Nicaraguan tyranny goes all out

"We're going all out," proclaimed Rosario Murillo, wife of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and the real head of the diabolical tandem that tyrannises the Central American country, in 2018. Since then, the couple, obsessed with accumulating more and more power, has broken all the dikes and turned the country into a prison where the slightest dissent is not allowed. Those who call their regime a dictatorship surely fall short. In a dictatorship, however unjust, at least there are rules; in a tyranny, the will or whim of the tyrant prevails over the laws. 

Ortega and Murillo, who still fly the Sandinista banner, have poisoned the meaning that Augusto César Sandino wanted to give to the revolution that would liberate his people from the Somoza dictatorship. As in Cuba and Venezuela, those dissidents who have been able to leave the country have left. The Ortega-Murillo government has decided to deprive 94 of them, who make a living as best they can far from their homeland, of their legal identity, i.e. their Nicaraguan nationality, seizing all the movable and immovable property they had to leave. 

It is quite possible that those thus deprived of everything will feel to a greater or lesser degree the pain and sorrow of not being able to recover their identity until this nightmare is over. However, history will record that many, if not all, of them gave much more glory to Nicaragua than the satraps who tyrannise it. Writers like Gioconda Belli, Sofía Montenegro and Sergio Ramírez; journalists like Carlos Fernando Chamorro; clergymen like Bishop Silvio Báez; lawyers like Vilma Núñez and Rafael Solís; ex-guerrillas like Mónica Baltodano, or diplomats like Arturo McFields and Norman Caldera, far from being guilty of "conspiracy to undermine national integrity and propagation of false news", crimes for which they have been convicted by the regime's justice (sic), have always distinguished themselves for their tireless struggle for the prosperity of the country, the equality of its men and women and the good name of Nicaragua in the international community. 

Previously, the Ortega-Murillo family had taken 222 dissidents out of the dungeons and put them on a plane, depriving them of their nationality and consequently stripping them of their property. Initially destined for the United States, the ordeal of the terrible physical and psychological torture to which they have been subjected is over for them, although they will now have to start a new life on the hard road that exile always is. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has offered them Spanish nationality. If this comes to fruition, it is a gesture that honours him and therefore all Spaniards of good will.

Sánchez and other leaders of democratic countries could complete this gesture by heeding the request of Bianca Jagger, founder and president of the Foundation of the same name for the Defence of Human Rights: to demand the immediate unconditional release of the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez Lagos, who was kidnapped last August and whose clergy house was raided. The bishop, who had denounced in his homilies the grave and systematic violations of human rights, religious persecution and abuses of power by the Ortega-Murillo family, refused to board the plane with the 222 exiles, which further angered the pair of satraps, who imprisoned him in the prison known as La Modelo, one of the most brutal, and that is to say, in all of Latin America. The next day, he was sentenced to 26 years and 4 months in prison - what legal precision - along with the loss of his nationality and his (presumed) citizenship rights for life.  

Extreme progressivism and "woke" wanted to see in the decision to expel the 222 from Nicaragua a magnanimous release of the prisoners from their hardships, without questioning at all the flagrant violation of human rights to which they have been subjected not only in prison but also with the imposition of a banishment and disqualification for life. This is probably so unjust that it may not see the Ortega-Murillo family overthrown and prosecuted for the crimes of their tyranny before any justice worthy of the name. Although, as many of the outlaws say, "we must not lose hope that Nicaragua will regain its freedom".  Unfortunately, there are examples very close to home in the same geographical area where this hope is fading with the passage of time, at least for the generations that pass without the arrival of the longed-for freedom materialising.