Who is Orlando Tardencilla, the former guerrilla that dictator Daniel Ortega appointed as his new ambassador to the OAS

“Name comrade Orlando José Tardencilla as Permanent Representative of the Republic of Nicaragua, with the rank of extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador, to the OAS,” Ortega said through presidential agreement 58-2022, published in the official gazette La Gaceta.

The “comrade”, as the Nicaraguan dictator officially calls him, is a lawyer by profession who fought against the dictatorship of Somoza, which was overthrown in 1979. In 1980 he joined the then Salvadoran guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and was arrested in that country a year later.

After a year in Salvadoran prisons, he was sent to the United States to testify that his presence in El Salvador was evidence that the Sandinistas, with the support of the Government of Fidel Castro of Cuba, were exporting war and communism through Central America, and once in Washington, in front of journalists, he said the opposite and accused the United States of “being determined to attack the Nicaraguan revolution” at the time.

He is the father of the judge loyal to the regime Nadia Camila Tardencilla Rodríguez, head of the Second Criminal District Court of Managua, which has ordered the imprisonment of human rights defenders and journalists. Last week, in fact, he imposed a nine-year prison sentence “for alleged money laundering” on the general manager of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro.

He has belonged to the Nicaraguan Christian Way (CCN) party and founded the Alternative for Change party, which allied with the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) since 2011.

In addition, he served for three months as the country's ambassador to the Office of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations, based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Tardencilla has also been a deputy to the National Assembly and the Central American Parliament.

Tardencilla's appointment comes 11 days after Ortega removed journalist and diplomat Arturo McFields Yescas, who denounced during a session of the OAS Permanent Council a “dictatorship” in his country and demanded the release of imprisoned opponents.

“OAS welcomes guerrilla fighter Orlando Tardencilla today with a red carpet. Forgetting the 181 political prisoners, 355 dead and 170,000 exiles. The democracies of Latin America cannot be silent. The bad guys win when the good guys are silent,” McFields said, on his Twitter account.

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Last Friday, Tardencilla presented his credentials with a speech in which he attacked the agency for being an “instrument of aggression” controlled by the United States. “This organization informally failed to apply its own founding norm, becoming a sad instrument of aggression by the United States Government, which reconverted it into what would become known as the United States Ministry of Colonies,” Tardencilla said in his speech.

The new ambassador criticized that the OAS has carried out “infamous acts against various peoples” and condemned the imposition of sanctions on Nicaragua by “the agencies of the United States government with the complicity of puppet governments in Europe and Latin America.”

Faced with this, he asserted that Nicaragua “does not recognize itself as a colony of any foreign power.” “Today we are here to reiterate that we uphold our independence and jurisdictional sovereignty to which we are entitled,” claimed the new Nicaraguan ambassador to the OAS, an organization that Ortega has promised to abandon.

Human rights organizations estimate that at least 170 opponents have been detained since the 2018 protests against the Nicaraguan government, including seven potential electoral rivals of Daniel Ortega, who won the November presidential elections for a fourth consecutive term.

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