Various Nicaraguan opposition and human rights groups rejected the state persecution against the workers of the newspaper La Prensa that forced them into exile.
The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo intensified its policy of intimidation against the independent press since last July 6, on that date it arrested two drivers of the newspaper for no reason. Both are in prison and await trial on false charges.
«Forced exile of La Prensa staff is one more step towards the closure of any possibility of freedom of expression and the press. They are conditioned to depend on other sources, making it impossible to verify in situ the abuses committed by the regime and to be able to report from outside,” the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) wrote on its Twitter social network account.
Related news: Workers of La Prensa flee Nicaragua due to attacks by the dictatorship
Fernando Brenes, member of the Executive Council of the Civic Alliance for the political sector, stated that, after the prison and exile of the opposition political leaders, independent journalism is the second step by which the regime feels threatened and what it seeks it is “pulverize it and shut up definitively”.
«(The objective is that) there is no redoubt of denunciation and information to the population, it is the application of (the) logic of totalitarian regimes such as Chinese imperialism and regimes (such as) Cuban, North Korean, Iranian and Russian. They want to silence the people and impose their narrative and the decision of the press to safeguard their staff is the right decision to break the information fence,” Brenes told Article 66.
Marlon Caldera, a member of the Political Council of the Blue and White National Unity (Unab), pointed out that these actions by the dictatorship are a new attack against the independent press of Nicaragua.
«Like any dictatorial regime, the press is one of its targets. For them it is important to silence the voices that can reveal the crimes that they commit daily against the people of Nicaragua. However, and in the midst of all this repressive apparatus, La Prensa is still alive and will continue to be alive, denouncing all the human rights violations that the Ortega Murillo commit in Nicaragua,” said the opponent.
“Between July 6 and 11, the Police carried out 13 raids on the homes of people who work for independent media outlets, not just La Prensa. Six of these raids were carried out at night, outside the hours established by law and there was no search warrant or justification that had legal basis. In five raids there were thefts of equipment that these people used in their work. This affected five digital platforms apart from La Prensa », he detailed.
María Asunción Moreno, a member of the Civic Alliance, affirmed that the dictatorship’s attack on the independent press has been “fierce but very particularly on the newspaper La Prensa” and that the regime believed that by taking over its facilities it was silencing it.
«To his surprise, La Prensa, which he had already been short of paper for a long time, strengthened its online edition and since then day by day we have been informed in its digital edition, so that the staff of La Prensa heroically It has maintained a high standard of online journalism and that is something that the regime does not tolerate,” Moreno said.
The opponent indicated that the objective of the Ortega Murillo regime is “to silence that medium at all costs, harassing journalists, imprisoning humble drivers, demonstrating that no one who works for La Prensa or has any connection with it can live peacefully in Nicaragua.”
“We are clear that the regime does not tolerate the independent press, and now it is going in the most violent way against all the personnel, thinking that now it will be able to silence them. I have faith that from exile La Prensa will continue to inform us with the courage and informative quality that characterizes it”, he concluded.
Persecution against the Press
After the arrest of two drivers, the raid on the homes of several journalists and photographers, the repression escalated. Faced with these actions by the Nicaraguan dictatorship, the administration of the media outlet put his staff in custody and later took him out of the country. Although the men and women of the press are no longer in his home, the regime has not stopped besieging his relatives.
“Although all the people left irregularly due to the fear of being detained at the country’s borders, several had to flee without taking their passports with them or carrying only the expired documents, since for months the regime has refused to renew the travel documents of independent media journalists, as part of the systematic repression and attacks on press freedom. This makes it impossible for people fleeing Nicaragua to move,” reported La Prensa on its website.
The media reported that they are in the process of reorganizing their newsroom abroad to continue their informative work on the national reality. The facilities of La Prensa have been taken over by the dictatorship since August 2021, its general manager, Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro; He was found guilty of alleged customs fraud.
In addition, other directors of the media outlet are incarcerated, such as former presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro and former deputy Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. To the Chamorro brothers, political prisoners of Ortega. the dictatorship accused them of money laundering and subjected them to a trial with political overtones, experts consider.
