Liseth de los Angeles Santamaria Duarte, local criminal judge of Nueva Guinea, of the Autonomous Region of the South Caribbean Coast, and who worked for 16 years in the Judiciary, resigned her position and decided to go into exile in the United States.
In an exclusive interview with the Nicaragua Actual media outlet and without specifying when she went into exile, the former court said that the reasons she left office was because she disagreed with the government policy of the Daniel Ortega regime.
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«They demand and force one to do everything they —the dictatorship— say and I got tired of that. I felt pressured to be told: “Look, do this like this”. I got tired of being a puppet because there the work that one longs to do is not being done, since one makes a promise of law before exercising the position, ” expressed Santamaría Duarte.
He added that seeing that he was not acting in accordance with the law, but rather that he complied with everything that the dictatorship ordered him to do, “then I made the decision to get out of there.”
He also denounced that his departure and that of his family was followed by the Ortega dictatorship through the GPS of his cell phone (Global Positioning System).
As for the reaction of the Nicaraguan government, after making the decision to leave the country, the former judge indicated that she was dismissed from her post, once it became known that she had left Nicaragua, even though she had already resigned.
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«—The Ortega government—was too upset because they never imagined that a person like me would reveal myself to them (…) so I took advantage of my vacations and came here, I left my resignation letter; my mom did me the favor of going to deliver it to the judicial complex. They received it but later I realized that they did not liquidate me, but what they did was dismiss me so as not to give me liquidation », she narrated.
Convictions of political prisoners are by orders of Ortega
On the other hand, Liseth Santamaría affirmed what has already been known by other judges, that the sentences and judicial processes against opponents obey guidelines directly from the Presidency.
“Judges are always receiving guidance from the government. We can see so many political prisoners who are imprisoned unjustly, simply because the judges receive orders and if they do not carry them out, they run away, so to keep their jobs as judges they try to comply with the guidelines that are dictated by the Government».
He stressed that due to the authoritarian imposition of Ortega and Murillo, “there is no justice in Nicaragua, because the judges always end up doing what the government tells them to do.”
The ex-judicial asserted that she cannot return to Nicaragua for fear of reprisals by the Ortega dictatorship. “If I return to Nicaragua they can accuse me of treason against the country, they can put me in jail and they can harm my children and my family, because although it is true my children are older, but I had to bring them with me because they could take action against them to take revenge on me.”
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The former worker of the Nicaraguan Judiciary joins the thousands of Nicaraguans and some judges and lawyers who have decided to leave the country so as not to continue being subjected by the Ortega regime.
The last judge known to have gone into exile was Roberto Zuniga, Originally from the municipality of Puerto Morazán-Tonalá, in the department of Chinandega, who abandoned his post and decided to go into exile in the United States with his wife and three children.
