All dressed up and nowhere to go: Ortega says he’s being snubbed on Obama’s Costa Rica visit

MANAGUA, Nicaragua – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega isn’t sure if he’ll attend the early May summit in Costa Rica with U.S. President Barack Obama, he says, because he wasn’t invited. At least not officially.

“We can’t speculate,” he said about Obama’s visit, “because until now, we don’t have anything formal, nothing official,” Ortega told the Nicaraguan press on Thursday.

Ortega claimed that he’d “found out about the SICA [Central American Integration System] visit from the news media,” adding that, “we are following the information.”

Relations between Ortega and his Costa Rican colleague, President Laura Chinchilla, are tense because of an ongoing border spat near the Caribbean coast that started in October 2010.

Chinchilla currently presides over SICA, and as host of the May 3-4 event with Obama and other Central American presidents in San José, it is up to her whom she invites.

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who was accused on Thursday of wartime atrocities, already has confirmed he’ll attend Obama’s first visit to the isthmus. He’ll stop in Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto on May 2, ahead of the Costa Rica trip.