The formation of a paramilitary force outside the Constitution confirms the institutional collapse of the National Police. It also reveals that under the command of General Julio Cesar Aviles, the Nicaraguan Army has become an instrument of complicity with the repression, acting as an extension of the State-Party-Family dictatorship.
Jose Miguel Vivanco, HRW’s director for the Americas, is demanding that the US, Canada and democratic governments in Latin America “double-down on sanctions” against the Ortega government.
Daniel Ortega must cease his persecution of journalists and the campaign of intimidation and threats against the media. He must order the State to suspend the acts of confiscation against Confidencial and 100% Noticias, return the stolen property, and compensate those affected.
With his self-amnesty, Ortega admits the dictatorship’s responsibility for the massacre. In doing so, he can’t erase his own responsibility as Supreme Police Chief, nor that of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, because according to international law justice for such crimes cannot be proscribed.
In a week, the dictatorship of Ortega Murillo suffered four important political defeats that have imprinted a new dynamic on the country: although the impasse remains, the Blue and White Movement has clearly taken up the political initiative.
The murder of political prisoner, Eddy Montes Praslin, by a prison guard in the La Modelo prison last Thursday, should be the Ortega Murillo dictatorship’s last political crime.
The stalemate in negotiations between the Civic Alliance and the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, as a result of the intransigence of commander Daniel Ortega, threatens to liquidate the second attempt at the national dialogue.
The image of euphoric protestors celebrating the fall of the first “Chayopalo”, one of the omnipresent metal “trees of life” imposed by Rosario Murillo, on the third day of the civic protest, revived in my memory the same sense of liberation that I lived some 40 years ago when the statue of Somoza García on a horse came crashing down.
The negotiations between the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship and the Civic Alliance ended last Wednesday without any agreement on the two most important items on the national agenda, endorsed by hundreds of thousands of citizens during the April Rebellion: democratization and justice.
Ortega was not even able to comply with these initial agreements which would have gvien him credibility while more substantial aspects were negotiated. Just 24 hours later after the agreements were announced, his police and paramilitary forces violently dispersed civilian protesters in one of Managua’s shopping malls.