The Attorney General of the Republic executed this Friday, February 17, the confiscation of 16 apartments located in the “Amazonia” housing complex, while at night the Special Operations Directorate (DOEP) of the Police raided the home of Sofía Montenegro and Azahálea Solís, located in the same residential complex in Reparto San Juan.
The journalist Montenegro and the lawyer Solís are members of the Autonomous Women’s Movement (MAM) and were not at home at the time of the assault, so they remain free, witnesses to the raid indicated.
Both are part of 94 citizens were stripped of their nationality last Wednesdaywhen the courts of the regime ordered the confiscation of their assets and declared them “traitors to the homeland”
Among this group of 94 citizens, whose nationality was stripped, are the Cervantes Prize winner Sergio Ramírez, the writer Gioconda Belli, the Auxiliary Bishop of Managua Silvio José Báez, the human rights defender Vilma Núñez, the director of CONFIDENTIAL, Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his wife Desirée Elizondo, and dozens of citizens.
Montenegro and Solís live in apartment number 2 of the “Amazonia” housing complex in Reparto San Juan in Managua. According to residents of the residence, the operation involved the mobilization of two trucks, three motorcycles and about 12 officers, some of whom belong to the DOEP and others to the Judicial Assistance Directorate (DAJ).
The troops searched the property between 5:30 and 9:00 pm, without the details of what was seized being known. At the end of the day, without offering any information, they withdrew from the place, leaving two police officers on the outskirts of the site.
“Amazonia” is made up of 16 apartments that were built in the early 1980s by a company associated with the then Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA). Its owners have individual titles to their properties since 1990, which are registered in the Property Registry, so the reason for the confiscation is unknown, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
The housing complex has been subject to “intermittent” police surveillance since 2019, as the regime escalated its repression against all those it considered “political objectives”, including Montenegro and Solís.
Montenegro was director of the Communication Research Center, whose legal status was canceled by the National Assembly on December 12, 2018. Solís was a member of the Civic Alliance and participated in the national dialogue negotiations after the 2018 and 2019 crisis, that failed because Ortega never fulfilled the commitment signed by Foreign Minister Denis Moncada to suspend the police state.
Neighborhood sources reported that plainclothes police increased their surveillance of Montenegro and Solís in “Amazonia” on Thursday, February 16, one day after the court ruling against the 94.
They saw Montenegro’s car parked, they thought it was still there, and they waited for any movement, but it never happened. When they later arrived and found that they were no longer in the place, they took the security guard away for “interrogation”.
Until the closing of the edition, it was unknown what had happened to the security guard, whom the sources consulted by CONFIDENTIAL identified only with the name “Agustín”.
The dispossession of the apartments
The owners of the 16 “Amazonia” apartments were summoned this Thursday to an interview at the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), to notify them of the surprise seizure of their properties at the hands of the State.
A PGR official verbally informed the owners that the houses —which have belonged to them for more than 30 years— now belong to the State, despite the fact that there is no previous process or claim that justifies the appropriation of the properties.
The options that the PGR gave the inhabitants of “Amazonia” were to pay a monthly rent of 500 dollars to continue in their homes, or to vacate the apartments.
The first owners of the 16 “Amazonia” apartments acquired the homes under Laws 85 and 86, approved between February and March 1990, by the first Sandinista government, chaired by Daniel Ortega. Subsequently, they submitted to the revisions of the property laws of four governments, including the second of Ortega, in which they received their property titles and registered them in the registry. Other owners bought out the original owners and made expensive investments in the homes. And a third group of users rent the houses to their owners.
“The Attorney General communicated everything verbally. It’s horrible that they take people’s property and offer them a lease,” said one of the sources.
For this person, it was a planned coup. An investigation carried out by a lawyer confirmed to the owners that the entry—in which they appeared as owners—had been deleted since 2022.
Among the owners of “Amazonia” there are also people linked to the Ortega regime, such as Juan José Ubeda, an Iniser official and former member of State Security from the extinct Ministry of the Interior; the engineer Ernesto Martínez Tiffer, president of Enel; and relatives of the Coronel Kautz brothers. However, it is unknown if they have also been stripped of their property.
“Everyone is afflicted, I mean in a general way. Nothing is known about the Sandinistas,” lamented a resident of the residence.
