At the gates of Christmas, the Coalición Lucha Nicaragua—made up of 17 organizations—called for the release of political prisoners and denounced an intensification of repression by the Ortega-Murillo regime and the cruelty imposed on the population in general, prisoners of conscience and their relatives.
The organizations reported last November the arbitrary detention of 33 people, of whom 16 are still incarcerated. These inmates are part of the total of 235 political prisoners, a panorama that supports the affirmation of this group that there has been nothing to celebrate for five years at Christmas and New Year’s Eve, for which they demanded their freedom.
The number of 235 captives for political reasons is the second highest since 2018. The report highlights that, of these, “four are relatives of the murdered victims, where the patterns of repression by state and parastatal actors stand out, aggravating the persecution and harassment against families”, affirms the pronouncement, which was read in a live broadcast carried out in social media by independent media.
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The coalition is made up of the Mothers of April Association (AMA), the Nunca Más Human Rights Collective, the Articulation of Social Movements, the Legal Defense Unit, the Union of Political Prisoners of Nicaragua (UPPN), the Autonomous Movement of Women, Journalists and Independent Communicators of Nicaragua (PCIN), Popol Na, among others.
Viciousness and impunity of Ortega
The seriousness of the situation of prisoners of conscience, the violation of the rights of mobilization and association—through the de facto police State—has made the case of Nicaragua one of the most serious in Latin America.
In the aforementioned statement, the organizations make it clear that the population is in “resistance against impunity” and describe one by one the human rights violations perpetrated by the dictatorship and its officials.
“The use of cruelty persists as a normalized practice in the Ortega-Murillo regime, which perfects its methods of control by deepening the isolation and physical, sexual and psychological torture against political prisoners and currently with greater viciousness in the harassment towards the relatives of the victims, including towards girls, boys and adolescents”, they warned.
They also explained that the political prisoners are in an emergency situation, subjected to isolation, in punishment cells or maximum security, added to the lack of specialized medical attention.
They denounced that the Ortega-Murillo regime has intensified during 2022 the harassment with threats and blackmail from prison authorities, through the denial of visits to family members, in some cases leading to arrest.
“Sensory deprivation is another normalized practice, where the denial of patio and sun can last for even months to appease the spirit of the detained person,” added the NGOs.
These organizations maintain that there is a criminalization such as “habitus structure of state terrorism. For Yaritza Mairena, representative of the UPPN, the inmates who are in the El Nuevo Chipote prison facilities suffer an “inhuman and degrading condition.”
Mairena said that an example of the precarious situation in which they find themselves is the case of sociologist Oscar Rene Vargas, accused by the dictatorship of “propagation of false news”, “conspiracy to undermine national integrity”, as well as the crime of “rebellion”. His relatives denounced that they have not even allowed him to have a blanket.
“Older people don’t have access to their medications or constant review of their chronic illnesses. Definitely, the conditions when they do not have a book to read for such a long time as more than a year, or a year and a half, has been torture,” Mairena insisted.
Mairena called on the international community to strengthen the mechanisms that can hit or punish Ortega’s dictatorial practices and other regimes that are spreading around the world. “If we do not change these mechanisms, authoritarianism may continue to be seen in the region and it is not the intention. We have to guarantee mechanisms of non-repetition of the dictatorships so that these acts of violence do not occur ”, he pointed out.
The Ortega-Murillo regime violated the right to defense
Alexandra Salazar, from the UDJ, added that in 2022 they returned to the patterns of 2018, when people detained in the departments were transferred to Managua to be tried in the capital, which corresponds to a “subtraction of the natural judge.”
“We see that the denial of access to files is increasing. They are not given a copy of the accusations, hearing records. The judicial officers claim to have delivered copies of the accusations to the public defenders, so the lawyers chosen by the political prisoners and their relatives must assume defenses and appear at the hearings without even having knowledge of the accusation,” Salazar said.
Salazar stressed that “an extension of the sentence to minor sons and daughters is being seen by being deprived of communication (in more than 1 year they have only managed to see them on 1 or two occasions) is a serious denial and implies affectations in the minors”.
Among the main targets of Ortega’s repression this year is also the Catholic Church. The dictatorship accuses the religious of being participants in a coup, when what the religious did was denounce the human rights violations perpetrated by the State.
On December 13, the Prosecutor’s Office formalized its accusation against the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, the first in the history of the Catholic hierarchy to be prosecuted, but the dictatorship also keeps other priests in jail, threw out the apostolic nuncio, expelled 18 nuns from the Missionaries of Charity order closed Catholic radio stations in the north of the country, desecrated temples and spied on churches.
