The President of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, ruled out any possibility of dialogue with Nicaragua after the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, said he aims to “recover” the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste.
“We do not accept talking to Nicaragua about Guanacaste. Costa Rica does not accept that they challenge its absolute rights over the province of Guanacaste,” affirmed the president in an official statement after a meeting with Foreign Minister Enrique Castillo, the Costa Rican Ambassador in Managua, Javier Sancho, and several ministers.
The Presidential House announced that the first step taken after Ortega’s statements was to send a formal note of protest delivered Thursday to the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Costa Rica, Harold Rivas.
In addition, she called her representative in Managua to consultations and will keep him in Costa Rica “indefinitely, to see how the situation evolves,” explained Castillo.
The Costa Rican Government also will report what happened to the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the UN Security Council. “It is a case of Nicaragua wanting to move from words to deeds,” explained Chinchilla.
The President denominated Ortega’s Government an “adversary government of Costa Rica” and said that the claims of the Nicaraguan leader are “absurd.”
“The commander leading the regime of Managua tramples on the historical and legal reality to offend us and seeks to deceive its own people… They won’t enter Guanacaste,” she declared.
For his part, on Wednesday, August 14, the mayor of Nicoya, Marcos Jimenez, decided to send a letter to Ortega, where, on behalf of Nicoyanos, he requested “respect, prudence, coherence with the sentiment of the Guanacaste people who feel a deep pride in being Costa Rican” and ended with “our unscathed position, from the pride of being residents of the Republic of Costa Rica by our own free will.”
The boundaries between Costa Rica and Nicaragua were established in the Treaty of Cañas–Jerez, signed in 1858, but both nations have faced off for years over border disputes.
This territory was annexed to Costa Rica in 1824, after holding town councils in the main towns, and according to local historians before that date it did not belong to any country.
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