The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) concluded, in its 2022 annual report, that Nicaragua lives under “a state of permanent terror”, consolidated by the “electoral farces” of 2021 Y 2022 and “the numerous repressive strategies” that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has developed to remain in power.
The regime has also been merciless against the more than 235 political prisoners “violating all their human rights, treating them as ‘non-persons’, denying them the most basic things to be able to live, such as water, food, health, and with the clear objective of physically and mentally destroying them along with their families,” it reads. in the Cenidh report.
They value that in 2022 the Judiciary was “the greatest instrument of repression of the Ortega-Murillo regime”, which it has used “to imprison and prosecute innocents in the so-called mistrials, the most aberrant action and violation of human rights, registered in the most recent history of Nicaragua”.
ANNUAL REPORT LAUNCH
The @cenidh shares his report at a national and international level: , , which exposes the serious situation of #HRD in 2022Discharge https://t.co/TQFeK2MRL3 pic.twitter.com/jIPo9kNR1I
— Cenidh (@cenidh) January 20, 2023
They emphasize that the Police, mobs, and fanatics of the regime “are organized” to maintain constant surveillance, harass, attack, and threaten people considered to be opponents; released political prisoners, relatives of political prisoners, social activists, journalists and human rights defenders, “in an effort to intimidate and remember who has power.”
“The arbitrary arrests of opponents (new arrests or recaptures) have been one of the most used criminal practices in 2022 by the Ortega-Murillo regime, which reflects its inability to govern and its unwillingness to respect national laws and agreements. international human rights”, emphasizes the organization.
A fractured society
The regime also implemented in the last year “a repressive pattern without precedent in Nicaragua,” warns Cenidh. This pattern consisted of “capturing relatives of opponents those that he has not managed to capture, demanding that they turn themselves in so that their relatives can be released. A practice used only by the mafias or the worst dictatorships in the world”, underlines the report in its conclusions.
Faced with this hostile panorama, the organization values that the Ortega-Murillo regime has caused the disarticulation of Nicaraguan families, forcing them into forced exile. “The core of society is fractured by the incessant repression and state of terror, repressive laws, poverty, hunger, lack of jobs… and a whole range of problems that make life impossible, economic development and all kinds of ”, they emphasize.
“In Nicaragua there is no longer freedom of expression and press,” says the Cenidh report. The regime has not only chosen to silence the voices of critics and independent journalists, it has also “usurped the facilities and assets of the media” such as 100% Noticias, La Prensa and CONFIDENTIAL. They warn that only in 2022 some 93 Nicaraguan journalists went into exile.
Freedom of conscience and religion” is also the cause of harassment, attacks, even arbitrary detention and prosecution” of a dozen priests, including the bishop of the diocese of Matagalpa, Monsignor Rolando Alvarez. The regime has designated all of them as “its enemies” and is focused on destroying their “honor and reputation”, in the face of the “silence or timid responses” of the senior leaders of the Catholic Church.
In addition, in 2022 the regime practically destroyed the social fabric by canceling the legal status of more than 3,000 Non-Profit Organizations (OSFL), regardless of “the impact that these repressive actions have caused in the most defenseless and poor sectors of the Nicaraguan population”, emphasizes the agency.
