MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Assembly Speaker claims NGOs in Venezuela respond to Washington

NGOs are facades seeking to destabilize Caracas, Rodríguez argued

Venezuelan National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodríguez claimed Monday that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) were Trojan horses used by Washington to destabilize his country.

“It is through some facades that they call NGOs, organizations that depend entirely on the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and the State Department, with which they finance all the actions of destabilization and violence against the people of Venezuela,” Rodríguez argued after US Undersecretary of State Brian Nichols described Caracas' Aug. 15 measures regulating NGOs as a “direct attack on society and freedom of association.”

The initiative provides for a series of requirements NGOs and other non-profit entities need to operate in the South American country. Failure to comply entails sanctions and may result in their dissolution.

Nicaragua's Sandinista administration has long been targeting these entities. On Monday, some 1,500 NGOs were shut down in one day, their assets being transferred to the State. The government targeted mostly Catholic and Evangelical groups deemed hostile to President Daniel Ortega. The Interior Ministry claimed these organizations had failed to submit their financial statements “for periods between 01 and 35 years.”

The list of entities whose “legal personality and registration” were canceled also included charitable, sports, small business, rural and retired persons' societies or foundations, as well as Rotary and chess clubs. In addition, indigenous organizations and those of former combatants of the civil between Ortega's Sandinistas and the Contras in the 1980s were also closed.

Ortega and his Vice President wife Rosario Murillo tightened the laws against NGOs after the 2018 protests, which in three months left more than 300 people dead. The 78-year-old ruler claims that NGOs and especially the Catholic Church supported those protests, which he considers a Washington-sponsored coup attempt.

With the new 1,500 NGOs, the number of such organizations dissolved after 2018 amounts to more than 5,200. As per Nicaragua's new legislation, NGOs need to form a partnership with the State to carry out their activities. The Sandinista regime announced this measure three days ago.

“As of today, NGOs operating in Nicaragua will be governed by a new operational model that we have characterized as 'partnership alliances',” Murillo explained last Friday.

The Sandinistas also argued that illegalizing these NGOs was part of an ordering process because not all of the 7,227 registered in Nicaragua as of 2018 were still active.

Nicaragua's crisis deepened after the Nov. 2021 elections in which Ortega was granted a fifth term in office with every opposition leader either in jail or in exile. Some of them were later expelled from the country and stripped of their nationality after being accused of “treason to the homeland.”