Pediatrician Jorge Alemán Zapata becomes the most recent victim to whom the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo prohibits entry to Nicaragua when he returned with his family from a trip to the United States.
The doctor with a specialty in pediatric pulmonology was fired in 2018 after treating injured protesters following anti-government protests.
According to witnesses, on Wednesday afternoon, Alemán Zapata was preparing with his children to return to Nicaragua on a flight from Miami, USA. Upon arriving at the Managua International Airport, the airline asked its passengers to wait in their seats, where An Immigration officer approached Alemán and his children to give them 4 airline tickets to El Salvador.
Related news: Nicaragua and its long history of amnesties and exiles
However, at the last minute the doctor’s children were authorized to enter Nicaragua while the entry ban was maintained with Alemán Zapata. The doctor requested that the return destination be the United States.
According to some passengers, the moment of farewell between Alemán and his children was emotional and painful in the face of the forced separation.
The Leonese doctor joins the more than two hundred people who have been blocked from returning to Nicaragua between 2020 and 2024. Alemán published on his official social networks that due to the impediment to entering the country, he will treat his patients virtually.
The ban on entry of nationals into the country has been used by the Government as another tool to perpetuate a spiral of silence, used in this case against opposition people or perceived as such and their families.
Doctors threatened and fired
The medical union regulated by the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health has suffered part of the repression of the Nicaraguan dictatorship. After the demonstrations against the Sandinista regime in 2018, the State prohibited public hospitals and doctors from providing care to young people injured by the attacks by the Ortega Police.
As part of the authoritarian control of the regime, doctors and health personnel were also prohibited from working in two positions, in addition to requiring their resignation to avoid paying benefits. The poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nicaragua further deepened the pressure of the Ortega regime against health personnel.
Jorge Alemán Zapata, who was fired from the Escuela Oscar Danilo Rosales Argüello (HEODRA) hospital, is the son of a respected doctor in León who sympathizes with the Ortega regime.
