2023-05-02 01:22:48
After 20 months of captivity imposed by Ortega, Professor Arturo Cruz Sequeira, former candidate for the Presidency in Nicaragua, returned on Sunday, April 30, 2023, through the front door to the Central American Institute of Business Administration (INCAE) during the graduation of 220 students, of 17 nationalities, held at the Walter Kissling Gam campus in Costa Rica.
Authorities of this house of studies and graduates joined the professor in an ovation, after the words of the INCAE rector, engineer Enrique Bolaños Abaunza, who recalled that Cruz Sequeira has been a professor in the last 30 years of this prestigious business school from Latin America.
“He joined our institution in 1993 and since then he has impacted the lives of thousands of students, teaching his classes. On many occasions, I meet Incaistas who express their respect and admiration for Arturo for his extraordinary teaching ability, ”Bolaños Abaunza highlighted in his speech.
The act was broadcast through the INCAE page on YouTube. The 220 students correspond to the Business Administration classes “Latin American Leadership” 2021, 2022, 2021-1 and “Global Perspective” 2020.
In addition to being an academic, Cruz Sequeira served as ambassador of the Daniel Ortega regime in the United States between 2007 and 2009. In 2021, the dictatorship made him a political prisoner after he expressed his aspirations to participate in the votes that were finally carried out without electoral competition. . The dictatorship imprisoned all the dictator’s possible contenders, including Professor Cruz, provoking the indignation and solidarity of many of his students.
He was sentenced in March 2022 to nine years in prison, accused of committing the alleged crime of “conspiracy to undermine national integrity to the detriment of the State of Nicaragua and society” in a process carried out by institutions of the security system. justice, under the control of the ruling party. A month before the sentence, he was under house arrest, after it was reported that he had health problems.
According to journalistic reports, Cruz Sequeira’s nightmare began on Saturday, June 5, 2021, when he was arrested on his return from a trip to the United States, and the Public Ministry expressed about his case “that there were indications that he had violated the rights of the town”.
“Today we are blessed to have him with us, after 20 months. When talking with him, I see a person with enormous enthusiasm to be able to return, to what he likes the most, which is to educate. I see a person spiritually strengthened, with humility and enormous resilience. The poet Horace described very well what I have observed in Arturo: In setbacks is when we know all our resources to make use of them. Welcome back, Arturo!” said Bolaños Abaunza.
Applause resounded at INCAE. The former presidential candidate responded with a respectful silence, standing up and smiling at those present, while his image was projected on a big screen on the central stage, where he was accompanied by the authorities.
Artavia’s message to graduates
The president of INCAE’s board of directors, Roberto Artavia Loría, expressed his “personal joy and institutional pride” for the presence of the former politician, whom he hopes will “honor them with his presence” for many years at the business school.
Artavia Loría gave a message to the graduates in a context in which the region needs new leadership, skills and abilities. “Throughout the 41 years that have passed since I was in the chair that you occupy, I have also seen corruption, selfishness, greed, senseless fights for useless ideologies that have kept Latin America and the world in a kind of mediocrity. eternal, despite the marvelous advances in knowledge, science and technology”, lamented the president of the board of directors.
For Artavia Loría, the changes facing humanity are opportunities to increase well-being in the region, guided by leaders inspired by integrity, solidarity, innovation and collaboration, but if the opposite occurs—leaders who privilege power over community- will touch a world for the grandchildren that continues to “degrade in the environmental and segregate in the social”.
Cruz Sequeira is one of the 222 political prisoners who were exiled by Ortega on February 9, 2023 to the United States. The judicial system stripped all of them of their nationality. Since that same year, INCAE students dedicated their promotion to him and expressed the desire to “see him free.”
According to his official biography, Professor Cruz has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford in England. He was part of the group of advisers from the Western Hemisphere to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and, at the time of his capture, he was a pre-candidate for the Presidency for the so-called Citizen Alliance.
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