The lawmakers followed an order from Daniel Ortega, who accused them of being foreign agents. The academy has 94 years of history and works on the revision and amendments of the new grammar of the Spanish language
File photo of general view of the Nicaraguan Parliament (EFE/Jorge Torres)
The Nicaraguan Parliament canceled this Tuesday the legal personality of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language, after 94 years of existence, accused by the government of Daniel Ortega not to register as a foreign agent.
The plenary session thus advanced with an order executed on Saturday by President Ortega.
The chamber, controlled by members close to the president, with the support of 75 of the 91 deputies, banned another 82 NGOs, including the Enrique Bolaños Foundation, of the former president of the same name (2001-2007), accused of bypassing the legal system.
Without any debate in the plenary session of the chamber, these cancellations were approved by means of a legislative decree presented by Sandinista deputy Filiberto Rodríguez,at the request of the Ministry of the Interior (Migob), a government entity that oversees NGOs.
Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega
El Migob alleges thatthe canceled entities “have transgressed and failed to comply with their obligations” and have “hindered the control and surveillance” carried out on these entities.
Among the faults pointed out to the NGOs canceled are those of “failing to comply with the registration as a foreign agent; not reporting their financial reports and not promoting transparency in the use of the funds, not knowing their execution and whether they were consistent with the objectives and purposes for which they were granted legal personality.”
The Nicaraguan Academy of Lengua (ANL), based in Managua, was created in August 1928, and among its prominent members are the writer Sergio Ramírez and the novelist and poet Gioconda Belli, both based in Spain.
Image of members of the so-called Association Mothers of April, in Managua (EFE/Jorge Torres)
The ANL had rejected the accusations and mentioned that it is working “on the review, amendments and contributions to the new grammar of the Spanish language and the dictionary of the Spanish language”.
The government approved at the end of 2020 a law that requires civil society organizations and legal entities that receive funds from abroad to register as foreign agents and to account for how they spend the money or how they use the donations they receive.
Cultural barbarism
The writer and former vice president Sergio Ramírez told the AFP agency i> his “astonishment” for what he described as a “cultural barbarism” because “the language cannot be switched”.
Ramírez pointed out that he has received messages from academies throughout the continent. The dissolution of the ANL “has raised a wave of stupor and repudiation” in the world of letters, he pointed out.
Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli is a member of the National Academy of Language (EFE/Olaf Malzahn)
“No one can confiscate institutions. I don’t know what the idea of outlawing the academy is. It is a barbaric idea to confiscate the research, the work on the language”, the author of “Castigo Divino” (1988) and “Margarita , the sea is beautiful” (1998).
“Among the contributions to the language, the ANL has the responsibility of contributing to the different dictionaries of the language, the largest dictionary, Nicaraguanisms; there is legal dictionary, grammar. All this is going to continue to be done by the specialists,” warned Ramírez.
To Ramírez, exiled in Spain since 2021 for evading an arrest warrant against him, he took the news of the dissolution of the ANL in Guatemala, where he attends the literary festival Centroamérica Cuenta.
The celebration of this event has been moved out of Nicaragua since the repression of the massive protests of 2018. In 2019 it was held in Costa Rica, while the pandemic forced it to be suspended in 2020 and to perform it virtually in 2021.
Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez (EFE /Francisco Guasco)
With these 83 NGOs, the number of entities canceled by the Ortega government since 2018 increases to more than 300, in the context of the crisis triggered by anti-government protests that left a balance of 355 dead and thousands of exiles, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The government accuses the illegalized NGOs to use the funds received to attempt a coup d’état with the support of the United States.
Daniel Ortega, 76, who was part of the first Sandinista governing board in 1979 and then was President between 1985 and 1990, he returned to power in 2007, where he remains after winning a fourth consecutive term in the November elections, with his rivals imprisoned.
(With information from AFP)