One day after the wife of Nicaraguan Félix Maradiaga told journalists that her husband had lost almost 30 kilos in a year in prison and that he feared for his health, the government of President Daniel Ortega brought the former presidential candidate before the cameras .
Maradiaga was thin but seemed to walk and talk without difficulty. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March and had not been seen publicly since his arrest in June 2021.
In Nicaragua there are about 190 political prisoners, including six others who could have challenged Ortega for the presidency in November, according to human rights groups. None of them had been seen in pictures or video since his arrest until Maradiaga’s brief appearance in court on Saturday.
“The government put on a show, a scene of public torture (by Maradiaga) broadcast live to the population” with the aim of instilling terror among Nicaraguans, lawyer Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, said in an interview with AP. (Cenidh).
More than four years after the civic rebellion of April 2018, relatives of the prisoners said in a virtual press conference that the government is “killing them little by little”, by keeping them incommunicado, in unsanitary conditions, with poor food and little medical care.
Their situation is “one of the worst I have seen during my career,” said Jared Genser, an international lawyer for both opponents at the same conference.
Berta Valle, Maradiaga’s wife, reiterated that the prisoners do not have access to reading material or visits from their minor children, which she described as “white torture.”
Victoria Cárdenas, wife of former presidential candidate Juan Sebastián Chamorro, who has also been imprisoned for almost 400 days, urged the government to “open the prisons and show political prisoners.” Both she and Valle are exiled in the United States, since the government ordered her capture after denouncing the arrest of her husbands.
For her part, Renata Holmann, daughter of the journalist and manager of the closed newspaper La Prensa Juan Lorenzo Holmann, said that her father suffers from chronic illnesses and others acquired in prison.
“They are killing them little by little, day by day. The physical deterioration has left them completely unrecognizable, “said the young woman and stated that she is” extremely distressed “because she fears that her father will die in the prison she entered in August.
In May 2019, opponent Eddy Montes was assassinated by a security guard at the Modelo prison, north of Managua, and in February former Sandinista guerrilla fighter Hugo Torres died after suffering from an illness about which the government did not provide details.
According to Núñez, Ortega has imposed an “informative limbo” between prisoners and their families, which “creates more desperation and anguish and is a new form of repression.”
Núñez, who was imprisoned under the dictator Anastasio Somoza’s regime in the 1970s, assured that the treatment he received in prison at the time “does not compare to the subhuman conditions” suffered by these prisoners.
The 84-year-old jurist is the only human rights defender still in Nicaragua, since the rest of her colleagues had to go into exile due to pressure and threats. The Cenidh was closed and her assets confiscated by the government in 2018.
In Nicaragua “there is a generalized fear of speaking out and denouncing” what the government does, said the defender. But “here we will continue and they will not shut us up,” she added.
According to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, a civil group linked to the opposition, as of June 30 there were 190 prisoners of conscience in Nicaragua, 180 of them arrested since 2018. Of the total, 18 are women, four of them under complete isolation.
The Ortega government has not given figures of prisoners and assures that there are no political prisoners in the country and that the detainees are “criminals and terrorists.”
Núñez said that the repression is also suffered by at least a dozen prisoners of conscience under house arrest due to health problems or old age, since police officers remain inside their homes and their relatives are restricted from communicating with the outside world. .
“The family also becomes kidnapped,” he said.
A commission of deputies from Latin American leftist parties arrived in Costa Rica on Wednesday with the intention of entering Nicaragua on Friday to verify the situation of the prisoners. The Ortega government has not made a statement about the visit.
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