The Nicaraguan Dora María Téllez analyzes the offer of Mexican nationality

Blanche Petrich

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday February 26, 2023, p. 8

Dora María Téllez, one of the most important figures in the Nicaraguan opposition among the 222 former political prisoners who were exiled four days ago, stripped of their nationality and property (including retirement pensions in the case of the elderly), contemplates the possibility of accepting the offer of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to settle in Mexico, announced four days ago.

It is one of my strongest options, I would love itconfirmed to the dayalthough in the short term he will have to remain in the United States, welcomed, like all the other released-exiles, to whom Washington granted humanitarian visas (parole) that give them protection for two years, but that do not allow them to leave the country in the meantime .

On February 22, in the morning, the President revealed that since December of last year he had already written a letter to the regime of Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo offering to bring Téllez to Mexico, who had spent more than a year in an isolation cell and in the dark. . His family had reported a deterioration in his health.

That day, the offer was extended to all Nicaraguans deprived of their nationality (there are 317 so far) so that they may avail themselves of the protection of the Mexican State in the form of asylum, citizenship or what they decide.

international solidarity

Other governments – Spain, Argentina, Chile and Colombia – had previously announced that they would also open their doors to those who decided to do so. The award-winning novelist Sergio Ramírez (Tongolele did not know how to dance is one of his most recent works), who left Nicaragua before being captured, accepted the offer of the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and announced that he would become a citizen of that country. The President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, also offered him the same offer, which Ramírez thanked. For her part, the popular writer Gioconda Belli, currently in Spain, announced that she would accept the Chilean nationality offered by President Gabriel Boric, one of the Latin American voices that has most strongly condemned the Managua government.

After arriving in Washington on the plane that took 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners into exile, most of them dissidents from very diverse forces and political identities, Dora María and her partner Ana Margarita Vijil, founders of the Sandinista Renewal Movement, who later became called Unamos, they moved to the state of Georgia, where their relatives live.

The leader, who was a fundamental part of the revolutionary process of the 1970s and 1980s –today buried by the Ortega-Murillo duo– indicated that while she makes the pertinent consultations with the United States immigration authorities and analyzes her different options, she will give priority attention to health matters.

I will consult with the Department of State regarding exit permits from the United States while on a humanitarian visa. But, very much in his nature, he also shared: I already put my papers in to have a work permit.