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Managua – Nicaragua declared this Wednesday “traitors to the homeland” 94 exiled opponents, including the writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli, stripping them of their nationality and disqualifying them for life from holding public office.
In addition to Belli and Ramírez, who was vice president of the Sandinista government in the 1980s headed by current president Daniel Ortega, among those sanctioned are the Catholic bishop Silvio Báez, former guerrilla commanders Luis Carrión and Mónica Baltodano, and human rights activist Wilma Nunez.
The president of the Managua Court of Appeals, Ernesto Rodríguez Mejía, read before official media the resolution that stripped the 94 people considered “fugitives from justice” of their Nicaraguan nationality.
“The accused carried out and continue to carry out criminal acts to the detriment of peace, sovereignty, independence and self-determination of the Nicaraguan people, inciting the destabilization of the country, promoting economic, commercial and financial blockades, all to the detriment of peace. and the well-being of the population,” said the magistrate.
“Because of these facts, the defendants cannot be considered Nicaraguan citizens,” he added.
“Great honor”
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Central America condemned “in the most energetic way this new wave of human rights violations.”
“We call on the State to immediately cease the persecution and reprisals against human rights defenders and dissident voices, and restore all their rights and freedoms,” the Office tweeted.
For Ortega’s former ambassador to the OAS, Arturo McFields, it is “a great honor to be on this list.”
Sergio Ramírez, exiled in Spain, separated in 1995 from the Sandinista Front led by Ortega to form a dissident movement with other Sandinista intellectuals and personalities.
While Gioconda Belli is a poet and author of several novels, among them “The inhabited woman”, “Sofía of omens” and “The country under my skin: Memory of love and war”. She was also an opponent of the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and collaborated with the Sandinista government in the 1980s.
On the sanctioned list are politicians from different opposition parties and formations, former government officials, former Sandinista guerrillas, activists from non-governmental organizations and journalists.
“Keep the defendants as traitors to the homeland, for which reason the accessory penalties of absolute and special disqualification from holding public office, holding public office on behalf of or at the service of the State of Nicaragua are imposed” and positions of public election to perpetuity, indicated the judge.
“Measure of Hate and Vengeance”
The measure was taken six days after the Ortega government released and expelled to the United States 222 imprisoned opponents, whom it also stripped of their nationality and political rights, at a time when it faces criticism from the international community due to the growing authoritarianism of his government.
The journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, included among those sanctioned, published on social networks that “those punished for measures of hatred and revenge are all citizens who demand a change with justice and freedom, including civil and military public servants.”
Exiled in Costa Rica, Chamorro is the son of former President Violeta Barrios (1990-1997), but unlike his mother and brothers, he collaborated with the Ortega regime in the 1980s and directed the Sandinista newspaper, Barricada.
Like other Sandinistas, he broke with Ortega in the middle of the following decade, when the current president led the opposition to the government of Violeta Barrios, who had defeated him in the 1990 elections.
confiscation of assets
The magistrate pointed out that “for being traitors to the country, the 94 defendants were imposed the accessory penalties of absolute and special disqualification from holding public office, holding public office on behalf of or at the service of the State of Nicaragua, as well as holding positions of popular election and the loss of their citizenship rights in perpetuity, respectively”.
“The loss of Nicaraguan nationality was ordered, the immobilization and confiscation of their real estate and companies in favor of the State of Nicaragua; but also, they were declared fugitives from justice,” he explained.
The Nicaraguan authorities detained hundreds of opponents in the context of the repression that followed a political and social crisis with street protests that broke out in 2018 against Ortega, in power since 2007 and successively re-elected in disputed elections.
On Friday, the Catholic bishop Rolando Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years in prison, a day after he refused to go to the United States with the 222 opponents released and expelled from the country.
