The newspaper La Prensa de Nicaragua, the oldest in the Central American country, denounced this Thursday that the government of President Daniel Ortega has forced its staff into exile in July, without specifying the number of workers who made the decision to “flee” irregular.
“The persecution that Daniel Ortega’s regime intensified against the staff of the newspaper La Prensa this month and forced the media’s staff to flee the country. Journalists, editors, photographers, and other personnel have been forced to leave Nicaragua irregularly in the last two weeks to protect their safety and freedom,” said La Prensa, whose facilities have been in the hands of the National Police since last August.
La Prensa published the complaint 15 days after the arrest of two of its workers, as well as the search of the homes of several of its journalists, photographers, “and other staff”, after the newspaper covered the expulsion of the nuns. of the Missionaries of Charity order, founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
“This situation forced La Prensa to shelter its staff and later take them out of the country,” said the outlet, which currently only exists in its digital version.
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“Despite the fact that the staff is not in their homes, police and civilians continue to come to their homes to harass their families,” he said.
The Nicaraguan media pointed out that its staff left “irregularly due to fear of being detained at the country’s borders, several had to flee without taking their passports with them or carrying only expired documents, since for months the regime has refused to renew the travel documents of journalists from independent media, as part of the systematic repression and attacks on press freedom.”
La Prensa recalled that its directors Cristiana Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, as well as other independent journalists, are currently in prison.
It also reported that it is “in the process of reorganizing its newsroom abroad to continue informing Nicaraguans, in the same way that it has done for more than 95 years.”
La Prensa’s complaint comes within the framework of the sociopolitical crisis that, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), has left at least 355 dead in Nicaragua, of which Ortega has admitted 200, more than 200,000 exiles, and that It maintains more than 190 convicts whom humanitarian organizations consider “political prisoners”.
According to the Nicaraguan Independent Journalists and Communicators movement (PCIN), some 120 journalists have opted for exile since the beginning of the crisis, in 2018.
