The main opponent in Nicaragua, Cristiana Chamorro, was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison: she thought she would defeat Daniel Ortega in the presidential election of November 2021 but she was arrested six months before and placed in house arrest on the orders of Nicaraguan justice.
Convicted on March 12 of money laundering and embezzlement, Ms. Chamorro, 68, will remain under house arrest, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh).
The charges brought by the government of President Daniel Ortega had prevented her from participating in the November presidential election for which she was given favorite by polls.
According to the court, which tried her behind closed doors for seven days in the sinister El Chipote prison, the alleged acts were committed through the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCH), a press freedom training and defense center that Cristiana Chamorro directed for twenty years.
The foundation was used to receive money from abroad intended to destabilize the government of Daniel Ortega and his vice-president and wife Rosario Murillo, according to the prosecution.
Ms. Chamorro’s brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, also convicted, was sentenced to nine years in prison, which he will have to serve in El Chipote prison where he has been detained since his arrest.
Sentences of up to 13 years in prison were imposed on two former employees of the FVBCH, as well as Ms. Chamorro’s driver.
“Fines (amounting to) millions” were imposed on the opponent and its three former employees. They are “impossible to pay” and if these “are commuted to prison terms, this would be equivalent to life imprisonment”, notes the Cenidh.
– “Serve the Nicaraguans” –
Arrested on June 2, 2021, Cristiana Chamorro rejected the charges, assuring that the case was brought against her for having tried to “serve Nicaraguans” by running for president.
“When you take a position that endangers the power of the dictatorship, you expect everything, even the worst,” Chamorro told AFP at the end of May.
“The people put me at the top of the voting intentions. That’s why the dictator ordered them to accuse me, it’s revenge against the people,” she said.
A total of seven opposition candidates, along with 39 other opponents, were arrested in the months leading up to the election, allowing President Daniel Ortega, a 76-year-old former guerrilla, to be elected to a fourth term without strong opponent against him.
Thirty opponents have already been declared guilty, of whom now more than twenty have been sentenced to terms ranging from 8 to 13 years in prison. One of them, Hugo Torres, a Sandinista guerrilla hero who turned to opposition to Daniel Ortega, died in hospital custody in February.
Mr. Ortega’s election is not recognized by most of the international community, including the Organization of American States (OAS), the United States and the European Union, on the grounds that the Nicaraguan elections are not were not democratic.
Cristiana Chamorro is the daughter of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (1990-1997), who defeated Mr. Ortega at the polls in 1990.
His father, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was shot dead in Managua in January 1978 for opposing the Somoza dictatorship, which ruled Nicaragua for nearly half a century until the victory of the Sandinista Front in National Liberation (FSLN) in 1979.