Miami, Feb 15 (EFE) .- Berta Valle, wife of former Nicaraguan presidential candidate Félix Maradiaga, one of the seven opposition leaders subject to a collective trial in Managua on Tuesday, tells Efe that the best proof that the process is a ” farce” is that your husband will meet his lawyer today.
“Since his arrest he has had four lawyers, two went into exile due to persecution by the regime and another is in prison,” he stresses.
The wife of the former secretary general of the Ministry of Defense during the presidency of Enrique Bolaños (2002-2006), who is accused of treason and lives in exile in Miami with her eight-year-old daughter and her mother-in-law since 2018, spoke with Efe on a “super stressful” day.
Their confidence that Maradiaga, one of the civic leaders of the 2018 protests against the Daniel Ortega dictatorship, will have a fair trial is null, but their “faith” -she is a Baptist and he is a Catholic- and the “teachings” of his husband give her “strength”.
“FIXED SENTENCE”
“This is a fixed sentence. We don’t know how many years, but for the other trials it will be between 13 and 15 years in prison,” he says in a telephone conversation interrupted by calls from Nicaragua.
The last time she physically saw her husband, accused of “conspiracy to undermine national integrity,” was in 2020 when she decided to return to Nicaragua to compete in the elections held last November.
Like six other opposition candidates, he was arrested in June 2021 and President Daniel Ortega was re-elected.
On June 7, 2021, Valle was able to speak with him by phone. Since then, he has only known about him through family members who are authorized to visit him from time to time in the Chipote prison.
Valle says that despite the fact that “there is a lot of fear” and more so since the death in prison of former Sandinista guerrilla Hugo Torres last weekend due to “an illness”, the relatives of Ortega’s political prisoners have learned a lesson: “they we can remain silent. If we do, we remain in the hands of the regime.”
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Together with Victoria Cárdenas, wife of Juan Sebastián Chamorro, also imprisoned, Berta Valle is dedicated to “taking the situation of political prisoners to international spheres.”
TRIP TO GENEVA
Next week he will travel to Geneva, where a new session of the United Nations Human Rights Council will open on February 28 to “insist” that pressure be increased on the Ortega regime.
The Human Rights Watch organization, which has also denounced the “farce” of the trial against the seven critics of the government “arbitrarily imprisoned since June 2021”, has asked the Council to create an independent mechanism to investigate the abuses in Nicaragua.
“The 49th session (…) is an opportunity to send the government of Ortega and Murillo a strong message that these human rights violations will not be tolerated,” said HRW’s acting director for the Americas, Tamara Taraciuk.
Valle appreciates the help of human rights organizations such as HRW, which considers that “given the lack of judicial independence of the Nicaraguan courts, the creation of a mechanism of these characteristics would allow the victims to be heard by an independent body and would open the door to hold those responsible accountable for their actions.
The activist lists the “due process violations” suffered by her husband and the other political prisoners, including that the lawyers do not have access to the complete judicial files of their clients or that the trials are not held in the courts but in prison facilities.
The cases of Maradiaga and Chamorro have already been presented by a US lawyer before international bodies that deal with arbitrary detentions and torture, emphasizes Berta Valle.
Félix Madariaga’s wife emphasizes that her strength comes, in addition to believing that “God has a purpose in Nicaragua,” from knowing that her husband is innocent and that his fight to defend “democracy and public liberties is legitimate.”
Sooner or later, he says, there will be “a miracle.”
(c) EFE Agency
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