“Wait, we don’t have permission to kill him,” a hooded paramilitary sneered at his cronies after spending several minutes calling his superiors to tell him whether to “proceed” or not. The bosses in turn consulted their bosses: “we’ve got the man,” they said. In front of the firing squad, in broad daylight and on public roads, they had the opponent, at that time the leader of the National Coalition, Félix Maradiaga, commending himself to God.
The now ex-political exile in the US could well begin his story as Gabriel García Márquez begins his book “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”: “The day they were going to kill him”, he got up very early, got ready and got ready. arranged to travel to Matagalpa. He was going to an opposition activity, but was intercepted by a group of paramilitaries who put them on the side of the road, ready to assassinate him.
When the paramilitary who was acting as the group’s leader finished speaking on the radio, he returned to his cronies, spoke to them and then turned to the opponent, patted him on the shoulder and said: “We have no order to kill you.”
That morning of July 1, 2018, in the midst of the repressive escalation ordered by the dictatorship, Maradiaga made two things clear: that God loves him and spared his life, and that the paramilitaries obeyed a very short and direct chain of command. whose first link was Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. “It was they who gave the order to kill, that’s why they are criminals against humanity,” the former politician directly accused in an interview with Article 66.
Journalistic investigations have established that the main organizers and heads of the paramilitary groups that acted in the 2018 repression, which claimed the lives of at least 355 people and injured more than 2,000, according to data from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) They were the Sandinista commanders, Leopoldo Rivas Algfaro, José Valdivia, Glauco Robelo Callejas, a retired Army brigadier general, and Eden Pastora Gómez. The four reported directly to Daniel Ortega and handed down the orders to the groups of henchmen the dictator once called “volunteer police.”
“The paramilitaries did not act alone or freely, they responded to a chain of command, they responded to Ortega’s orders,” says the former presidential candidate.
Dictators decided who should die and who should not.
The former politician states that his story is not to tell what happened to him but to illustrate how the couple of tyrants disposed of the lives of Nicaraguans to the point of believing themselves to be gods and deciding who should die and who should not.
That day, Maradiaga recounts, when they were intercepted by the paramilitaries, “the sociologist Fidel Moreira and ‘Esteban,'” the driver, got out of the vehicle. They took them to the edge of the road, but they took him into a property covered by weeds and there the squad was formed that was preparing to “shoot” him but the order was to leave him alive.
While the weapons of war were pointed at him, one of the hooded men said: “What are you going to say?”, asking him to say his last words. “That my life belongs to Christ and that I love my daughter,” replied the opponent.
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“And what would you say to the commander (Ortega)?” he said again. “That we think differently,” he replied. Minutes later the order came. And after insults, threats and a meticulous search of the vehicle, they let him continue on his way. But he did not end there. They besieged it. He slipped away from León and was discovered there. A group of paramilitaries gave him a beating that sent him to the hospital, from where he was taken with the intercession of the Organization of American States (OAS) and went into exile.
“I thank God for being alive. Other Nicaraguan brothers were not so lucky,” says the opposition leader from exile.
For Maradiaga, all those who have been victims of the Ortega-Murillo must tell their stories, which are documented so that they are taken into account when justice is done against the tyrants and their accomplices, for all the deaths, disappearances and torture they have ordered. .
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On September 5, 2018, the United Nations Security Council summoned Maradiaga to give his testimony. In the conclusions of that instance, despite the objections of China and Russia, it was concluded that this case and others should be referred to the UN Human Rights Council for follow-up.
Human rights organizations have accompanied Maradiaga in an advocacy campaign at the UN. Finally, in March of this year, the UN HRC issued a resolution and a report in which Daniel Ortega is directly identified as “responsible for crimes against humanity.”
