The cancellation of 2,181 non-profit organizations, carried out by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo from the end of 2018 to September 2022, has the objective of “shutting up and dismantling civil society” in Nicaragua, affirm directors of NGOs and universities that They were stripped of their legal status and their movable and immovable property. But they maintain that Ortega will not achieve its objective.
“The interest of the regime is to try to silence civil society, but it will not succeed,” says Amaru Ruiz, president of the canceled and confiscated Fundación del Río. The environmentalist adds that Ortega “is not going to achieve it because the citizens themselves recognize the work and development that civil society organizations have been carrying out in accompanying their most heartfelt problems and that is something that the Ortega dictatorship will never be able to take away. -Murillo”.
“You can remove legal status, legality, you can exile us, but our principles can never take it away from us,” he said in an interview with Tonight.
Cancellation and confiscation in retaliation for the April Rebellion
The Fundación del Río was one of the first NGOs canceled in December 2018, in retaliation for the denunciation of the Government’s negligence in the fire of the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, which sparked citizen protests to demand justice, freedom and democracy. .
Amaru Ruiz, now in exile, denounced that the regime has carried out -after the cancellation of its legal status- a “de facto confiscation” of the organization’s real estate, stripping them of 22 properties, including one that had nothing to do with the NGO, because it was an inheritance.
“This confiscation process has been gradual, it began after the cancellation of legal status. The central offices in San Carlos, Río San Juan were taken, after this the expropriation process continued through government institutions and the National Police, which have taken, for example, the Marena took our conservation areas of forest, which we had both in the municipalities of San Carlos and El Castillo. Our community radio stations were also taken over, one that was located in San Miguelito and another in El Castillo. After that, three months ago, the last facilities of the office and a hotel that we had in the municipality of San Miguelito were taken over and handed over to the municipality of San Miguelito, which is Sandinista, and declared a cultural house,” he denounced. .
However, Ruiz maintains that “civil society organizations can reinvent themselves and continue working, as long as there is a contribution from Nicaraguan citizens in the sense of continuing the actions of trust, which the organizations have woven.”
He considers that “thanks to the work of the local organizations, of the indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, of the people who have worked for more than 20 years, trusting in the work of the organization, is that the organization can continue working in the territories, in accompanying these communities”.
The goal: They want to see themselves as the only protectors
The feminist María Teresa Blandón, director of the feminist program La Corriente, also pointed out that the confiscation of women’s rights organizations has been “de facto”, recalling that since the end of 2018 the Ortega-Murillo regime “began with the Police took over the facilities of CISAS and the Leadership Institute of Las Segovias and then came the other organizations, the María Elena Cuadra Women’s Movement, La Corriente and the Matagalpa Women’s Collective”.
“In all cases, the Police have arrived without prior notice, without any documents, that is, an act by military means has taken over the premises of the organizations. In some cases they have announced that they are going to set up care centers, but in general this does not materialize, we know that these premises are taken over by the Police. In the case of La Corriente the same thing happened, on July 8 the Police arrived, expelled the boy who was guarding the facilities and they took possession, ”Blandón denounced in the program Tonight.
She stressed that the regime seeks to “silence” the voices of organizations that defend women’s rights in order “to be able to impose their discourse, their false discourse of gender equity,” mentioning that the regime in these more than 15 years in power has carried out actions contrary to women’s rights, among them: the absolute criminalization of abortion, with which they have condemned poor women to high-risk pregnancies and even death; the lack of interest and even their complicity with sexist violence; the dismantling of women’s police stations; the reform of the Comprehensive Law Against Violence against Women; and stigmatization campaigns against organizations that defend victims of this type of violence.
Sociologist María Teresa Blandón has been out of the country since last July, after the Ortega-Murillo regime denied her entry into the country. She left on June 24 through the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua, where Immigration agents conducted a “long interrogation” of her, but she had no major difficulty traveling. However, when she attempted to return on July 1, she was notified by Avianca airlines that she would not be able to return to her country.
The director of the canceled program La Corriente appreciated that her banishment occurred because the regime “wants to impose silence, they want to prevent civil society organizations, people who have prestige and who are denouncing the violation of human rights in Nicaragua from continuing to do so. ”.
“What they want is to impoverish society, impose a policy of fear, but also they want to take revenge on all those voices that from different places have been denouncing the violation of human rightsdenouncing the installation of a new dictatorship and we continue to demand free and transparent elections, the suspension of the de facto police state in which we live, the recovery of our freedoms, in short, the departure of this regime because we already know that as long as they remain in We already know that Nicaraguan society is going to continue to suffer persecution, siege, fraud, plunder, expropriation, as we have been seeing during the last four and a half years,” he added.
Obstruction of justice: Cannot challenge cancellations
The directors of these canceled and confiscated organizations agree that these closures ordered by the regime leave Nicaraguan citizens as the main victims, who benefited from the work of those hundreds of closed NGOs, and the ability and right to receive development cooperation. In Nicaragua.
Adrián Meza, rector and founder of the Paulo Freire University (UPF), outlawed by the Ortega-Murillo regime last February, explained that after the closure thousands of students have had difficulty continuing their studies.
“The Government is not interested, they were clear about the enormous damage to the students, however, that is not their concern, their concern is the absolute control of higher education and if for this they have to ruin the academic life of thousands of students that is not your problem, it is not your concern,” he denounced.
He noted that the university was dispossessed of three properties and a large amount of movable property, adding approximate economic losses amounting to about 700,000 dollars.
Mesa, from the exilestressed that within Nicaragua “there are no legal mechanisms” that really work independently and can be used to challenge all these illegal decisions of the Ortega regime.
“In Nicaragua there is no judiciary nor is there a regulatory framework that works, we are all convinced of that. One of the things the regime did was to dismantle the legal devices to which citizens and institutions could have access, precisely in order to act with absolute impunity, because any initiative in Nicaragua of this nature is an initiative that goes nowhere. , because we already know that there is no administration of justice in the country, there are secretaries with caps and gowns willing to sign what the regime puts in front of them, even if it is a sentence that has no representation anywhere in the world, that is not the concern of judges and magistrates, they sign what they put in front of them”, he explained.
He stressed that some students, affected by the closure of the Paulo Freire University, given the lack of justice in Nicaragua, have resorted to international bodies, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), to denounce “the damage caused to their right to have access to higher education.
