Nicaragua will honor its most recent national hero, the late Puerto Rican baseball player Roberto Clemente (1934-1972), on the 30th as part of the 50th anniversary of his death, the vice president of the Central American country, Rosario Murillo, reported this Wednesday.
“On the 30th we are going to pay tribute to the national hero Roberto Clemente at the Soberanía National Baseball Stadium,” said Murillo, who is the wife of President Daniel Ortega, through official Nicaraguan media.
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It will be the first tribute dedicated to Clemente in Nicaragua after the National Assembly (Parliament), unanimously, declared him a national hero on the 6th “for his humanism and solidarity.”
The Puerto Rican is remembered in Nicaragua because he died in a plane crash on December 31, 1972, trying to bring help from his country to the victims of the 6.2 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale that devastated Managua and claimed more than 10,000 lives. the night of December 23 of that year.
The plane in which the first Latin American to connect 3,000 hits in Major League Baseball (MLB) and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, was traveling, plunged into the Caribbean Sea and his body was never found.
Months before the tragedy, Clemente participated in the 1972 World Baseball Championship in Nicaragua as manager of the Puerto Rican baseball team.
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In 2011, the Puerto Rican was declared a “Delected Son In Memoriam” in the city of Masaya, in the Pacific of Nicaragua, and in 2013 the Mayor’s Office of Managua inaugurated a children’s stadium called Roberto Clemente.
Clemente was the 1966 Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player in the United States, a 12-time Gold Glove winner and a 12-time star player.
