The last 35 days of Andrea Margarita del Carmen, former program director of the disappeared center PEN Nicaragua, have been distressing in exile. His son Gabriel Alfonso López, a 34-year-old auditor, is imprisoned in a new stage of repression by the Daniel Ortega regime, which imprisons the relatives of politically persecuted people to try to capture them.
On September 14, while López was at his mother’s house on Carretera Sur in Managua, taking care of his 90-year-old grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s, he was arrested by the Police.
He was finally charged on September 30 for committing the alleged crime “of undermining national integrity”, after a preliminary hearing almost at noon on October 1, and on the 19th of this month the initial session was held before the Sixth District Court. Criminal Court, in charge of Rolando Sanarrusia Munguía, with a history of persecuting political prisoners.
Read: Relatives of political hostages of the regime claim: Release them. They are innocent”
Andrea Margarita reported that the police officers took her son’s cell phone and from there they sent him messages, which she ignored. It was then that they took him to the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, where the police cells of El Chipote are located, denounced as a torture center of the dictatorship in Nicaragua.
“When the family went to ask about him in El Chipote, they were told that they were interested in me, and that he would only go free if he turned me in. It is confirmed that he is there, but no one in the family has been able to see him. Not even the lawyer,” said the DD activist on Wednesday. H H. to the journalist Cindy Regidor in the television program Tonight.
In the interview, Andrea Margarita defined herself as a defender of freedom of expression, thought and organization, three constitutional rights that are currently criminalized in Nicaraguan territory.
The mother maintained that she did not have great expectations of the hearing on October 19, in which she could imagine the police presenting as “evidence” a series of false profiles on social networks and the testimony of uniformed men accusing her son.
According to the record of the hearing of October 1, which is the only one available in the electronic system of the courts so far, the “evidence” presented was not very clear. The public defender said at that time that the list of facts described without specifying what was the use of social networks between 2020 and 2022.
In the same document reference is made to two publications between January and August. “Where you reproduce the publication made on a website where the only comment is that sanctions be applied to sandisapos, it does not say what criminal act he has done. Reproducing two publications is not conspiring against the State of Nicaragua, so I ask that the same (accusation) be rejected,” said the public defender.
The defendant’s defense was later assumed by a private lawyer. For Andrea Margarita, the State’s persecution has caused a lot of pain in her family. The regime’s decision not only seems unfair, but shameful, because it shows how they have gone to the limit of punishing other people just because they are relatives of politically persecuted people.
“We are all innocent, we are not criminals, nor do we plan coups, but the worst thing is that these are things that one has seen in drug mafia movies, that they take a family member hostage,” he said.
The persecution of the family of Javier Álvarez
The family of Javier Alvarez is in a similar situation. His wife Jeannine Horvilleur Cuadra, his daughter Ana Carolina and his son-in-law Félix Ernesto Roiz Sotomayor are prosecuted. They were accused before the same court for the crimes of “conspiracy” and “propagation of false news”.
Álvarez and his attorney declined to comment on the hearing that took place on October 18 at 2 p.m. As in the previous case, the only record available in the court’s electronic system corresponds to the initial hearing held on October 1.
The defense at the preliminary hearing emphasized that the acts of investigation, supposedly carried out by the Police, were not even described. “It also refers to the fact that the defendant Félix (Roiz) published false news through social networks, but that circumstance is not clear in the narration of the Public Ministry,” he said.
The Álvarez family was initially represented by a public defender. Now a private attorney does it.
The growing concern of Dulce Porras
Freddy Martín Porras García, accused since October 1 for “the crime of conspiracy” and “propagation of false news” has scheduled his initial hearing for October 21 at two in the afternoon, according to the official information in his file.
According to Dulce Porras, the sister of the detainee, they live days full of worries. “The family is still in a state of anguish, he has three daughters, his wife,” the persecuted politician said by telephone.
She is a leader of UNAMOS, the former Sandinista Renewal Movement. Porras’s brother was captured on September 15, in the midst of national holidays, at her house in Carazo.
