Brazil expels Nicaraguan ambassador in response to expulsion of Brazilian diplomat

The Brazilian government announced on Thursday afternoon the expulsion of Nicaraguan Ambassador Fulvia Patricia Castro Mata from the country. The information was confirmed by Brazil’s Foreign Ministry Itamaraty in response to Nicaragua’s expulsion of Brazil’s Ambassador to that country Breno Sousa da Costa the day before.

A The decision to expel the diplomat from Nicaragua was taken by Lula da Silva after a meeting with Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira. At the meeting, Lula and Vieira assessed the expulsion of the Brazilian ambassador by a theoretically friendly country as serious and that this measure required an appropriate response – the expulsion of Fulvia.

Nicaragua expelled the Brazilian ambassador in retaliation for his absence from the celebration of the so-called Sandinista Revolution, which took place on July 19. On that day, the government of Managua marked another anniversary of the 1979 revolution, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front, led by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and came to power for the first time.

Ortega, despite the good relations he had always enjoyed with Lula da Silva, was not pleased by the absence of the Brazilian ambassador and decided to expel him as a test, further worsening relations between the two countries, which had suddenly been shaken by the radical change in policy of a former guerrilla who had been democratically elected but had become a dictator as brutal as the one he had overthrown decades earlier. It was because of this radicalism, as well as the arrests and expulsions of Catholic clergy who had criticized Ortega, that Lula ordered the ambassador to skip the celebrations of the revolution, angering the former Sandinista guerrilla.