Nicaragua leaves the Central American Parliament the day after an OAS rebuke

Nicaragua said on Saturday that it was leaving the Central American Parliament with immediate effect, denouncing the 1987 treaty that created the six-country body. The foreign ministry called the step an exercise of sovereignty. It came one day after the Organization of American States passed a resolution calling on Managua to free political prisoners and restore civil liberties.

The parliament, known as PARLACEN, was built as a regional chamber for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic. Its founding text talks about democracy and human rights. Nicaragua's withdrawal does not dissolve the chamber. It removes one of the six founding members and the seats that member held. The foreign ministry did not publish a timetable for recalling deputies or closing its office. It said the denunciation takes effect at once.

The OAS vote on Friday is the proximate cause the government did not name. Managua's statement did not mention the resolution. Reuters and Al Jazeera both placed the withdrawal immediately after it. Nicaragua left the OAS itself in 2023, arguing that the organisation had become a tool of United States intervention. In 2025 it said it would leave the UN Human Rights Council after a UN report asked other states to act on violations in the country. Saturday's step continues that sequence: a regional body, then a UN body, then the regional parliament.

The domestic record behind those exits is dated and specific. Protests that began in April 2018 were put down by police. The toll cited in wire accounts is more than 350 dead, about 2,000 injured, and thousands detained or driven out of the country. Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who holds the title of co-president, have tightened control since. Last July the government said Nicaragua would no longer hold elections. A parliament seat in a regional chamber is a small thing next to the cancellation of a national ballot. It is the same direction of travel.

PARLACEN has limited binding power. Its value to a member is the seat, the immunity that has sometimes attached to deputies, and the claim to be inside Central American diplomacy. Leaving it costs Managua that claim and costs the chamber a member that had already stopped treating regional votes as binding. The practical change is narrower than the language of denunciation. Deputies from the other five countries can still sit. What they cannot do is pretend Nicaragua is in the room.

The United States has said in the past that it would use regional bodies to isolate Managua. Saturday's withdrawal does some of that work from the other side. A country that has already left the OAS and signalled an exit from the Human Rights Council does not need a vote in Guatemala City to be isolated. It needs the vote only if it still wants the procedure. Denouncing the treaty is a way of refusing the procedure.

Immediate effect is the clause that matters for the other capitals. A denunciation under a treaty usually runs on a notice period. Managua said this one does not. If the 1987 text requires notice, the other members can argue that the seats remain occupied until the notice expires. If they accept the foreign ministry's reading, the seats are empty on Monday. Neither reading had been answered by PARLACEN's secretariat in the first wire reports.

Ortega and Murillo have a pattern of announcing an exit and then treating the announcement as the act. The July statement on elections was of that kind: a decision described as already taken, with no electoral calendar left to amend. The PARLACEN denunciation fits. The open item is whether any Nicaraguan deputy tries to take a seat this week, and whether the chamber's rules still let them.