Hit and Run: A Sadistic Plot of the Ortega Dictatorship

THE NICARAGUAN SISYPHUS… Political prisoners that the Ortega dictatorship wants to keep in jail, can serve out their sentence but are then charged with new fabrictated crimes to keep locked up. Illustration: PxMolina

Political prisoner Carlos Bonilla served his jail sentence. Immediately an executioner judge prosecuted him for drug-trafficking

Por Enrique Saenz (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – I have said on other occasions that dictatorships have little imagination. And the one installed in Nicaragua has even less. They constantly repeat the same practices of their contemporaries from other latitudes. There we have the case of the Putin law.

Ortega’s servants even copied the title: Foreign Agents Law. Likewise, with the law against hate crimes. Maduro imposed a law with the same title, but several years ago. Ortega’s minions couldn’t think up another title and copied the one from Maduro’s law. And so, we could continue.

But the Ortega dictatorship has gone to great pains to copy the same formulas of Somoza. Examples abound. Somoza Garcia had his three “Ps”: “plata” (money) for friends, “palo” (beatings) for the indifferent, and “plomo” (bullets) for enemies. Now the regime’s henchmen stain the walls of their opponents’ houses with the word “plomo.” I could continue, but today I want to refer to the last copycat action.

Last week we were shown another shameful example of mimicking Somoza.

In the opposition media of the time of the Somoza dynasty, the expression “hit and run” became known. It referred to the infamous practice with the prisoners they wanted to keep in jail. Once they served their sentence they were accused of another crime. And thus, with the complicity of subservient judges, they kept in captivity whoever they wanted.

Ortega began to dust off that same ploy. Last week, political prisoner Carlos Bonilla received a release order for having served out his sentence. However, immediately an executioner judge charged him for drug trafficking while in prison. A ludicrous charge since the prisoner spent his jail time in a maximum-security cell.

With the same sinister formula, they keep incarcerated Marvin Vargas, a leader of army veterans in prison for ten years. The original charge was a misdemeanor in 2011. However, since then, under different pretexts, they kept him locked up. Most of the time in maximum-security cells. Once he served his last sentence in 2017, they shamelessly accused him for drug trafficking.

A crude farce. How can they explain that someone is dealing drugs in a maximum-security cell?

And, even if we admitted such nonsense, I would have to admit that such a crime can only be committed if there is negligence, complicity, concealment or co-authorship in the chain of custody. However, neither in the case of Bonilla, nor in the case of Vargas, has any custodian appeared on trial.

Obviously, it is a fabricated plot. A cruel plot. Besides unjust imprisonment, the sadism of ordering their freedom as a condition to incarcerate again, with the embellishment of denigrating the victim with the charge of drug trafficking.

Such a plot can only be motivated by the hatred that nestles in the guts of those who make the decisions of selective repression.

Of course, we already know that the servants at the penitentiary system do not have the capacity to adopt these decisions, and, even less, the executioner judges. As the popular saying goes, they are orders that “come from above.”

Moreover, it is precisely “above”, where the tireless fountain of hate, cruelty and sadism is, which victimizes the Nicaraguan people.

Read more by Enrique Saenz here on Havana Times.