An international commission of parliamentarians, social activists and human rights defenders from six Latin American countries will try to enter Nicaragua this Friday, July 8, to personally verify the conditions of the more than 180 political prisoners of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
The delegation is made up of deputies and activists from Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Panama. They will lead a caravan —with Nicaraguan exiles and human rights defenders— that will leave San José, the Costa Rican capital, towards the Peñas Blancas border in Nicaragua.
The program Tonight He spoke with two Argentine members of the commission, who agree that the government model of Ortega and his wife should not be considered “left, socialist and anti-imperialist.”
“From an economic or political point of view, and wherever you look at it, the Ortega regime has nothing to do with socialism, with the left or with anti-imperialism. It is also important to unmask this issue,” he said. Luciana Echevarría, deputy of the province of Córdoba for the Socialist Workers Movement – Left Unity Front.
“We are in a moment of great social polarization worldwide. The right and imperialism use the atrocities of the (Ortega and Murillo) regime to try to delegitimize an entire model, to delegitimize many (social) struggles,” the Argentine legislator stressed.
“A socialist leader can never become the executioner of his own people and that is what is happening in Nicaragua (…) the only way they can implement their economic and political plan is through force,” he added.
“Unmask the regime”
For the Argentine activist Mariano Rosa, political coordinator of the international commission, “a strong point of the initiative is that in no way can it be imputed any kind of relationship with the US embassy or with sectors of the right. We are from the left”.
He explained that, in the country, “an international task of immediate humanitarian support is needed for the life and freedom of (political) prisoners,” since “in Nicaragua there is a dramatic situation, one of the most serious on a Latin American scale. and international”.
He also urged for “a political task of unmasking”, since the regime “has nothing to do with the left, nor with anti-imperialism, nor with socialism, nor with anything.”
“(In Nicaragua) there is a situation of brutal repression, a dictatorship, a police state, which we consider to be the opposite of our conception of a leftist model,” commented the national leader of the MST-FIT Unity and the International Socialist League ( LIS).
“Cowardly” attitude of presidents
The activist pointed out that the presidents Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in Mexico, and Alberto Fernandezin Argentina, have had “a cowardly attitude” and “a complicit silence” in the face of the repression of the Ortega regime.
“There is no energetic attitude, there is no position or clear determination to condemn what is happening there (in Nicaragua), which has nothing to do with locating oneself in the political field of the (Joe) Biden Administration, it has to do with with recognizing that there is a police state, that there is no right to protest, that there are 190 prisoners in subhuman conditions,” he commented.
“It is disastrous that all this is done in the name of progressivism, of the left, of anti-imperialism. We believe that these governments have a responsibility to take a very clear, categorical and forceful position of condemnation, ”he added.
For the deputy, in the case of presidents Gabriel Boric, from Chile, and the newly elected Gustavo Petro, in Colombiawe have to see “how these governments advance, that they do not remain in a declaration (of condemnation) but also exert more international pressure”.
“Sanctions must be established, a diplomatic rupture with this (Ortega) government, since finally it seems that these are the things that must be advanced, if you really want to face a dictatorship in these times,” he commented. Echevarria.
silence of the regime
The international commission has sent a request to enter the national territory through various means, but the regime has not answered them. At the beginning of last June, a delegation —member of the Argentine coordinator “Memory, Truth and Justice Encounter”— appeared before the Nicaraguan embassy in Argentina, to deliver a note to the Ortega ambassador about the trip to the country; however, they were not received.
“We have made diplomatic efforts at the highest level, embassies and consulates of different countries in the world. There is a process through the Argentine Foreign Ministry, through the embassy in Managua, for now the answers have been evasive,” said Rosa, who indicated that “we made a very specific proposal for a roadmap” of the prisons that want visit.
This is not the first international commission that the regime has denied entry to Nicaragua. In the middle of last June, the Government of Ortega and Murillo flatly refused to allow entry into the country or cooperate with the Commission of Independent Experts appointed by the Human Rights Council of the United Nations (UN), created to investigate the human rights violations that occurred in Nicaragua between 2018 and 2022.
Echevarria He commented that the visit to Costa Rica and the border with Nicaragua —due to the refusal of entry—, will serve to document the testimonies of relatives of political prisoners and those Nicaraguans forced into exile, which will be integrated into a report and disseminated internationally. .
“One difference (of this commission) with other organizations is that we are here putting our bodies in them, because we believe that it is the way in which we must confront this regime,” assured the Argentine legislator.
