The President of the Republic of Nicaragua. Comandante Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and Vice-President Rosario Murillo Zambrana send the following message to the General Assembly and the world.
“The people of Nicaragua salute the peoples represented in the General Assembly at its seventy-eighth session, with our heads held high, as always, because we have managed to survive and overcome all the tragedies and catastrophes imposed by a history of domination, cruelty, intervention, occupation and interference in all aspects of our
life, including our electoral processes, subverted by the empires and their economic and military might, with which they have tried to destroy us and dominate us.
“We are living at a time of the extinction of the imperialist, colonialist model of looting and genocide, whose greed has impacted nature and our world — a world of many patrimonies, languages and steadfast ways of life. In these times of decision and conviction of the need for substantive change in order to recover all our rights and values in the face of the overwhelming criminal greed of colonialism and imperialism in all their manifestations. Nicaragua continues to engage in all battles for genuine freedom, for light and for truth that cannot be concealed.
“We are the immense and invincible force of a courageous new world of peoples who do not let themselves be cut off from hope or faith, and who. with our growing spiritual strength, demand respectful cooperation, solidarity and human fraternity, such that everything can change and be transformed and we can live peacefully and securely, working and prospering in our own sacred lands, in shared destiny and prosperity.
“This world that has now stood up; that has started to make its way. claiming its own voice and identity, its ancestral and current knowledge; this world of a culture of peace has spoken at this seventy-eighth session of the General Assembly, shall continue, with increasing self-assurance and certainty, to sow. cultivate and harvest the indispensable transformations, even in these very United Nations, whose nature has been distorted and transformed, unfortunately, into a body servile to and dependent on the Powers that be.
“The new world that belongs to us all demands respect. It demands peace. It insists upon peace. It demands justice for everyone. It demands remembrance, history, reparation and non-repetition. That is why. from this rostrum, we demand that the United Nations enforce the mandate of the International Court of Justice of The Hague, which in 1986 sentenced the United States of America to indemnify Nicaragua, at least in part, for the costs of the destruction, permanent aggression, pain and suffering endured by hundreds of thousands of families during the insane and vengeful war imposed on our country and our people, in what was called the “counterrevolution”.
“That, of course, does not restore lives; it does not heal the broken hearts of so many families and individuals, but at least it rebuilds, for all Nicaraguans, the economic, social, productive, cultural infrastructure that those responsible shattered with their grotesque intervention, but which, as always and every time, was defeated by the honour, integrity and glory of Nicaragua’s spirit, by the grace of God.
“Sandino lives. Sandino lives in each of those victories over nefarious and diabolical imperialism, and Sandino is in this Hall today, demanding that all of us comply with and enforce the law and international law to indemnify the Nicaraguan people with what they deserve in all justice and truth, after having forcefully asserted the right to peace and life, claiming what belongs to us — sovereignty, freedom and harmony — to make our way with our own destinies. We demand that the United Nations speak up and order the Government of the United States of America to comply with the historic judgment that condemned and obliged it to recognize Nicaragua, and to abide by it in all its commendable provisions.
“Nicaragua, with the dignity and heroism of our struggles, races, peoples, cultures and balanced life, demands that closure and joins in the call of all the peoples and countries that have spoken from this rostrum to denounce the aggressive, interventionist, arbitrary, unjust policies whose coercive, unilateral measures are not only illegal and illegitimate, but constitute a destabilizing, destructive, warlike modality that imposes changes of Government through coups d’etat, attempts to incite coups and acts of vandalism known these days as “colour revolutions”, causing grief to so many families among so many peoples.
“We stand in permanent solidarity with the peoples and countries that experience the uncivilized barbarism that recapitulates the tides and echoes of the imperialist, colonialist, fascist models that have caused the deaths of millions of human beings, imposing regimes of terror and deprivation, with shameful waves and unprecedented tsunamis of migration. Those tragedies trace the desperation
of injustice and the neocolonial project to silence, dominate and exclude so as to continue plundering the wealth of the world’s peoples. Entire countries have been destroyed in that brutal scorched-earth policy, which seeks to satisfy the beastly appetites of the Earth’s imperialists. Entire countries have been occupied and their peoples sacrificed and massacred under the same atrocious policies and actions, in violation of all rights, which only reinforces what we know and denounce again here as hate crimes.
“We express our permanent and combative solidarity with the Palestinian people, the Syrian people, the Sahrawi people, the Eritrean people and people in all those places where they have sought to create fascist and neo-Nazi enclaves. We express our permanent and combative solidarity with all the struggling peoples of Africa. Asia and Latin America. We are peoples and countries that resist and fight the blockades, the economic warfare and the systematic and permanent intervention in the social, cultural, economic and political life of all our institutions as we witness more and more violations of all rights.
“We express our combative solidarity with the people of Cuba, of Marti, of Fidel, of Raul and of Miguel Diaz-Canel over 62 years of murderous blockade. We express our combative solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, where Chavez lives on. the struggle goes on and Nicolas has defeated all destructive assaults.
‘We express our combative solidarity with the peoples and Governments of our Central American region that do not falter in the struggle for security and peace so as to confront and conquer the hell of poverty. To Honduras and its brave President Xiomara Castro Sarmiento — Honduras, our fraternal neighbour, where Morazan and Sandino prevail — we offer our familial, fraternal embrace in unflagging solidarity.
“We express our combative solidarity with Bolivia, the great people of Tupac Katari. who are moving onward amidst the same old threats; with the people of Argentina and their sovereign right over the Malvinas Islands; and with Puerto Rico, brave and unstoppable in its struggle for independence.
“Our strength is with the People’s Republic of China, the Power that today is showing the world and the human family how solidarity, respectful cooperation, generous brotherhood and sisterhood are practiced and lived among older brothers and sisters, younger brothers and sisters, but all as one big family with a common destiny, as we fight to overcome the actions of dispossession, economic stagnation and poverty imposed on so many people.
‘We express our active and combative solidarity with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in its historical battles for sovereignty and rights.
To the people of Belarus, always dignified and in solidarity, we offer our respect and recognition.
“We express our solidarity and combative force with the heroic struggles waged by the Russian Federation for peace and security, for a world that we must all defend from the growing threats of empires and their neo-Nazi policies, their fascist emblems and slogans, which seek to return us to the unwonted perversion of wars of expansion and domination, and which have left millions of dead and families destroyed all over the world. Our support for the Russian Federation is an unwavering support and an inescapable human alliance for the security, dialogue and harmony that are essential and irreplaceable for the human community.
“We express our solidarity and support with the Islamic Republic of Iran, another example of sharing and coexisting with peoples ravaged by imperial greed. Despite the incessant, excessive and infernal arrogance of those who think they are superior, we reaffirm that they do not separate us and together we travel along paths of courage and dignity.
“We demand from this place respect for the United Nations system in order to restore its founding values, in this other world where we learn, keep ourselves abreast and continue, yes. to defend just, sovereign, self-defined models based on the maxim “Respect for the rights of others is peace”. As Eternal Comandante Hugo Chavez Frias told the General Assembly in 2005. the United Nations must be re-founded. That was taken up again by Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister of Dignity. Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. who also served as President of the General Assembly, when in 2008 he raised the urgency of re-founding the United Nations to serve the world’s peoples.
“The United Nations has just held a meeting of Heads of State and Government of the Group of 77 and China in Cuba, which reached agreements of fundamental importance for the world—agreements that must be taken into account and fulfilled so that, with a consciousness of freedom and of the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human family, we continue to break the chains of slavery and dependence, of submission and subordination, of servile obedience that the selfish, ambitious and perfidious colonial and imperial interests intend, even at this point in history, to continue imposing on us.
“We regard with hope the recent meeting and enlargement of the BRICS grouping, which today with Brazil. Russia. India. China and South Africa, in addition to Argentina. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. Egypt. Ethiopia and Iran, represent new forces and strength in the struggles for our economic and financial sovereignty as free and capable peoples.
“In the face of all the advances in science. techniques and technologies, including those portentously called “artificial intelligence” — as if they were not the result of human intelligence — Nicaragua demands the full participation of the peoples who have made those advances of the conquistadors possible with our blood and resources. We demand what is ours — the right to fully enjoy this development, improving the conditions of work, study and life of our peoples, with all their rights. In addition to inclusion. Nicaragua also proposes the rational and beneficial use of those resources of humankind, which in the hands of the same malevolent actors as always, constitute weapons of mass destruction against countries, peoples and communities.
“‘Always together and always moving forward’”, as Sandino would say. with proposals based on respect, consideration, fraternity and a nation for everyone. Nicaragua joins the intense search for. and struggle to protect our inheritance of natural resources, our cultures, our languages and ways of life and our original communities, working daily and tirelessly for peace, which is not only a right, but an urgent necessity for the survival of humankind — that is. for the life we all deserve. The aggressions that they arrogantly and haughtily call “sanctions” do not define or intimidate us. nor do they disable us. nor do they bend us. nor do they lead us to sell out or surrender. We do not know the word “surrender”. I repeat — the aggressions that they arrogantly and haughtily call “sanctions” do not define or intimidate us. nor do they disable us. nor do they bend us. nor do they lead us to sell out or surrender. We do not know the word “surrender”.
“Life is made up of daily struggles to assert what belongs to us — a world free of wars, of chemical or nuclear weapons, of looting, ignorance, fraud, of new deceptions and brazen thefts, including the assault on our talents; a world free of offences, because war. looting, the poverty they generate, misery, pandemics, the lack of health care, education, housing and the lack of favourable conditions for life all constitute an offensive, disparaging, humiliating, cruel, degrading and immense prison where human security is denied, promoting seas of exoduses bereft of dignity and cutting off hope. joy. culture and life for the majority of the planet.
“What belongs to us is a world free of brutality and aggression; a world free of arrogance; a world free of supreme ignorance; a world free of hatred, evil and misery; a world free of sadness and emotional poison; a world free of the deformations, apathy and depression intentionally created by drugs, which have become another form of terrorism, among so many other perversions and provocations that plague us.
“What belongs to us is a world free of impositions; a world of vigour, courage and values; a world committed to a simple, powerful, forceful common good — love, which is stronger than hatred and conquers everything and is capable of everything; love, which we so sorely need to build trust so as definitively install new horizons and prodigious futures. We want a world of spiritual beings who are also human, who are not perfect but who can and should close ranks to recover the goodness and strength of this planet that we share.
“Above and beyond all the forms of terrorism imposed upon us. there is the spirit, the flame, the insignia and the axiom of our human condition. That is what we are fighting for. That is why we win. That is why we will overcome. We are forever moving forward.”