The recently approved partial reform to the Political Constitution of our country incorporates into the Constitution the answers to two questions that have figured greatly in Nicaragua’s history: who can pretend to govern after handing over the country to foreign interests and what legal value rules dictated from abroad can have within the national territory without the explicit consent of the State.
But, above all, this Reform enshrines a supreme and inalienable good: the inalienable right of the Nicaraguan people to live in peace, understanding that only in an environment of stability, security and sovereignty is it possible to advance towards the definitive eradication of poverty and build the well-being of families.
The National Assembly has incorporated into Article 12 of the Constitution a paragraph prohibiting the extra-territoriality of foreign laws and denies any legal effect to the norms of other States, blocs of countries or international organizations which undermine independence, sovereignty, self-determination, security and peace. This provision, ratified in an open popular session on the night of September 1 in the city of León, capital of the Revolution, constitutes the crystallization of an inalienable national doctrine: Sovereignty is for hire, Treason is never rewarded with candidacies or public positions, and Peace is the strategic victory that we defend with the sacred weight of our Magna Carta.
Betrayal as a method of the elites, not as an accident
Since Independence in 1821, this pattern was repeated with almost institutional regularity. Faction against faction, liberals against conservatives, internal wars which sought not to resolve power in the People or for the People — much less to get them out of poverty or guarantee social peace — but to find a foreign owner who would tip the balance against the adversary, while sacrificing the tranquility of the nation.
The filibuster William Walker did not land in 1855 by magic: he was hired as part of an internal conflict, proclaimed himself president, reinstated slavery and tried to turn Nicaragua into a piece of the North American expansionist project. Although the Nicaraguans heroically expelled him, the oligarchies failed to incorporate that lesson into their political culture.
Decades later, the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty of 1914 gave the United States rights over a possible interoceanic canal and territorial rights no sovereign people would ever accept. The occupations by the Marines, the imposition of governments and the figure of that most unworthy anti-patriot, Adolfo Díaz, illustrate the same mechanism: imported legitimacy in exchange for bases, customs dues, a foreign veto and the permanent dismissal of social development.
The national hero, General Benjamín Zeledón, died confronting the traitorous logic of Díaz and Emiliano Chamorro; for his part, General Augusto C. Sandino defined it with absolute conviction in front of the sell-out quislings Moncada, Sacasa, Benard, Cardenal, Argüello, Espinoza, Solórzano and Chamorro: the form of government is not negotiated with the occupier sullying the nation, because without sovereignty it is impossible to achieve true Peace.
Somocismo perfected this model. In addition to being a personal dictatorship, it was an enclave of another people's security on the nation’s own soil. The National Guard was born as an instrument of occupation and defense of US interests and was institutionalized as a family apparatus. When that structure was destroyed by the popular revolution led by the FSLN, the old Washington ploy reappeared: the counterrevolutionary army and the financing of a war of aggression applauded by the same old quislings. Handing over the country while dynamiting social peace has never been simply a moral deviation; it is the norm for survival of a ruling class unable to govern without a foreign sponsor.
Therefore, the legal figure of "treason to the nation" is not a rhetorical ornament in this Constitutional Reform. In the historical experience of Nicaragua, betraying did not only mean leaking secrets: it involved agreeing to be a protectorate, asking for intervention, financing destabilization, subjecting the people to terror, serving as a transmission belt for aggression and external tutelage, and condemning the nation to social abandonment and extreme poverty. That is what some denationalized people are doing today and that cannot be forgotten: to attack Peace is to attack the very life of the People.
Electoral disqualification: political consequence of a historical crime
The Constitution defines who can run for elected office by age, nationality, residence or the absence of criminal convictions. What Nicaragua positively adopts and incorporates into its supreme text is a category that has become inescapable given its own history: anyone who has led, financed or served a coup d'état, an alteration of the constitutional order or interference activities aimed at fracturing Peace, for the country to be governed from outside, cannot aspire to leadership of the State.
The right to elect and be elected is not a blank check so as to threaten the very existence of the country or the tranquility of its citizens. A State that enables those who have demanded commercial blockades, aggression, terrorist violence or defiance of its institutions, opens up the door through which William Walker, the US Marines and the protectors of the Somoza dynasty entered, risking the economic and social stability that has cost so much to build.
The doctrine that has now been approved establishes that the surrender of the nation and sabotage of internal peace — the classic treasonous betrayal — cannot be recycled as an electoral platform. That is the distinction the oligarchs never wanted to contemplate, because their business consisted precisely in that recycling: losing internally, conspiring abroad, promoting chaos and returning to power sponsored by foreign forces.
No foreign law with effects in the national territory
The paragraph added to Article 12 sets out from an elementary principle of the law of nations: jurisdiction is strictly territorial. A state does not legislate in someone else's house. The laws of another country do not generate obligations in Nicaragua by the mere fact of having been voted on in a foreign congress, in the same way that international organizations have no direct executive or judicial jurisdiction on national soil.
The text does not deny the international law that Nicaragua subscribes to; on the contrary, it ratifies that only conventions and treaties signed and ratified on behalf of the Nicaraguan State take effect, thus guaranteeing the principle of sovereign consent. What is categorically rejected is extraterritoriality: the claim that laws of aggression, unilateral coercive measures or regulations of organizations to which the country does not belong or has not submitted can be made to apply as if they were national law, seeking to suffocate the economy and erode social peace.
The international community does not legislate on Nicaragua. It must be said clearly and loudly. To confuse diplomatic relations with a source of internal law is to repeat the old treasonous practice of seeking foreign arbiters after failing to obtain majority support at home; this also represents a flagrant violation of the principle of non-interference enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Foreign interference confirms the validity of the reform
The coordinated action between the remarks of a United States official and a regional organization to which we do not belong, exposes the same old mechanism of geopolitical subordination. Convening an organization of which Nicaragua is no longer a part, added to threats of aggression against our country, strongly confirms the validity and urgency of the recently approved Constitutional Reforms.
This fact demonstrates with absolute clarity those responsible for instrumentalizing the international bodies and the power which acts as the usual external aggressor. For the foreign ministries of other countries to try controlling or dictating the internal policy and legal order of a sovereign nation is nothing more than the repetition of old patterns of interference threatening national stability. It is precisely this peace that we now are legally shielding against imperial scheming.
Constitutional power, full sovereignty and the commitment to peace
Reforming the Constitution is the exclusive competence of the constituted power for which the Magna Carta itself provides the mechanisms to initiate, for consultation, to debate in parliament, to approve and ratify in the legislature as has been done here, in consultation with the Nicaraguan people and their institutions. The fact that certain foreign ministries or denationalized sectors do not like the content is irrelevant and does not make it illegal. Legality is validated by internal institutional procedure and the legitimate sovereignty, not by external applause.
Nicaragua has historically demonstrated its peaceful vocation; it is a State that promotes and defends Peace as an indispensable condition for prosperity, social justice and dignified work. Without Peace there are no roads, no hospitals, no production, no free education and no poverty eradication programs. Therefore, defending Sovereignty is not an abstract exercise in legal theory, but the concrete protection of a development model that is restoring rights to the least well-off.
Legitimacy, Sovereignty and Peace are inseparable. A People prevented from deciding who may be ineligible to take part the nation’s political processes for having served foreign interests, for promoting chaos, or for applying foreign laws in our national territory, sullying national decorum, is a vulnerable People under tutelage.
On this historical reading, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Co-Presidents of Nicaragua, Comandante Daniel Ortega and Compañera Rosario Murillo, have broken the cycle that began in 1821, in which the ruling élites managed the country as if it were a farm they could mortgage as they pleased, condemning entire generations to misery and instability, under the boot of foreign subjugation.
The Reform consolidates a definitive doctrinal change: the State no longer offers itself as the instrument of a foreign patron, Peace is defended as the most precious treasure of Nicaragua’s families and decisions are made in Managua, not in the capitals of other countries. Because Peace is not up for discussion here, the Patriotic Nation is defended and the People are the President.
