The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs said this weekend that it “closely follows the situation” of its citizens, Jeannine Horvilleur Cuadra, 63, and her daughter Ana Álvarez Horvilleur, 43, who were detained in Managua last September 13th.
Horvilleur Cuadra and Álvarez Horvilleur are mother and daughter, and they were arrested on Tuesday by the Nicaraguan Police when they were looking for their husband and father, respectively, Nicaraguan Javier Álvarez Zamora, who managed to leave the country to request international protection.
The Police also captured Félix Roiz Sotomayor, a Nicaraguan national, who is the husband of Ana Álvarez Horvilleur. The three members of that family remain in the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, known as El Chipote.
“We have contacted the Nicaraguan authorities,” said the French Foreign Ministry. The embassy is fully mobilized, in conjunction with the consular office in Costa Rica,” says the statement released in Paris.
The Nicaraguan authorities did not report recently on the new wave of arrests against persecuted and relatives of opponents.
“They have not committed any crime”
The political persecuted Javier Alvarez Zamora denounced, in an interview with the Esta Semana program, that on September 13 the police entered his house in Managua after eleven o’clock at night, “they searched the whole house and when they couldn’t find me, because they were looking for me, They take my daughter, who at that moment is accompanying my wife. Also, they raided my daughter’s house, where she lives with her husband, Félix Roiz Sotomayor, and they also took him prisoner”.
Álvarez stressed that none of the three “have to be captured” because “they have not committed any crime.” “I have not committed any crime either, I am not a criminal. I am not a dangerous person. I am not a dangerous element and this is for me an extraordinary level of inhumanity and repression because when they do not find me they take them detained to the cells of El Chipote”.
In that interview, Álvarez also explained that the situation of his wife and daughter, both of Nicaraguan-French nationality, had already been reported to the French authorities, through the French embassy in Nicaragua, although, for now, he indicated that he preferred not go into detail about the steps that the French Government may be taking.
“The French ambassador yesterday (Friday) contacted me and we prefer by common agreement with the embassy not to delve further into what is being done, but, yes, the French embassy in Nicaragua, the French foreign ministry, are already aware. of the situation of this pair of Nicaraguan citizens in the first place and French by family descent, of French citizenship acquired precisely by family descent”, he pointed out.
For the Nicaraguan human rights collective Never Again there is “a pattern of arbitrary and unconstitutional actions (by the Police), which consists of the capture of relatives, of loved ones of the persecuted persons”, with the aim of forcing them to hand over information for the capture of the wanted person.
This new pattern “reaffirms practices of intensified terrorism in recent months against different social sectors of the country. The Nicaraguan Human Rights Collective Never Again denounces the recent wave of arbitrary arrests directed against different social sectors of the country, once again we condemn and demand the immediate end of the repression”, says the public complaint of human rights defenders.
Ten arrested in the last days
In the last week, the Ortega and Murillo regime has arbitrarily detained ten people, most of them belonging to the Unión Democrática Renovadora (Unamos), formerly the Sandinista Renovating Movement, as well as their relatives.
According to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) at the national level “a strategy of harassment, persecution, threats and even arbitrary arrests of party members and their families has been unleashed.” But some of the victims have decided “not to report to avoid further reprisals that lead to irreparable situations.”
The agency also pointed out that “this criminal behavior” of the regime’s authorities has no precedent in history.
“It is not characteristic of any dictatorship, it has the borders of a kidnapping where the kidnapper seizes innocent victims, takes them as hostages to capture the person he wants to kidnap. What exceeds the criminal gravity of kidnapping for ransom, which according to the Penal Code is when a ransom or any monetary benefit is demanded, “said the Cenidh.
For the organization “this is not a temporary persecution” but rather “we are facing an obvious decision to annihilate them politically and physically.”
