The National Police, subordinate to the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, occupied the facilities of the extinct Luisa Mercado Foundation, located in the municipality of Masatepe, in Masaya. The body was chaired by the renowned Nicaraguan writer and novelist, Sergio Ramírez Mercado, who is persecuted by the dictatorship.
Local sources informed Confidential that the Sandinista police did a deployment of agents to appropriate the real estate. The seizure of the property occurred on the afternoon of this Friday, June 30.
“A patrol assigned to the city and three riot police trucks from Managua were seen at the site, which guaranteed the confiscation of the house,” the digital media detailed.
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For his part, sports writer Miguel Mendoza shared on social networks the first images of one of the broken doors of the house where the Luisa Mercado Foundation worked. These damages are the result of the brutality perpetrated by the officers who seized the facility.
On April 19, 2022, the National Assembly, with a Sandinista majority, resolved to cancel the legal personality of the Luisa Mercado Foundation and 24 other non-governmental organizations. This measure is part of the Ortega regime’s ongoing persecution of civil society, which has resulted in the closure of more than 3,500 organizations since 2018.
The entity was dedicated to providing musical education for children and young people from Masatepe and surrounding municipalities, it also had a library of about 6,000 titles.
So far, the writer Sergio Ramírez has not given any statement about what happened.
The novelist currently lives in exile due to the persecution of the Ortega Murillo regime. The dictatorship, in 2021, issued an arrest warrant against the winner of the Cervantes Prize for allegedly “inciting hatred and violence.”
In addition, the regime declared 94 exiled opponents “traitors to the homeland”, including Ramírez and also the writer Gioconda Belli, stripping them of their nationality and disqualifying them for life from holding public office.
This measure came after 222 political prisoners were released in Nicaragua and expelled to the United States, in addition to stripping them of their nationality.
