Left-wing Argentine parliamentarians and representatives of human rights organizations will travel to Nicaragua on July 6 to personally verify the conditions of at least 180 people deprived of their liberty for political reasons under the regime of Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
“It is essential to put on the agenda the dramatic situation in terms of human rights violations that Nicaragua is experiencing and unmask a true farce: that government has nothing to do with the left, nor with socialism, nor with anti-imperialism” Celeste Fierro, the MST Left Front Unity Argentine referent, expressed this Wednesday in a statement from the organization.
Ortega assumed his fifth term -and fourth consecutive- on January 10, after elections marked by seven imprisoned candidates accused of “treason against the fatherland” and the elimination of three political factions. The Sandinista leader will be able to remain as president until 2027, when he will complete 20 consecutive years in power.
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For his part, one of the coordinators of the MST and of the international commission that will travel to Nicaragua, Mariano Rosa, indicated that the delegation will first land in Costa Rica, where they will be received by Nicaraguan exiles and social leaders who will lead a caravan from San José to Nicaragua.
The Ortega government reached its boiling point during the popular protests that broke out in April 2018, leaving a minimum balance of 328 dead, according to numbers from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), although local organizations raise the figure to 684.
“The impulse of an International Commission has a humanitarian purpose, in the face of complaints from relatives of prisoners, and groups of Nicaraguan exiles. We are a left that fights for the freedoms of peoples around the world. And with the long tradition in the fight for human rights in Argentina, we could not turn our backs on this situation”, assured the left-wing Argentine legislator, Luciana Echeverría, who will be part of the Argentine delegation.
