The dictator Daniel Ortega awarded his security adviser, retired commissioner Horacio Rocha, and in less than a month raised him in rank by naming him advisory minister, according to the Presidential Agreement No. 181-2022, published in La Gaceta No. 232 of this Monday, December 12. Rocha was appointed security adviser to the Presidency on November 11. A month later, Ortega added the position of “minister” to his faithful follower.
Horacio Rocha was Daniel Ortega’s escort, he is an “expert in espionage and masking (deception),” according to a profile built by Article 66 with the testimony of a group of people who know him. Different sources identify him as a former file of former President Arnoldo Alemán, although one analyst believes that he was rather a spy for Ortega in the former liberal president’s circle.
In the late 1970s, when he was less than 20 years old, he was recruited by the still clandestine guerrilla movement Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). Taking into account that his older sister, Eleonora Rocha, was already a guerrilla with a long history within the ranks of the insurgent group, Horacio Rocha entered under a good recommendation.
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Already in the ranks of the FSLN, Rocha was sent to Cuba for military training as part of the last contingent of guerrillas who were preparing in that country to join as combatants in 1979. Rocha was not able to demonstrate his combat capabilities because he is not known to be an outstanding participation in combats for the final insurrection of 1979. “He came to victory with the almost virgin carbine,” said one of the sources with a laugh.
Throughout the 1980s, Rochón was Ortega’s faithful escort and upon reaching 1990, the year in which the first Sandinista dictatorship lost power through votes against Mrs. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, both the feared State Security and the Security Directorate. Personnel disappeared but not in the broad sense of the word, rather they were “diluted” between the Army and the Police.
In 1996, when Arnoldo Alemán, by then mayor of Managua, announced his presidential candidacy for the Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC), Horacio Rocha returned to the fore, when he was appointed chief of bodyguards for the liberal candidate. Throughout the Alemán government, Rocha López was in charge of protecting the president and they developed a great “closeness.” Rocha, already promoted to commissioner, was on his way to the highest leadership of the Police. German helped him.
Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007 and against all express law, in 2011, when Rochón’s term in office expired, Ortega decided to leave his former trusted bodyguard for more than one extra period, until he passed. retired in 2014.
«I am surprised that it is said seriously that Horacio Rocha was a German file within the Police. It’s hard to seriously believe it because Rochón has always been blindly loyal to Daniel Ortega,” says the former State Security agent who shared memories with this media outlet.
In 2014, Ortega officially retired his former bodyguard, but less than a year later, in 2015, through Presidential Agreement No. 210-2015, he named him Consul General in the Republic of Korea, and was also named “in combo”, as ambassador in that same Asian country, his wife Ana Isabel Argüello Irigoyen, who had also been appointed a few months earlier as Vice Minister of Development, Industry and Commerce.
For the retired Army major, Roberto Samcam, Ortega called Rocha to work by his side as an adviser on security matters, firstly because of his loyalty to him, and then because of his conspiracy experience. Ortega knows him very well because he worked alongside him for many years and his life and his safety depended on Rocha and the men under his command.
