MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Repression in Nicaragua on the rise

Anyone criticizing the government of Ortega can be arrested for treason

The Nicaraguan regime of President Daniel Ortega and his Vice President wife Rosario Murillo ordered new arrests of journalists and activists for “treason,” it was reported this week. The country's judiciary also banned a group of 25 lawyers and notary publics from practicing because they were stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship.

Since 2018 all those publishing views contrary to Ortega's liking have been harassed or detained. On May 3, some 57 citizens were arrested after being followed to their homes and threatened.

“Five policemen came to my house looking for me to tell me not to be publishing things on my networks, that the next time I do it, they will come for me and put me under the order of the Public Prosecutor's Office,” a Nicaraguan journalist told EFE.

One of the victims explained that the policemen told her that she was part of a list made by militants of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) who track the web profiles of Ortega's “haters” in each of Nicaragua's 153 municipalities.

“They came to my house and even took pictures of me”, assured an agronomist engineer who suffered police harassment after asking the State through social networks to guarantee drinking water in his city during the summer, when temperatures reach 49 degrees Celsius.

Five human rights organizations, including Raza e Igualdad, condemned the wave of violence by security forces,

Meanwhile, 25 opposition lawyers were stripped of their law degrees, including writer Sergio Ramírez Mercado, human rights defender Vilma Núñez and even the best man at the wedding of the presidential couple, the former magistrate Rafael Solís. They had been convicted in absentia of political crimes, such as “treason”, and the Ortega-Murillo family had also stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality, their assets were confiscated and exiled them. Fifteen of the 25 people included in the measure are part of the group of 222 political prisoners who were exiled to the United States last February.

The judiciary issued this May 11 two resolutions invoking the National Council of Administration and Judicial Career and its “competence to organize and direct the procedure of incorporation and granting of the titles of lawyers and notaries public, as well as to authorize and suspend the practice of the profession” for being traitors to the homeland.

Two days earlier, the Sandinista Judiciary imposed the same measure on Yonarqui Martinez, a defender of political prisoners.

Attorney Héctor Mairena, one of those stripped of his law degree, told EL PAÍS that the decision shows viciousness. “It evidences the will of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to annihilate us civilly. We were already annihilated economically when they took away the pensions of several of us who were retirees... and now they want to annihilate us professionally,” he said.

Mairena, a member of the UNAMOS movement (formerly Movimiento Renovador Sandinista), indicated that the “menu of the dictatorship is varied but also shows that it is running out”. According to him, within the “menu of repression is imprisonment, exile and now stripping of the profession.”

The judiciary maintains that “they were imposed the accessory penalties of absolute and special disqualification to hold public office, to exercise public functions in the name and service of the State of Nicaragua, as well as, to exercise popularly elected positions and the loss of their citizenship rights in perpetuity, as well as the loss of Nicaraguan nationality, consequently, in accordance with the Nicaraguan legal system and regulations governing the profession of attorney and notary public, these persons cannot hold the title, nor exercise the profession of attorney and notary public, since they lost the right to exercise such profession, by virtue of having lost Nicaraguan nationality.”