Lesther Alemán, the student leader who demanded the resignation of socialist president Daniel Ortega in 2018, has just been sentenced for conspiracy against Nicaragua. Like him, five other arrested opponents were found guilty of this crime and their relatives claim their innocence.
“My son has at no time destabilized the country,” Lesbia Alfaro, Lesther’s mother, told AFP. dead”.
Aleman, 24, was found guilty Thursday by a court, charged with the crime of “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” in a trial held behind closed doors in a Managua prison.
In 2018, Alemán asked Ortega to resign from the presidency during the dialogue that the Catholic Church had promoted between the government and the social organizations that participated in the demonstrations, which according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) left 355 dead due to the repression and more than 100,000 exiles.
“What Lesther was asking for was justice and for that” he was prosecuted in an act of “hate”, Alfaro maintains and stresses that his son is “innocent”.
Lesther, who went into exile in 2018 and returned to Nicaragua in 2019, is one of the 46 opponents detained in 2021, most of them months before the November elections in which former guerrilla Ortega was re-elected for his fourth consecutive term. With him go six sentenced of that group.
“It doesn’t matter if they give him 10 or 15 years (in prison), this will end,” said the woman, alluding to the sentence that the judge will hand down in the coming days.
On February 1, the trials against imprisoned opponents began. The Prosecutor’s Office requested 10 years in prison for the opposition activist Yader Parajón, convicted of the crime of conspiracy.
The “prosecutors, those clowns, were asking for a 10-year sentence” for Yader, his father Miguel Parajón denounced, after attending the sentence debate hearing that was also held in a prison auditorium without access to the press.
Yader, who was arrested last September when trying to leave the country, arrived at the hearing guarded by police with his hands handcuffed and his head bowed.
He is “very skinny, see how it hurts me to see how they treat me”, even “it makes me want to cry”, said the man, who said that his son, seeing him, tried to cheer him up.
“Be strong dad, I’m going out one day, don’t worry,” said Miguel, who was told by his son, whose sentence will be announced next Tuesday.
Among the victims of the 2018 repression is Jimmy Parajón, Yader’s brother, who “was killed with a shot to the chest,” his father said.
Dialogue
Miguel said that Yader was prosecuted for complaining about the death of his brother, since whose death his family has lived a “nightmare.”
“I ask for his freedom because my son is innocent, my boy is not a criminal, he has not killed anyone, he was studying at the university, but his dream was cut short,” he lamented. Yader’s mother died of cancer in 2017.
“A dialogue would be good” that would allow the release of all imprisoned opponents,” exhorted Miguel Parajón. President Ortega has already warned that things will not be like in 2018, when there was an amnesty for detained protesters.
Another of the imprisoned and recently convicted opponents is the journalist and former presidential candidate Miguel Mora.
His wife, journalist Verónica Chávez, who attended the trial, told AFP that Mora is “innocent” and that “he is resisting with strength and an unshakable faith in God.”
“He has not committed any crime and therefore I continue to await his release,” Chavez demanded.
Relatives of detained opponents have denounced the precarious prison conditions and health problems faced by inmates.
Among those sentenced is also the former guerrilla and leader of the Sandinista dissidence Dora María Téllez, Ortega’s former comrade-in-arms, from whom she distanced herself due to political differences in the 1990s.
The international community, mainly the United States, the European Union and the Organization of American States (OAS) have called for the release of the opponents in Nicaragua.
