Monica Baltodano and Family Flee Nicaragua
Due to Daniel Ortega’s repression and jailing of opposition figures and ex-comrades
HAVANA TIMES – Former FSLN guerrilla leader Monica Baltodano, her husband Julio Lopez and her daughter Monica Lopez Baltodano decided to go into exile, after “living practically underground” due to the brutal repression of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua.
This is the message of the Lopez-Baltodano family announcing their exile:
With this message we want to make public the difficult decision made by three members of our family: Monica Baltodano, Julio Lopez Campos and Monica Augusta Lopez Baltodano. After months of living practically underground and given the brutal repressive wave that the country is experiencing, a few days ago we decided to temporarily leave Nicaragua, travelling via a blind spot on the border to go into exile.
Although since September 2018 we were granted precautionary measures of protection by the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights), the relentless espionage activities, daily presence of intelligence officers, harassment, and political persecution of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, pointed to making our entire family political prisoners.
With this decision we add ourselves to other exiled members of our family and join the more than one hundred thousand Nicaraguans who have gone through the same sorrow of choosing to leave our land to preserve their freedom and integrity.
We have had more than 20 accumulated years of dissidence and political confrontation with the Ortega regime. We have denounced their perversions, the breakdown of the FSLN party, state terrorism, and all the plundering of private and public assets of the Nicaraguan people.
Nicaragua’s history of struggle shows that every authoritarian regime gets its July 19 [1979] or April 19 [2018]. We will keep on fighting and supporting the efforts of the blue and white opposition, confident that only the people save the people.