Caribbean & Central America - January 2013 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The reconciliatory noises to come out of the first meeting between President Daniel Ortega and his Colombian counterpart, Juan Manuel Santos, since the 19 November ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the maritime and territorial dispute [RC-12-12], have failed to prove convincing.

Following the meeting between the two leaders, which took place in Mexico on 1 December, ahead of the inauguration of Enrique Peña Nieto as Mexico’s new president, Ortega made various assurances. He said that Nicaragua would respect the ancestral fishing rights of the Raizal, a Creole population on the Colombian islands of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina which are now surrounded by Nicaraguan waters following the ICJ ruling which ordered Colombia to cede 75,000km2 (or 40%) of its maritime territory to Nicaragua. He also said that there would be no drilling for oil in those parts of the area designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) as the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve – reportedly one of Santos’ main concerns.

While doubts may surround Ortega’s reassurances regarding the latter point (see sidebar), Santos’s insistence that the meeting constituted a “positive step” and that Colombia would seek to keep communications open have similarly failed to mask underlying tensions. The commander of the Colombian navy, Admiral Roberto García Márquez, said that “the presidential order is to maintain our warships at the 82nd meridian” (the previous maritime boundary) while the commander of the Nicaraguan army, General Julio César Aviles, told Nicaragua’s legislature that if Colombian vessels were found in the area granted to Nicaragua by the ICJ ruling, the Nicaraguan naval force would have to “remove them in accordance with the ICJ ruling, which is not up for debate”. Both governments subsequently sought to downplay these positions however, declaring that their naval forces had been ordered not to resort to force or “provocative” actions. Armando Segura, the president of the Nicaragua chamber of fishing has, however, since told reporters that hundreds of Nicaraguan fishermen had complained of being harassed by Colombian military frigates and helicopters. The press office of the Colombian armed forces refused to comment on the complaints.

Roping in the US

At the end of November, Nicaragua’s legislative assembly approved a presidential decree authorising US troops to carry out joint anti-drug patrols with the Nicaraguan navy in the country’s newly assigned Caribbean waters, from 1 January to 30 June 2013.

  While the US, whose navy and coast guard regularly carry out security patrols in Caribbean waters with the cooperation of its Latin American partners, did not take any position on the situation arising from the ICJ judgment(since 1986, the US only accepts ICJ jurisdiction on a case-by-case basis, having withdrawn from automatic jurisdiction when the ICJ ruled that its Contra war violated international law), Ortega was quick to trumpet its participation in these patrols as an implicit endorsement of Nicaragua’s sovereignty over the area.

 The US ambassador to Nicaragua, Phyllis Powers, has since sought to distance the US from the dispute. She told reporters that following the approval of the decree, the US would continue to work “closely” with Nicaragua in the fight against drug trafficking, but in response to whether the US would increase support to Nicaragua given that it nearly doubled its territory in the Caribbean at the expense of Colombia, she said that the issue “is very complex…I don’t have the details and don’t wish to enter into discussion regarding new and old economic territory”. As regards the amount of resources assigned for cooperation with Nicaragua, she said that “it was the same as we have had in the area for some years…we will continue to work with these resources”.

• Ecosystems

Jaime Incer Barquero, an advisor to President Daniel Ortega on environmental and scientific affairs, was cited by the international press as saying that Nicaragua had yet to assess the ecosystems of its Caribbean waters “to define areas of absolute protection [and zones] where sustainable exploitation of shrimp, lobster or oil can be carried out”. He told reporters that the government is “barely aware” of the situation in the Miskito Cays area, some 13,000km² close to the coastline of Nicaragua’s North Atlantic region (Raan).