Daniel Ortega’s regime once again attacks Radio La Costeñísima, the only independent radio outlet in Bluefields that continues to report despite the siege and repression against its journalists.
The communicator Kalúa Salazar, press officer of the station, told Article 66 that a sympathizer of the Ortega dictatorship, identified on Facebook as Jorge Luis Mena Lumbí, published that due to an alleged “initiative of the residents of Bluefields, in the coming weeks they will be collecting signatures to request the definitive closure of Radio La Costeñísima.”
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Among the allegations that the fanatic of the regime exposes for the supposed collection of signatures, is that the station publishes false news, incites violence, instability, and makes “a call for unjustified rebellion.”
They also point to the direction of the medium of receiving financing from abroad “and many things for which the Law recently approved by the National Assembly, Cybercrime Law, is required to be applied.”
Given these accusations, Salazar affirms that they are false and unsubstantiated accusations, because “all the people of Bluefields know what work La Costeñísima has carried out in the last 20 years, which makes us think that it is yet another attempt to promote fear and silence the only radio and independent media that remains in the region».
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The communicator added that this new threat occurs when in Bluefields there is a wave of siege against journalists “and that is due to the dates (of the four years of the April rebellion) that are approaching.”
“No media outlet is safe in Nicaragua, because there are no rights for anyone. We hope that this does not happen because it would be very difficult for the population to run out of information and only be left with partisan information from the official Bluefields media, “said the press officer of La Costeñísima.
On the other hand, the platform Press Freedom Alerts Nicaragua, which documents cases of violations of freedom of expression and the press in the country, recalls that Radio La Costeñísima “is a community radio station serving the population of the South Caribbean Coast since its foundation and in recent years has been the focus of threats by Sandinista representatives and fanatics. Doing journalism and supporting citizens is not a crime »he affirms.
Since 2018, Radio La Costeñísima has been the object of constant siege by the Police and Ortega paramilitaries, so its journalists do not rule out that these threats materialize.
“We do not have any additional information, only what was published on Facebook and of course it is a threat that could be true,” concluded Kalúa Salazar.
