Spaces are opening and closing

In a historic ruling, the International Court of Justice has finally recognized Nicaragua’s right to over 90,000 square kilometers of the Caribbean Sea off our coasts as an exclusive economic zone, nearly doubling the country’s size. Until November 19 that entire area was under Colombia’s sovereignty. Paradoxically, while international law is opening spaces of maritime sovereignty to us, our own national government is increasingly closing down our spaces of citizens’ sovereignty.

Envío team

The November 19 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague overjoyed Nicaragua and deeply upset Colombia. It came only two days before Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) proclaimed the definitive results of the November 4 municipal elections, awarding 134 of the country’s 153 mayoral seats to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Ironically, we won “the other Nicaragua in the sea” just as we were losing, perhaps definitively this time, our confidence in elections. We had only begun to gain that confidence in 1984 after a half century of dictatorship, then embraced it wholeheartedly in 1990 when the FSLN made history by being the first Nicaraguan government to hand over the presidency peacefully after losing those elections.

“Pay any price”

With 100% of the vote tallies from all polling places in their hands, the Liberal candidates demonstrated that they had won in Nueva Guinea, Ciudad Darío, Matiguás and El Almendro. For two weeks they demonstrated the fraud committed in their municipalities, formally challenging the preliminary results and presenting suits to have the vote count reviewed. It was all in vain. They lacked the capacity to reveal what had happened in more than 60 municipalities where the Institute for Democracy and Development (IPADE) verified that the popular will hadn’t been respected and serious anomalies had been practiced.

These elections will be remembered as having the lowest turnout since Nicaragua’s recent electoral history began in 1984. Abstention estimates vary widely, even by the country’s two election observer organizations, which after being barred by the government from officially observing the past two elections have trained thousands of voters to report in by cell phone. Ethics & Transparency estimates 70% abstention and IPADE 54.5%. Despite the visible lack of lines at polling centers shown on TV, the CSE insists that abstention was only 42.7%, with CSE president Roberto Rivas lauding it as the highest voter turnout in municipal elections since they started being held separately from presidential elections in 2002.

The electoral authorities repeated many of the stratagems they had perfected in the 2008 municipal elections and 2011 general elections to create, alter or hide the results. The certainty that this would happen again largely explains the voter abstention.

The government admittedly had many municipalities legitimately sown up, either because of good government by FSLN mayors in the previous term, or because of the government’s handout of goods in its social programs. But voters had made it fully aware that it didn’t have a chance in a number of traditionally Liberal municipalities. These are the ones in what is known as the “contra corridor,” which runs down through the center and center-east area of the country, and were targeted during the campaign by both the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) and the Independent Liberal Party (PLI). The FSLN, which has developed a real taste for absolute power, decided to win those munici¬palities by any means necessary, following the advice of the late Tomás Borge, one of the party’s founders: “I told Daniel Ortega: ‘We can pay any price, say what they will. The only thing we can’t do is lose power; whatever they say, we’ll do whatever we have to. The highest price would be to lose power.”

President Ortega’s main objective in these elections was to reverse the local power structure in historically Liberal mayor’s offices, using fraud and then following up with an inflow of resources, not to mention the element that won him the 2006 presidential elections: keeping the Right divided. The use of such ploys is implicit recognition of its minority support in a geographically large but sparsely populated area of the country. In the words of Gabriel Álvarez, opposition activist and expert on Nicaraguan law, “Ortega knows he’s weaker that the rest of us recognize.”

“Doing what we have to do”

The new maneuver reportedly used to favor the FSLN in these elections was sending the Army and the Police in to skew the results. The Nicaraguan Human Rights Center (CENIDH) and various media received denunciations from a number of rural municipalities in the northern part of the country on election day itself. The population claimed to have seen contingents of uniformed and armed military personnel ranging from riot police to regular police officers and soldiers who were believed to have been sent there to vote and then sent off to vote again in other places.

It is in fact legal for soldiers and police to vote wherever they have been posted, which is positive because it ensures they will not be disenfranchised if deployed around voting time. It is also true that both police and soldiers were billeted in areas where violence was anticipated—precisely the Liberal strongholds in the central part of the country—so it is possible they were not sent just to vote there and also possible that they didn’t vote twice. But the problem is that today’s FSLN government is not the same one that took power idealistically and with recognized revolutionary mystique in 1979. While many people had higher hopes, it has proven itself notoriously non-transparent and has lost credibility with all but the most loyal FSLN core. As a result, much of the population is quick to believe the worst when such denunciations are made.

The Sandinista origins of the Army and Police, the fact that the President is also commander-in-chief of both institutions and the failure of the heads of both to either deny or clear up these accusations make them especially serious because they compromise the hard-earned credibility enjoyed by both armed institutions until recently. Whatever the truth behind the charges, the presence of sizable military contingents voting in places where the FSLN had never won did indeed change the local political correlation.

Nueva Guinea,
November 18

The resistance to the apparently fraudulent results led to the burning of one mayor’s office and several other public buildings in San Nicolás and La Paz Centro; two dead and several wounded in Ciudad Darío; three weeks of protests and the death of a young FSLN member in Matiguás, and four massive demonstrations in Nueva Guinea in support of Denis Obando, the Liberal mayoral candidate who ran for reelection, whom the population—and reportedly the monitors’ tallies—consider the real winner.

The last of these demonstrations was held on November 18. That day police riot squads attacked and besieged the Liberal campaign headquarters. They also rounded up 60 demonstrators and ordinary residents and took them to police installations where hooded police officers viciously beat the men and sexually humiliated the women. The following day a CENIDH team went out to Nueva Guinea, which is 292 km east of Managua, and gathered dozens of denunciations of these events. “We found a terrorized popula-tion,” CENIDH lawyer Wendy Flores told envío.

Days later, on November 28, the US-financed Movement for Nicaragua (MpN) presented other testimonies and denunciations that had been gathered in Nueva Guinea by various civil society organizations on November 25 and 26.

One of the 15 sworn statements from a man included this statement: “They beat me so hard I lost consciousness. After that I don’t remember anything. When I regained consciousness they continued beating me and said, ‘You Liberal son of a bitch, here you’re going to find out what terror is!’”

Another one, this time from a woman, said, “When they took me to the police station they wanted to beat me but I told them I was pregnant. They decided not to beat me, and instead they said, “But you’re going to see how people suffer here. And they made me watch how they beat the male prisoners. Then I fainted.”

In the earlier protests against what was believed to be fraud in the 2008 municipal elections, shock groups organized by the FSLN had hit and stoned the opposition. This time National Police riot squads accompanied these same shock groups in various municipalities or acted directly against the demonstrators.

The use of riot police to repress opposition members who repudiate the electoral results or to stop opposition protests from taking place has been another “novelty” of these elections, as CENIDH verified in the case of 500 riot police deployed to the small community of San Juan de Limay. Their presence is much more intimidating because they are dressed in black from head to foot, with helmets, bullet-proof vests and kneepads.

Accelerated deterioration

Police repression of Nueva Guinea’s Liberal population was characterized by CENIDH and by the Permanent Human Rights Commission as “inhuman acts and torture.” In the meeting called by the MpN, political scientist Félix Maradiaga said, “I don’t believe that the 15,000 permanent and volunteer police officers in the National Police of Nicaragua approve of the acts of police violence being documented up to now.” He cited others prior to the events in Nueva Guinea. “There are thousands of police officers who risk their lives every day to secure the tranquility of the citizenry,” he added. “But the accelerated deterioration of the police institution as a result of turning a large part of its members into party followers and their collaboration with FSLN activists in acts of political violence constitute a degeneration that is affecting the entire police corps.” CENIDH president Vilma Núñez didn’t mince words: “A country that has a rotten police force is a completely exposed country.”

When questioned about the events headed by her subordinates in Nueva Guinea, National Police Chief Aminta Granera replied, “What we’ve been doing is avoiding clashes between the two groups… We would prefer not to, but when there is no acceptance of doing things peacefully, force has to be used.” Later, when pressured by the media and by the power social networks demonstrated in this case by disseminating information, the Police promised an investigation.

Nueva Guinea has become the most emblematic case of this new fraud. The four years of Denis Obando’s term as mayor (2008-2012) have left signs of progress, more organization and a transparent municipal administration that has won him recognition and awards. He is convinced by his party’s vote tallies that his bid for reelection had enough backing at the polls to win and the massive demonstrations of support when he challenged the usurpation filled him with euphoria. In the days prior to the disproportionate repression of November 18, he crowed that “Nueva Guinea will be the paradigm in which many sparks will fly, demonstrating that Nicaragua must be respected!”

Nonetheless, the brutal behavior of the riot police showed him the inequality between a disarmed civic protect and the unquestioned use of disproportionate violence to impede it. It revealed the government’s determination to impose itself “whatever they may say.”

The governing party’s incursion by fraud and force into traditionally Liberal municipalities that became contra territory in the eighties reveals that the FSLN has decided to play with fire, which could have very negative consequences. After listening to the indignation triggered by the alteration of the voting results and by the police repression, worried voices in CENIDH are predicting that “the resistance won’t end here.” It is rumored in Nueva Guinea that people aren’t going to remain silent when the FSLN mayor takes office in January.

This is not the
end of the story

Nueva Guinea is a sprawling and very productive municipality, home to 20% of the country’s cattle herd. It is one of the three centers from which cattle on the hoof are exported to Venezuela by Albanisa, one of the businesses of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA). It also produces nearly 80% of Nicaragua’s export of roots and tubers and has very promising prospects for the cultivation of fine quality cacao and other organic agricul¬tural products.

The first economic effect of the fraud in Nueva Guinea has come even before the mayor’s office changes hands. US Agency for International Development will not execute three projects programmed for 2013 and valued at around US$1.25 million: a sports field, property appraisals and road signing. “These people,” Mayor Obando said of USAID, “are transparent, they like the authorities to be elected legally and they have been upset by what happened.” He predicted the further loss of other development projects that were being concretized.

The risk of
playing with fire

Could playing with fire bring other kinds of consequences? There is a very good risk that it could. When people say—as they did in Ciudad Darío, where riot police bullets protecting FSLN sympathizers killed two men protesting the fraud—that they won’t file charges with the police because “they won’t do anything,” They tend instead to take justice into their own hands.

What is commonly called “the law of the bush” in rural zones could catch on in those areas. What is understood by justice amounts to wreaking revenge, settling scores. A few years ago a group called the “avenging band” emerged in Nueva Guinea. It was made up of nearly two dozen armed men who sought “justice” by killing cattle rustlers. Local leaders of former combatants in the armed Resistance—the contras—could also be revived and have already been announcing that they will act against the government.

The closing of political spaces usually generates desperation in the mind of humiliated populations that leads to imagining and carrying out violent actions, especially if they know their way around weapons and have had an organized military experience. It is shocking and regrettable that those at the head of the governing party today either haven’t learned that or are willing to subject Nicaragua to it again after everything this country has lived through.

Has the electoral
system really collapsed?

Collapse was the most repeated word in all analyses of this once again negative electoral experience. But the fact that something has collapsed doesn’t mean it has stopped functioning. A system can collapse, a civilization can collapse, transportation can collapse, a human body or a single organ inside the body can collapse… But Nicaragua’s electoral system is still functioning as nothing less than the fourth branch of government, with unappealable rulings, just like those of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It consumes a major slice of the national budget, houses a sizable number of very well paid officials and has now produced four elections in a row in which it is accused of having imposed the results it was assigned to produce by hook or by crook. And those returns in turn have permitted the current political system itself to continue functioning.

It’s less a collapse than a perverse mutation in which the electoral system acts completely in the interests of the governing party. The mutation had its origin in the Ortega-Alemán pact over a decade ago and has produced a new and dangerous species: an electoral system that doesn’t always let you vote, doesn’t permit those it lets vote elect and doesn’t guarantee democracy but exists to ensure the continuation in power of one party, the FSLN. There is no similar species anywhere else in Latin America today.

The struggle undertaken by virtually the whole of society—of course with the exception of the presidential couple and the hard core supporters of the governing party—to change the top authorities of the Supreme Electoral Council has been increasingly huge, but it seems nearly impossible, and also useless. The mutation in the electoral system has given life to a totally decomposed institutionality, rotten from top to bottom, which has made electoral crimes a common practice that some now even proclaim with pride. In a meeting in Managua after the elections, an FSLN activist from Boaco shamelessly announced, “I exercised my right to vote 16 times.” Was it an exception born of triumphal euphoria? Would it do any good to change people at the top as long as the laws, the regulations and the rest of the system remain?

Facing absolute power

Starting on January 10, 2013, when the new municipal authorities take office, the FSLN project will have its plan almost completed, having concentrated virtually all central and local power in its hands. Absolute power. The next step will be the constitutional reforms.

The changes required by the ICJ ruling will be made in article 10 of the Constitution, which establishes Nicaragua’s sovereign limits. This could serve as an excuse for the governing party to include other constitutional reforms that are essential to the governing couple’s project. The apparent priorities are limitless reelection and the elevation of both the Councils and Cabinets of Citizens’ Power to the level of state institutions. Both have already happened de facto; all that remains is to legitimize them in the Magna Charta.

Given this near total concentration of power and the massive abstention in the recent elections, read as repudiation of the country’s political course, the opposition is talking about achieving solid unity to face off against the FSLN in 2016, in the “mega-elections” that once every 20 years see the four-year municipal elections line up on the same day as the five-year presidential and legislative elections.

Unity, unity

Immediately after the elections there was a flurry of initiatives, protagonists, opinions and reflection forums to resolve the lack of opposition unity, for which the growing power of Ortega and his party continues to be simplistically blamed. Eduardo Montealegre, who has taken the reins of the Independent Liberal party (PLI) in the past two years and now controls it politically and financially, declared that the first unitary step must be to strengthen that party; his goal is clearly to project himself as the leader of a united opposition and its presidential candidate for 2016. Many other voices insist that what is necessary is “Liberal unity,” by which is meant the PLI and the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), which was the leading Liberal party in the nineties and most of the past decade, but has now been run into the ground by its corrupt and self-serving leader, Arnoldo Alemán. It is the continuing division of those two forces that has opened the way for the FSLN to gain its near monopoly of political and institutional power.

Still other voices agree on the need for unity, but have a broader, more plural vision and argue that what is required is to add reflection, information, organization and mobilization, “setting aside differences and focusing forcefully on the agreements,” to quote Dora María Téllez, a member of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) executive council. She argues that “the first order of business is to place ourselves in a clear position of opposition and the second is for this clear opposition to manifest itself by demanding a total change in the electoral system and accompanying the people’s social demands all over the country.”

The MRS, which abandoned its electoral and political alliance with the PLI once it decided not to participate in the municipal elections because of the blatant party bias of the electoral structures, is arguing for unity from the bottom up, with local leaders, and then building up to the national level. This viewpoint is shared by CENIDH president Vilma Núñez, whose institution is overwhelmed by the denunciations of human rights violations it receives every day. “There are protests by diverse sectors: merchants, taxi drivers, producers; there are claims around water and electricity; there’s even political inconformity within the governing party itself. The disagreement with what is going on is almost generalized. What we have to do is get the population to take the situation on and participate.”

As in Venezuela?

Venezuela’s recent experience in this respect keeps cropping up in many of the post-electoral analyses and in the proposals for a united opposition to run against and beat Ortega in 2016. There has already been a lot of discussion about the pressing need for primary elections to choose a single candidate for the whole opposition. But starting there seems like a short-sighted view, like building a house by starting with the windows rather than the foundation.

The experience of the Democratic Unity Table (MUD) in Venezuela, which ran candidate Henrique Capriles this past October, was the fruit of many years of efforts. MUD had existed in practice since 2006, was formalized in 2008, restructured in 2009, and finally served as the umbrella for 30 political parties and organizations with very diverse ideologies. It organized 11 working groups that hammered out and pre-sented common proposals on issues of decentralization, international affairs, strategy, programs, human rights, etc. All this preceded the primary elections of February 2012 in which 3 million Venezuelans participated.

In short, it was an intense, dense and prolonged process, full of contradictions and an arduous search for consensus. Is the Nicaraguan political opposition ready for anything like that?

Opinions are divided between those who happily say they are ready for consensus and the parties will soon achieve it, and those hoping it will come from below, forged by the discontent of the population that is suffering the current government’s excessive control, or has serious needs the government isn’t addressing. Their desire is to see the people themselves awaken and build an opposition outside of the party framework that we can’t yet see.

As with so any other issues, time will tell, and there’s no way to know how long it will take, given that the asymmetry between the government and the opposition and between the government and civil society is very large in Nicaragua. Venezuela’s society is much more diversified, it has a history of institutionality, the political parties have more solid trajectories, the business class is bigger and more sophisticated, the electoral system has passed the test… The differences are many.

“Changing something
so nothing changes”

The International Court’s ruling, which opened so much space for us in the Caribbean Sea, also coincided with the pressured approval of the Tax Concertation Law on November 30 by the majority governing party bench in the National Assembly. As many suspected, the new law closed the door on possible areas of tax justice that could have put us on the road to more equitable, sustainable development.

In this issue’s Speaking Out section, economist José Luis Medal summarizes the content of the tax reform law by quoting the cynical formula of 20th-century Italian novelist Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his book Il Gattopardo, so commonly cited in political science to refer to the practice of reformist or revolutionary politicians to make concessions or reforms to conserve the structures and thus not really change anything. In this case, what hasn’t changed is Nicaragua’s unjust, regressive, inequitable tax system, which always ends up favoring the rich.

The government “concerted” the tax reform with only the business elite grouped under the umbrella organiza¬tion called the Supreme Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP). And this new expression of the government-COSEP alliance reveals another important difference the Nicaraguan opposition comes up against in comparing itself with Chávez’s Venezuela: there private enterprise has participated actively in the opposition effort at unity, whereas in Nicaragua COSEP, which virtually led the political opposition to the FSLN in the eighties, is today the government’s strongest domestic ally.

Something’s going on...

Consulted by envío, tax law expert Julio Francisco Báez did not hide his indignation when he described the context in which the tax reform was approved: “Something’s going on in a country where a tax reform is executed from start to finish between the government and a tiny upper echelon of economic power behind closed doors and in absolute secrecy. Absolutely no one else was consulted. The universities, cooperatives and small, medium and large business people didn’t even find out about it much less were they given an opportunity to voice an opinion. There was also no consultation with academia or salaried people.

“Something’s going on in society when the legislative branch is subjected to absolute silence, castrated in its primordial constitutional function, which is to draft, consult and analyze laws. The legislators played the embarrassing role of ‘rubber-stampers of the concertation,’ as the heads of the government-COSEP alliance called them without the least shame. This black Mass is the fiscal expression of the corporative State being shaped in Nicaragua. The supreme power of the economy—encapsulated in COSEP—and the supreme power of the national institutions—firmly in the grip of the executive power—are jointly and hap-pily plotting out the future of a nation all by themselves.”

“Let’s say what
we have to say…”

The enormous privileges that the country’s economically powerful class have kept in the new tax law are obvious. Unlike Nicaragua, other leftist governments currently in power in Latin American have been making progress in setting up less regressive tax systems. The other exception is Venezuela, but it has the luxury of not increasing taxes on the rich because the country is sitting on a sea of petroleum.

So how has this indulgence with big capital been “sold” to the FSLN rank and file? What political logic has it employed? Government spokespeople explain it like this: if the populations’ most urgent need is employment, and if it’s private enterprise that generates jobs rather than the state, what the FSLN is doing is guaranteeing more jobs, and by doing that is ensuring a more efficient and rapid fight against poverty.

They’re also telling the population that these privileges are temporary, that over the long haul, when the neoliberal vision of the “trickle down” of wealth has been assured, then the FSLN will tighten the belt of the wealthy. Do either the people or the government apologists believe that? Who knows? But they shouldn’t, because it’s the very same thing people have been told for the past three decades: during the war, during the postwar, during the structural adjustment period, during the downs—and ups—of world prices for our export com¬modities… and meanwhile, they get poorer in the worst times while the wealthy get visibly wealthier in all times.

Beyond such discourses by “sources close to the government,” the largest paradox of Ortega’s political project is that despite having such enormous political and social control, the FSLN seems to fear a possible conflict with the economic elite. Why? One possible interpretation is that the FSLN’s own ever more powerful business group now shares the same interests as the traditional large Nicaraguan business owners and corporate executives, making it loathe to undertake any tax reform that would truly modify the inequity, allowing the “wretched of the earth” to “arise.”

But the FSLN’s own business group could surely continue evading taxes and enjoying fiscal privileges regardless of a profound tax reform because its party controls the government. Might it not be that the upper echelons of the FSLN are haunted by the ghost of the enormous capital flight that took place in the eighties, with the consequent deterioration of the country’s productive apparatus, a deterioration that, if repeated, would also affect them? Perhaps COSEP is fully aware of that ghost, and is successfully blackmailing even such a powerful government, just as it has known how to blackmail so many. But those are just hypotheses. Those who know the real reason aren’t saying.

Some spaces are opening while others are closing

2012 is ending. The world isn’t, at least not yet. And that wasn’t the message the Mayans wrote in stone. What they wrote on those steles was that their time, like all times, ours included, goes round and round, completing cycles.

Nicaragua finally got the world’s highest court to delimit the maritime limits between Colombia and Nicaragua, 11 years after filing its suit with the International Court of Justice and 26 years after rejecting the state of things. Pulling our country out of the enclosure Colombia imposed on it with an artificial border in front of our own coasts over sixty years ago involved a whole cycle of diplomatic and also financial efforts, since the process is extremely costly.

Ortega invited the three Presidents who preceded him plus their foreign ministers (Violeta Chamorro’s son-in-law Antonio Lacayo came in her place) to the celebration in Managua of the ICJ’s decision on November 19, an act he called one of “national unity.”

Two dozen red and black FSLN flags interspersed with a dozen blue and white flags of the nation said everything that needed to be said about the borders between party and State and about the correlation of forces within that national unity. Although President Ortega was harvesting the efforts of many others over so many years, he was the only one who spoke, while the others sat listening like stones, tensely immobile.

Ortega’s speech celebrated the opening of spaces in the sea to us and called on Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos—who is very reluctant to accept the ruling—to respect international law, even though Ortega himself is riding roughshod over national law. On that same day, the National Police released the Nueva Guinea residents who were beaten and humiliated for civically expressing their anger about the illegalities committed during the electoral process in their municipality precisely because they herald the closing of spaces of citizen’s sovereignty in local government.

Will we know how to take
care and learn from our past?

The seas we have recovered in which to exercise our sovereignty are one of the most common drug routes for traffickers from Colombia to reach Central America’s Caribbean coasts before moving on by land to the US market. But as Roberto Orozco, a specialist on this issue, warned in envío earlier this year, “there’s no real coordinated international effort among all the countries to ease the problem. It has to be made not just in Nicaragua but in all the Central American Caribbean, including throwing a retaining wall around the San Andrés islands, the point of departure for some of the drugs that arrive in Central America.” Will we really be up to that challenge, particularly now, when our own wall has shown itself to be perforated by institutional complicities?

The seas that have been returned to us as an exclusive economic zone are a reserve that holds biosphere treasures and a wealth of fish that must be carefully exploited so as not to deplete them. There are also suspected offshore oil deposits. Given that Nicaragua has never cared for its inland “seas”—the immense Lake Cocibolca and Managua’s currently foul Lake Xolotlán—in any cycle of their history, will we know how to take care of the immense expanse of sea we’ve now recovered?

“The other Nicaragua in the sea” that has been returned to us and recognized is Caribbean. No govern-ment has so much as responded to the urgent need for a highway that connects the Pacific with the Caribbean. Not even this government, despite President Chávez promising in 2007 that ALBA would make it happen. Even today the country’s Caribbean regions, with all their natural wealth, so much of which has been stolen, still have the highest poverty rates.

Will we learn to be Caribbeans after living so long with our backs turned to their sea? Could that be the opportunity the ICJ has opened for us? Or will the abundant resources of our now expanded Caribbean Sea only attract investments that enrich the same old faces, deepening even more the inequity that the tax reform will consolidate?

Timeline of the maritime
dispute with Colombia

With both Nicaragua and Colombia having accepted the legal competence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1948, its November 19 ruling ended a protracted territorial dispute between the two countries. Here are some milestones in the conflict:

1928—Colombia and Nicaragua signed the Esguerra-Bárcenas Treaty giving Colombia the sea containing the San Andrés archipelago and the seven nearby cays and setting meridian 82 as Nicaragua’s maritime border.

1968—Colombia ratified this treaty and the border was imposed.

1980—The Sandinista revolutionary government declared the treaty null and void, arguing that it was signed when Nicaragua was militarily occupied by the US, and claimed back the San Andrés archipelago.

2001—Nicaragua filed suit against Colombia with the ICJ asking for a new demarcation of the maritime borders.

2007—The ICJ confirmed its own jurisdiction to decide on the ownership of the seven cays and draw the Nicaraguan maritime border, and ruled that the San Andrés archipelago belongs to Colombia.

2010—The ICJ began hearings, listening to the arguments of the two countries.

2012—The ICJ issued its decision on the maritime border, which is final. It confirmed Colombia’s sovereignty over the seven cays and redefined the border between Colombia and Nicaragua, moving it beyond meridian 79, which returns to Nicaragua 90,000 square kilometers (56,143 square miles) of Caribbean Sea off its coast.

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