Dictator Daniel Ortega continues to entrust Nicaragua’s diplomatic relations to foreigners and newcomers, and this time he handed over two more embassies, in Europe, to the controversial Italian nationalized Nicaraguan citizen Maurizio Carlos Alberto Gelli, currently resident ambassador in Spain, and also assigned another position as ambassador in Africa to former university leader Luis Andino, resident representative in Burkina Faso.
The vice dictator of Nicaragua and government spokesperson, Rosario Murillo, announced this April 18, during her daily appearance through her propaganda media, that Gelli received the award as extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador of Nicaragua to Slovakia in a concurrent capacity from Spain.
A day earlier, Murillo had announced that Gelli had also received the approval as Nicaragua’s ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where he will also be concurrently based in Madrid, Spain, where he is resident ambassador.
Likewise, this Thursday he reported that the former president of the National Union of Students of Nicaragua (UNEN), Luis Andino, received the approval of the government of the Republic of Benin, to be ambassador of Nicaragua in that West African country.
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During the announcement of the new position for the former UNEN, Murillo praised him for having accompanied her and her husband, the dictator Ortega, during what she called “that fiction of dialogue,” referring to the “national dialogue” for which his regime begged. to the Episcopal Conference to convene it in May 2018, at the height of the rebellion and when the dictatorship was on the verge of collapse, as a façade to buy time, reorganize and unleash repression.
Gelli, son of a mobster and now Ortega’s super ambassador
With these two new appointments, Gelli now holds nine positions in the diplomacy of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. Eight of these positions are ambassadors and one is Nicaragua’s representative to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). The Italian is based at the Nicaraguan embassy in Madrid, Spain, where he was appointed ambassador on November 26, 2022.
The Italian is a controversial character. He is the son of Licio Gelli, former leader of the Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), who was accused of relations with the mafia and Cosa Nostra, the bankruptcy of Banco Ambrosiano, being an anti-communist agent during the Cold War, conspiracy work during the decade of the eighties in Argentina and financial scandals in Uruguay.
Related news: Ortega appoints Maurizio Gelli, son of an Italian mobster, as Nicaragua’s ambassador to Spain
Licio Gelli died in 2015, at the age of 96. But, according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, his son, Maurizio Gelli, tried to launder the “illegal fortune of 1.2 billion dollars” accumulated by his father. Ortega’s super diplomat, he has been Nicaragua’s ambassador to Canada and Uruguay.
The questioned Italian, to whom Ortega gave Nicaraguan nationality, is part of an elite of “super ambassadors” that Ortega has structured, granting them multiple diplomatic positions. Also on this list is the citizen of Libyan origin Mohamed Mohamed Farrara Lashtar, nephew of the late dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, who holds 12 ambassadorships, and the Nicaraguan Alba Azucena Torres Mejía with eight embassies.
