Organizations defending human rights in Nicaragua rejected this Wednesday the exhibition of opponents considered political prisoners of the Government of President Daniel Ortega, following complaints from their relatives, who stated that they suffered from malnutrition and extreme weight loss.
“It was evident that the regime resorted to filters to hide their paleness, but they failed to deceive us, they failed to discredit their relatives, who have communicated at the national and international level the subhuman conditions and torture to which their relatives are subjected,” said the official. Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), after the Nicaraguan authorities released photographs and videos of the convicts.
At least 20 opponents were presented between yesterday and today through images in official media and Sandinista profiles, from the joint complaint of their relatives, in which they stated that they suffer “more malnutrition and extreme weight loss” due to a supposed reduction in food portions.
In the images it was possible to observe the opponents, including the former dissident Sandinista guerrilla Dora María Téllez and three former candidates for the Presidency, unfounded in the blue clothing of inmates, with physical appearances similar to those described by their relatives previously, it is say underweight and emaciated.
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The Nicaraguan Human Rights Collective Never Again described the exhibition as an “advertising show” and a “marketing show”, with which the Ortega government seeks to “wash its face.”
Both Cenidh and that Collective agreed that the “informative hearings” before Judge Octavio Ernesto Rothschuh, president of the Managua Court of Appeals, and other judges, where the images were allegedly taken, do not exist in the judicial proceedings.
“It is an express confession of abuse of power and prevarication that all these magistrates and judges are committing,” Cenidh stressed.
“This presentation, from a legal point of view, does not make sense, the only purpose of the presentation is to whitewash the Ortega regime,” said the lawyer for the Juan Carlos Arce Collective.
The organizations agreed to demand the release of more than 200 inmates considered political prisoners, including Bishop Rolando Álvarez and ten Catholic priests, arrested in the last three months.
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The convicts exhibited in the last two days remain locked up in the prison known as El Chipote, which has been denounced as an alleged torture center of the Nicaraguan Police by various humanitarian organizations.
The opponents, arrested between May and November 2021, were sentenced to between 7 and 13 years in prison for crimes considered “treason against the country” or money laundering.
President Daniel Ortega has branded the imprisoned opponents as “traitors to the country”, “criminals” and “sons of bitches of the Yankee imperialists”.
