Sergio Ramírez challenges Brazil’s OAS vote on Nicaragua

Sergio Ramírez has reminded Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of a speech the Brazilian president gave in Managua in 1991, when Lula said political power should be determined by citizens’ votes.

In an open letter, the Nicaraguan writer challenged Brazil’s position at the Organization of American States on Nicaragua’s political situation, especially after Daniel Ortega announced plans to eliminate elections. Ramírez set Lula’s current stance against the principles he said the president defended at the First Congress of the Sandinista Front.

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There was only one kind of democracy, the one in which power was determined by citizens’ votes.

Ramírez recalled that Lula had rejected the left’s distinction between “proletarian democracy” and “bourgeois democracy,” arguing that there was only one democracy, based on the vote of citizens. Those remarks angered Ortega and the party’s orthodox supporters, Ramírez wrote. He described how Edmundo Jarquín later brought him to Lula’s hotel, where they spent hours discussing the future of a Latin American left that “had to be democratic or it would not be.”

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It had to be democratic or it would not be.

Ramírez has lived in exile in Spain since 2021, after Ortega’s government and Rosario Murillo expelled him and stripped him of his Nicaraguan citizenship. He wrote that those who accompanied Lula in Managua are now also in exile because they opposed what he called the “two-headed dictatorship” of Ortega and his wife, describing their rule as a satrapy without precedent in Nicaragua’s history.

The writer urged Lula to take a firm position in defense of democracy and avoid allowing relations between Brazil and Nicaragua to create a negative perception among Nicaraguans. He also warned that Brazil could face consequences for supporting Managua’s position at the OAS.

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Two-headed dictatorship