The Costa Rican national lawyer Marcia Aguiluz was presented, this Monday, July 3, as the new president of the Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective, replacing Gonzalo Carrión, founder of the organization and one of the most prestigious defenders in the country, and who held the position since the organization’s founding in 2019.
Aguiluz is a Costa Rican lawyer, a specialist in human rights issues and with 15 years of experience representing victims of violations of their rights before international organizations, according to her professional profile.
She was also director, for almost a decade, of the Center for Justice and International Law, (Cejil for its acronym in English). Aguiluz has already had “encounters” with the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
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In October 2018, at the height of the repression against the social protests of that year, the Nicaraguan regime expelled her from the country along with a Cejil team that had arrived to attend a meeting with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). .
In her first message to Nicaraguans, through a video released by the Collective, the new president of the defense organization thanked the lawyer Gonzalo Carrión for his 4 years at the helm of the institution.
Carrión is one of the founders of the Collective and will now continue his work as a defender from the position of “coordinator of the documentation area”, indicates the organization’s statement.
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Aguiluz assured that from his new position he will continue working so that the body he now chairs continues to defend the human rights of Nicaraguans until the people can count on “a free, fair, democratic and equal Nicaragua.”
The Nunca Más Nicaragua Human Rights Collective was born in exile “spontaneously” in 2019, in Costa Rica. It was founded by a group of Nicaraguan defenders who were forced to leave their country as a result of the repression unleashed against them by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship.
Since its foundation, they have assumed the mission of “documenting the serious human rights violations perpetrated by the State of Nicaragua in the context of the social protests that began in April 2018, and contributing to the recovery of historical memory, to its preservation so that In the long term, a lasting democracy based on respect for human rights is built. Its first director was Gonzalo Carrión, who after four years left his position for the new president, Marcia Aguiluz, to take over.
