Hello, everyone. This is Mauder Rebels. I'm Ben Norton. My co-host, Max Blumenthal, is joining us. He'll be here in a few minutes.

And today we're talking about Nicaragua. On November 7th, there were elections in the country. And at the gray zone, I've done some coverage of it.

I was on the ground as an electoral observer and I've published shovel reports.

The U.S. government has refused to recognize the results of the election.

So we're going through something very similar to the coup scenario against Venezuela in 2019

with one Guaido in which Washington and Brussels and

about two or three dozen other Western countries largely and right-wing governments in Latin

America refused to recognize the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and now similarly,

the U.S. and Brussels are doing something similar

in Nicaragua, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the San Luis de government.

The Biden administration passed the so-called Reynacer Act.

Reynacer calls for sanctions on Nicaragua, and in fact, something that I think is very important to point out is that these sanctions, the U.S. actually just imposed sanctions on November 15th. But the sanctions that the U.S. is imposing on Nicaragua explicitly call for not just government, not just government institutions, but also civilians. This is text of

the Rhenocet Act that was just passed by the U.S. Congress with total bipartisan support. And you can

see here that this is the language from the bill, which calls for sanctions on, quote quote party members and elected officials from the

san dieista national liberation front and their family members so basically what the u.s. government

just did is is declared that if you support the san danista, if you're one of the over two million

Nicaraguans, that is over one third of the population in a country of roughly six million people,

if you voted for the San Distas. And if you're a family, if you're a member of the party,

or if you're a family member of the party, the U.S. basically just declared you persona non grata and is going to try to punish you economically.

I mean, this is economic warfare, not just on the Nicaraguan government, but on the

Nicaraguan population. So today to talk about this, I'm also joined by a great guest.

Here speaking with me right now is Steve Sweeney.

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