The digital communication medium Nicaragua Investiga denounced that its website was taken offline due to a series of complaints made by the Production Bank (Banpro) for the use of a photograph and the name of its general manager, Luis Rivas Anduray, currently political prisoner of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
The accusations arise from October 2021 when the outlet published a profile of the political prisoner on its website where it used a photograph of Rivas Anduray with the bank’s logo in the background, the image was taken from the archive of El Nuevo Diario, a newspaper of the that the prisoner of conscience was a director.
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“We had been filing a number of complaints on our website which put their stay online at risk. There have been a series of systematic attacks since October of last year (2021). They had not prospered because we had tried to resolve the situation and I must admit that we had refused to make this complaint so that all Nicaraguans would know about it out of fear,” said Jennifer Ortiz, director of the multimedia platform.
«This business organization assures our domain provider that we breach several copyright regulations because on October 21, 2021 we published a biographical profile of Luis Rivas. During the coverage, the journalist who carried out this informative profile, as should be the rule in a journalistic work of this type, consulted several sources and several of these sources referred to this role that Luis Rivas had, during his tenure as Banpro director when El Nuevo Diario acquired this communication medium and unfortunately that meant that the medium lost its critical force,” added Ortiz.
The profile collected testimonies from journalists who worked at that time in El Nuevo Diario and explained that Anduray was very harsh with journalists and that he tried not to confront the government in his informative notes.
«Banpro considered that this information specifically undermined its image. We use some photographs that the bank had provided in the past to various media to refer to business notes, which are convenient for them to advertise themselves and these photographs we use to illustrate the journalistic report », he continued.
The provider of the website recommended to Nicaragua Investiga that they erase the brand and change the photograph, and indicates that they did so in the first instance. Then the Bank no longer claimed the use of the logo; but rather claimed that the use of the name of its general manager to “stain his image and to attack everything that the brand represents and we could not agree to erase the name of Luis Rivas because it is journalistic information.”
“We have taken the line note to avoid these inconveniences and try to resolve this situation. We changed the photo and re-shared the information… but he continues his unmeasured attack on the page. They were even pending if the note was published again », he asserted.
“It is an unfortunate situation because the independent media not only have to fight against the censorship of the Daniel Ortega regime; but also against the big corporations that feel affected when one does not publish content that favors them, “he said.
The director of the media said that it is a “worrying and unfortunate situation that the media is facing the powers that be in the country. Daniel Ortega is our immediate enemy but he is not the only enemy we have; once Daniel Ortega leaves, the situation will not change », she lamented.
