The political prisoner and opposition leader José Antonio Peraza served this Friday, June 10, 330 days in prison in the cells of the Evaristo Vásquez Police Complex, headquarters of the Judicial Assistance Directorate (DAJ), known as “El Nuevo Chipote”.
José Antonio Peraza is a political scientist and member of the Political Council of the Blue and White National Unity (Unab). The dictatorship accused him of violating Law 1055, the Sovereignty Law, a legal tool approved by the deputies of the dictatorship to persecute, imprison and prosecute opponents of the Ortega-Murillo regime.
Peraza was violently detained on June 26, 2021 at his home. In the cells of “El Chipote” he has been subjected to extensive interrogations, poor nutrition, few hours of sunlight per week and no access to medicine to treat the illnesses he has developed during his captivity.
Related news: Ortega regime sentences political scientist José Antonio Peraza to 10 years in prison
The opponent, a specialist in political and electoral systems, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on February 17. He was also disqualified from holding public office by Judge Ángel Jancarlos Fernández González, of the Fourth Criminal District Court of Managua.
José Antonio Peraza was director of the civic organization Movement for Nicaragua and was detained in October 2018, when together with a group of opponents he intended to protest in Managua against Daniel Ortega in the context of the socio-political crisis that the country has been experiencing for four years.
The opponent was arrested during a wave of arrests of opposition leaders and critics of Sandinismo, in the framework of the general elections of November last year, in which Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, fourth consecutive and second with his wife, Rosario. Murillo, as vice president.
According to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, Daniel Ortega has accumulated more than 180 political prisoners since the April 2017 crisis. Some 40 opponents were arrested in the 2021 electoral context, 30 of them are imprisoned in “El Chipote”.
