Nicaraguan human rights activist Berta Valle, wife of imprisoned opposition figure Félix Maradiaga, told Efe that her husband and the other political prisoners in Nicaragua are “totally defenseless” in the face of “incommunicado detention, torture and solitary confinement” that They suffer in prison.
Exiled in the US along with her daughter and mother-in-law, she declares herself “very distressed” by the lack of news about the health of her husband, who on June 10 informed the two relatives with permission to visit him in prison where is “arbitrarily detained” that he was going to start a 21-day hunger strike.
The strike theoretically began on June 21 and not only Maradiaga, one of the opposition presidential candidates who was imprisoned more than a year ago, was going to participate, Valle told Efe by telephone from his home in Florida on Tuesday.
Berta Valle said that her husband, imprisoned since June 8, 2021 and sentenced to 13 years in prison in a “political trial”, is a person with “determination”.
DOUBTS BEFORE OFFICIAL VIDEOS
That is why he believes that Maradiaga may be fasting to ask for an end to solitary confinement and solitary confinement and medical attention for political prisoners, but, on the contrary, he has “many doubts” about the videos released by the “regime” of Daniel Ortega in recent days.
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In one of them, her husband is seen being questioned by a journalist from the official press who asks him not to “lie” and tell people that he is in good health, something that Maradiaga does not say, who even points out to the cameras that has no communication with the outside and was the victim of a “political trial.”
Berta Valle recently released a “spoken portrait” of her husband according to those who have seen him in prison, far removed from the image of the corpulent politician who denounced President Daniel Ortega before the UN Security Council in 2018.
According to Valle, the Ortega government has claimed that these videos are the equivalent of “proof of life,” but she does not accept them as such and wants to see it for herself.
Maradiaga’s sister and brother-in-law, who visited him for the last time on June 10, also know that he had heart problems and was taken to the Chipote infirmary, as the prison where he is located is known, where care is “very deficient”.
Maradiaga has been in prison for 393 days and has lost 60 pounds, about 30 kilos, according to his wife, who urges the Nicaraguan authorities that if it is true that he is in good health, as the official journalist says in the video, let enter the prison to visit the Red Cross and United Nations observers.
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VALLE IMPLORES INTERCESSION FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS
Valle thanked the Hemispheric Front for Freedom (FHL), a Miami-based organization of politicians, academics and human rights defenders from several countries, for publishing a statement expressing its “absolute rejection” of the “persecution politics” unleashed by Ortega against his opponents.
The FHL demands in the statement the release of all political prisoners in Nicaragua, respect for their human rights and that of all Nicaraguans, and the end of repression and political persecution in the Central American country.
Berta Valle, for her part, asked everyone who is in a position to intercede for her husband and the other Nicaraguan political prisoners to do everything they can for them, because, as she said paraphrasing Maradiaga, “they are turning off their lives a little little by little”.
The human rights activist stressed that her husband is not in solitary confinement, as is the opposition activist Tamara Dávila, who has been “two months without seeing the sun”, but with another prisoner, but they are prohibited from talking to each other.
Valle feels “deep anguish” because he has not been able to speak to Maradiaga once in the year and almost a month that he has been imprisoned. His daughter has not even been able to send him a drawing and they have prohibited her until she has a Bible with her in the cell, he stressed.
The wife of the former secretary general of the Ministry of Defense during the presidency of Enrique Bolaños (2002-2006) is accused in Nicaragua of treason and lives in exile in Miami with her nine-year-old daughter and her mother-in-law since 2018.
