The educational organization recalled that since 2018 Nicaragua has lived “under a climate of general discontent against the Ortega government.”
By La Prensa, Oct 7, 2023
The Association of Universities of the Society of Jesus in Latin America (AUSJAL) asked for support from the international community to stop the authoritarian advance of the regime of Daniel Ortega after the confiscation of the Central American University (UCA).
“The UCA – like the Society of Jesus in that country – is the most recent victim of an ongoing process of repression and the subjugation of critical and dissident voices. Therefore, the support of the international community should be focused on stopping the advances of Ortega which increasingly are gobbling up parts of the body and soul of the Nicaraguan people,” states a report prepared by the organization dated September 21, 2023 which was sent to the Pope.
Luis Arriaga Valenzuela, S.J. President of the Iberoamerican University in the city of Mexico and president of the Association of Universities of the Society of Jesus in Latin America, pointed out in the introduction of the report that “throughout recent years the authoritarian drift of the regime headed by Daniel Ortega has disappointed the hopes that which at one time the people of Nicaragua had deposited in the Sandinistas.”
We Jesuits, who observed the revolutionary process which was experienced a little more than forty years ago in that country with hope, today confront a bigger challenge: raising awareness about the fact that an arbitrary and unjust temporal power is attempting to violate the rights of a people which is fighting hard to be free. This is a call to action. It cannot be anything else for those of us who assume that the search for a Greater Good is a commitment to the mission of reconciliation and justice which we have taken up in this Earth,” he indicated.
Five years of political crisis
In the report, the educational organization recalled that since 2018 it is living “under a climate of general discontent against the Ortega government. For that reason, that year a social uprising exploded, led principally by the youth of the country, especially within the university circles of Managua and other important cities. Within the framework of this social uprising, the UCA provided refuge to demonstrators and people critical of the regime, who mostly were students. Many of them members of the UCA and other Nicaraguan universities.”
He indicated that “throughout this century Nicaragua has lived through a political context defined by a growing limitation of public freedoms and the rupture of the constitutional order which is proper for any democratic society. Since 2007, the lack of change in the central government has permitted the current President to be re-elected on three occasions. The permanence of Daniel Ortega in power has only been possible through the repression of the dissidents and the alteration of the legal framework which supports the presidential investiture.”
Since 2018 all this has been translated into “an environment of a lack of legality and respect for human rights where the autonomy of multiple institutions has been violated, as well as the integrity of countless people, Nicaraguans as well as foreigners.”
They denounced that the State is blocking freedom of movement, as well as the right of association and gathering, among other multiple violations of the freedoms of Nicaraguans.
AUSJAL recalled that in 1990 the UCA gave Daniel Ortega an honorary doctorate for recognizing his own defeat in the general elections which gave the triumph to Violeta Chamorro of the National Opposition Union as President of the Republic. This triumph inaugurated a period of six 6-year periods when opposition parties to the FSLN were in power.
Nevertheless, “since 2007, when the first presidency of Ortega in this century began, Nicaragua has lived in the shadow of an increasingly authoritarian political system which shows no intentions of change or rotation of leadership.”
They denounced that since 2018 the UCA was under attack from the regime. “The occupation and dissolution of the UCA is the culmination of an ongoing campaign of harassment against this university, which was maintained as a space of opposition and refuge for dissident Nicaraguans. As previously noted, it is important to mention that the government had already dissolved multiple universities, several of them from the Catholic tradition.”
Demands
AUSJAL reiterates the demands of the Central American Province, of the General Curia of the Society of Jesus and Jesuits from all over the world ,who have asked that “the drastic, unexpected and unjust measures adopted by the Nicaraguan judicial order and the National Council of Universities be immediately reversed and corrected.”
Also, They demand ending “what up to now has been a growing attitude of governmental aggression against the university and its members,” and “that a rational solution be sought where truth, justice, dialogue and the defense of academic freedom might prevail.”
The Association also calls on “all members of the Catholic Church and people of good heart to join in the efforts against the Ortega regime, which has now harmed the people of Nicaragua enough. Likewise, it calls them to the defense of the Jesuit mission in that country and brothers in Christ who in this moment are found to be in search of protection in the pursuit of a greater good.”
Bastion of the student struggle
The UCA was one of the bastions of the student struggle within the context of the 2018 protests against the Ortega regime. Since then, it has remained under siege by the police and many of its students had to go into exile in other countries in order to not be jailed or disappeared.
“In Nicaragua there is a context of the lack of the Rule of Law, where there are no guarantees for the effective application of human rights. The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has incurred multiple violations of those rights and has committed crimes against humanity.”
They emphasized that “the political system of Nicaragua is increasing plunged into authoritarianism, because the ruling couple do not seem to have intentions of allowing changes in government. On the contrary, they have constantly acted to remove the counterweights within the government itself and civil society. The actions undertaken against organizations and people who have raised their voice in favor of justice, human rights and democracy are only explained as an attempt to perpetuate their regime ad infinitum.”
Multiple voices of the international community have made statements against the actions of the Ortega regime, among them, the Secretary General of the UN, the Organization of American States (OAS), and different organizations in defense of human rights. Also, multiple universities and study centers have expressed their solidarity with the UCA and share the condemnation of the acts, like the university members of the network of Jesuit Universities in Spain (UNIJES), the Colombian Association of Universities (ASCUN), the José Simeón Cañas Central American University and the University of Costa Rica.