Despite the fact that the Nicaraguan regime has closed, confiscated independent media outlets, and forced dozens of journalists into exile, the recent survey by M&R Consultores, paid for by the ruling party, stated that 81.9 percent of Nicaraguans assure that there is freedom of media expression.
The survey, presented on the morning of Wednesday, April 12, was only praised and applauded by regime “analysts” and government propaganda journalists.
Related news: An Ortega pollster says that 70% of Nicaraguans love to live with their boots on their necks
However, the data contradicts the complaint by the Southern Voices Network that ensures that the dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo constantly violate the universal right to freedom of expression and of the press in Nicaragua.
Ortega survey contains “false data”
For journalist Lucía Pineda Ubau, Ortega’s former political prisoner and director of 100% Noticias, the survey that “Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega sent to do contains false and unreal data.” She also asserts that the truth and reality “explodes in the face of the dictatorship itself.”
«They themselves – the Nicaraguan dictatorship – repress so that people do not express themselves freely. They persecute opponents, victims, parishioners of the Catholic Church, so it is totally false that people feel that there is freedom of expression,” added Pineda, whose nationality was stripped by the dictatorship along with a dozen journalists on a list of 94 opponents.
He also recalled that due to the censorship and repression suffered by independent journalism “journalists cannot express themselves and report in the country and the Ortega-Murillo family media monopolize the television and radio spectrum, while private media censor themselves because they close them, they confiscate them, they steal and they go to jail».
Related news: Voces del Sur denounces the breach of freedom of expression and press in Nicaragua
«Confidencial, 100% Noticias and the newspaper La Prensa were confiscated and 50 programs and other closed media were added. We have suffered imprisonment and exile, so this is further proof that the data from that survey is false, “he stressed.
For his part, journalist Cristopher Mendoza, a member of the Executive Commission of Independent Journalists and Communicators (PCIN), stated that it is “totally ridiculous if one takes into account that the reports on press freedom show that more than 170 journalists have exiled”.
“What these results should really show is that in Nicaragua there is a dictatorship, persecution, and violation of human rights, so that it is consistent with what the international community and different human rights experts have corroborated,” he said.
He also expressed that what the dictator Daniel Ortega is trying to do is “see the idiotic face of the Nicaraguan people and the international community who are sure that the results of that survey are not real, because perhaps they surveyed totally uninformed people, surely workers of the State”.
Attacks against journalists
So far in 2023, the Ortega dictatorship stripped 22 journalists of their Nicaraguan nationality, the vast majority of whom, from exile, continue to report on human rights violations committed by the ruling party.
Among the journalists who have become stateless are Carlos Fernando Chamorro, winner of the 38th Ortega y Gasset Journalism Awards and director of Confidencial and Esta Semana; Wilfredo Miranda, collaborator in Nicaragua for the Spanish newspaper El País and winner of the 2018 King of Spain Ibero-American Journalism Award.
Related news: Ortega expels nuns and priests; prevents freedom of worship, but affirms that there is religious freedom
Also the directors of digital media Lucía Pineda (100% News), Luis Galeano (Café con Voz), Jennifer Ortiz (Nicaragua Investiga), Patricia Orozco (Onda Local), Manuel Díaz (Bacanal Nica), Álvaro Navarro (Article 66), David Quintana (Ecological Bulletin), Aníbal Toruño (Radio Darío), Santiago Aburto (BTN News) and Jimmy Guevara (Criteria).
In 2022, the Ortega-Murillo regime closed more than 50 media outlets and two international media outlets were removed from the cable television grid, including CNN en Español. Likewise, eight news or opinion programs stopped broadcasting, most of them did not speak out to avoid reprisals from the regime.
Voces del Sur points out, in its latest report in the first quarter of 2023, that there have been 38 violations of press freedom in the last three months in Nicaragua.
Of the attackers against journalists, 27 are state-owned (National Assembly), four non-state (banks) and seven parastatals (sympathizers of the Ortega regime).
Related news: The Ortega dictatorship will declare April 19 “National Day of Peace”
One of the cases of attacks on journalists, reported by Voces del Sur, was the one that occurred on January 3, 2023, in which sympathizers of the Sandinista Front party harassed and intimidated the photographer of an international news agency.
Five years after the repression of 2018, where the repression of freedom of the press and expression continues, the Ortega regime reported this Thursday that it will declare April 19 “National Day of Peace”, despite the fact that it is the least that Nicaraguans live.
