The organization Amnesty International (AI) affirmed this Tuesday that no one is safe in Nicaragua from the “repressive model” imposed by the government of Daniel Ortega, which threatens human rights in an “unprecedented” way.
“The repression in Nicaragua leaves no one safe,” said Ana Piquer, director for the Americas of AI, quoted in a statement.
“From indigenous leaders, journalists, human rights defenders and anyone who is seen as a risk to government policies, the authorities continue to consolidate the climate of fear in which dissent is punished with prison, exile or disappearance,” he added.
Since the 2018 anti-government protests, which Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, consider a US-sponsored coup attempt, hundreds of people “have been unjustly imprisoned” and thousands have been forced into exile, AI said. .
At least 300 people died in the protests, according to the UN.
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The humanitarian organization urged the Ortega government to “immediately stop all repressive practices,” guarantee human rights and end the “criminalization of dissent.”
Recently, the NGO Collective Nicaragua Never Again reported more than 2,000 arbitrary arrests and at least 229 cases of torture of detainees since 2018.
Additionally, Amnesty classified the imprisoned Miskito indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera as a “prisoner of conscience” and demanded his release and that of dozens of other detainees.
The Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners in Nicaragua currently registers 45 detainees for political causes in the country.
Since February 2023, the Ortega government has stripped of Nicaraguan nationality from some 450 politicians, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists and religious people exiled or expelled from the country.
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Amnesty demanded “an end to the practice of arbitrary deprivation of nationality, as well as the full restitution of the rights of people stripped of it,” and asked the international community not to remain “indifferent” to the situation in Nicaragua. .
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s and has been in power again since 2007, issued a broad constitutional reform in November that stipulates that “traitors to the country” lose Nicaraguan nationality, a position with which they were the vast majority of those expelled from the country accused.
