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In the midst of what the opposition denounces as political persecution of those opposed to the ideology of the ruling Daniel Ortega, several NGOs have had to seek refuge in Costa Rica, after being suspended in Nicaragua.
18 Missionaries of Charity sisters, the order of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, were expelled on July 6 from Nicaragua. The Government ordered the cancellation of the association under which they developed their social work for more than 30 years in three locations in the country.
They cared for the elderly, ran a nursery, a soup kitchen for the homeless, a home for vulnerable girls, and gave food packages to more than 300 families. Today the nuns remain in Costa Rica, in the city of Coronado, waiting to be relocated to other Central American countries.
Sister Paola regrets not having been able to continue her work in Nicaragua and does not understand her forced departure. “With sorrow, but knowing that, from faith, seeing that it is God’s will, we don’t understand why, but God’s will is always there,” she told France 24.
NGOs and universities closed in Nicaragua
In total, the Nicaraguan Government has canceled more than 1,000 NGOs of all kinds: academic, human rights, professional associations, humanitarian foundations that provided basic health and food services, in the poorest country in the region after Haiti, according to the World Bank.
The Paulo Freire University (UPF) was eliminated along with six other private universities in February of this year. The center, which served almost 2,000 students, was closed and its assets confiscated by the state.
Adrián Meza, rector of UPF, considers that this is a reprisal from the authorities for speaking out in favor of the university students who protested against the government in 2018 and who suffered state repression.
Meza had installed a branch in San José since 2020 to serve Nicaraguan refugee students who fled repression and political persecution, a task that he now continues in person, after his exile.
But the elimination of non-profit organizations began much earlier, at the end of 2018, when human rights organizations and research centers such as the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policies (IEEPP) and the Center for Communication Research (Centro de Investigación de la Comunicación) were annulled. Five), for whom the researcher and sociologist Elvira Cuadra worked.
Cuadra has founded a new center to continue, from Costa Rica, with a task that is almost non-existent in Nicaragua, a country immersed in a socio-political and human rights crisis after citizen protests demanding the removal of President Daniel Ortega from power. .
The president is accused of repressing them and of having proclaimed himself the winner last year in a vote carried out under a system controlled by his FSLN party, with little citizen participation and considered illegitimate by the international community, having imprisoned all his political opponents.
“Right now Ortega is carrying out what I call the institutionalization of a police state. As long as civil society exists, that constitutes a factor that contravenes his project of a police state and continuity in power,” says Cuadra, now director of the Center of Transdisciplinary Studies of Central America (CETCAM).
The Nicaraguan Assembly controlled by the ruling party justifies that the eliminated organizations have failed to comply with the laws. The United Nations, through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has rejected the actions of the Government of President Daniel Ortega and has said that without civic space there is no democracy.
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