Due to its geographical location in the middle of the Central American isthmus, Nicaragua's stability and security have been an essential factor for the economic development of the region. This reality was demonstrated during the failed coup attempt of 2018 which significantly affected the economies of neighboring countries. Nicaragua contributes greatly to regional stability due to its sustained economic development, its successful fight against organized crime and drug trafficking, its respect for the principle of non-intervention and its commitment to dialogue and international law for the resolution of disagreements.
The government of our Co-Presidents Comandante Daniel and Compañera Rosario coordinates closely with neighboring countries on fundamental issues for the regional economy. The cooperation covers electric power sharing, public health, environmental policies, monitoring of natural phenomena, border security, tourism development and the countless other issues that arise in the region’s bilateral relations. The Sandinista government has made Nicaragua an exemplary country in all areas of national life despite the illegal application by the Western powers of various harmful unilateral coercive measures.
However, Nicaragua has managed to overcome the opprobrious North American and European coercion and has been able to resume the course of sustained growth it had during the decade 2007 to 2017. In addition to having to deal with illegal coercive measures, thanks above all to the resilience and tenacity of the popular economy, the country has left behind the devastating economic consequences of the failed 2018 coup attempt, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the effects of the destructive hurricanes of 2020. Decisive for the country's economic success have been its development cooperation relations with the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China along with the expansion of regional and international trade relations
The regional dimension
At the Central American level, the cooperation of the People's Republic of China has opened new perspectives for the development of transport corridors and auxiliary infrastructure to facilitate the future increase of regional trade. In the case of Nicaragua, for example, the expansion and modernization of the port of Corinto and the installation of the “Julia Herrera de Pomares” logistics center goes hand in hand with an ambitious program to improve the country's highways. As explained by the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Compañero Oscar Mojica “we are improving the main international routes connecting our country with Central America". All these investments promote the productive and commercial development of the region.
Other investments in Nicaragua by China and Russia and related countries, such as Belarus, strengthen different areas of economic activity with important benefits for all Central American countries. Russia gives support for vital security issues in the region such as biosecurity, cybersecurity and the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking. About two thousand police officers from fourteen countries of the region, including officials from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Central American countries, have taken part in training courses at the Police Training Center of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs based in Nicaragua. Russian cooperation also includes the health sector, legal cooperation, wheat supply, transport improvement, modernization of productive sector equipment and military cooperation.
In addition, the ground station of the Glonass satellite system facilitates access to essential data for various sectors of the economy and national life. Among other advantages, access to Glonass allows better preparation for possible adverse natural and climatic phenomena, supports better agricultural planning, ensures more accurate catastral and topographic information and improves the monitoring of possible criminal activity. Another area with an important regional dimension in which Nicaragua has made more progress, thanks to Russian technology, has been health care. The products of the Mechnikov Latin American Institute of Biotechnology are marketed throughout the region.
At the moment, the Mechnikov Institute provides Nicaragua and the region with vaccines against influenza, pneumococcus and Sars-Cov-2, as well as treatments for anemia associated with kidney failure. With similar focus on national and regional human development, Nicaragua, thanks to the support of the Russian company Rosatom, is improving its oncology care with the installation of a nuclear medicine center. The center will treat patients with high technology and produce the isotopes that are used with patients who require radionuclear treatment. The government has made it clear that these advances will be accessible to patients at the regional level. Separately, nuclear technology is also used in different ways to improve agricultural yields.
The Chinese cooperation with Nicaragua offers a broader dimension to cooperation relations for national and regional development which strengthen and complement the contributions of Russia and the other countries that support Nicaragua. In the same way that China has strengthened the development of its main Pacific port, Corinto, a Chinese company is building the new deep-water port in Bluefields. Minister Oscar Mojica explains that, “The Bluefields deep-water Port ... will be a fundamental historic milestone to consolidate the multi-modal interoceanic transport route between Corinto and Bluefields. Its objective is to create a new outlet to the sea for Nicaragua and to create an integrated development model between the port, the industries, the population...”
The development of maritime port infrastructure is accompanied not only by the improvement and expansion of the entire highway system but also by expansion and improvements of the Augusto C. Sandino Airport in Managua and the construction of the new intercontinental airport in Punta Huete. All these tremendous investments are integrated with each other to facilitate greater maritime, air and land connectivity for the entire Central American region. In the same way, Chinese investment in renewable energies in Nicaragua and other countries in the region strengthens not only the national electric power system but also makes more robust the entire regional system, of which Nicaragua is an essential part.
Yankee hemispheric doctrine
This entire national and regional context renders absurd the counterproductive US hemispheric doctrine now revived with especially criminal brutality under the corrupt administration of President Donald Trump. Its national security policy now in Latin America and the Caribbean states that “After years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We are going to deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to possess or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
This latest incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine has been made even worse by the sinister influence of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, a creature of the Miami drug trafficking industry, Marco Rubio. Last month, Mr. Rubio said “For too long, extra-hemispheric actors backed by foreign states, specifically China, have entered our hemisphere with promises that mask their predatory practices.... When critical national assets fall under the ownership or control of another nation, countries lose their sacred right to determine their own destiny and face serious threats to their national sovereignty, data privacy and economic independence.”
The blatant cynicism and hypocrisy in this statement is shocking, as if the Yankee government in all its predatory history has ever been concerned about the national sovereignty of another country. Even more so now, with the long-standing vivid example of US genocidal economic and political-military aggression against Cuba and the persistent extortion and open theft of the resources of entire peoples. Essentially, as much commentary has stated, it is a reenactment of Plan Condor from the era of the dictatorships of 50 years ago, always with the threat of military and economic aggression, but this time mainly through the modality of direct US interference in collusion with local elites to corrupt, manipulate and abuse the judicial and electoral systems of their respective countries.
The fundamental problem for the Yankee elites is that the center of gravity of the world economy is no loner the West but the huge Eurasian region. In the case of Russia, the new aggressive US posture in Latin America and the Caribbean will not change the reality that the Russian economy is essential for the supply of fertilizers to the region. It is also the main supplier country of accessible nuclear technology and a major supplier of petroleum products. On the other hand, China's influence in Latin America and the Caribbean has advanced to levels impossible to reverse, even among the region’s US vassal countries.
China is the most important trading partner for the entire region apart from Mexico, which is the largest trading partner of the US economy. In the last five years, the policies of the People's Republic of China in its economic relations in Latin America and the Caribbean have adapted to the aggressive US policy against Chinese influence in the region. They also recognize the precarious economic situation of their partners among the South American countries, highly indebted and with low levels of productivity. Currently, Chinese financing is channeled less through its state-owned banks to the governments of the region and more through its commercial banks to Chinese companies active in the region’s energy, mining and infrastructure sectors.
Chinese economic authorities and companies plan for the medium and long term and can take risks in moments when North American and European investors and companies prefer to withdraw. In 2024, North American direct investment to Latin America and the Caribbean fell by 12% at a time when more than 20 countries in the region had joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A fundamental question for the governments and economies of the region is to what extent US pressure to reduce relations with China will counteract the imperative for the countries of the region to ensure their national and regional economic development.
In fact, the investment and trade relations of the US private sector and the institutions controlled by the Yankee elites are more limited and come with greater conditions than the commercial, financial and cooperation relations with China. A relevant example is that the currency swap arrangement between China and Argentina, which has been essential for Argentina's finances and trade under the disastrous policies of Javier Milei's regime, was just renewed this past August. In recent years, the Belt and Road Initiative has promoted some 200 projects of different types in Latin America and the Caribbean which have created more than one million jobs.
For companies in the region, relations with Asia increase their options to obtain better terms in their commercial relations, diversify the markets for their products and offer alternative sources to procure inputs, equipment and machinery. In the region as a whole, Chinese companies want to establish robust, reliable value chains and logistics nodes and, more recently, to explore the opportunities for new forward-looking technological infrastructure. Chinese cooperation has facilitated important technology transfer processes, such as the Venezuelan satellites or the deep space observation station in Neuquen, Argentina.
In Nicaragua, the opening last year by China of the first Luban technological education workshop in all of Latin America confirms China's vision of the future in its relations with the region. This year the first 66 students graduated from their courses for industrial manufacturing, automation and programming, mechatronic integration, and Internet of Things applications. China's development cooperation is strongly solidarity based. The Sandinista Popular Revolution in Nicaragua exemplifies the reality that Chinese cooperation, far from being a threat to the stability of the hemisphere, opens up great opportunities for higher levels of human development throughout the region.
As Compañera Rosario Murillo has said, “We are working in a world of solidarity and respect, strengthened in brother and sisterhood with the Communist Party of China, with the People and with President Xi Jinping, ensuring peace and rights for Nicaraguan families and promoting well-being for the families of the whole world." Likewise, Comandante Daniel Ortega has explained how "...now, with President Xi Jinping, much wider doors are opening for humanity. And he has expressed it very clearly: How do we make the world a world of Peace, a world of complementarity, a world where we help each other, where great powers do not use their might to impose themselves and to exploit the world’s Peoples.
"And China has been fulfilling its principles, which are revolutionary principles, principles of the Chinese Communist Party... China today has really become the compass, pointing the way which other nations also share, that planet Earth cannot continue to live under the boot of empires which accumulate wealth at the expense of developing Peoples, crushing them, invading them, murdering them. That has to change, and it will surely have to change, because every day we find more countries defending these positions.”
