The opposition Nicaraguan Democratic Unity (Unamos, former Sandinista Renewal Movement, MRS), celebrated the resistance of the historic ex-guerrilla Dora María Téllez, imprisoned in Nicaragua since June 2021 for alleged “treason”, who turns 67 this Monday.
“Today, November 21, is the birthday of Dora María Téllez, political kidnapped, always in resistance. #LibertadYa, #PatriaLibreParaVivir, #LibertadParaLosPresosPoliticos,” Unamos wrote on its social networks, with a photograph of the legendary “Comandante Dos,” who resigned from Sandinismo following the 2018 protests against his former partner in struggle, President Daniel Ortega.
Téllez, who together with Edén Pastora (Commander Zero) and Hugo Torres (Commander One), led the assault on the National Palace in 1978, which dealt a heavy blow to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, overthrown in 1979, has been detained since on June 13, 2021, in a prison known as “El Chipote”.
“El Chipote”, located on the outskirts of Managua, has been denounced by human rights defenders as an alleged “torture center” of the National Police, whose supreme commander is Ortega.
Related news: Dora María Téllez turns 67, under “confinement and torture” in the cells of “El Chipote”
Téllez, Nicaragua’s Minister of Health in the 1980s, distanced herself from the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) when she founded the MRS, in 1995, along with other Sandinista dissidents, including 2017 Cervantes Prize winner Sergio Ramírez Mercado , who was vice president of Nicaragua between 1985 and 1990, with Ortega as president.
A year before being captured, Commander Two affirmed that the word “Sandinista” gave her “repeat”, alleging the 355 deaths and hundreds of “political prisoners” that resulted, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), from the armed attacks against anti-government demonstrations in 2018.
The Sandinista leader has acknowledged the death of 200 people and has insisted on referring to the “political prisoners” as “terrorists” or “sons of bitches of the Yankee imperialists.”
Téllez’s statements led the MRS, which had lost its legal personality a year after Ortega’s return to power (2007), to a transformation process that turned it into Unamos, in an attempt to distance itself from Sandinismo.
The ex-guerrilla, who last February was sentenced to 8 years in prison for allegedly “conspiring to undermine national integrity”, was praised by the Nobel Prize winner for Literature Gabriel García Márquez with his chronicle of that assault on the National Palace, which he described as “The most audacious operation in the history of the urban guerrilla in Latin America.”
Since 2018 Nicaragua has been going through a sociopolitical crisis, which worsened after the controversial general elections on November 7, in which Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, fourth in a row and second along with his wife, Rosario Murillo, as vice president, with seven of his potential rivals in prison and two in exile.
