As “International Human Rights Day” is commemorated this December 10, the alliance defending civil rights worldwide Civicus elected the Nicaraguan peasant leader, twice imprisoned by the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, Medardo Mairena to pay tribute to him for being “a story of resilience and defense of human rights.”
«The story of Medardo Mairena, a Nicaraguan defender released from prison and now exiled in the United States, is a story of resilience and defense of human rights. HH. For this reason, we honor him today on International Human Rights Day,” he says. Civicus through their social media accounts.
Mairena, originally from the mountains of Central Zelaya, born exactly in Nueva Guinea in 1978, currently a 46-year-old farmer, was dedicated to agriculture and small livestock. He left his fields to become one of the main organizers of the “anti-canal peasants”, an organization born in 2013, which was originally called the National Council in Defense of Land, Lake and Sovereignty and later transformed into the Peasant Movement.
Together with the historic peasant leader Francisca “Chica” Ramírez and other peasants, Mairena became one of the most visible faces of the rural producers who challenged the Ortega dictatorship and managed to denounce to the world the dispossession of their lands and the unviability of the canal route that in the end remained in models and a “Chinese tale.”
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The belligerence of the peasants put their leaders in the “shooting angle” of the dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to the point that they began a real hunt against them.
In 2018, in the midst of popular effervescence after the protests of that year, Chica Ramírez went into exile with her family due to her imminent capture by the repressive forces of the Sandinista regime.
That same year, Mairena was incriminated in a multiple crime involving four police officers and a civilian employee of the State in the municipality of San Miguelito, in the department of Río San Juan.
The peasant leader was captured when he was trying to travel abroad to fulfill previously agreed commitments to continue denouncing human rights violations in Nicaragua.
He was brutally tortured, as he himself has told it, they threatened to disappear his family and murder his little daughter and take her body to his cell. In a trial lacking the minimum procedural guarantees, held in the Ninth Criminal Trial District Court, led by Ortega judge Edgard Altamirano, he was sentenced to 216 years in prison.
However, in an amnesty law that the Ortega administration issued more to amnesty its police and paramilitaries than for the blue and white Protestants, Mairena was released from prison but it was not for long.
At the beginning of 2021, he announced his intention to challenge Ortega for power in the general elections. By declaring his willingness to be one of the opposition candidates for the Presidency, this earned him a second conviction. He was kidnapped in Managua, by a large force of special police troops, and taken to the cells of the Judicial Assistance Directorate known as El Chipote, where all the presidential candidates and the most notable leaders of the organization were also imprisoned. opposition, including several women.
Related news: UN report on Nicaragua: Persecution, torture and disappearance of political prisoners persist
The peasant leader was tried again and this time sentenced to 13 years in prison for allegedly treason. After keeping him in harsh prison conditions for more than a year and a half, he was released on February 9, 2023, denationalized and exiled to the United States along with 221 other political prisoners.
Since his exile, where he works in construction to survive, Mairena has not stopped advocating, before international bodies, for the release of all political prisoners remaining in the prisons of the Nicaraguan dictatorship and for political prisoners around the world. .
Furthermore, he continues to denounce human rights violations in his country, to which, according to the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, he no longer belongs, but to which Mairena continues to defend and fight for his freedom, and in that sense, Civicus He takes up a phrase from the peasant leader: “no one said it would be easy, but with God’s help we will achieve it.”
This December 10, Mairena is honored by Civicus as an example of resilience and asks international public opinion to continue demanding the release of all political prisoners in the world.
