The Blue and White National Unity (Unab) demands justice, four years after the “repression and murders” of dozens of civilians in the city of Estelí after the first group of paramilitaries ordered by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo entered .
It was on June 7, 2018 when “the first organized paramilitary group of the FSLN appeared in the city of Estelí, carrying weapons of war, they were sent and ordered to repress and kill dozens of innocent civilians who were protesting against the repression,” Unab denounced through its social networks.
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The paramilitary network at the service of Daniel Ortega has been operating in Nicaragua since 2018, when the population rose up in protest against the government and demanded the resignation of Ortega and Murillo. The Sandinista leader’s response was a brutal police and paramilitary repression of the demonstrations, which left at least 355 people murdered, according to data from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Daniel Ortega has given different explanations about these groups. In July 2018, CNN journalist Andrés Oppenheimer showed him a photograph of the paramilitaries with Sandinista Front flags. Ortega dismissed them with a phrase: “It could be a montage.” He later said that they were “citizens defending themselves” and days later, in an interview with Euronews, he alleged that they were “volunteer police.”
Article 25 of Law 872, on Organization, Functions, Career and Special Social Security Regime of the National Police indicates that the tasks that correspond to volunteer police officers are to “assist the Police in surveillance, patrolling, regulation of traffic and in cases of natural disasters. In addition, it establishes that the volunteer police must be identified.
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However, Ortega’s paramilitary network does not appear to be a group of “volunteers.” They are not identified as police officers and operate in civilian clothes. The formation of the paramilitaries took just over a month and it was on June 6, 2018, the first time they were seen operating in coordination with the National Police.
The paramilitary groups were made up of public employees, former soldiers, members of the Sandinista Youth and gang members, according to the report of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, created by the IACHR to investigate the acts of violence that occurred in Nicaragua between April 18 and 31. May 2018.
