The dictatorship of Daniel Ortega showed emaciated faces of political prisoners to the cameras in a spectacle condemned by the international community. This analysis talks about how this act is just the latest episode in a series of threatening persecutions against the opposition and dissidents in Nicaragua, even targeting the Catholic Church
By Wilfredo Miranda Aburto in DIVERGENTES
San José, Costa Rica, Sept 15, 2022
The priest Uriel Vallejos early in the morning at the end of August went deep into footrails in the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. He carried two changes of clothes, a pair of boots and terror. “Put yourself in the hands of God,” said the coyote who guided him through blind spots on the border into exile. “If you are traveling, they can arrest you and throw you in jail.”
The priest fled amidst the darkness because the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo had been following him for nearly a month. On August 1 the police, the principal repressive arm of the government, closed down the radio that Vallejos directed in the city of Sébaco, and later he was besieged in the rectory of his parish, Divina Misericordia, where he spent four days unable to leave, eating bread, water and yoghurt. Then, Vice President Murillo ordered he be transferred to Managua to confine him in the Our Lady of Fatima National Seminary. There they assigned police custody to him and prohibited him from returning to Sébaco in the province of Matagalpa, whose diocese is led by Bishop Rolando Álvarez, also abducted by police in those very days. Today Mons. Álvarez is under house arrest and Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, according to Catholic sources, has asked his priests to not talk about him in their homilies.
Vallejos circumvented the police cordon and got to Costa Rica. He did not take refuge in that country, as have some 120,000 Nicaraguans, but used it as a springboard to get to Rome. In front of the statue of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi he announced his exile and denounced the persecution that he suffered in those days in the Catholic Church of Nicaragua. This priest is one of the five religious who have been exiled in recent weeks. This past Tuesday is when the pastor Juan de Dios García tried to return to Nicaragua from the United States where he was on a family trip, and the Sandinista immigration authorities refused his entry, imposing exile on him.
The persecution of the Church unleashed by the Ortega-Murillo regime in recent weeks is an additional escalation in the total repression that is experienced in Nicaragua. To the harassment of the religious is added the closure of another hundred civil society organizations, whose buildings have been confiscated; the approval of a real estate law to punish the property of opponents, the persecution against the journalists of the La Prensa newspaper, the ongoing arrest of more activists in the cities of Managua, León and Nueva Guinea. Four board members of the municipal structures of the Democratic Renovator Union (UNAMOS), previously known as the Sandinista Renovator Movement, were detained this Monday September 11 and at least three more are being besieged by the police in the context of the national holidays.
On August 31, after multiple demands of relatives, who denounced poor treatment and terrible food in the El Chipote prison, the government for the first time in more than a year presented the political prisoners. The mythical former guerrilla, Dora María Téllez ,was presented emaciated and translucent because of the lack of sun, like the other political prisoners, with signs of malnourishment.
The former Sandinista and historian Mónica Baltodano, maintains that Ortega has shown no mercy to dissident Sandinistas and key figures in the fight against the Somoza dictatorship because he considers them traitors. She maintains that if she had not gone into exile in Costa Rica after her non-governmental organization was raided by the Police, today she would be in jail along with Dora María Téllez.
“I never expected the regime of Daniel Ortega to reach these extremes, of torturing political prisoners and persecuting everyone. We were the first ones to warn that a new dictatorship was coming in Nicaragua. Above all in his first re-election we were emphatic in pointing out how serious it was to allow that, because it was fully revealing his dictatorial plan, but we did not think that he would get to arrest Hugo Torres and he was going to allow him to die like a dog. What he is doing with the political prisoners is weakening them from the physical, subjective point of view and from their equilibrium.”
The impact of the famished political prisoners was a harsh emotional blow for their loved ones, as Baltodano felt with Dora María Téllez, but also left clear that the Ortega-Murillos continue radicalizing their posture.
“They have become more radicalized and their power rests on weapons and the terror that they instill, especially the police. Ortega was able to construct the complete subordination of institutions which have turned him into one of the dictators with the most control over the other branches in the region. In the time of Somoza there were fissures in the Judicial Branch and the National Assembly; you could hear some deputies criticize, but now all that is absolutely subordinated to the presidential couple. We have a Parliament making, designing laws as a straight-jacket for the opposition; laws specifically directed to choke off and crush everything that is opposed to it,” said Baltodano.
An impossible dialogue
This past Tuesday September 13th 45 countries that form part of the United Nations Organization (UN) condemned the brutal impression imposed by the regime and the constant violations of the right of association, freedom of speech and religion of Nicaraguans, before the Human Rights Council of that organization.
“Nicaragua has continued repressing the rights of peaceful meeting and association, and of religion”, highlighted the document. The group of countries regretted that the regime has cancelled the legal status of more than a thousand civil organizations and a dozen universities, impacting the right to education.” It highlighted that it also impaired the “enjoyment” of the freedom of expression and opinion, with more than one hundred journalists forced into exile and a dozen radios and television stations censored in August.
“The attacks on the freedom of association have increased exponentially. This year the legal status was revoked of 1,512 human rights organizations, support for development organizations, professional associations, including medical ones, and entities associated with the Catholic Church,” said a representative of the organization within the framework of the 51st period of sessions of the Human Rights Council of the UN, which is being carried out between September 12 to October 7th in Geneva, Switzerland.
The UN suggested dialogue the Ortega-Murillo, but the last approach that Colombia attempted left it clear that it is not an option on the table for Managua. “During the periodic universal exam, seven States also recommended it and even though Nicaragua accepted four of those recommendations, dialogue so far has not been renewed, in spite of the announcement of President Daniel Ortega in 2021,” noted the UN.
The presentation of the political prisoners this past August 31st coincided with an approach for “humanitarian purposes” that the new Colombian government of Gustavo Petro with Ortega-Murillo. Nevertheless, the foreign minister of Colombia, Álvaro Leyva, said that matters of a public order “cannot be rode roughshod over”, as Ortega has been doing, nor “sticking your friends in jail, nor doing away with national associations, defenders of human rights.” “This has been an atrocity,” he lamented.
The negotiation failed.
In the face of a dismantled opposition and civil society, the international community has fallen flat on its face with Ortega and the prescription, so far not very effective, seems to not have changed much. Baltodano believes that at this time Ortega and Murillo “are getting away with it.” “There is still no national nor international force that says that this dictatorship has to come to an end,” she says in San José, Costa Rica, where she has been exiled since 2021, when her former fellow fighters undertook a manhunt against all opposition leaders that allowed him to remain in power, through some elections without any competition.
International financing continues to fuel him
The former deputy Eliseo Núñez maintains that Ortega-Murillo have criminalized “everything” to consolidate a totalitarian regime. “In this moment they are trying to dismantle the network of the Catholic Church to prevent a discursive line originating from that side that would allow the opposition to have esprit de corps. Because one of the things that you lose in these regimes is the esprit de corps. They break the social network, but previously they break apart the organizational networks. That is why the freedom of association is criminalized. The attack that civil society and the church received is part of the same. They make you feel absolutely alone. They do not want anyone to go to mass and hear a critical homily,” analyzed Núñez.
Baltodano and Núñez agree that so long as Ortega and Murillo can continue ensuring resources so that their repressive mechanism can function, the regime will continue afloat. “He has had financing for the repression in the IFIs (International Financial Institutions). What the IADB and the World Bank took away from him, now the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) is giving him. So long as he has that capacity to make his payroll and maintain himself economically, creating public investment to be able to provide jobs and keep the circle of businesspeople who are around him, Ortega is going to be able to support himself on this model, but it is a model which is easy to stop from outside. The only thing that is difficult to sustain of the pillars that support the dictatorship is the pillar of family remittances,” said Núñez. And he added, “The other pillar of exports is very unclear because its principal client, which is the United States, can shut off the spicket at any time.”
Even though in a lukewarm way, Washington has imposed some economic measures in recent months to pressure the Ortega-Murillo regime. On Wednesday July 20 Washington provided proof that it could stop imports: it excluded Nicaragua from the sugar quota for its 2023 fiscal year within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This blow to the sugar growers was translated into “a message” to other business sectors that still find themselves comfortable with the Ortega-Murillo regime, according to economic sources connected to CAFTA-DR. The principal person harmed was the sugar magnate Carlos Pellas who, so far, has maintained a mute posture in the face of the repressive attacks of the regime.
“What is most important is the sign that the United States is sending that, just as it is doing with the sugar sector, it can also do to other important sectors like tobacco, meat and others that have preferential quotas with the United States,” said an economist who worked as a consultant to the CAFTA negotiations between 2003 and 2004.
At the end of August the Biden government began to consider stemming imports from Nicaragua, while blocking some of the most important items through CAFTA-DR. Other voices in Washington propose going farther. The Senator Marco Rubio called on the Biden administration to apply direct sanctions on the officials of the regime and to suspend the benefits of the Free Trade Treaty.
Absolute power
While this panorama continues blocked, Baltodano is concerned about the declining health of the political prisoners, whose time in prison could be extended in light of the municipal elections set for this coming November. In these elections Sandinism “will establish absolute power” in the municipalities, according to the organization “Open Ballotboxes” [Urnas Abiertas].
“Ortega is going to wipe out the entire opposition and I did not think that he could reach such level of criminality, to the point that he persecutes historic figures of Sandinism or has taken us into exile, where they pursue us with different methods: with fiscal, financial harassment; they deny us passports in the consulates or driver´s licenses….he tries to reduce us to citizen inexistence,” bemoans Baltodano, who believes that the eventual death of Daniel Ortega does not resolve the conundrum of repression in Nicaragua. “With the death of Ortega the dictatorship will be weakened, but an entire power scheme has to be built which would allow them to manipulate his heir. You already see what happened with Somoza García: his physical disappearance did not make a difference, and that dictatorship continued. What is essential is how we Nicaraguans might be capable of organizing forces inside and out of Nicaragua, that would not lead us to profound transformations, but to the transition process that Nicaragua needs to reconstitute itself as a Republic.”