The autocratic regime of President Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice-president, Rosario Murillo, inaugurated a new form of repression in Nicaragua in May: the arrest of opponents at night in their homes, the search of their homes, their expeditious indictment for “conspiracy” or “spreading false news”, and their release on condition that they report to the police station every day.
Since the beginning of May, seventy-five people have been arrested in this way, then released, and have since lived in fear of being arrested again and imprisoned. Among them, a journalist, a doctor who denounced the government for negligence during the first wave of Covid-19, in 2020, the leader of a student organization or even the mother of Richard Pavon Bermudez, the first victim of the repression of demonstrations. April 2018, which left more than three hundred dead.
“The regime succeeds with this in expanding the control it exercises over opponents, without having to put them in prison, which has a political cost for it, explains the lawyer and political scientist Eliseo Nuñez. The fact of having to clock in every day, sometimes several dozen kilometers from their home, makes life impossible for them, and has pushed some into exile, one more way of deactivating opposition cells that could still be active. in the country. »
A like can lead to an arrest
In its repressive spiral, the regime also decided to suspend, in early May, by a decision of the Supreme Court, the authorization to practice of twenty-seven lawyers, including Mr. Nuñez, writer Sergio Ramirez or human rights defender Vilma Nuñez. All are accused of “treason to the fatherland”. Fifteen of them were among the 222 political prisoners released on February 9, expelled to Washington and stripped of their nationality, and thus became stateless. A few days later, 94 other opponents, almost all of whom were already in exile, were also stripped of their nationality, civil rights and property.
“Last night I fell asleep with the news of my suspension [du barreau]but, this morning, I woke up with the announcement that the Spanish government granted me citizenship, lawyer and opponent Ana Margarita Vijil wrote on social networks. After a difficult news, another that gives hope. » Mme Vijil, who was part of the group of 222 opponents expelled, spent more than six hundred days in prison.
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