The former president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, joined the “Christmas in Freedom” campaign promoted by the University Coordinator for Democracy and Justice (CUDJ), by demanding in these family reunion festivities, the release of political prisoners from Nicaragua and other countries living under a dictatorship.
Through her Twitter account, the former president and one of the critics of the authoritarian regime of Daniel Ortega, assured that “this Christmas I will light a candle, I will raise a prayer and I will ask for the freedom of all the political prisoners in Nicaragua…”, she shared .
His voice joins that of relatives of prisoners of conscience, human rights defenders and international organizations that have demanded the release of political prisoners.
In this sense, the campaign “Christmas without political prisoners”, a clamor that has been maintained for the last five years, is another effort to make visible the pain of those unjustly deprived of their liberty, and they can meet in freedom on this Christmas Eve.
This Christmas I will light a candle, I will say a prayer,… and I will ask for the freedom of all the political prisoners in #Nicaragua and of so many other countries that live in dictatorship. ???#ChristmasInFreedom#SOSNicaragua pic.twitter.com/Vjky8fUkJD
— Laura Chinchilla M. (@Laura_Ch) December 24, 2022
Opposition and human rights organizations have published on their social media accounts, videos, photographs, and art of prisoners of conscience demanding their right to be with their family. However, Daniel Ortega has insisted on intensifying the repression and accumulating more prisoners of conscience.
According to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, until November 2022, officially 235 prisoners of conscience in the different prisons of the National Penitentiary System and police delegations.
However, this figure could easily rise to 250 arbitrarily kidnapped people. This is because many families have not yet authorized the Mechanism to include their prisoner of conscience in the list that they update monthly. People do not lose hope that their political prisoners will be released, if they keep the case completely anonymous.
For its part, the Nicaraguan University Alliance (AUN), assured through its Twitter account that they have been “repeating this campaign for five years with the hope that it will always be the last Christmas we have to do it, that it will be the last Christmas we Families are separated because they have a relative imprisoned unfairly, because the children have their mother or father imprisoned unfairly,” said the source.
This Christmas, our greatest wish is that peace reign in every home in our nation. The young people of the Nicaraguan University Alliance, AUN, wish you a Blessed Christmas. Freedom for our political prisoners! #ChristmasWithoutPoliticalPrisoners pic.twitter.com/zmP6R8z7T1
— AUN (@AUNNicaragua) December 24, 2022
The Daniel Ortega regime imprisoned more than 500 prisoners of conscience in 2018, in retaliation for their involvement in the civic protests that broke out that year, and which the government repressed. Despite the fact that in 2019 the same regime approved a tailor-made amnesty law, and the majority of those deprived of liberty were released, there were those who were left in prison; among these, 12 prisoners of conscience who this year will spend their fifth Christmas in inhumane conditions.
Ivania Álvarez, from the civic organization Urnas Abiertas, previously told CONFIDENTIAL that Nicaragua is reaching its fifth Christmas in one of the “crudest and most violent years in terms of political prisoners, with a new modality, which is the persecution of the family.
“We are very clear that not even in the time of the Anastasio-Somoza dictatorship, if they were looking for someone, they were looking for that person, and now, when they did not find the objective, they took their son, their wife, their son-in-law, their brother, and That shows the degree of cruelty that this dictatorship has,” he said.
