- Nicaragua's National Assembly approved a constitutional reform on September 1 barring anyone labeled a "traitor to the homeland" from running for office, and stretching the Ortega-Murillo co-presidential term from six to seven years. A second vote, now set for January 18, 2027, is still required.
- Carolina Jiménez, president of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), argues Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum's "self-determination" defense of Nicaragua collapses once a government removes its citizens' ability to choose anyone at all.
- Mexico abstained from an August 19 OAS vote convening emergency talks on Nicaragua, which passed with Brazil as the lone "no."
- Jiménez points to Mexico's own 2022 intervention in Peru's politics as evidence the country doesn't apply its non-intervention principle evenly.
Nicaragua's ruling Assembly has now done on paper what critics long warned it would: strip an entire category of citizens of the right to ever appear on a ballot again. To Carolina Jiménez, who leads the rights group WOLA, that single fact undercuts the argument Sheinbaum has leaned on for weeks — that Nicaraguans are simply exercising their own self-determination.
The clash lands just as Nicaragua's Congress advances a measure that could permanently sideline the opposition, and weeks after Mexico chose not to back a regional push to confront that same crisis.
A Doctrine Stretched Thin
Since Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega first raised the idea of scrapping elections back in July, Sheinbaum has repeatedly fallen back on the Estrada Doctrine, Mexico's decades-old commitment to staying out of other countries' internal affairs, rather than criticize Ortega directly. Her position hasn't moved: what happens inside Nicaragua is for Nicaraguans to settle.
Jiménez's rebuttal is that the premise falls apart the moment a government eliminates its own mechanism for changing hands. "What comes next for the whole region?" she asked, casting Ortega's move less as an internal matter than as a template other leaders might copy.
She also flags what she sees as an inconsistency close to home: Mexico stepped directly into Peruvian politics to shelter an ally facing prosecution, yet treats Nicaragua's crackdown as something it can't touch — a contrast she frames as picking and choosing when the doctrine applies.
What Nicaragua's Assembly Just Locked In
The reform that triggered this latest round of criticism cleared Nicaragua's National Assembly unanimously and by show of hands on September 1, during a special session held in León. It bars candidates and public officials tied to coup attempts, foreign-backed political activity, or support for sanctions against the state — a label the government has already pinned on at least 452 exiled critics, among them writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli.
The same measure stretches the terms of the Ortega-Murillo "co-presidency," lawmakers, mayors and military commanders from six years to seven. Co-president Rosario Murillo has said the required second legislative vote will take place starting January 18, 2027 — a step that, given the ruling party's total control of the chamber, amounts to a formality rather than a real test.
The 2018 uprising that preceded this slow rollback of the ballot box remains the backdrop critics keep returning to. Jiménez puts the death toll at more than 350; the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in its most recent count, documented 355 confirmed deaths along with thousands wounded and hundreds of political prisoners.
The Vote Mexico Sat Out
On August 19, the OAS Permanent Council approved a U.S.-led resolution calling an emergency meeting of foreign ministers over Nicaragua. Most tallies put the result at 29 in favor, Brazil opposed, and Mexico abstaining, with Haiti and Venezuela not registering votes. No date has been set for the ministerial session itself.
Sheinbaum defended the abstention days later, telling reporters it was "a matter of self-determination of peoples, clearly established in the Constitution." Jiménez calls that framing hollow: a population's protests have already been met with mass casualties and exile, she argues, and now even the ballot box is being taken away — leaving little room to talk about a people determining anything.
The Peru Precedent
Jiménez's double-standard argument rests heavily on Peru. After Pedro Castillo's failed attempt to dissolve Congress in December 2022, Mexico's government granted asylum to his prime minister, Betssy Chávez, inside its Lima embassy — a move Peru's government at the time called direct interference. Castillo and Chávez were later each sentenced to 11 years and 5 months for conspiracy to rebel, and Peru severed diplomatic ties with Mexico over the asylum in November 2025.
The standoff didn't end until Peru had a new government. Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as Peru's president on July 28, 2026, after edging out a rival by fewer than 50,000 votes. Roughly a week later, her administration issued Chávez the safe-conduct pass that let her fly to Mexico, restoring relations between the two countries on August 7 — a gesture Sheinbaum publicly credited to Fujimori's government rather than treating it as a resolution of her own making.
A History of Bending the Rule
Jiménez argues that record undercuts the idea that non-intervention is untouchable, pointing out that Mexico itself severed ties with the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua back in 1979 over its own record of atrocities — proof, in her view, that Mexican foreign policy has moved before when abuses were severe enough.
For now, she says, Mexico and Brazil still have room to lead a coordinated regional response before the OAS foreign ministers eventually meet — and that stepping back simply hands the initiative to Washington.
