Nicaragua Quits Central American Parliament as Ortega Government Deepens Its Isolation
Managua denounces the 1987 founding treaty a day after an OAS resolution urged it to free political prisoners
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File photo: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega during a meeting in Managua, July 2024. Photo: State Duma of the Russian Federation, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nicaragua is withdrawing from the Central American Parliament, known as Parlacen, furthering its isolation on the international stage as the government of President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-president Rosario Murillo faces accusations of widespread human rights abuses, Reuters and the Associated Press reported.
In a statement on Saturday, Nicaragua's Foreign Ministry said it had decided to denounce the 1987 treaty establishing the six-country parliament "in the full exercise of its sovereignty", adding that the move would take immediate effect, according to Reuters. The government did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for further comment.
A day after OAS pressure
The announcement came a day after the Organization of American States passed a resolution on Friday calling on Nicaraguan authorities to free political prisoners and restore civil liberties.
Nicaragua left the OAS in 2023, saying the organisation had become a tool for US interventionism, and in 2025 said it would withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council after a UN report urged action over rights violations, Reuters reported. Al Jazeera said the Ortega-Murillo government has accused such international groups of being vehicles for outside intervention.
According to the news site Infobae, Managua notified Parlacen's board and the foreign ministry of Guatemala, the depositary of the treaty, so that other member states could be informed.
Parlacen responds
In a statement issued from Guatemala on Sunday, Parlacen said it would examine the legal, operational, political and diplomatic consequences of Nicaragua's decision, Infobae reported. The body stressed that any change in a member state's participation must comply with international law and the principle that treaties must be honoured in good faith.
Infobae noted that Nicaragua is the second country to signal it wants to leave the regional parliament, after El Salvador.
Years of crisis
Nicaragua has been in political crisis since April 2018, when social protests suppressed by police left more than 350 people dead, 2,000 injured and thousands detained or forced to flee the country, according to Reuters.
Ortega has been accused of using the state to target critics and dissidents, including through imprisonment, torture and exile, Al Jazeera reported. A UN report released in September found the government responsible for at least eight deaths in custody since 2018.
In July, the government announced the country would no longer hold elections. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded at the time by calling the government a "dictatorship".
"Ortega's pledge to abolish elections in Nicaragua proves his cowardice and fear of the Nicaraguan people's will," Rubio wrote, as quoted by Al Jazeera.
Ortega has held power continuously since 2007, following an earlier presidential term in the 1980s.
