US 'Pressure' Frees Detainees, But Not from Its Own Camps
ABC News breathlessly reports Nicaragua's government is freeing detainees after 'pressure' from the US. A feel-good story, designed to highlight benevolent American influence, meticulously ignores why the US has any leverage over Nicaragua to begin with. This 'pressure' is a direct descendent of a century of direct US military interventions, support for brutal dictatorships, and funding of
opposition groups – including the infamous Contras in the 1980s, who the International Court of Justice condemned for human rights abuses and the US for violating international law (a judgment the US ignored). One might wonder why the US, seemingly so concerned with detainee welfare abroad, maintains its own notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility, where individuals have been held without
charge or trial for over two decades. Perhaps the 'pressure' is simply reserved for countries that haven't quite aligned their geopolitical interests with Washington's, rather than being a universal principle of detainee rights. The narrative conveniently forgets who often creates the conditions for these 'detainees' to exist.