A report by the Nicaraguan Never Again Human Rights Collective recorded 150 cases of torture from 2019 to October 2022 in the Central American country, which it attributed to the government of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.
“From 2019 to date, the Collective has received 150 complaints from victims of torture and has monitored this situation in previous reports from the Nicaraguan Observatory against Torture, demonstrating the systematic way in which it is practiced with impunity,” the organization said in a report. against torture.
According to the Collective, “the Government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo keeps more than 215 people imprisoned for political reasons in Nicaragua, and at least 34 of them are in the cells of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, known as El Nuevo Chipote, where the most basic rights of every person deprived of liberty are violated.”
In the report, the organization highlighted the practice of “white torture” in Nicaraguan prisons, in which the so-called “political prisoners” allegedly suffer “isolation, solitary confinement, food shortages, denial of reading materials and the lack of regularization of family visits”.
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In addition, the inmates supposedly endure, from the authorities, “lack of timely and specialized medical care aimed at eroding the physical condition of political prisoners,” he warned.
Due to the lack of conditions in the dungeons, more than 20 “political prisoners” have been on a hunger strike since last September 20, including former dissident Sandinista guerrilla Dora María Téllez, without their situation being known until now, he said. The report.
The Collective also counted “at least 2,175 (non-governmental) organizations arbitrarily canceled from 2018 to date,” of which 29 were religious.
“The violence and brutal persecution of the State against the Catholic Church has caused the exile of at least 55 priests, the exile of two priests and multiple judicial processes, in the last two months,” he denounced.
The report highlighted that in Nicaragua “arbitrary legal processes” are carried out, of which “judges and magistrates are fully aware, that in practice their actions are contrary to the law, however, they voluntarily violate due process, which which constitutes the crime of prevarication”.
The report, carried out from exile by the members of the Collective, is framed in the context of the sociopolitical crisis that Nicaragua has been experiencing since 2018, the year in which hundreds of people died, and which worsened in the elections last November, when Ortega and Murillo were re-elected with seven of their rivals imprisoned and two in exile.
