By John Perry

(John Perry is based in Masaya, Nicaragua, and writes for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, London Review of Books, FAIR, Covert Action Magazine and others. This article was originally published in Covert Action Magazine on Nov. 1, 2024.) 

Governments in Latin America have been at the forefront of opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and several of those which have done so suddenly face new threats, even including attempted coups. Adrienne Pine, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said during a recent webinar hosted by the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition that “Anybody who stands with Palestine is going to be attacked in Latin America by the US and by Zionists.”

Recent events appear to show the truth of her remarks.

Of the 165 countries that recognise Israel, only four have officially cut diplomatic ties with the country since it began its Gaza offensive, and all of them are Latin American: Bolivia, Belize, Colombia and Nicaragua (Venezuela severed its ties with Israel in 2009 while Cuba broke off relations during the Yom Kippur War of 1973). A further eight countries have withdrawn their diplomats from Tel Aviv since October 7, 2023, of which Chile, Brazil and Honduras are from Latin America.

This article looks at the experience of three governments in the region which have strongly opposed Israel’s genocidal war—Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia. All are suffering attacks that appear to be either in direct retaliation for their actions or which suspiciously coincide with them. All three have progressive governments which have historic reasons for challenging Israel, adding to their condemnation of its recent actions.

Israel’s ties with Latin America are longstanding. As well as extensive trading relationships, Israel has often backed repressive regimes or undermined progressive governments. In “Israel’s Latin American trail of terror” Aljazeera summarises its grizzly history in the region, from training death squads in El Salvador to supplying the arms used to massacre Guatemalan campesinos.

Israel has often acted as a surrogate for Washington when the US doesn’t want to “get its hands dirty”. In Nicaragua, it supplied arms to the “Contra” forces that attempted to overthrow the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s [having previously supplied arms to the Somoza dictatorship]. In Honduras, it helped prevent President Mel Zelaya from returning to power after he was ousted in the 2009 coup. When the country then became a “narcostate”, its President Juan Orlando Hernández (now serving a lengthy prison term in the US for drug-trafficking), became Israel’s closest ally in the region. In Colombia, it sold massive quantities of arms to paramilitary groups which destabilized the country during decades of widespread violence.

Nicaragua is a “platform for terrorism”

Israel’s history means it is well placed to retaliate when Latin American governments attack it as genocidal. The example of Nicaragua is the clearest. The country was the first to join the action taken by South Africa in bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the beginning of this year. It followed this by taking its own ICJ case against Germany, for supplying arms to Israel. The ICJ’s provisional ruling had the initial effect of reducing the flow of German weapons until Israel later signed a “commitment” that they would not be used in violation of the genocide convention. Most recently, on October 11, President Daniel Ortega announced the breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel, calling Prime Minister Netanyahu a “son of the devil” and comparing him to Hitler.

The attempted retribution was swift. Four days after Ortega’s speech, the Israeli consul in neighboring Costa Rica, Amir Rockman, gave an interview in which he claimed that “Iranian interests and, in particular, those of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, are installed in Nicaragua.”

He further claimed that “radical Iranian forces and terror groups operate freely” in Nicaragua, although he was not asked for, nor did he provide, any evidence.

Given that some 3,000 kilometers separate Nicaragua from the US border, the usefulness to a “terror group” of being able to operate in a small Central American country is far from clear.

Right-wing outlets opposed to the Sandinista government gleefully elaborated on what Rockman said. Mijal Gur-Aryeh, Israel’s ambassador in Costa Rica, told La Prensa that “Nicaragua had been converted into a platform for terrorism in the region.” A few days later she added that Hezbollah had “bases” in Venezuela and Bolivia as well as Nicaragua.

This enabled one of the best-known opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, Felix Maradiaga, to call for the Sandinista party to be declared a terrorist organization. “In the short term, this could aggravate the delicate economic situation in Nicaragua,” he said. “But I firmly believe that any temporary sacrifice will be smaller than the bigger benefit of weakening a regime which has used the country as a platform for extreme and illegal activities.”

Nicaragua Sandinista government rejected Israel’s allegations on October 21. While there is, as of yet, no evidence that Israel’s claims have resonance in Washington, if Nicaragua were to be designated a “state sponsor of terrorism” (SSOT) the effects could be very serious.

It could potentially do even more harm to its economy than the current raft of US sanctions, affecting its rapidly growing tourism industry and perhaps much more. A warning is provided by the severe damage done to Cuba’s economy after it was added to the SSOT list, which added to the already considerable damage caused by the longstanding US blockade.

An SSOT designation also gives license to U.S. and other Western law enforcement agencies to persecute those working in solidarity with a listed country, as has already happened to those supporting Palestine (with solidarity groups often falsely accused of supporting Hamas).

Nicaragua survived an attempted coup in 2018, and Ortega has made no suggestion that a second coup is on the cards. However, both Honduras and Colombia have made such recent claims. We consider Honduras next.

A new “coup attempt” in Honduras?

Adrienne Pine’s comments about attacks on countries supporting Palestine followed on from her description of Israel’s role in supporting the neoliberal regime that ran Honduras from 2009 until the Libre party finally ousted it in the 2021 election.

This included spending $342 million on importing Israeli military equipment. In a reversal of her predecessor’s policy, progressive President Xiomara Castro has expressed strong support for Palestine. She has recalled her ambassador from Israel and in September, at the meeting of the UN General Assembly, condemned the genocide in Gaza. In what was seen by Washington as a further provocation, Honduras was one of the first countries in Latin America to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s victory in Venezuela’s July 28 election.

Following both these moves, Castro has come under intense pressure on different fronts which, she says, amounts to an attempted coup. In response, she has ended the extradition treaty between her country and the United States (the same treaty that allowed her predecessor, Hernández, to be sent for trial in New York). Castro herself has direct experience of a coup, since it was her husband, Mel Zelaya, who was deposed as president in 2009 by the U.S.-backed military and forced out of the country. It is hardly surprising that she is alert to the possibility of a second one.

Who orchestrated the coup attempt? Suspicion falls on Washington’s ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Laura Dogu, who has a track record in this respect. She was the ambassador in Nicaragua prior to the 2018 coup attempt, and since coming to Honduras in 2022, has made strong links with capitalist-class opponents of the Libre party, just as she did in Managua with business leaders hostile to the Sandinista revolution.

As Pine explained in the webinar, Dogu tried to paint Honduras’s links with Venezuela as related to drug trafficking, and a few days later fuel was added to this fire by the publication of a video showing a drug baron in discussion with Castro’s brother-in-law, allegedly about providing election campaign funding. The video was released by Insight Crime, a thinktank funded by USAID, the Open Society Foundation and similar bodies allied with Washington.

While Xiomara Castro’s victory in the 2021 election was decisive, and she still enjoys strong working-class support, there are abundant risks to her presidency. She faces a tumultuous congress, her vice-president resigned and is now her opponent, and both the military and the police forces are still contaminated by the corruption and impunity they enjoyed under previous neoliberal governments.

Murders of community leaders who stand in the way of big business continue. The most recent was September’s killing of esteemed community leader Juan López. As James Phillips writes in Covert Action, the crime “highlights the inability [weakness] of the Castro government in the face of the powerful corruption that still poisons much of the political economy and daily life of the country.” Castro specifically mentioned the case and her determination to solve it in her speech to the UN.

Castro has not yet been able to break the strong links between the Honduran military and Israel (much less its links with the U.S.). Indeed, it was revealed in April that Honduras was still buying Israeli military equipment of the kind used in Gaza, and that Honduran police officers have been receiving training in Israel. The news came from the Israeli ambassador, presumably intended to embarrass Castro.

Colombia: “The coup has begun”

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro is probably Israel’s strongest critic in Latin America. He not only denounces the Israeli regime as “genocidal,” but has described its actions in Gaza as comparable to Auschwitz. He broke diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv in May this year, provoking an immediate call from Washington urging him to change his mind, accompanied by warnings that this put at risk Colombia’s development and security.

Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S. recently spoke to Jacobin about the significance of his country’s severance of ties with Israel. He noted that previous governments would have made sure to “…brief the United States before it made any public announcement on any policy issue. But this time, when we severed ties with Israel, we didn’t tell the US.”

Yet Petro’s increasingly strident denunciations of Israel, including (in September) likening its military offensive in Gaza to “the horrors of the Holocaust,” and then saying that Netanyahu and his government “embody Nazism,” brought a major backlash. Washington responded by saying that “We cannot accept this. We cannot tolerate this” and the U.S. ambassador in Bogota labelled Petro as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, like Xiomara Castro, Petro doubled down on his denunciations of Israel when he spoke at the UN General Assembly, saying “When Gaza dies, all of humanity will die.”

Like Honduras, Colombia had close ties with Israel under its previous governments. Petro’s predecessor, Ivan Duque, signed a free trade agreement with Israel in 2020. Colombia’s trade with Israel became second only to Brazil’s in the continent, with the principal export being coal. Petro halted coal exports in August this year, noting that the fuel was being used to make bombs to kill Palestinian children.

On October 1, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro warned of a planned coup in Colombia, accusing its former president Ivan Duque of working with Washington to carry it out. Then on October 9, President Petro claimed that “the coup had begun”, citing the attempt by the National Electoral Council to bring his presidency to an end via an investigation into alleged illegalities in his election campaign finances, allegations which he strongly contests.

It then emerged that, not long before the last election, Ivan Duque purchased Israeli “Pegasus” software and used it to spy on political opponents. While this leak (like the similar one in Honduras) may have been intended to remind Petro of his military’s continuing connections with Israel, it appears to have backfired. Petro has accused Duque of using state money illegally and of money laundering, citing as evidence that half of the $11 billion dollar payment was unaccountably sent to Israel by plane, in cash. Nevertheless, the news strengthened the impression that Petro, like previous presidents, is surrounded by corruption.

This is one of several similarities between Petro’s situation and that of Xiomara Castro in Honduras. First, there are questionable attempts to link Petro with drug cartels via accusations against his relatives.

Second, like his Honduran counterpart, he faces constant right-wing resistance to his attempts at radical transformation of his country, up to and including “lawfare” against his presidency itself.

And in a third similarity, the weakness of Colombia’s justice system in tackling corruption was illustrated by the fact that a case against Chiquita Brands International for financing paramilitaries could only be brought to its recent conclusion in a U.S. court, just as happened in Honduras in the case against former president Hernández. Of course, the two countries also share a long history of close ties between their security systems and the U.S. military, including the hosting of large U.S. military bases.

Why are so few countries willing to challenge Israel?

If Latin America is in the vanguard of resistance to Israeli genocide, it is nevertheless geographically remote from West Asia and its resistance is largely symbolic and far from being of decisive significance.

Reflecting on this in Naked Capitalism, Nick Corbishley asks, “why are so few countries willing to take meaningful diplomatic or economic actions, including imposing targeted sanctions, against a rogue state that has not only slaughtered tens of thousands of Gazan civilians but is hell-bent on creating a regional conflagration in the Middle East?”

In response, he suggests four explanations:

-Fear of U.S.-led retaliation—such as South Africa has faced since its action against Israel at the ICJ.
-Fear of economic reprisals—such as the threats made against Ireland, that it would lose the high-tech industries that underpin much of its economy because of its criticisms of Israel.
-The risk of Israel suspending sales and support services for its high-tech weaponry—which happened to Colombia as soon as it ended coal exports.
-The threat of Israeli retaliation against ministers or even leaders of governments who fall out of line on Gaza and other issues—as happened in all three countries examined here, with possible further threats arising from the widespread availability of Israeli Pegasus software and its potential for revealing embarrassing information about Israel’s opponents.

Israel is a formidable foe, and not only on the battlefield. The Guardian revealed Israel’s nine-year surveillance and intimidation of no less a body than the International Criminal Court. At the moment, hard evidence of Israeli attempts to undermine progressive Latin American governments is limited, but the potential is obvious. It is likely to be most effective against government’s whose political position is precarious.

Gustavo Petro perfectly understands the reasons why so few countries have stood firmly against Israel’s genocide. In a discussion with other progressive Latin American leaders, he said that the Western powers are giving a warning to the rest of humanity: “What happens to Palestine will happen to any of you, if you dare make changes without our permission.”

* * * * *

Briefs
By Nan McCurdy

“It is Hope for Change that is Mobilizing the World Today.”
The World Parliamentary Forum against Fascism was held in Caracas on Nov. 4 and 5 with the participation of 300 legislators from 70 countries, including Nicaragua. Vice-President Rosario Murillo reported in her daily talk to Nicaraguans that on the second day of the Forum, Nicaraguan hero and National Assembly member Orlando Tardencilla spoke to the delegates “against hatred, human misery, discord, disunity, and any way of sowing evil and death among the human community.” She further quoted Tardencilla as saying: “We speak with the undefeated heart of our heroes, from the honor and pride of a fighting Nicaragua, where we have always fought, and we fight, against hatred in all its forms, against the interference, the interventions and the audacity, the impudence, the brazenness, of those who think they are masters of the world. We speak among brothers and sisters who proclaim full rights for all humanity. And from that unwavering demand for justice and truth, we know that we walk in glory and victories, despite the provocations of arrogance, of supremacy, of conceits, of vanity, of all falsehoods. It is the airs of change that are mobilizing the world today. And those changes are towards something better for the world. We are not going backwards.” (Noon edition of Multinoticias channel 4 television, November 5, 2024)

Inmates Return Home 
Nicaragua’s penitentiaries carried out simultaneous ceremonies to release 1,500 inmates, who will now serve their sentence at home under what is called family coexistence. In the activity at the Jorge Navarro Prison, Minister of the Interior Maria Amelia Coronel said that, in commemoration of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, 1,391 men and 109 women were to be released from the Penitentiary Centers. “As mentioned by Compañera Rosario Murillo, today is a day of family reunion, with a new opportunity for life, life with work, security, tranquility and certainty of life moving forward,” she stated. The minister said that she hoped that the prisoners gaining their release have taken advantage of the study opportunities and technical courses offered by institutions such as the Ministry of Education and the Technology Institute, “whose objective is that you learn to become entrepreneurs, acquiring a work tool for the time of your release.” Coronel commented that she hopes that every man and woman who receives the family living regime, will value this second opportunity. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/reos-regresan-a-casa-tras-cambio-de-regimen-carcelario/ (La Primerisima, 1 November 2024)

MIFAMILIA Provides Care for Children and Adolescents
The Ministry of the Family in coordination with the Department of Youth Affairs of the National Police, held workshops for the prevention of violence for 25 adolescents at risk in Jinotega.  Likewise, the National Institute of Technology, INATEC, offered workshops for 72 young people from León, Tipitapa, and District III, with courses in food, baking, event decoration, beauty and more. Also, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, meetings were held with 22 mothers and fathers to prevent bullying in Jinotepe, Carazo. And, some 3,897 adolescents, young people, women, senior citizens and their families were visited, promoting the practice of harmonious and respectful coexistence that should prevail in homes, nationwide. The attendance of 11,160 children was verified in 276 Child Development Centers nationwide, where working mothers can have their children from infants to age six well-cared for. Fourteen technical visits were made to verify the quality of care in the CDIs of Matagalpa, Caribe Norte, Las Minas, Nueva Segovia, León, Managua, Granada and Chontales. (La Primerisima, 5 November 2024)

130 Entrepreneurs Particípate in “Nicaragua Emprende”
Vice President Rosario Murillo announced that “Today Nicaragua Emprende, part of the creative economy, was inaugurated at the Olof Palme Convention Center with more than 130 people who make and sell handicrafts, leather products, footwear, accessories, textiles, natural cosmetics, cocoa processing, coffee, dairy products, seafood, furniture, food products, marketing services, logistics and more.” Murillo emphasized that it is peace that allows Nicaragua and these entrepreneurs from all over the country to prosper.” She also said that more than 20,000 activities are planned for the weekend of Nov. 8 to 10. (Canal 4, 4 November 2024)

Small Business Owners Boost the Economy
From October 28 to November 3, more than 1,250 entrepreneurs participated in 115 fairs, small farmers’ markets and food product sales, which contributed to the national economy with the generation of more than US$107,000 in sales income. During this week these families offered floral arrangements and bouquets, traditional beverages, all kinds of food and drinks, handicrafts, fruits, vegetables, dairy products, processed coffee, cocoa, honey, among other products. These spaces are used by the participants to promote their work and reach new markets. Small family businesses are contributing to socioeconomic development and guaranteeing the supply of food and household products through fairs and solidarity trade spaces. See photos: https://radiolaprimerisima.com/pequenos-emprendedores-contribuyen-a-dinamizacion-de-economia/ (La Primerisima, 5 November 2024)

Nicaragua Strengthens Food Safety
Nicaragua reiterated its commitment to food safety, ensuring that all food products comply with established quality and safety standards. Through the Institute for Agricultural Protection and Safety (IPSA), constant vigilance is carried out to verify that food is produced in accordance with control and inspection procedures. This work is aligned with the sanitary and phytosanitary measures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Codex Alimentarius, which are essential to protect public health and ensure safe food production. In this context, from November 4 to 6, IPSA will host a national seminar on Food Risk Analysis, organized jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This seminar aims to strengthen the technical capacities of food safety officials. Through various activities, it will seek to improve chemical and microbiological sampling plans, as well as food-related epidemiological surveillance. (Canal 4, 4 November 2024)

Commitment to Peaceful Resolution of Disputes Between States
On October 30, the United Nations General Assembly held its discussion of the annual report on the work of the International Court of Justice (World Court) presented by Court President Judge Nawaf Salam of Lebanon. During his speech, Nicaragua’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Jaime Hermida, reaffirmed the commitment of the Government of Nicaragua to the peaceful settlement of disputes between states. He said that Nicaragua’s commitment to peaceful resolutions of disputes between states has been evident since 1984 when Nicaragua took the United States to the ICJ, a process that concluded in a historic ruling that mandated the United States compensate the Nicaraguan people for the atrocities committed against them during what was known as the Contra war. and that Nicaragua still demands that this debt from the US be paid. Hermida reaffirmed the government’s support of the initiatives that have been presented before this highest world judicial body, including those of Nicaragua, to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people. Nicaragua has denounced the governments that continue to facilitate, provide and deliver more and more weapons to Israel, allowing them to commit genocide in Palestine. (La Primerisima, 1 November 2024)

Ambassador Participates in anti-Zionist Summit in Iran
The Nicaraguan ambassador to Iran, Ramon Moncada Colindres, will attend the summit of the Global Coalition Against Evil focusing on confronting the Zionist regime in Israel and condemning Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Taking place at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran, it honors the members of the Army Air Defense of the Islamic Republic who were killed in October by an Israeli attack. The Summit will also be attended by the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Yemen. Iran’s foreign minister has urged all countries in the region to mobilize to stop Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon. Iranian officials have pledged a crushing response to future aggressions by Israel. Iran has called on the world to cooperate to stop the devastation carried out by Israel. (La Primerisima, 4 November, 2024)