President Joe Biden has signed an executive order targeting Nicaragua’s gold industry, as the United States aims to punish Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega over a crackdown on dissent and curbs to democratic institutions.
Biden’s executive order gives the US Treasury Department “the authority to target certain persons that operate or have operated in the gold sector of the Nicaraguan economy”, the department said in a statement on Monday.
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list of 3 items list 1 of 3 list 2 of 3 list 3 of 3 end of list It also allows Washington to bar new US investments in Nicaraguan economic sectors, imports of certain products from the Central American nation and exports by US citizens of certain items to Nicaragua, it said, among other potential measures.
The Treasury also sanctioned Nicaragua’s mining authority, the General Directorate of Mines, and a Nicaraguan government official and “close confidant” of Ortega.
“The Ortega-Murillo regime’s continued attacks on democratic actors and members of civil society and unjust detention of political prisonersdemonstrate that the regime feels it is not bound by the rule of law,” Treasury official Brian E Nelson said in the statement.
“With President Biden’s new Executive Order, we can and will use every tool at our disposal to deny the Ortega-Murillo regime the resources they need to continue to undermine democratic institutions in Nicaragua,” Nelson said.
The Biden administration has imposed a slew of sanctions in recent months, including US visa restrictions, on Nicaraguan officials and their relatives over the country’s poor human rights record.
Ortega has faced growing international criticism over his government’s crackdown on opposition leaders and human rights activists, especially in the lead-up to elections last year that Western nations denounced as a “sham”.
Human rights organisations have denounced the wave of arrests, which has seen dozens of people detained and sentenced to often lengthy prison terms. Other opposition figures have fled the country, often to neighbouring Costa Rica.
In June, the United Nations human rights chief warned that “socio-political, economic and human rights crises” in Nicaragua were forcing thousands of people to leave their homes in a wave of migration that was growing in “unprecedented numbers”.