The United Nations on Thursday accused the Nicaraguan regime of committing “serious systematic violations of human rights, equivalent to crimes against humanity” in an investigation into the growing repression of political dissent in the Central American nation.
Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship has persecuted his opponents for years in a campaign that reached its turning point in the 2018 anti-government protests, which resulted in a violent crackdown by authorities.
But in the last year, repression has spread to large sectors of society with the aim of “incapacitating any type of opposition in the long term,” according to an independent group of UN experts who have been investigating the situation since March 2022. .
“Nicaragua is trapped in a spiral of violence marked by the persecution of all forms of political opposition, whether real or perceived,” Jan Simon, an expert who led the investigation, said in a statement. “The government has solidified a spiral of silence that incapacitates any possible opposition.”
The Ortega regime has repeated that the massive demonstrations of 2018 were a failed coup d’état orchestrated by the United States, and usually responds to criticism with the same argument.
The State has attacked civilians, including university students, indigenous people, blacks as well as members of the Catholic Church. Now he persecutes minors and family members for the simple fact of being related to people who raised their voices against the authorities.
In December, the police accused the director of the Miss Nicaragua beauty pageant of a plot in which she manipulated the competition against pro-regime candidates. In February, the dictatorship closed more social groups, including the country’s scout organization and a Rotary club.
According to the report, the repression has crossed the country’s borders and reached the hundreds of thousands of people who fled from it, mainly to the United States and Costa Rica. Hundreds of Nicaraguans have been stripped of their nationality and are now stateless, so they cannot access fundamental rights.
The UN report urged the Ortega regime to release citizens detained “arbitrarily” and called on world leaders to expand sanctions to “individuals and institutions implicated in human rights violations.”
The Human Rights Group’s report on Nicaragua states that Daniel Ortega’s regime perpetrates “abuses and crimes” to “eliminate all critical voices and dissuade, in the long term, any new organization and social mobilization initiative.”
“The government of Nicaragua continues to perpetrate serious systematic violations of human rights, equivalent to crimes against humanity, for political reasons,” declared the Group, reiterating expressions from the report presented a year ago.
However, “the situation has worsened” in the last year due to the “consolidation and centralization of all powers and institutions of the State”, especially the judicial power, in the hands of Ortega and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, he adds. .
“During 2023 there has been an exponential increase in patterns of violations focused on incapacitating any type of long-term opposition,” according to the document.
“President Ortega, Vice President Murillo and the high-level officials identified in the investigation must be held accountable to the international community,” said Jan Simon.
The group of experts is independent and was created in 2022 by mandate of the UN Human Rights Council to investigate abuses committed in Nicaragua since April 2018, when protests broke out against the Ortega government, whose repression left 355 dead and hundreds detained. (opponents, social leaders, businessmen, journalists).
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