Lawyer Manuel Urbina Lara, 60, has spent more than 770 days in jail during the dictatorships of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. He was first detained in the Waswalí Penitentiary System, Matagalpa, for more than a year, then he was transferred to the National Penitentiary System (SPN), known as “La Modelo”.
The jurist is a beneficiary of precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and part of the political prisoners who were not exiled to the United States. The dictator Daniel Ortega assured on February 9, after his release and expatriation, that the United States refused to receive the political prisoner in its territory.
His relatives, friends and human rights organizations have denounced that the political prisoner is subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Urbina Lara is a renowned lawyer who repeatedly denounced corruption and nepotism in the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), even before 2018.
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His incendiary complaints against the presiding magistrate of the CSJ, Alba Luz Ramos Vanegas; judges; magistrates and other officials, led him to be suspended by the Judiciary to exercise the right for a determined time. Urbina Lara appealed the decision and denounced reprisals against him.
The critic of the dictatorship is still in prison, despite the fact that the Local Criminal Judge of Jinotega, Diana Isabel Jarquín Valle, ordered his release in a preliminary hearing -in February 2021-, a decision that he revoked hours later. The Ortega and Murillo hostage suffers from high blood pressure, severe headaches and back pain.
The justice of Daniel Ortega sentenced Manuel Urbina Lara to four years in prison, after on Sunday, January 24, 2021, the truck he was driving in Matagalpa left the lane and went into a ravine, losing the life of the citizen of name José Antonio Ruiz Rizo, who minutes before had boarded the vehicle in the back. The defender was charged with reckless homicide by the regime’s justice system.
The political prisoner has spent more than 26 months in prison despite the fact that the relatives of José Antonio Rizo Castro wanted “reach a mediation” with Manuel Urbina Lara, but the Prosecutor’s Office did not allow it. The actions by the Ortega regime are described by the relatives of the political prisoner as “political revenge.”
At the time, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights (CPDH) explained that in the case of Urbina Lara it has been demonstrated that there was no fraud, so “it is a common action that mediation is given, there is compensation, compensation, then the judge gives him due legal control and since there is an interest of the family, generally the judge orders his release and, if he decides to continue this process, the accused person faces the process in freedom”.
