Fernando Antonio Baltodano Velásquez, Sandinista mayor of Diriamba, in Carazo, was found dead on the afternoon of this Monday, August 22, with a bullet wound to the head and inside his truck, parked in a vacant lot on the road between Diriamba and the spa of La Boquita. The National Police has not yet issued a report on the event.
A photograph of the mayor’s body has circulated on social networks and on the WhatsApp messaging application, in which he appears sitting in front of the wheel of his vehicle and holding a pistol with both hands. The image has unleashed a wave of speculation among the residents of Diriamba, who believe that Baltodano was murdered.
According to the newspaper La Prensa, the Diriamba mayor’s office was intervened last week by the Nicaraguan Institute for Municipal Development (Inifom), due to an alleged “problem with some checks.”
Baltodano, 54, had been at the head of the commune since 2013 and was emerging as the candidate of the Sandinista Front in the next municipal elections on November 6 this year.
The Sandinista had already been mayor of Diriamba between 2005 and 2008. In addition, he was elected departmental deputy for the FSLN in Carazo, for the period of 2012-2017, for which the Parliament’s Board of Directors granted him permission to direct the building palace .
In 2014, the media reported that Baltodano tendered his resignation —the reasons are unknown—, but it was not accepted by the Sandinista Front, so he remained in office.
In 2018, Baltodano was pointed out by residents of Diriamba as being one of those responsible —along with Mayor Mariano Madrigal, of Jinotepe— of the “Cleaning Operation” in Carazo, where more than 20 citizens were killed at the hands of police and paramilitaries, in the context of the popular civic demonstrations that demanded the departure from power of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
He was also accused of coordinating an attack by Ortega mobs against Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes; the auxiliary bishop of Managua, Monsignor Silvio Báez; and the apostolic nuncio in Nicaragua, Monsignor Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, when they arrived at the Minor Basilica of San Sebastián, in Diriamba, to free a group of young people who were taking refuge in the temple and surrounded by paramilitaries.
