The storm against the professor and opposition member Guisella Elizabeth Ortega Cerón, 34, began when the Police found her on November 24 with her two-year-old baby. She was arbitrarily taken into detention and a repeated script ensued with other political prisoners: family separation, an accusation without imagination, a diligent prosecutor and a judge willing to accept judicial fabrications even on weekends.
The crimes charged to Ortega Cerón, who has been besieged by the dictatorship since 2018, were “provocation”, “proposition” and “conspiracy to undermine national integrity” and propagation of “false news”, according to the file of the case registered under number 025521-orm4-2022-PN.
According to a report published last October 24 by CONFIDENCIAL, the dictatorship had convicted 45 Nicaraguans for “conspiracy” and “false news” up to that date —with sentences ranging from seven to thirteen years in prison. Among the victims are the seven presidential candidates who were imprisoned in the escalation prior to the 2021 vote when Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo were re-elected without democratic guarantees.
If the documentation of the teacher’s case shows anything, however, it is the speed with which the authorities of the justice system coordinate when they sit the prisoners of conscience on the bench. “The truth is that the 235 political prisoners in Nicaragua are innocent. They have not committed crimes, ”commented an independent lawyer, who asked that his name be kept anonymous.
Prosecutor Sandro Efraín Peña Urbina acted against the teacher, who formulated the charges in a seven-page document at 8:23 on the morning of Saturday, November 26, two days after the arrest. He also accused the professor’s niece, Heidi Walkiria Ortega, and Francisco Hernaldo Vásquez Delgado.
Repressive judge is in charge of the “process”
That same Saturday, at 9:18 in the morning, Judge Rolando Salvador Sanarrusia Munguía, who has a record of persecuting other political prisoners, held the preliminary hearing. When the clock struck 9:35 am, that is, 17 minutes after the start, he had already sentenced the defendants to prison, after admitting the accusation in a session in the Sixth Criminal Court of Courts of Managua.
Sanarrusia is one of the 23 judicial operators of the dictatorship, penalized by the United States on July 15, who they accused of undermining democratic institutions and discretionally exercising the legal process to present false charges against Nicaraguan opponents.
The defendants were represented by a public defender. These are lawyers that the State makes available to those defendants who have no defense. For months, it has also been questioned, because they end up acting in favor of the interests of the prosecutors and judges of the regime.
In the first hearing, however, the defense attorney explained that there was not enough clarity in the facts, nor an “individualization” that would allow knowing how the teacher, her niece, and Mr. Vásquez participated in the prosecutor’s plot.
“In the penultimate paragraph, it refers to the fact that the defendants organized plans against the Government, but they do not detail the plans, how they were going to be carried out, all this has to be detailed in case it is admitted,” explained the public defender. However, after hearing the parties, the judge continued with the process and sentenced the defendants to jail, setting the initial hearing for Tuesday, December 6 at 9:00 am.
However, according to what was reported in the media, Professor Ortega, known as “Taylor”, was prosecuted allegedly because the Police linked her to prints of stickers with the colors of the Nicaraguan flag that are seen as subversive by the regime since 2018, when the State brutally repressed opponents.
His niece is the owner of “Multistervicios Ortega” and Hernández—the third defendant—of Copynic, the latter the company that rented printers and photocopiers to the former so that he could carry out his work, as explained by the independent portal Article 66.
CENIDH denounces “machoteros” processes
For the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH), this type of express trials, fabricated by the State, is usually called “machoteros” in reference to the word machote, which in legal language refers to the documents that the State’s lawyers already They have facts and they only change the names of the defendants and the dates of the facts to try to give credibility to the fabrication without success.
“If you look closely, all the accusations presented by the Prosecutor’s Office. Regardless of the circumstances and the people, they are always the same crimes: conspiracy or damage to the national integrity. Also the cybercrimes, they kind of have a crime, perhaps what changes are the individual inventions to justify, but in reality they have no imagination. They give the impression that all of Nicaragua was in collusion carrying out the same action. They are repressing and working with a pre-established draft accusation to criminalize people,” explained Vilma Núñez, president of CENIDH.
Núñez added that the only one of the political prisoners who has been accused of a different crime was the sociologist Oscar René Vargas, who, in addition to accusing him of spreading false news and conspiracy, was charged with another charge: rebellion. In none of the cases, according to the jurist, do they have grounds for that and what they are after is “increasing his sentence and criminalizing him more than the rest.”
“If the rest, they have been given from 07 to 13 years. Beware Oscar René (Vargas) they will want to give him 30 years. Or I don’t know how many years, that’s the intention”, affirmed the human rights defender, who considers that all these events demonstrate the instrumentalization of the Judiciary to repress.
? Judicial farces continue. With the macho procedure, the ORMU regime accused Dr. Óscar René Vargas, of conspiracy to undermine national integrity, provocation to commit rebellion and propagation of false news pic.twitter.com/RYXWuSFx3J
— Cenidh (@cenidh) December 1, 2022
Vargas was arrested when he was at his sister’s house in Bolonia, whom he came to visit because she is in poor health. Despite the crimes attributed, the sociologist is actually punished for his criticism of the Ortega regime and for the criminalization of his work as a thinker, disclosed on his blog and in independent media.
The sociologist worked as an adviser to the National Directorate of the FSLN in the eighties, he is an economist and historian and had denounced until his capture the serious crisis that the country is going through from the economic, social and political point of view and the responsibility of Ortega in the same and in the forced migration of thousands of Nicaraguans.
