The Union of Political Prisoners (UPPN), through its social networks, released an alert demanding the release of political prisoner Jaime Navarrete Blandón, who despite having served, in January 2023, the illegal and arbitrary sentence imposed on him by the Ortega regime for political reasons, added another 20 months of confinement to that sentence.
Navarrete Blandón, the organization notes, was arrested for the first time on June 16, 2018, accused of allegedly murdering a “paramilitary” during the social protests that began in April of that year and sentenced to 24 years in prison, although the same regime later released him on June 11, 2019, under the controversial Amnesty Law.
The protester did not last a month in freedom when the regime ordered a second kidnapping. Navarrete Blandón was arrested again on July 24, 2019, according to the UPPN, “under new false accusations,” this time related to possession of “psychotropic narcotics, other controlled substances and illegal possession of weapons,” for which he was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, which were completed in January 2023.
The Union of Political Prisoners denounced that despite the completion of the term of the illegal and arbitrary sentence, the prisoner of conscience remains “imprisoned in inhumane conditions in ‘La 300’ (maximum security cell)” of the Jorge Navarro Penitentiary System, known as La Modelo, in Tipitapa.
The indigenous leader of the Autonomous Region of the North Caribbean Coast, alternate deputy and president of the political organization Yatama, Nancy Henríquez, remains arbitrarily imprisoned by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, with a drastic deterioration of her health and without receiving adequate medical attention from the regime’s jailers, denounced the organization defending prisoners of conscience, Unidad de Defensa Jurídica (UDJ).
Through its official social media accounts, the UDJ denounces that the indigenous leader has suffered deterioration in her health, worsened by the conditions in which she has been kept in the dictatorship’s prisons for almost a year.
“Nancy Elizabeth Henríquez is an indigenous leader, alternate deputy, mother of 5 children, grandmother and president of the YATAMA party. In prison she has not received medical care and treatment to adequately deal with her chronic illnesses,” the UDJ denounces in a post on its X account.
He also added that Henríquez suffers from “diabetes, hypertension, fatty liver, gastritis, hair loss, rheumatic pain and cataracts.”
The Nicaraguan dictatorship has remained completely silent regarding the “investigative” process against the now former presidential advisor and indigenous leader Steadman Fagot Müller, kidnapped by the Army and handed over to the Sandinista Police on charges of alleged drug trafficking and threatening state security, while the Yatama leadership in exile has called on the communities to “rise up.”
Fagot, one of the most visible and veteran indigenous leaders of the North Caribbean Coast, was kidnapped by members of the Nicaraguan Army in the municipality of Waspán on September 14, after he made an incendiary complaint accusing the Army and the Police of being accomplices of the massacre committed by settler invaders on indigenous lands.
The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship is now holding the three most visible indigenous leaders of the North Caribbean Coast hostage. For a year now, it has kept Brooklyn Rivera, a deputy and top leader of the Yapti Tasba Masraka Nanih Aslatakanka (YATAMA) party, the main political force of the indigenous people, in a condition of “forced disappearance.”
