On International Human Rights Day, Nicaraguan defenders warn that 2022 has been “the year of greatest suffering” in Nicaragua, after 2018. They assure that Nicaraguans “have lost our status as citizens”, “our lives are conditioned by fear ” and “the only thing” that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has not managed to overcome are the 355 murders that were committed during the repression of the massive protests four years ago.
The president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh)Vilma Núñez, valued that the repression in 2022 has been “especially cruel.” Situation for which she considers that “one can no longer speak of systematic violations of human rights but of a policy of extermination”, since the blows of the regime go “against everything and everyone”.
Human rights violations have surpassed what happened in previous years. “Perhaps the only thing that (the regime) has not been able to overcome is the 355 murders. That doesn’t mean people don’t keep dying. The people who drown crossing the Rio Grande, the people who are killed while fleeing the country to Costa Rica, that has a cause and it is precisely the persecution”, stressed Núñez.
For Juan Carlos Arce, from the Nicaragua Human Rights Collective Nunca+, 2022 is undoubtedly “the year of greatest suffering” after 2018 and it is also the year in which “the Ortega regime is ratified as the perpetrator of crimes against humanity.” .
“We have a systematic and massive pattern of torture practices that we are seeing with the political prisoners“. In addition, “this is the year of kidnappings of relatives of political dissidents, that is unacceptable,” commented the human rights defender.
“There is no redoubt of visible citizenship”
In Arce’s opinion, this year the Ortega regime managed to consolidate its de facto police state, “that state of terror, of fear, that immobilizes the citizenry, political dissent.” Nicaraguans “have finished losing our status as citizens and the regime has consolidated that state of terror that has crushed or annihilated citizen rights,” he stressed.
The human rights defender recalled that the regime went from prohibiting all kinds of citizen protest to closing dozens of media, to persecute the Catholic Church and to cancel more than 3,000 civil society organizations this year alone. “There is no stronghold of visible citizenship left in Nicaragua, they have ordered us to exercise our rights in hiding,” he said.
For the president of Cenidh, the persecution of freedom of expression reached its climax this year 2022. “We had already seen the confiscation of CONFIDENTIAL and 100% Noticias, but we have never seen an entire newspaper like La Prensa have had to exile all its editors”.
On the other hand, “having taken family members hostage just because they could not capture the person they were looking for is the last straw and they had the nerve to tell them ‘we have nothing against you, but as long as your relative doesn’t show up, let’s not let you in freedom’ and now they are being prosecuted,” denounced Núñez.
Nicaraguan victims of fear
Both Núñez and Arce acknowledge that fear has currently gripped the Nicaraguan citizenry. All State institutions “are based on repression” and the de facto police state “has been consolidated.”
“All our work, even our thinking and acting are conditioned by the will of these people (the dictators). Even if you don’t want to remember them, as soon as you can’t do something, as soon as you can’t dispose of your will to lead yourself to an activity, you immediately think of them as the omnipresent and perverse image that affects people’s daily lives”. described Nunez.
For his part, Arce specified that despite the seriousness of human rights violations in Nicaragua, “many people do not file complaints for fear that their family members will be attacked.” This pattern of damage also “has the objective of neutralizing (dissidents), leading people to think that if they continue speaking in exile they are going to harm their relatives in Nicaragua, so they better keep quiet.” “That is the goal,” Arce said.
