED was created, in part, to
stop the spread of Sandinismo in Latin America.</p>
<p>The Nicaraguan government countered the IMF’s
reforms by rejecting the cutting out of any
retirees, with a proposed 5% cut to all
retirement checks, an increase in all
contributions to the social security system, and
with fiscal reform that removed a tax-ceiling
that protected Nicaragua’s biggest salaries from
higher taxation. The business sector was
furious, and together with nongovernmental
organizations organized the first marches, using
the pretext of the reforms in the same
manipulative way Amnesty International’s report
explains them: “… the reform increased social
security contributions by both employers and
employees and imposed an additional 5%
contribution on pensioners.”</p>
<p>The continuing narrative, repeated and
validated by Amnesty International, is that the
protesters are peaceful and the genocidal
government is irrationally bent on committing
atrocities in plain sight. Meanwhile, the number
of dead among Sandinista supporters and police
officers continues to rise. The report states
that ballistic investigations suggest that those
shooting at protesters are likely trained
snipers, pointing to government involvement, but
fails to mention that many of the victims are
Sandinistas, regular citizens, and police
officers. It also does not mention that the
“peaceful protesters” have burned down and
destroyed more than 60 public buildings, among
them many City Halls, Sandinista houses,
markets, artisan shops, radio stations, and
more; nor does it mention that the protesters
have established “tranques,” or roadblocks, in
order to debilitate the economy as a tactic to
oust the government. Such “tranques” have become
extremely dangerous scenes where murder,
robbery, kidnapping, and the rape of at least
one child have taken place; a young pregnant
woman whose ambulance wasn’t let through also
died on May 17<sup>th</sup>. All of these crimes
occur daily and are highly documented, but
aren’t included in Amnesty International’s
report.</p>
<p>While the organization is right to criticize
the government’s belittling response to the
initial protests, such response was not entirely
untrue. According to the report, Vice-President
Murillo said, among other things, that “…they
[the protesters] had made up the reports of
fatalities (…) as part of an anti-government
strategy.” What Amnesty leaves out is that
several of the reported dead students did turn
up alive, one of them all the way in Spain,
while others had not been killed at rallies, nor
were they students or activists, including one
who died from a scattered bullet, and another
who died from a heart attack in his bed.</p>
<p>Amnesty’s report also leaves out that many of
the students have deserted the movement,
alleging that there are criminals entrenched at
universities as well as at the various
“tranques,” who are only interested in
destabilizing the nation. Those criminals have
created a state of sustained fear among the
population, imposing “taxes” on those who want
passage, persecuting those who refuse to be
detained, kidnapping them, beating them,
torturing them, and setting their cars on fire.
In a common practice, they undress their
victims, paint their naked bodies in public with
the blue and white of the Nicaraguan flag, and
then set them free, prompting them to run right
before shooting them with homemade mortar
weapons. All of this information, which did not
make the report, is available in numerous videos
and other sources.</p>
<p><strong>Why Nicaragua?</strong></p>
<p>The most basic review of the history between
Nicaragua and the United States will show a
clear rivalry. Beginning in the mid-1800s,
Nicaragua has been resisting U.S. intervention
into the country’s affairs, a resistance that
continued through the 20<sup>th</sup> century,
first with General August C. Sandino’s fight in
the 1920s and 30s, and then with the
Sandinistas, organized as the Sandinista
National Liberation Front (FSLN), which
overthrew the U.S.-supported, 40-year Somoza
family dictatorship in 1979. The FSLN, despite
having gained power through armed struggle,
called for elections shortly after its triumph
in 1984, and eventually lost to yet another
U.S.-supported coalition of right-wing political
parties in 1990. The FSLN once again managed,
aided by pacts made with the church and the
opposition, to win the election of 2006, and has
remained in power since.</p>
<p>In addition to Nicaragua’s close ties with
Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and especially China,
with whom the country signed a contract to build
a canal, the other main reason the United States
is after the Sandinistas, is Nicaragua’s highly
successful economic model, which represents an
existential threat to the neoliberal economic
order imposed by the U.S. and its allies.</p>
<p>Despite always being among the poorest nations
in the American continent and the world,
Nicaragua has managed, since Ortega returned to
power in 2007, to cut poverty by three quarters.
Prior to the protests in April, the country’s
economy sustained a steady annual economic
growth of about 5% for several years, and the
country had the third fastest-growing economy in
Latin America, and was one of the safest nations
in the region.</p>
<p>The government’s infrastructural upgrades have
facilitated trade among Nicaragua’s poorest
citizens; they have created universal access to
education: primary, secondary, and university;
there are programs on land, housing, nutrition,
and more; the healthcare system, while modest,
is not only excellent, but accessible to
everyone. Approximately 90% of the food consumed
by Nicaraguans is produced in Nicaragua, and
about 70% of jobs come from the grassroots
economy –rather than from transnational
corporations- including from small investors
from the United States and Europe, who have
moved to the country and are a driving force
behind the tourism industry.</p>
<p>The audacity of success, of giving its poorest
citizens a life with dignity, of being an
example of sovereignty to wealthier, more
powerful nations, all in direct contradiction to
the neoliberal model and its emphasis on
privatization and austerity, has once again
placed Nicaragua in the crosshairs of U.S.
intervention. Imagine the example to other
nations -their economies already strangled by
neoliberal policies- becoming aware of one of
the poorest countries on earth being able to
feed its people and grow its economy without
throwing its poorest citizens under the iron
boot of capitalism. The United States will never
tolerate such a dangerous example.</p>
<p><strong>In closing</strong></p>
<p>The Nicaraguan government has deficiencies and
contradictions to work on, like all governments,
and as a Sandinista myself I would like to see
the party transformed in various important ways,
both internally and externally. I have refrained
from writing of those deficiencies and
contradictions, however, because the violent
protests and ensuing chaos we have seen are not
the result of the Nicaraguan government’s
shortcomings, but rather, of its many successes;
that inconvenient truth is the reason the United
States and its allies, including Amnesty
International, have chosen to “…create highly
politicized and polarized environments (…). [And
to] go to extraordinary lengths to manipulate or
manufacture “evidence” for both internal and
external consumption.”</p>
<p>At a time when even the Organization of
American States, the United Nations, and the
Vatican have called for peaceful and
constitutional reforms as the only way out of
the conflict, Amnesty International has
continued to beseech the international community
to not “abandon the Nicaraguan people.” Such
biased stance, obscenely bloated on highly
manipulated, distorted, and one-sided
information, has made the terrible situation in
Nicaragua even worse. The loss of Nicaraguan
lives, including the blood of those ignored by
Amnesty International, has been used to
manufacture the “evidence” used in the
organization’s report, which makes the
organization complicit in what future foreign
intervention might fall upon the Nicaraguan
people. It is now up to the organization to
correct that wrong, and to do so in a way that
reflects a firm commitment first and foremost to
the truth, wherever it might fall, and to
neutrality, peace, democracy, and always, to the
sovereignty of every nation on earth.</p>
<p>Sincerely,</p>
<p>Camilo E. Mejia,</p>
<p>Iraq war veteran, resister, and conscientious
objector (2003-2004)</p>
<p>Amnesty International prisoner of conscience
(June 2004)</p>
<p>Born in Nicaragua, citizen of the world</p>
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