This Wednesday, December 28, political prisoners Walter Antonio Gomez Y Marcos Antonio Freight, both former administrative workers of the closed Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCH), have been held captive for 19 months in the Evaristo Vásquez Police Complex, known as “El Nuevo Chipote”.
On May 28, 2021, they were arrested and taken hostage by the conscience of the dictatorship. His crime was having worked for several years with the then presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro, the most popular candidate and the one who could wrest the Presidency from the dictator at the polls.
The Public Ministry, controlled by Daniel Ortega, accused them of the alleged crime of laundering money, goods and assets; and misappropriation and retention; abusive management and ideological falsehood. Gomez and Fletes were the first detainees in the new onslaught of the Ortega regime against the opposition.
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Gómez and Fletes were part of the defendants in the case against Chamorro, who has remained at home in jail since she was arrested in June 2021.
During the trial, which defense lawyers say was plagued by irregularities and annulments, a series of witnesses such as police officers and journalists paraded. The accusation was based on the support that the organization gave for several years to the independent media.
In the accusatory libel, Marcos Fletes and Walter Gómez, accountant and administrator respectively, are accused of requesting third parties to exchange checks from the Foundation where they worked until its voluntary closure so as not to register as a “foreign agent.”
Judge Luden Martín Quiroz, of the Ninth Criminal Trial District Court of Managua, was in charge of sentencing Gómez and Fletes to 13 years in prison for each.
On August 30, after 15 months in detention, Gómez and Fletes were exhibited for the first time to the dictatorship’s propaganda media. On that occasion they looked unrecognizable, emaciated and thin due to the inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment to which they are subjected, according to their relatives have denounced throughout their captivity.
According to him Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, in Nicaragua there are more than 230 opponents imprisoned for political reasons and tried with laws approved months before the presidential elections and branded as repressive by opponents and human rights organizations. All have been victims of torture, according to complaints from their relatives.
