Colombia offers nationality to the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez

Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva and former Spanish President Felipe González.rrss

The Government of Colombia has offered citizenship to Sergio Ramírez, part of the more than 300 Nicaraguan opponents stripped of their nationality by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.

The South American Foreign Minister, Álvaro Leyva, announced this Wednesday that the writer, winner of the Cervantes Prize and former Vice President of Nicaragua, has accepted it with emotion and gratitude.

"Yesterday, in Madrid, Spain, interpreting the solidarity of the country as a whole and the sentiment of President Gustavo Petro, I offered Colombian nationality to the Nicaraguan politician, intellectual and writer," Leyva reported in a brief message early in the morning, accompanied by the photos of the meeting with the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos and the former president of the Spanish Government Felipe González.

"Free and democratic Colombia embraces him and welcomes him to his second homeland," added the foreign minister.

“The idea that they can take away your country is absurd, it doesn't make any sense.

No legal sense, because it goes against the Nicaraguan Constitution.

There is not even a sentence of exile, they are barbaric sentences that were eliminated from the Enlightenment”, reflected Ramírez, who has had a Spanish passport since 2018, in a recent interview with EL PAÍS.

"And then the idea that someone can take away something that is living inside you, which is your country... That convinces you that it is absurd."

The government of Gustavo Petro had already expressed its "concern" last week over Ortega's most recent onslaught in Nicaragua, which stripped another 94 citizens of their nationality –among them Ramírez, the writer Gioconda Belli and the journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro. –, after it had already been withdrawn from another 222 political prisoners released and expelled to the United States.

"These measures violate the right to nationality, contemplated in a set of international legal instruments, including, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights, a treaty to which Nicaragua is a State party," he said at the time, with a very contained language, the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Relations.

Nicaragua is a swampy ground for Colombian diplomacy.

Relations with Managua are a delicate matter, since both countries have a border dispute in the Caribbean Sea that involves the sovereignty of the waters surrounding the San Andrés and Providencia archipelago.

A third process between both parties is currently in progress at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, after the Central American country requested in 2013 the expansion of its continental shelf.

Relations are strained.

The Foreign Ministry had even stumbled in its bet against Managua by absenting itself from an OAS session on condemning the Ortega y Murillo regime for persecuting the press and imprisoning opponents, recently inaugurated Petro.

That move, never fully clarified, was due to strategic and humanitarian reasons, but not ideological ones, Foreign Minister Leyva defended at the time.

The latest offensive by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has cost the Sandinista regime only resounding condemnation among the major countries in the region.

Of the five main powers in Latin America, all governed by the left, the Executive of Gabriel Boric in Chile has openly expressed its repudiation of what happened, while that of Petro has aired its concern.

Argentina and Chile have also offered citizenship to Sergio Ramírez and the rest of the Nicaraguans persecuted by Ortega.

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