The former head of State Security and former Vice Minister of the Interior of Nicaragua, Reinaldo Gregorio Lenín Cerna Juárez, was sanctioned on Monday, October 24, by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury for being “a close confidant” to the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
According to the US government, the sanctions against him are due to the fact that the Ortega loyalist “was involved in numerous incidents of violence, murder and torture and admitted to being associated with known terrorist groups.” Cerna joined the ranks of the FSLN in the 1970s and during his years of combat he guaranteed that his men and he would continue with the Sandinista party “until the end.”
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The Sandinista leader, over 70 years old, fought for 14 years in hiding and served seven years in prison during the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship. He shared a cell with Ortega and belonged to the structures of the Ministry of the Interior and directed State Security in the 1980s during the regime’s first term.
In the structures of the Sandinista Front he is known as “the boss.” He led two intelligence operations, one in October 1979, where a group executed former national guard Pablo Salazar in Tegucigalpa, known in the insurrection as Commander Bravo, and in September 1980, another group killed Anastasio Somoza Debayle in the streets of Paraguay.
In the first case, Lenín Cerna, then Nicaraguan consul in Honduras, provided the executing group in the Consulate office with a submachine gun, a pistol with a silencer and four grenades, according to the testimony of Argentine Jorge Massetti, a former Cuban agent. In the second case, he participated in the planning of the operation that ended the life of the former Nicaraguan dictator.
Cerna has been accused of directing for several years the torture of opponents and peasants in the cells of the Sandinista State Security where hundreds of Nicaraguans are imprisoned. His opponents have described him as a man who inspires fear because of his ability to intimidate which has given him a lot of power within the party.
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The Joe Biden administration highlighted that all these actions by Cerna keep him as one of the most loyal to Ortega. The United States details that the final objective of the sanctions “is not to punish, but to provoke a positive change in the behavior” of the regime’s officials and mainly in the presidential couple.
“It is the most recent and perhaps the most aggressive measure by the United States to punish the former Sandinista guerrilla leader for his continuous attacks against democracy and human rights in the Central American country and for his security cooperation with Russia,” he said on Monday. the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
