It was Sunday, July 8, a date like today, but from 2018, when at around five in the morning, the first shots from high-caliber firearms were heard. There was an exchange of information until it was confirmed: four caravans of Hilux trucks full of Ortega paramilitaries had entered Jinotepe through four access points.
Thus began one of the bloodiest massacres committed in Nicaragua against the civilian population, ordered by the dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, which resulted in at least 35 murders in a single day.
It was the beginning of the so-called “Operation Cleaning” against Carazo, which executed the “caravan of death”, as the population baptized the columns of Hilux trucks. The opposition leader and exiled former politician Juan Sebastián Chamorro recalls, through a publication on his Twitter account, that that Sunday was “the bloodiest day of the protests.”
«At least 35 murdered by the dictatorship that tragic Sunday, especially in Diriamba and Jinotepe. The dictatorship left with all the lead and weapons, ordering its fanatics to shoot to kill. “There will be justice!” Chamorro sentences.
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The also former presidential candidate of the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD) recalls that the massacre perpetrated during the so-called Cleaning Operation, particularly on July 8 in Diriamba and Jinotepe, was accompanied by other actions at other roadblocks also in Chinandega , Masaya, Catarina where there were murders.
For the opposition leader, “the cleanup operation was a new stage of repression at the highest level, in which Daniel Ortega ordered the murder of people. It was a deliberate criminal action of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.”
A paramilitary, military and police massacre
The retired Army major, Roberto Samcam, who knew the resistance of the people of Caracas up close and the details of the massacre of July 8, 2018 in that department, values that that day the dictators Ortega and Murillo ordered “a miserable attack, disproportionate and criminal.
The retired officer, now an analyst on military issues and an opponent in exile, maintains that, in the armed offensive, ordered by the dictators against Carazo, they deployed a force “that was prepared, trained, supplied, armed by the Nicaraguan Army, with all military intelligence information.
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Also, remember that, in the regime’s criminal attack against the roadblocks in Carazo, they used drones. “A paramilitary force is not going to be using drones. There was a strategic accompaniment by the Army and the Police. There is a disproportion. For this reason, this clean-up operation, together with the one ordered by Anastasio Somoza in September 1978, are considered crimes against humanity,” the retired military sentenced.
Continue reporting crimes against humanity
For his part, the also ex-political and exiled Félix Maradiaga, director of the Libertad Foundation, recalled the Carazo massacre on its fifth anniversary and described that day as “dark”, in which police forces, paramilitaries and the Army, at the service of the dictators Daniel Ortega, carried out a “brutal attack” against the citizens of Caracas.
“This military, police, and paramilitary aggression, known as ‘Operation Cleanup,’ left a significant number of young people murdered while exercising their legitimate right to oppose a regime that had already been murdering in cold blood, kidnapping protesters, violating democratic principles, and looting. our natural resources,” denounces Maradiaga.
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The opponent and former presidential candidate insisted that, from different countries of the world and corners of Nicaragua, they continue to demand that “those responsible for crimes against humanity be brought to justice so that they pay for these crimes.”
“We cannot allow impunity to prevail. The bishops, priests, men and women religious who have been imprisoned and expelled from the country for helping those most in need, the opponents who have become stateless, and the civil society organizations and universities that have disappeared, also deserve justice. Nicaragua is today an immense prison because of the State terrorism policy implemented by the Ortega dictatorship, with the active complicity of the Army and the Police,” denounced Maradiaga and the Libertad Foundation.
