Daniel Ortega “Unity is essential to defend peace and progress”

https://radiolaprimerisima.com/la-unidad-es-fundamental-para-defender-la-paz-y-el-progreso/

By Commander Daniel Ortega , Co-president of Nicaragua

June 23, 2025. Excerpts:

“How furious they were when the North Korean President announced that they would not stand idly by in the face of aggression, because they were constantly surrounded and threatened by the weapons of the American military… he has been clear in saying: if they attack us, we will not hesitate to respond with the atomic weapons we have…and that makes them untouchable.

“What’s the United Nations for? What’s the United Nations for? Nothing! Nothing! Because no matter how much they talk at the United Nations about reaching agreements, they’re not fulfilled. Ah, if the agreement is to attack a country, that agreement is fulfilled. If the agreement is to invade, bomb, destroy Libya, that agreement is fulfilled, just as they assassinated our brother Muammar Gaddafi.

“It’s pointless for the vast majority of the world’s people to vote there in favor of lifting the blockade against Cuba, because simply nothing happens there, and they actually intensify the blockade, and what they cause is suffering for the Cuban people.

“It becomes increasingly clear that the United Nations has a number of organizations that serve nothing more than as instruments of empires, to squeeze the throats, the necks, of those peoples fighting for sovereignty, for well-being, for peace, and that, moreover, it is a theater, a total theater, as if to mock the people.

“Hope lies in these powers like the People’s Republic of China, which has a humane, supportive, and generous attitude, and that logically makes it easier for it to be welcomed in all countries, and that angers the US government.

Trump is now putting immigrants “in jail, because he says they’re all bandits, that they’re all criminals, they’re murderers. … But there’s also a rebellion among immigrants who take to the streets to protest, and they’re imprisoned and beaten. There in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the greatest resistance is there.”

“And here in Nicaragua, we continue to stand united, following the example of Carlos, who gave his life for the Nicaraguan people, for the peasants… And he gave his life fighting for unity…. this is a fundamental point for all of us Nicaraguans, for the youth, for the workers, for the Army, for the Police: unity, unity! Because the enemy uses its skills to seek ways to sow distrust, sow division, speak ill of one another, thereby provoking fractures. And we must be sure that the more united we are, the stronger we will be. The more united we are, the more we will guarantee peace for the Nicaraguan people. And guaranteeing peace for the Nicaraguan people means ensuring that we continue to advance all the social programs to defeat poverty and that the conditions of Nicaraguan families improve with each passing day.”

Unity is essential to defend peace and progress

 By Commander Daniel Ortega , Co-president of Nicaragua.

Today, on this day when we commemorate our brother Carlos, Carlos Fonseca, on his birthday, he is in another place, but he is present here. Present among the Nicaraguan people, present in the souls of the peasants, the workers, and the Nicaraguan youth, present in the fighting spirit to defend peace, in the Police and the Army.

These are times when it is clear that what we must protect most is peace, because war, violence, interventions, and aggression are multiplying across much of our planet, and there are regions where people are even being massacred, people are being destroyed, such as the Palestinian people, a heroic people who continue to resist, continue to defend their right to life, their right to have a home.

And then we hear about atomic weapons. Atomic weapons have become a weapon. There were commitments at the United Nations to avoid atomic weapons, but the imperialists of the Earth, who have the capacity and resources to build atomic weapons, have built them, and they don’t allow any other country to build atomic weapons.

How furious they were when the North Korean President announced that they would not stand idly by in the face of aggression, because they were constantly surrounded and threatened by the weapons of the American military.

And the Republic of which he is President is a small nation, a small territory; the territory of Iran and the population of Iran are much larger, more than 90 million people in Iran. And he has been clear in saying: if they attack us, we will not hesitate to respond with the atomic weapons we have. Because they have atomic weapons, they have managed to build them under difficult conditions, and that makes them untouchable.

That is to say, it seems that in the world, so that no country could be attacked, sanctioned, invaded, or bombed, all countries should have their little atomic weapons, their atomic rockets. Then, no one would move, no one would move an attack, an aggression. But the way forward is not to multiply atomic weapons around the world.

We have declared Latin America a zone of peace, free of this type of weaponry, and the challenge facing humanity, the challenge facing, above all, the imperialists of the Earth, is to begin destroying atomic weapons.

Only by eliminating atomic weapons will there be peace and security in the world; otherwise, all peoples are threatened and blackmailed when an imperialist power dares to launch bombings, when a country is not at war, to destroy the laboratories that have been operating in Iran, under the supervision of the United Nations.

Why? To ensure that Iran’s program was a program—as they have explained—of development in the nuclear field, but for peaceful use. Because many countries have nuclear power plants, and they are very safe, very stable, and also cost the least to generate, and that’s what they were inspecting there.

And after the bombs were dropped on the sites where the laboratories were supposedly located, it turns out that it was all a show; because the President who ordered the rocket launches did so to help the Israeli government. At the same time, the Israeli government, which has atomic weapons, refuses to be inspected, and no one inspects it.

And what’s the United Nations for? What’s the United Nations for? Nothing! Nothing! Because no matter how much they talk at the United Nations about reaching agreements, they’re not fulfilled. Ah, if the agreement is to attack a country, that agreement is fulfilled. If the agreement is to invade, bomb, destroy Libya, that agreement is fulfilled, just as they assassinated our brother Muammar Gaddafi.

But when the majority agreements there demand the suspension of the blockade against Cuba after 63 years, in a vote where virtually everyone votes in favor of lifting the blockade against Cuba, two or three countries—Israel and the United States—that disagree vote against it.

It’s pointless for the vast majority of the world’s people to vote there in favor of lifting the blockade against Cuba, because simply nothing happens there, and they actually intensify the blockade, and what they cause is suffering for the Cuban people, a heroic people, the people of Martí, the people of Fidel, of Raúl, of our brother Díaz-Canel, fighting a heroic, heroic, heroic battle.

It’s a brutal blockade, where they’re left without power, without the ability to acquire spare parts to get the plants up and running. A total, brutal blockade! And what does the United Nations say? They vote, everyone votes there, everyone votes, but there are no conditions there, at the United Nations, to enforce what the United Nations or its agencies vote for.

The United States owes us millions in compensation after the war President Ronald Reagan imposed on us, which left thousands dead here in Nicaragua—murdered boys and girls, peasants, and humble working people. Armed, trained, and financed by the United States.

From 1979 to 1990, it was an uninterrupted war, fought with the heart, because we were a Revolution that had an Army, a Police Force, which were being organized when the onslaught of the Yankee Empire began.

And we went to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which is a United Nations instrument, and it’s assumed that whatever the Court says is enforced. And the Court ruled, condemning the United States for terrorist activities against the Nicaraguan people, and ordered them to pay compensation. And yet, to this day, they haven’t compensated.

It becomes increasingly clear that the United Nations has a number of organizations that serve nothing more than as instruments of empires, to squeeze the throats, the necks, of those peoples fighting for sovereignty, for well-being, for peace, and that, moreover, it is a theater, a total theater, as if to mock the people.

Father Miguel D’Escoto, when he presided over the United Nations on behalf of Nicaragua, raised a proposal, a banner, that we had to rebuild, that we had to refound… What does refounding mean? It means destroying the foundations, the foundations that the United Nations currently has, since those foundations are maintained by the powers.

So we would have to take that power away from the powers, and give it to all peoples, to all nations, and in that way the United Nations would make sense.

The United Nations is simply a mockery of the people, a mockery of humanity. The United Nations should disappear, disappear! And therein lies the challenge of building, on the foundations of the people, with the strength of all peoples, of all nations, a society of nations in which the imperialists of the Earth will surely not want to join; because they want international institutions that are at their service, that pass resolutions to punish, murder, and attack those peoples who defend sovereignty, defend the right to prosperity and well-being.

These are not new times in the history of humanity, not new, like the powerful, the imperialists of all times. It’s enough to remember that two world wars originated in Europe, and that the Second World War, led by the Nazis, by Hitler, was sweeping across Europe, taking over the world and wiping out those citizens who didn’t have the Aryan gene in their blood, because they said that anyone who wasn’t Aryan had to disappear, had to go to the gas chamber.

If they have come to dominate these nations, these peoples, well, they’re sent to the gas chamber simply for being brown, not to mention being Black. To the gas chamber. Because for them, it was only the Aryan race.

And to dominate all of Europe and beyond, they attacked Russia, but there Russia confronted them and defeated them. And this year has been the year of celebrating another anniversary of the defeat of Nazism.

Hitler had his scientists not to build atomic rockets, because at that time atomic weapons were unknown, but to build atomic bombs. There he had his scientists working hard, and he was sure that with atomic bombs being dropped everywhere, there wouldn’t be a country or nation left that wouldn’t surrender.

Well, Hitler was defeated by the Red Army and by the army of that great nation founded by Mao Tse-tung and where President Xi Jinping is. He was defeated by the people, the workers, the soldiers, of Russia, under the leadership of that great leader, Joseph Stalin.

Stalin defeated the Nazis, and immediately after the Nazis were defeated, the Americans rushed to find German scientists to take them to develop the bomb. This was in 1945, after the war was over. They took them to the United States, and, in conjunction with American scientists, they developed some small bombs there. The war was over, it was over.

And in 1947, in the first days of August, they decided to test the bombs. At that time, there were no rockets; they had to transport the bombs, loading them onto airplanes and then dropping them on targets. They had chosen two Japanese cities as targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the anniversary is coming up in August. There they dropped the atomic bombs, the first and only atomic bombs ever detonated on any population in all of history.

The other one who is tempted to drop atomic bombs on the current President of the United States, although he talks about peace, but on the other hand he threatens.

But the only two atomic bombs ever exploded in the world were exploded by the United States, and there were 325,000 deaths from those bombs.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t military targets, and the population remained there, a portion of them murdered, and the population that wasn’t murdered was contaminated by radiation. Children began to suffer from cancer and thousands of other illnesses, as did adults, and many people began to die from radiation. And to this day, even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is evidence, the living traces of descendants of families affected by radiation.

And it’s incredible to hear the imperialists of the Earth, who don’t condemn these events, they don’t condemn them; rather, the Europeans have rushed to find ways to arm themselves with rockets. Ah! They have the right!

If it occurred to us to find a few rockets so they don’t hit us, because with the rockets no one here can hit us, that’s how it is. But it doesn’t occur to us, because we are not people who fall prey to the game and the instrument of nuclear weapons.

We don’t even know how this war, which Israel started, will end. From one day to the next, it launched attacks against Iran, claiming that Iran was building these laboratories, but for peaceful nuclear energy. They said no, they were for rockets. And the specialists from the agencies who have visited them, who have gone to inspect the sites, said there was no sign that they were building bombs or rockets there, but that it was for peaceful purposes.

But Israel, which has rockets, doesn’t even want to think about Iran having rockets, because it already imagines Iran is going to fire rockets at them; so it prefers to start attacking Iran first. It doesn’t launch rockets because it knows that if it launches rockets, Israel would be committing a crime and would be guilty of a crime that would be condemned. There would be no government there that would want to support them in launching atomic rockets, using atomic material.

So what Israel did was pursue a war of attrition, attacking, attacking, attacking, attacking. This, of course, was done in agreement with the US government.

As they attacked, Iran also responded. In other words, the right to defense is granted by law. The attacks came from Israel every day, so Iran had to start responding as well. But since Israel was feeling that the bombs coming from Iran through these modern devices, modern instruments of war, were causing them a lot of damage, they told the United States government that they should go and destroy the rocket development sites in Iran.

And they left. In the end, they left and organized an operation with several planes and bombed the sites, indeed, where the laboratories were. Nothing happened when they bombed the sites where the laboratories were, because if there had been uranium there, what happened in Chernobyl would immediately be a thousand times more disastrous. It would begin to spread, carried by the winds, and that would contaminate it with radiation and kill thousands of people. It would float there as far as the wind could take it. But nothing of that sort happened.

The US government says they’ve already destroyed the laboratories, but on the other hand, it’s known that they had moved the laboratories to another location a long time ago, because they knew they could get there. So, this is a tragicomedy because it’s a real tragedy. It terrifies the people in the area, and on the other hand, it terrifies the world as well, and they say they’re doing it for peace.

So, after he fulfilled his promise to the Israelis—not to the people of Israel, but to the governments, because the people of Israel are a noble people and suffer from all this—when he fulfilled his promise to the government of Israel, the murderer of the Palestinian people, the President of the United States then came out saying that the problem was resolved, because he was finished, and that he had already reached agreements with the Iranian government for peace.

But here’s a report where Iran contradicts Trump, because Trump came out saying, as if he’d already done his duty, I’d already defeated them; now, ceasefire… The man of peace! But no one pays attention to him. Netanyahu, the executioner of the Palestinian people, has more power because he continues to launch his explosive devices at Iran.

Logically, Iran must also respond to these attacks; and what has Iran said? Let Israel cease fire, and we will cease fire. Then there would be conditions to seek understanding and seek the restoration of peace in that entire region.

So far, the truth is, it’s hard to believe the President of the United States, because he keeps saying one thing, then another. Well, that’s his way of doing it.

On the other hand, it has it against our people, against the people of our entire region, the people of Africa, Asia, etc., who have emigrated to the United States, where they have made families, where they have been granted residency. Why? Because they are the fundamental workforce for that empire to sustain itself economically.

And he’s persecuting them, he’s persecuting them, he’s putting them in jail, because he says they’re all bandits, that they’re all criminals, they’re murderers. How many barbarities has he said about our Mexican brothers and sisters, and all our Latin American brothers and sisters, like that, bandits, he says, murderers, and he’s persecuting them.

But there’s also a rebellion among immigrants who take to the streets to protest, and they’re imprisoned and beaten. There in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the greatest resistance is there. Why? First, because the President of the United States should know that this territory didn’t belong to the United States, that this territory belonged to Mexico from his ancestors.

And when the immigrants arrived in the United States, they came from England, they came from Europe, and they began to seize the lands of the indigenous communities in the United States, and then they also took over the entire region of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

That’s Mexican territory, it’s Mexican territory, and deep down, they feel like Mexican brothers and sisters there, fighting to defend their right to continue working. Because they take everything from them, they imprison them, they search every workplace; the police, or the National Guard, come into every workplace and grab all the workers.

There, they don’t make any distinctions. They grab them and take them away, and then, if a worker who’s actually American shows up, they’ll release him; but if the others aren’t American, they’ll be imprisoned and wait to be deported.

They also capture mothers and separate them from their children. It’s a true tragedy unfolding in the United States against immigrants. And this also affects American companies, because this is the labor force they have available, both in agricultural work and in construction, and in all kinds of jobs.

But there’s persecution that doesn’t comply with the law. They don’t care about the law. He simply decides, this is done, and that’s done. And the judges say no, and he doesn’t care and carries on.

Well, that’s causing enormous damage to the United States.

Then, the first thing he did was order tax increases in every country in the world, and there are discussions, disputes, even with the European community, which has been their instrument with NATO, where they are looking for ways to negotiate.

These are times in which humanity, having so many means, so many instruments to create conditions of peace, stability, progress, and well-being—in the United States itself with all those migrants—and to pursue a policy of cooperation with all the countries of the world, and especially with developing countries, fails to do so.

On the other hand, the People’s Republic of China does, and they get so angry when the People’s Republic of China is developing projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They get angry and threaten governments for allowing companies from the People’s Republic of China to enter.

So, hope lies in these powers like the People’s Republic of China, which has a humane, supportive, and generous attitude, and that logically makes it easier for it to be welcomed in all countries, and that angers the US government.

The same thing happens with the Russian Federation, where the Russian Federation establishes itself and cooperates, including in the field of security, because the Russian Federation has established a Center here to combat crime and drug trafficking.

It’s been here in Nicaragua for 12 years. It’s a school, they run it. Russian military specialists work there, and they’re open to the entire region and beyond. And people from different Central American countries come to this school to take courses. They don’t like that.

The most important thing, I believe, in these difficult times for many people, is that we must remain attached, tied to the conscience that leads us to defend sovereignty and work for peace. Because with peace, work for the benefit of the people can advance. Work of all kinds, which I won’t list today because we’d be up early, but work that is multiplying and reaching the most remote corners of our country.

Faced with these tribulations caused by the imperialists of the Earth, the aggressions, well, we are committed to peace… Hopefully, hopefully, the Israeli government will stop attacking Iran, then Iran will logically stop firing, and other conditions would open up for reaching an agreement.

The Israelis didn’t want those laboratories there? President Trump already says he made them disappear with the bombings he ordered. So, where is the brake there, so to speak? The brake is the Government of Israel, the Government, not the people of Israel, the Government of Israel, which is the instrument the imperialists of the Earth are using to try to seize that entire area.

Because it’s not just Palestine; they want to take over all those towns where there’s so much wealth, minerals, oil, everything. They want to take over that entire area, without considering the consequences. Because wanting to take over that entire area is simply not possible, because there are peoples with history there, brave peoples, peoples who have fought, peoples who have suffered the loss of millions of people in their struggle against the colonialists.

And here in Nicaragua, we continue to stand united, following the example of Carlos, Carlos, who gave his life for the Nicaraguan people, for the peasants; who penetrated the mountains in difficult conditions when the guerrillas were completely isolated and were being destroyed.

And with his glasses, very thick, because he suffered from myopia, which made it difficult for him to see even with them; but he took on the challenge of joining the mountain detachment so that a meeting could be held for the unit and that unity would give us more strength. And he gave his life fighting for unity.

And in that regard, this is a fundamental point for all of us Nicaraguans, for the youth, for the workers, for the Army, for the Police: unity, unity! Because the enemy uses its skills to seek ways to sow distrust, sow division, speak ill of one another, thereby provoking fractures.

And we must be sure that the more united we are, the stronger we will be. The more united we are, the more we will guarantee peace for the Nicaraguan people. And guaranteeing peace for the Nicaraguan people means ensuring that we continue to advance all the social programs to defeat poverty and that the conditions of Nicaraguan families improve with each passing day.

The mission of the people, of all institutions, and where is the fundamental support for these missions to be carried out logically? In the Police, in the Army, in the Ministry of the Interior, they are there, and they are managing the measures we have been taking to prevent so much death.

We need to count the number of deaths and accidents we’re taking to prevent deaths and accidents on the roads and city streets. What was the average we had before? Now we need to calculate the average from that date. Wait another 15 days and we’ll see.

Because this is about saving lives, and we need to understand that because we like to run, we all like to run, that’s the truth; but how many deaths there are every day, and how much suffering there is for the families of those who die.

Long live the National Police!
Long live the Nicaraguan Army!
Long live the unity of all the people!
Long live peace!
Long live Commander-in-Chief Carlos Fonseca, father of the Sandinista Popular Revolution!