Managua, Nicaragua – Officials from Nicaragua’s governing party said Wednesday they were outraged by new U.S. demands that they halt efforts to impeach the country’s president, calling him the leader of a group of “traitors.”
An official statement issued by the Constitutionalist Liberal Party called the comments by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick “a clear humiliation and outrage by a foreign power.”
It was a historic twist for a party that has long been a close ally of the United States and which partly owes its return to power to a U.S.-backed insurrection against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government of the 1980s.
But as Zoellick made starkly clear, the U.S. government now sees Liberal Party leader Arnoldo Aleman as a threat to democracy in Nicaragua.
Aleman was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a conviction for fraud and money laundering after leaving office in early 2002. Prosecutors claim he diverted tens of millions of dollars to his own accounts.
It turned his supporters against their party’s own president, Enrique Bolanos, and drove them into what Zoellick called “a corrupt pact” with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega meant to weaken Bolanos, who faces the threat of impeachment and removal from office for alleged campaign-finance violations.
Zoellick ended a two-day trip to Nicaragua earlier Wednesday after warning that at least $175 million in U.S. aid would be lost if Bolanos is impeached and removed from office.
He also threatened to strip the U.S. visas of corrupt associates of Aleman, and even to try to keep them from traveling to other foreign countries.
The Liberal Party declaration called Zoellick’s description of Aleman as “a convicted criminal” to be “confused and unjust accusations.”
It described Aleman as a man who “overflows with patriotism, who is accompanied by the consciousness of honor and of justice.”
