Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rejected the authoritarian drift of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo against the independent media in Nicaragua. The organization’s statement comes after the exile of the entire editorial staff of the newspaper La Prensa, the longest-running in the country and the last to circulate in print in the Central American country after resisting a customs embargo by the Managua regime.
«The repressive apparatus deployed by the Ortega government to reduce journalists to silence is as terrifying as it is intolerable. The independent press in Nicaragua is in a phase of agony and voices critical of the authorities are inexorably disappearing,” lamented Emmanuel Colombié, director of RSF’s Office in Latin America.
The newspaper La Prensa reported on its website that journalists, photographers, editors and other media workers had to leave Nicaragua clandestinely after an escalation of repression by the regime against all its collaborators that triggered arrests, raids, threats and police siege. .
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«The informative work of La Prensa, one of the last bastions of independent journalism, is vital for the population of Nicaragua. RSF offers all its support to the editorial staff of the newspaper and to the Nicaraguan press as a whole, victim of the dramatic and pathetic authoritarian drift of President Ortega”, Colombié highlighted.
«Between July 9 and 25, the last employees of the newspaper the press have clandestinely left Nicaraguan territory. With this latest flight, the entire newsroom of the newspaper is forced to work from outside the country, given the intensification of pressures,” Reporters Without Borders states on its website.
The intensification of the state repression against the media’s collaborators included the arrest of two drivers of the media outlet on July 6; They are detained and their whereabouts and possible charges against them are unknown. After these events, other workers had to flee in time and take shelter while their houses were raided and searched by the Police of the Ortega Murillo dictatorship.
“Subsequently, they were forced to flee clandestinely from the country. This new episode, one more in the long series of persecutions of Daniel Ortega against La Prensa, has resulted in the forced exile of the last journalists and collaborators of the newspaper”, affirms Reporters Without Borders.
Since August 13, 2021, the facilities of La Prensa were taken over by the Police and its general manager, Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, was arrested. The dictatorship sentenced him to nine years in prison for alleged customs fraud. He is confined in the cells of the Judicial Assistance Directorate (DAJ), known as “El Chipote”, in isolation and incommunicado, sick, without specialized medical care, with poor nutrition, subjected to torture and with few hours of sunlight at night. week.
