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The Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega referred to the American president Donald Trump as "mentally deranged" during an official event in Managua on Monday, where he lashed out against the sanctions imposed on his children, the capture of Nicolás Maduro, and the threats of a military operation against Cuba, according to EFE.
The speech, delivered on the occasion of National Peace Day, came just days after the Trump administration launched the most extensive and coordinated sanctions offensive against the Ortega regime to date.
Ortega, 80 years old and in power since 2007, did not mention Trump by name at any point, but his references were unequivocal.
"Hasta the Nobel Peace Prize was fighting for it, but they didn't give it to him (...) It is a problem, we would say, of mental unhinging. As we say here: he is not in his right mind," stated the Sandinista leader.
"And the president of a power who is not in his right mind is going to destroy his people, and he is destroying the peace and stability of the world," he continued.
The immediate trigger for the outburst was the wave of sanctions from the previous week: on April 16, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned two sons of the presidential couple, Maurice Facundo Ortega Murillo and Daniel Edmundo Ortega Murillo, along with five other officials and seven companies in the Nicaraguan gold sector.
Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced additional sanctions against the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa, for serious human rights violations, on the eighth anniversary of the 2018 protests that left more than 325 protesters dead.
Rubio described the regime's actions as a brutal wave of repression against Nicaraguans who valiantly opposed the rising levels of tyranny, corruption, and abuses by the regime.
Ortega demanded Trump to end the war in Iran, lift the embargo against Cuba, remove sanctions against Venezuela, and "return President Nicolás Maduro to his country."
Maduro was captured by U.S. special forces on January 3, 2026, in Caracas and faces federal charges of narco-terrorism in New York. Ortega accused Trump of launching "attacks to kidnap presidents, as he did in Venezuela," and of threatening Cuba "with a military operation."
"If bombs need to be dropped, it's decided by the one who has become an expert in dropping bombs (...) It's the same one who continuously imposes sanctions on the people," he criticized.
For the Nicaraguan dictator, "the war imposed, in the manner that the current president of the United States imposes it, is typical of someone who has lost their mind and believes they can do anything, any barbarity."
His speech reflects the growing isolation of the Sandinista regime: with Maduro's fall, the leaderships of Nicaragua and Cuba are under maximum pressure from Washington, which has sanctioned over 250 Nicaraguan officials since April 2025.
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