43 years ago, Dora Maria Tellez joined thousands of Nicaraguans in the celebration for the overthrow of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of the dynasty that had taken over Nicaragua for more than 40 years.
She, “Commander Two,” became one of the most representative figures of that armed struggle that managed to put an end to the Somozas. This July 19, the date on which the triumph of the Sandinista popular revolution is commemorated, the former guerrilla is in jail. For the second consecutive year, she will spend this anniversary locked up in a tiny cell, in isolation and in the dark by orders of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
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This Tuesday, relatives of the hostage of conscience, one of the most critical of the current Nicaraguan dictatorship, released a spoken portrait of Téllez. The historian is pale and thin.
The image was shared to the newspaper The country and according to statements from relatives, information collected by the journalist Wilfredo Miranda, Téllez “has lost more than 15% of his body weight, but has coped well with prison due to his experience.”
The 66-year-old former guerrilla has been in prison since June 13, 2021, after police officers even monitored her home with drones, which they later raided. That day, she was arbitrarily detained after beating her, according to the complaints of her relatives.
Since that date, it has only received eight visits from which the spoken portrait was built, because the dictatorship has not publicly presented the political prisoners detained in the 2021 electoral context.
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The Sé Humano platform reiterates the conditions of torture to which the opponent is subjected within the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, known as “El Nuevo Chipote”, designated as a torture center of the Ortega-Murillo regime. “It looks almost translucent,” they warn.
For its part, the Spanish media El País emphasizes that the relatives of the political prisoner insist that the historical fighter “can’t stand being in the dark all the time, she can’t even see the palm of her hand.”
Téllez, Daniel Ortega’s former partner in struggle, was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison for the alleged crime of conspiracy to undermine national integrity. The fourth criminal district judge of Managua, Ángel Jancarlos Fernández González, today sanctioned by the United States Department of State, was in charge of conducting the political trial.
His participation in the fall of the Somozas
Dora María Téllez participated on August 22, 1978 in the Sandinista commando that took the National Palace by storm and took hostages the legislators related to Somoza Debayle, overthrown on June 19, 1979.
The Cenidh highlighted that Téllez led the “Rigoberto López Pérez” Western Front in the fight against Somoza and was the third in command of the takeover of the National Palace in 1978, which she led together with the legendary “Comandante Cero”, Edén Pastora, and the “Comandante Uno” Hugo Torres, who died last February as a political prisoner and in police custody.
She was Minister of Health during the first Sandinista Government (1979-1990) and distanced herself from the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1995 when a group of dissidents, including the writer and former Vice President Sergio Ramírez Mercado, currently in exile and retired of politics, they founded the Sandinista Renovating Movement (MRS).
Téllez presided over the MRS, which the authorities stripped of its legal personality in 2008, prior to municipal elections, and which is now called the Renovating Democratic Union (Unamos).
With information from EFE
