The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, through the General Directorate of Migration and Aliens (DGME), denied entry to Nicaragua to the Costa Rican journalist and humorist Juan Diego Ramirez Bonilla last Monday, January 2. The communicator intended to vacation for a week in the country, but he could not achieve his mission, he denounced in a video posted on his Facebook social network account.
Ramírez Bonilla arrived at the Peñas Blancas border post at 11:30 pm on Monday, January 2, aboard a Ticabus company bus. He recounts that a Nicaraguan Immigration officer took the list of the passengers and upon reaching his name asked him to accompany him to the offices.
“Nicaragua considers journalists to be enemies because in 2018, in an awakening that the Nicaraguan people had, there was an active participation of correspondent journalists from around the world, who came to film the violation of human rights that is taking place in that country. Since then there has been an express order from the government that journalists’ access to Nicaragua be prevented. So I was on file,” denounced the communicator.
Related news: Nicaragua denies entry to a Costa Rican professor for not revealing the names of “his acquaintances”
Already at the site, where he was held for an hour and 30 minutes, he says that the policeman began to question him and ask him “very tendentious questions” that provoked him, but he assures that he did not fall into the “game.” He later affirms that they transferred him to another office where they continued to question them with “incoherent things” where they finally told him that “he was not suitable to enter Nicaragua.”
“They told me that I could not continue, so I told him to give me the specific reasons why I as a tourist could not enter Nicaragua, then he told me “you are not suitable for Nicaragua, you are not going to enter,” “said the humorist.
After that episode, he asked the Migration officer for his documentation and he took him tightly by the elbow and escorted him to Migration in Costa Rica and “threw him on Costa Rican soil.” The communicator stated that the reasons for his expulsion are basically for being a journalist.
“That’s what’s happening. Alert with Nicaragua. It is not safe to travel to Nicaragua. It is the third time that I try to go as a tourist to be able to enjoy the beauties that this country has, its people, but political decisions prevent me. Think very well about the possibility of visiting Nicaragua. There are authoritarian policies that do not allow freedom of expression to manifest itself in any way. It is not admissible that as a communicator I have experienced what I suffered today (yesterday), “he remarked.
His experience in Nicaraguan Migration described it as “catastrophic, terrorist and unfortunate.” In addition, she stated that she will forward her complaint to national and international media and human rights organizations. She assured that in Nicaragua there is no democracy and that the country lives under a dictatorship.
Juan Diego Ramírez Bonilla is a journalist and broadcaster, he has studies in theater and imitates since he was a child, according to a profile published by the newspaper La Nación of Costa Rica. He has worked on various television programs in the neighboring nation.
