More than 20 opposition organizations from inside and outside (in exile) Nicaragua called on Thursday the country’s officials to “lose fear” of the Government of Daniel Ortega, whom the Nicaraguan diplomat Arturo McFields denounced as “dictatorship” in the Organization of American States (OAS).
We “echo McFields’ words not to lose hope, but to lose fear. Telling the truth about what is happening to the Nicaraguan people is not treason. The Ortega-Murillo regime has no future! The patriotic Nicaraguans who are in a position to abandon the dictatorship must do so now!” the organizations highlighted in a joint statement.
The day before, McFields took advantage of a telematic session of the OAS Permanent Council to denounce that “people inside and people outside are tired, tired of the dictatorship and its actions, and more and more people are going to say Enough”.
According to the diplomat, officials “are forced by the Nicaraguan regime to pretend, to fill vacancies and repeat slogans, because if they don’t they lose their jobs.”
This morning, Ortega, through a presidential agreement, annulled the appointment of McFields as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador of Nicaragua to the OAS, and in his place he appointed Francisco Obadiah Campbell Hooker, who is also the Nicaraguan representative in the United States. .
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“The dignity of public workers is continually trampled on, being forced to take actions against their will and suffering continuous mistreatment by the upper echelons of the regime,” said the organizations, including the two best known: the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy and the Blue and White National Unity.
The state sector, made up of more than 170,000 officials, was one of the few that did not join the massive anti-government protests against Ortega in 2018, which left “more than 350 dead,” according to McFields, a figure close to the 355 reported by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The officials who rebelled individually, including more than 400 doctors, were fired or decided to flee into exile for fear of reprisals, according to some of the organizations that signed the call.
McFIELDS LAUNCHES TWITTER
“Today I recover my freedom, my name, and I make use of the right to use social networks, in my country this is a crime,” said McFields this Thursday, after launching his Twitter account.
On social media, users who identified themselves as Sandinistas continued to refer to McFields, a journalist by profession, as a “traitor” or “selling homeland” and recalled that Ortega’s wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, let him into her house in 2006 to do a report on how his family celebrated Christmas.
For their part, organizations, including groups of “political prisoners”, youth, exiles and the diaspora, asked members of the diplomatic corps, Police and Army to follow the example of McFields.
“We urge public servants, including members of the foreign service, the Police and the Army, to follow this worthy example of denunciation and love of the country,” they stressed.
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While the opposition made the call, Ortega made changes in the embassies of Argentina and Venezuela, waiting for them to be ratified by the National Assembly (Parliament), where the Sandinistas and their allies have an absolute majority.
Carlos Midence, recently withdrawn as ambassador in Madrid on the grounds that the Kingdom of Spain was pressuring him and threatening “interference”, was sent as representative in Argentina, replacing Orlando Gómez Zamora, who will be ambassador to Venezuela, one of the main allies of the Sandinista government.
On the same day, Ortega annulled the appointment of the Nicaraguan ambassador to Venezuela, Yaosca Calderón Martín, who had held the position since July 2020.
He also appointed as his adviser for Policies and International Relations the former guerrilla and former deputy Orlando José Tardencilla, former Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
