Six days after the fourth anniversary of the April 2018 Rebellion, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo ordered a new wave of repression against opponents, community leaders, and musicians and producers from Managua, Nueva Segovia, Tipitapa, Masaya, and Somoto. CONFIDENTIAL counted —according to the report of civil society organizations and community leaders— that this Tuesday, April 12, there were four arrests, seven raids and three home sieges.
The new wave of repression also occurs a few days after the regime’s vice president and spokeswoman, Rosario Murillo, increased her public attacksthrough his midday interventions in the official media, against thousands of dissidents and opponents of his regime, whom he warned that “there will be no forgiveness or forgetting.”
On the afternoon of this Tuesday, April 12, the Ortega regime ordered the arrest in Managua of at least four musicians and producers who participated, on April 2, in the 15th anniversary concert of the Monroy y Surmenage band, an event in the that supposedly a criticism was raised against the Ortega-Murillo regime, through one of the songs performed.
The song that apparently upset the Ortega regime is titled “In the eye of the hurricane”which includes among its stanzas phrases such as: “a loud cry in April”, “everyone shouts present” and “in the rain they come closer, they die wide open”.
According to a report by 100% Noticias, the concert also said: “April is not forgotten”, alluding to the social protests that were repressed by the Ortega-Murillo regime in April 2018.
Josué Monroy, vocalist of the Monroy y Surmange band, is known to have been arrested this Tuesday afternoon at his home in Altamira, Managua. In a video that circulated through social networks, the moment in which police officers break into the singer’s home can be seen.
CONFIDENTIAL confirmed that Daniel Ortega’s regime also arrested music producer Leonardo Canales, director of La Anteala, and Xochilt Tapia and Salvador Espinoza, managers of Saxo Producciones and managers of the bands Monroy y Surmenage and Milly Majuc.
Tapia and Espinoza were with their five-year-old son at the time of the arrest, and the police left the minor at a neighbor’s house, he told CONFIDENTIAL a source close to the producers.
Raids and threats in Masaya
The raids carried out by the Police of the Ortega regime began at 8:00 am this Tuesday in the department of Masaya. CONFIDENTIAL documented the raids on the homes of María Andrea José, mother of Darwin Potosme -murdered by the Ortega repression in June 2018- and member of the April Mothers Association (AMA); and the citizen Yolanda González, persecuted since 2018 for participating in social protests.
The home of another of the AMA members who lives in Masaya was also raided, but for fear of reprisals, she decided not to disclose it publicly.
In the search of the house of María Andrea José, the group of police officers did not present a court order and threatened the seven people who were in the place.
“They told us to let them in, that if it wasn’t going to be worse for us,” denounced one of María Andrea’s relatives in an interview with CONFIDENTIAL.
The group of police officers, aboard five patrol cars and seven motorcycles, arrived at María Andrea José’s home around 9:00 am, claiming that they were looking for “political propaganda.”
“They told us: `we are going to check the house because we received a complaint. You have political propaganda here. They are organizing a mass in the Saint Michael Church‘”, he recounted.
After more than an hour going through the house’s belongings, the officers decided to leave but, before doing so, they photographed everyone who was in the house, including a minor, and threatened them, telling them that if they looked at them in the mass, which is supposedly being organized in the San Miguel Arcángel Church, “they picked them up and took them prisoners, where the other tranqueros are.”
The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) denounced the “police abuse” against the Potosme family and reminded “the regime that it is the right of Nicaraguans to commemorate their dead relatives.”
In addition, he demanded the “cessation of repression and respect for the physical and psychological integrity” of the relatives of the victims murdered in the context of social protests.
Police raid in search of “ballots”
The home of citizen Yolanda González was also raided this Tuesday by more than a dozen police officers, who were “looking for ballots” that were supposed to be “used in a mass at the San Miguel Arcángel de Masaya Church.”
The raid began at around 8:30 am and ended at 10:00 am It was witnessed by González, his 23-year-old daughter and four minors who panicked when they saw the group of police officers. In those more than two hours, the Police reviewed and turned everything inside the house, but did not find the alleged ballots.
In the last four years González has had three break-ins. The first occurred in October 2020, when she was related to the alleged illegal carrying of weapons, after the arrest of former Sandinista councilor Benjamín Gutiérrez Collado. Three months later, on January 15, 2021, the house was raided again and she was held for four hours by the Masaya Police, accused again of allegedly carrying weapons illegally.
In this third raid, the Police did not present a court order and did not take any property from the house, as happened in the previous raids, in which they stole money and belongings from the property. However, they threatened a new imprisonment and criminalization against Gutiérrez, in case she attends the mass that is supposedly being convened in the San Miguel Arcángel Church.
Raids in Madriz and Nueva Segovia
CONFIDENTIAL He also confirmed with community leaders, who request that their identity be omitted for fear of reprisals, the siege on the homes of three opponents from Tipitapa and the raid on two homes of opponents from Somoto, members of the Blue and White National Unity (UNAB) and the Civic Alliance for National Unity (ACUN), respectively.
Two raids were also recorded in Jalapa and Wiwilí, Nueva Segovia, in the homes of two members of the UNAB.
The sources indicated that in Jalapa, Nueva Segovia, one of the opponents was even “visited by police officers at his workplace” and forced to sign a document in which he promised “not to paste ballots, not to paint, or acts of terrorism against Nicaragua”.
The opponents whose homes were raided in Somoto and Wiwilí were also pressured to sign the document carried by the police officers.
The Blue and White Monitoring released an alert in which they indicate that this Tuesday they received “national complaints of an increase in repression related to the proximity of April 18 and 19” and called on the population to “take security measures and protection”.
