The Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli has become one of the most critical voices with the president of her country, Daniel Ortega, something that has forced her to go into exile and live between the US and Spain, from where she assures that next Sunday’s elections “are not an election” but “the ratification of power” of the president.
In an interview with Efe, the intellectual regrets the current situation in the country and is hopeless about the process: “I do not expect anything at all, they are totally fraudulent elections and what I hope that the people will realize more and more how false and destructive this government is. for their interests ”.
Belli supports “totally” the voices that ask not to vote as a sign of protest in the elections since, as he emphasizes, “no democratic minimum is going to be met.”
“Everything is completely fixed, they should even know the percentage with which they want to win, never before has there been a process as flawed as this, where all the candidates who could compete with Ortega are imprisoned, placed by him to prevent them from competing because knew they had enormous odds of winning, any of them“, Add.
“A slap to the civic roads”
The writer, exiled since this year due to the escalation of arrests of opponents, admits “without any hope” that the elections “will alter the situation in Nicaragua” because “they are fraudulent.”
“We already know the answer, we already know what will happen, it is the controlled ratification of the power of Ortega and Rosario Murillo” (Ortega’s wife), says Belli.
For the Nicaraguan, the process is “a slap in the face to civility and to the civic pathways that democracy facilitates so that people can change a government without having to resort to other “non-democratic” methods.
“With the history that Nicaragua has, it is even harder and more scandalous that these people have made these decisions to prevent the people from expressing their will, so I fully support the call not to vote, it is the way to express that rejection,” he says. .
Free political prisoners
Since last May, 39 opposition leaders and independent professionals, including seven presidential candidates, have been arrested within the framework of the current electoral cycle; some arrests that Belli attributes to the possibilities “of any of the candidates” to defeat Ortega “in fair elections.”
“He stopped them to prevent them from competing because he knew they had enormous chances of winning, this is the situation of Ortega in Nicaragua, he is so worn out and discredited that any of the candidates he imprisoned could have beaten him if they had been clean,” he insists.
Although he does not trust the president, he hopes that after the elections he will release the political prisoners: “It is urgent that Ortega give a signal that at least he will have the nobility to release political prisoners after defeating them for imprisoning them, he is the one who is morally defeated, what I hope is that he will free the political prisoners.
And it is that, according to narrates, the imprisoned candidates are suffering “conditions that are harmful to their rights” and denounce that they have not had access to lawyers or family visits during their first hundred days in detention.
“They have been allowed to see their relatives once or twice, for half an hour, surrounded by policemen, they are not fed enough, many have lost a lot of weight, they do not turn off the light at night, they do not take them out in the sun, they do not they have allowed us to pass a single book, a paper, a pencil and are the most outstanding in terms of the country’s political leadership ”, he laments.
The writer asks the international community not to “forget Nicaragua” and is “concerned” that “not enough is known about what is happening” in the country.
“It is very important that it be known and condemned, international pressure has to grow after this electoral farce“Other things can be done to try to make this man follow the rules of peaceful coexistence, at least respect for human rights”, ditch.
