In the midst of hurricane news, a very important story could be missed: the release from prison of a Sandinista militant who publicly shot a dissident for shouting “Long live free Nicaragua” to a caravan of Sandinista supporters heading to the July 19, 2020 celebration.
The judge who released him is the same judge who gave light sentences and then house arrest to the Sandinista Political Secretary, the Chief of Police, and a Supreme Electoral Council official who on the evening of Nov 8 2011, shortly after the presidential election that year, drove to the village of El Carrizo in San José de Cusmapa and shot 3 indigenous men who were poll watchers for an opposition party.
In spite of the fact that one of the human rights organizations cited in this article was founded by contra supporters in the 1980s (ANPDH,) the facts of this case were not in dispute at the time of the shooting. This article explores the context and consequences of his release.
Ortega sends a dangerous message to his Sandinista militancy as the 2021 elections get closer
By Eva Inestroza in La Prensa, Nov 22, 2020
After the recent ruling of freedom for the Orteguista shooter from La Trinidad, Estelí, the Sandinista militancy has a “free path” to commit any crime and enjoy impunity, human rights defenders warn.
As the 2021 elections get closer, the dictatorship sent once again a dangerous message of impunity to its Sandinista militancy, with the recent freedom of the Sandinista sympathizer, Abner Pineda Castellón, who shot and killed the dissident, Jorge Rugama Rizo, 42 years of age this past July 19th in the municipality of La Trinidad, Estelí. Human rights defenders concluded that the message is clear: “you can do what you want, and nothing will happen to you.”
This Thursday November 19th Judge Erick Laguna, from the Court of Estelí, freed the Orteguista gunman. Pineda was found guilty of the crime of negligent homicide by the court and given tbe minimum sentence of one year in jail, nevertheless, the judge immediately granted the accused the benefit of a suspended sentence, leaving him completely free, denounced the lawyer of the Permanent Human Rights Commission (CPDH), Eber Acevedo, the lawyer for the victim.
The activist. Alvaro Leiva, executive secretary of the Nicaraguan Association for Human rights (ANPDH), pointed out that the serious crisis of human rights violations in the country did not start in April 2018, with the explosion of the civic rebellion, that left more than 320 dead, dozens of people wounded and thousands exiled, according to international human rights organizations, that accused the State of Nicaragua of committing “crimes against humanity”, but that the constant human rights violations of Nicaraguans began when the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) took power in 1980.
“This party and its collaborators have demonstrated in different historical moments that justice and transparency in its administration do not exist. Crimes have been committed, atrocious crimes that have been left unpunished up to our days against many citizens, for which today their relatives continue demanding justice,” expressed Leiva.
“The release of Abner Pineda, operator and paramilitary of the FSLN, was another example of impunity in the administration of justice,” added the human rights defender.
For Acevedo, the liberation of Pineda can be interpreted as a message that the government of Ortega is sending to his militancy, whom he endows with impunity and gives them “free rein” to commit any misdeed and end up absolved, as long as they are loyal to his regime.
This dangerous message is sent as the 2021 presidential elections draw near, which are feared to be violent in the face of the refusal of the regime to abandon power, while the international community pressures for fair and transparent elections.
“It is true that (Abner Pineda) had a one-year sentence, but it means nothing because they freed him, the message is clear, the government is sending a message to its militancy to say that they can do whatever they want and that our judicial branch which is controlled by us will leave them freed,” said the lawyer of the CPDH.
Background of those benefitted by impunity by the regime
Both defenders coincided separately that any person who commits a crime and has an ideology in line with the Ortega Murillo regime will remain in impunity. Just such a case occurred with the paramilitary Pierson Gutiérrez Solís, 42 years of age, who more than two years ago murdered the medical student Rayéia Gabrielle Da Costa Lima, from Brazil.
Gutiérrez Solís was sentenced to 15 years of prison for the murder of the young woman, nevertheless, the First Criminal Court of Appeals for Managua ordered his freedom July 24, 2019, basing that ruling on the Amnesty Law, approved on June 8, 2019 by the magistrates of the dictatorship, precisely to promote impunity for those responsible for the police and paramilitary massacre ordered by the regime since April 2018. That law also ordered the criminal record of Gutiérrez Solís be eliminated.
“This is precisely where justice is not blind, this amnesty strategy that the regime applied to benefit their entire machinery and to destroy others,” pointed out Leiva.
Lima, 31 years of age, was murdered on the night of June 23, 2018 when she was returning home, the paramilitaries opened fire when she was driving precisely on the street that connects the Pista Suburbana and the American School.
Gutiérrez Solís is a member of the Sandinista Front, it was known that he was a soldier in the Nicaraguan Army and that he worked in the security corps of Alba of Nicaragua (ALBANISA) and the Nicaraguan Petroleum Enterprise (PETRONIC), both institutions sanctioned by the United States.
A similar thing happened with then Captain Zacarías Salgado, chief of the patrol that carried out the massacre of Las Jagüitas in July 2015, where two minors and a woman died, in addition to gravely wounding two minors, of a total of seven family members who were traveling in a vehicle during a failed antinarcotics operation, remembers Acevedo.
Salgado not only was able within three years to make an 11-year sentence disappear after having been found guilty of crimes of homicide, reckless injuries, exposition of people to danger because of the massacre of the family in the village of Las Jagüitas in Managua, but he was decorated by Francisco Díaz, Chief of the Orteguista Police and in law to the dictator, for supposed heroic actions during his participation in the repression campaign against the people in 2018. “The message is clear, they can do whatever they want, and nothing will happen to them,” insisted Acevedo.
“It is not possible that Pineda, having murdered in the light of day, in cold blood, in full view of the authorities, that today a judge would give him his freedom, under no condition would that injunction fit. We have the case of the murderer of Carlos Guadamuz, who travels freely throughout the country in the face of having committed a brutal murder,” mentioned Leiva.
The controversial journalist and politician, Carlos Guadamuz Portillo, was murdered by three shots on February 10, 2004, by the triggerman Willian Hurtado García, sentenced to 21 years in jail: 18 for the crime of murder as the principal sentence and three for attempted homicide of the son of Guadamuz, then a 16 year-old adolescent, who hit, pursued and captured him after having shot his father in front of the installations of Channel 23.
Hurtado García, the confessed criminal, only did four years of the 21 he was sentenced to in prison, due to the fact that he received the benefit of an“extraordinary order of family cohabitation” attributed to “primarily medical reasons”, justified the Minister of the Interior at that time, Ana Isabel Mora.
“The message is clear for the defenseless Nicaraguan population and the message for the corrupt and murderous members of the party of the regime, in the sense that they are given freedom to commit serious crimes, in criminal cases, and they are going to be rewarded with impunity,” agreed Leiva.
Judicial branch is corrupt, they point out
The executive secretary of the ANPDH, pointed to the magistrates and judges of the Supreme Court as corrupt, because they operate the same as the Sandinista Police, as a repressive organ against the opponents of the regime, by spearheading false accusations against opponents and not fulfilling their functions of ensuring the constitutional and procedural rights of people abducted for participating in the antigovernmental protests in 2018.
“We have a very corrupt, rotten judicial branch, and what one would least expect of an administration of justice is that there would not be impunity and grave human rights violations. We have the case of the political prisoners, who the bank from the branch of the administration of justice has invented and discredited, has jailed them, sentenced them without any existing legal basis, which shows us that the judicial branch many years ago quit being an autonomous branch in their decisions, and above all in the administration of justice,” said Leiva.
“It is precisely from there (Supreme Court) that the serious human rights violations come from which have remained and continue in impunity and injustice, without anything. And in this sense the fact of having made this decision (to free Pineda) does not take us by surprise,” he stated.
Therefore, Leiva declared, it should take anyone by surprise the day that many administrators of justice, among them “corrupt” judges and magistrates, might have to face human rights justice to be processed for the violation of the Constitution and the laws to which they are in debt.
According to the records of opposing organizations, the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy and the National Blue and White Unity, more than 100 people are in the different jails of the country detained for having participated in demonstrations opposed to the regime.
Irregularities in trial against the shooter of La Trinidad
The lawyer of the CPDH, Eber Acevedo, revealed that the Public Prosecutor from the beginning acted in a partial way in the process against Abner Pineda. The defense attorney relates that the Prosecutor´s office accused Pineda of the crime of homicide for the death of Jorge Luis Rugama Rizo on July 18, 2020 for having shouted “Long live free Nicaragua!” at a Sandinista caravan that was in front of his home, which was led by Pineda, in spite of the fact that the evidence and witnesses confirmed that it was a murder.
He recalls that from the first hearing the accused never used the blue uniform that people under arrest wear, in addition to the fact that in the first hearing the Public Prosecutor´s office had given him certain benefits like the use of a cell phone. “He had even questioned whether Luisa Rizo was the mother of Jorge Rugama Rizo, which led us to present a brief with birth certificates to demonstrate that she really was the mother of the victim and that she wanted us (CPDH) to represent her,” indicated Acevedo.
Then in the development of the trail, he explained that the Prosecutor presented a theory of the case which established that they were going to demonstrate the crime of homicide, while they (CPDH) as individual accusing lawyers were establishing the crime of murder, because it “occurred in circumstances that meant it was a murder,” argued Acevedo.
“During the trail the investigating officers were compelling, a ballistic expert said that that weapon could never have been fired by itself, that Abner Pineda acted on his own, loaded his weapon, removed the safety, and shot Jorge Luis. Likewise, the police investigator established that Abner Pineda got down from the vehicle, walked to where Jorge Luis was, in other words, some 70 meters, and detonated the weapon, taking his life, when Jorge Luis was being detained by some neighbors and completely defenseless,” he said.
Nevertheless, “some defense witnesses alleged that Jorge Luis went to where Abner was, grabbed him by the neck and that Abner defended himself and then the shot happened, which is completely false. Because photos were shown where the now lifeless body of Jorge was in front of his home, and not in the place where Abner was,” alleged Acevedo.
The CPDH is already working to appeal this verdict, according to Acevedo, highlighting the fact that the organization always maintained and demonstrated in the oral and public trial that the accused Abner Pineda was guilty of the crime of the murder of Jorge Rugama. “We demonstrated it, but the judge presumably received an order to free him and thus did so, but with the expert witnesses and those present, like the neighbors and the mother herself who testified as to the fact, the forensic doctor; all this evidence pointed to Pineda being declared guilty of murder and that he be sentenced to 20 to 30 years of prison (as the Penal Code dictates),” maintained the defense lawyer.