without consequences.

The West has shown that the assertion of both Venezuela and Nicaragua that they have the right to act independently of US and Western interests will not be tolerated, especially insofar as it dares to use the countries’ resources to invest in the wellbeing of their own people at the expense of the profits of multinational corporations. The US has made it clear that there are consequences for any administration that dares to challenge its authority. To this end, the United States is pushing the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Actof 2017 (also known as the NICA Act), which seeks to block the country’s access to international loans—all under the pretext of democracy and humanitarianism (despite the fact that these loans are largely used for health, education, and socialand other anti-Ortega groups), largely through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)and USAID. Recently, a group of student leaders of the protests took a trip to the United States funded by Freedom House, a US government-funded NED partner, and met with conservative senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to ask for support (the same three who recently re-introduced the NICA Act in April). While the intentions of the students and the reality on the ground are murky at best, the intentions of US imperialism couldn’t be clearer.

We mustn’t forget that the United States has a long history of meddling in Latin America and supporting regime change to further its own economic interests. In Nicaragua, the United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship and funded the right-wing