Dora María Téllez, a political analyst and former Sandinista guerrilla, said that the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is prescribing a new dose of unemployment, repression and purges for which it will apply new methods. The former political prisoner is referring to the sweep announced by the State of Nicaragua on the institutions under its control.
“They are going to cut workers in all institutions and they have already started. Perhaps you remember that the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office was moved to the Attorney General’s Office, there has already been a sweep of several dozen workers, there is talk of up to 40 employees, which must be almost all of them, since it was a relatively small institution, so the workers are facing a new wave of unemployment,” says Téllez.
The political analyst says that this sweep has reached the municipalities throughout the country. This wave of dismissals had been done very quietly, but it has only now been officially announced. For Téllez, all employees will be subjected to an evaluation and then the vast majority will be dismissed, and it is very likely that many will not receive benefits. That is the promise of the dictatorship, more unemployment, she reiterates.
“Free zones have been closing, leaving thousands of workers unemployed, but the consequences are the result of the Ortega-Murillo policy, which does not offer any guarantees to investors. They close the doors of their companies because they cannot continue to sustain themselves and this causes a lot of unemployment,” Téllez stressed.
The opposition leader also referred to the purge that the dictatorship carried out within its own structures, with the dismissals and even imprisonment of at least 40 high-ranking officials who served the Ortega regime in recent days, among them, the son of the founder of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca Terán, his wife, sister, nephews, and children.
Ortega’s plan: liquidate the Church
In her video posted on YouTube, the former commander also highlights the new wave of repression that the Ortega government has unleashed against the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.
«Yesterday and the day before, they attacked priests and religious, mainly from the Diocese of Matagalpa. There is only one from the Diocese of Juigalpa. The sweep in the Diocese of Matagalpa began with Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, then vicars one, two and three; then priests from different parishes, religious, minor friars, Capuchins, were swept away by the Ortega-Murillos, some imprisoned and others exiled,» says Téllez.
The member of the Democratic Renewal Union (Unamos) refers to the arbitrary detention of 11 priests and a deacon. The cruelty is focused on pastors who are under the direction of Bishop Alvarez, an open critic of the Sandinista dictatorship, for which he was kidnapped, denationalized and exiled.
“The dictatorship is proposing that the Catholic Church in Matagalpa be left without priests, parishes completely without priests and the few that there are are unable to cover all the parishes. They closed radio stations and programs in the Diocese of Matagalpa, they wanted to close its social networks, they imprisoned those in charge of communication for the Diocese (…) In other words, the regime’s objective is to liquidate the Catholic Church in Matagalpa,” Téllez analyzed.
So far, there is no official information on the whereabouts of the group of priests, nor the reason for their arrest; however, they could be in the National Interdiocesan Seminary of Our Lady of Fatima, a place that, according to Téllez, the dictatorship has turned into a “second chipote.”
