It’s a “Leap into the void of authoritarian radicalization” by Daniel Ortega. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, online media director Confidential, no longer has words strong enough to describe the latest measure of the Nicaraguan president’s regime. The journalist, who has been in exile in Costa Rica since 2021, is one of 94 opponents who have just had their nationality, civil rights and property withdrawn.
The measure was announced on Wednesday February 15 by the president of the Managua Court of Appeal, Ernesto Rodriguez Mejia. “The accused have carried out and continue to perpetrate criminal acts to the detriment of peace, sovereignty, independence and self-determination of the Nicaraguan people, by inciting the destabilization of the country, by favoring economic, commercial blockades and financialaccording to the magistrate. For these reasons, they cannot be considered Nicaraguan citizens. »
Treaties of “thugs on the run” and of “traitors to the fatherland”, the accused “, who have not yet been the subject of any trial and had not been indicted before that, are also “subject to a life ban from holding public office” and elected offices. Their property was “confiscated in favor of the Nicaraguan State”.
The measure was decreed six days after the release and deportation to Washington, on February 10, of 222 political prisoners, also stripped of their nationality and their rights, and after the sentence to twenty-six years in prison of the Bishop Rolando Alvarez the next day.
“A conviction without trial”
Among those affected by this Wednesday’s measure, writers Sergio Ramirez and Gioconda Belli, Bishop Silvio Baez, activist Vilma Nuñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), politicians, academics, ex-Sandinista guerrillas, clerics, journalists, intellectuals and former civil servants. Almost all of them had already left the country in recent months.
“According to our assessment, of the 94, only two or three are still in Nicaragua, accurate to Monde Jimena Reyes, Director for the Americas of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). This resolution is a legal UFO because it is a condemnation without trial. »
But the fate of Vilma Nuñez worries. Lawyer, activist of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the fight against the dictatorship of the Somoza family – she had been arrested in 1979 and brutally tortured –, then became an opponent of the regime of Daniel Ortega, in power from 1979 to 1990 and of From 2007 to today, she is one of the few who did not want to leave Nicaragua.
You have 43.96% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.