CPC [Citizen Power Committees] threaten Nicaraguans with “jail or exile”
La Prensa, Oct 18, 2023
CALIDH [Interamerican Human Rights Legal Assistance Center] received denouncements that police officials as well as members of the CPCs in the neighborhoods are threatening citizens with taking away their homes.
The persecution and repression on the part of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo against Nicaraguans considered “opponents or critics” does not stop; on the contrary, it has intensified. Now Police officers – an institution sanctioned by the United States – and members of the Citizen Power Committees (CPC) harass and threaten citizens offering them jail or exile, denounced the Interamerican Human Rights Legal Assistance Center (CALIDH).
Danny Ramírez-Ayérdiz, Executive Secretary of CALIDH, explained to La Prensa that in recent days the organization has received more than 10 denouncements on the part of people who are in Nicaragua, who describe that “police officials, who are known as intelligence, are harassing them in municipalities far from cities, because they show up at their homes and force them to go into exile or they are going to throw them in jail. There is a new escalation of the repression.”
Desperate Nicaraguans
Ramírez-Ayérdiz underlined that also members of the CPCs in the neighborhoods are threatening people with the fact that they are going to sick the Police on them and the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR), repressive apparatuses which in recent years Ortega has used. “The CPCs threaten them with the fact that they are going to take away their homes out of pure vengeance – for everything that happened in 2018 – and because of the unlimited power which the regime has given to these structures of repression in neighborhoods and communities. The violence which the CPCs exercise is more extreme in municipalities far from the cities,” he mentioned.
The lawyer also pointed out that the denouncements which they have received as an international organization shows that Nicaraguans in the country “feel utterly abandoned, desperation, terror and fear.”
He referred to the fact that out of fear of having close communication with any organizations which might be close to the country, for example, in Costa Rica, people see the need to “communicate with organizations which are further away, and we are one of them, and this concerns us a lot because you see the magnitude of the terrorism which has been imposed on the country.”
Hostile context and persecution
What is documented is happening within the hostile context which Nicaragua is experiencing as the consequence of the worsening of the repression of the dictatorship, after the explosion of the anti-governmental protests of April 2018.
This past weekend the regime, amid an enormous police deployment, ordered sending eight priests to the cells of the Judicial Support Office (DAJ) better known as the new Chipote. Seven of the priests remained under the figure of house arrest in the Our Lady of Fatima National Seminary, and Fr. Cristóbal Gadea, from Jinotega, was held in the installations of the Police headquarters in Plaza El Sol, as confirmed to La Prensa by sources close to the Nicaraguan Episcopal Conference (CEN).
In the second week of October, this newspaper also confirmed that the persecution against lay people of the Catholic Church is palpable in Jalapa, Ocotal and San Juan del Río Coco, where faithful have been detained, their homes raided, and others arrested and freed under threat and the obligation of returning weekly to sign in at the police stations of their respective municipalities.
In Ocotal La Prensa confirmed that the laypeople Salvador Paguaga, responsible for the social networks of the Our Lady of the Assumption parish, and María Asunción Salgado Duarte, were captured in their homes, after the capture of the pastor of the Catholic Church, where both of them were members.