Eduardo González
The Council of Ministers, at the proposal of Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, dismissed Sergio Farré as Spain’s ambassador to Nicaragua this Tuesday, just over a month after he was expelled by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo for unknown reasons.
A member of the diplomatic corps since 2005, Farré has served at Spanish embassies in Sudan, Slovenia, the Permanent Representation of Spain to the European Union in Brussels, Bolivia, and Belgium. He has also held various positions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, served as diplomatic advisor and spokesperson for the Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean in Barcelona, and head of the Department of University and Scientific Cooperation at the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
Sergio Farré was appointed ambassador to Nicaragua in early December and presented copies of his credentials on January 2. Just a month after his appointment, the Ortega-Murillo government ordered his expulsion on January 25 without providing any reasons.
Immediately afterward, the Spanish government ordered the expulsion of Nicaragua’s ambassador to Spain, Mauricio Carlo Gelli, and another diplomat accredited to the Nicaraguan Embassy in Madrid “in strict reciprocity for the unjust expulsion” of Sergio Farré, according to sources at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who spoke to The Diplomat. “The Spanish government will continue working to maintain the best relations with the brotherly people of Nicaragua,” they added.
Mauricio Carlo Gelli, an Italian citizen who became a naturalized Nicaraguan in 2009, was appointed Nicaragua’s ambassador to Spain in November 2022 and took up his post in December, after submitting his credentials.
This is not the first major diplomatic crisis between the two countries. In fact, Gelli was appointed ambassador to Spain nine months after Daniel Ortega’s government decided to remove Carlos Midence, who had held the post since September 2016, at a time of heightened tension in bilateral relations.
In August 2021, Spain recalled its ambassador in Managua, Mar Fernández-Palacios, for consultations in response to a statement from the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry that contained, according to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “gross falsehoods about Spanish judicial and electoral processes.”
Subsequently, Spain decided to reinstate the ambassador, but the Nicaraguan government opposed this and, to avoid the expulsion of Carlos Midence, decided to withdraw him on its own on March 10, 2022.
Despite this, in July 2022, the Spanish government requested Nicaragua’s approval to appoint Pilar Terrén as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. This request came after the families of opposition members persecuted by the Sandinista regime asked Minister José Manuel Albares to maintain a Spanish presence in Managua to bear witness to the situation in their country. Ortega immediately granted the approval. Terrén held the post until December 2025, when she was replaced by Sergio Farré, who had recently been expelled.
