Women from Matagalpa reacted annoyed with the police and paramilitary takeover of the facilities of the 8 de Marzo Women’s Collective. “It is a shameless robbery, a scoundrel and abuse against the women of this country,” said a community member upon hearing the news.
The assault happened this weekend. Police and civilians from the regime broke into the property of the NGO, forced its occupants to leave the property and seized it with the use and abuse of police and paramilitary force.
The group benefited women from rural areas in the municipality of Esquipulas with training in human, sexual and reproductive rights, conflict reduction, and even in talks and workshops that the Police itself gave to public officials.
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“The madness of this criminal government has no limits, they are capable of leaving the most vulnerable populations in Nicaragua completely helpless, such as women in rural areas, who experience sexist, religious and institutional violence every day, in addition to partner violence,” commented a women’s rights defender in the field, who asked that her identity be protected for this report.
Land donated and now taken away
Another rural women’s rights defender specified that the land where this women’s and children’s organization operates had been donated in 1997 by the mayor of Esquipulas, Mr. Hilario Espinoza Álvarez.
The March 8 Women’s Collective ceased to function on March 17, 2022, when the National Assembly approved the cancellation of its legal personality along with 25 other organizations.
“The women who ran this organization fought against all kinds of obstacles to community work, before the closure last year,” said the activist, adding that the dictatorship ordered “the installation of police officers who took photos, intimidating the peasant women who They visited the center and lately threatened the staff and the public that arrived with jail ».
Another assault: Aprumuwa
But not only was the 8 de Marzo Women’s Collective the institution victim of the Ortega dictatorship, the police seized the facilities of the Waslala Association for the Promotion of Women (Apromuwa), outlawed in May 2022, which operated in that municipality since 1996.
Aprumuwa was dedicated to the promotion and defense of human and women’s rights, sexual rights and reproductive rights, as well as economic empowerment.
In five years, the dictatorship has canceled more than three thousand organizations whose goods and assets were confiscated, repeating the confiscations and the Sandinista piñata of the eighties and nineties.
By United Voices
