La Prensa, the oldest newspaper in Nicaragua, meets 97 years of foundationin the midst of persecution, censorship, exile of all its personnel and confiscation of its facilities, despite this it continues to report and denounce the abuses of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
The media outlet, owned by the Chamorro family, recalled that “Moncada, Sacasa, the Somozas, the Sandinistas. Daniel Ortega. They all wanted to silence La Prensa with jail, confiscations, censorship, threats, murders, exiles, bombings and more, but none has been successful in 97 years.
In addition, Ortega during his first government, in the eighties, imposed a regime of media censorship in the country, in which La Prensa was his target for its critical line of the arbitrariness of the Sandinista administration.
Related news: Sandinista dictatorship will use La Prensa facilities for a newspaper, IAPA concerned
The dictator also subjected La Prensa and other media to a content review before publishing their news, which deliberately caused the newspaper to delay its circulation, in addition to the fact that the military in charge of carrying out this scrutiny had the power to demand that the media change title, suppress words, sentences or entire paragraphs, and even order the removal of a piece of news if it did not seem favorable to the first Sandinista government.
The medium’s story of resistance continues; despite suffering a second expropriation of its facilities on August 13, 2021, La Prensa continues reporting. The first raid, also by Daniel Ortega, was in the 1980s.
Ortega’s blows to La Prensa
The second aggression by the Daniel Ortega regime against the print media occurred one day after its general manager and secretary of the board of directors, Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro announced that the General Directorate of Customs (DGA) had retained the paper to block the circulation of the newspaper, for which the decision had been made to suspend the print edition and remain in the digital section.
In the morning hours of August 13, the Press facilities were raided by the Ortega Police. Holmann Chamorro was with the experts and with more than 10 regime propagandists, who “documented” the raid.
24 hours after the police search and confiscation of all the documents that were in the facilities, the Police transferred Juan Lorenzo Holmann to the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, known as “El Nuevo Chipote”, in Managua, supposedly with the excuse that signed some documents, however He left him in custody and kept him imprisoned for more than 17 months.
In 2022, the Ortega regime intensified the persecution against the collaborators of La Prensa and the entire Nicaraguan journalistic union. On July 6 of last year, the Ortega and Murillo dictatorship ordered the arrest of two drivers, the search of the homes of several journalists and photographers from the outlet, after the newspaper covered the expulsion of the nuns from the order. Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Faced with these actions, the staff of the media outlet were forced to go into exile and leave the country irregularly for fear of being the next to be jailed.
In August 2022, one year after the arbitrary confiscation of the facilities of La Prensa, the spokesperson for the Nicaraguan regime, Rosario Murillo, reported that in the building in the middle they will set up the “José Coronel Urtecho Cultural and Polytechnic Center».
Murillo accused La Prensa of being “a den of machining crimes against humanity” and therefore, his administration confiscated it and turned it into a “center for the depth of spirituality.”
According to the media outlet, his assets “at the time of the confiscation had a value close to the 10 million dollars».
At the beginning of January 2023, La Prensa denounced that the Ortega regime will put its stolen printing press to work in August 2021. The directors of the outlet reported that they had been unofficially informed that the Ortega-Murillo regime rehired specialized personnel in the business printing management. In addition, it acquired inputs for the operation of these equipments.
Faced with this new action by the dictator Daniel Ortega, the president of the YepMichael Greenspon, stated that he was “alarmed” because in addition to the fact that the Ortega administration illegally confiscated and dispossessed the newspaper’s assets, “now has the nerve to use media assets for propaganda purposes.”
To this day and despite the repressive measures by the Ortega government, La Prensa continues to work in its digital version, reporting the current situation and the crisis that Nicaragua is experiencing.
