Nicaraguan Police Kidnap Brother of Exiled Activist

Dulce Porras, a leader of the Democratic Renewal Union (Unamos) in Nicaragua’s Carazo department, denounced that on the night of September 15th, the Police from the Ortega regime abducted her brother, Freddy Martin Porras, from his home in Jinotepe.

Dulce Porras posted the denunciation from Costa Rica, where she’s currently exiled. According to her information, at approximately 6 pm on Thursday evening, a police patrol arrived at her brother Freddy’s home. Both he and his wife and daughter received blows and were later taken to the Jinotepe police station. When relatives arrived to inquire the reasons for the arrest, the authorities refused to give them any information.

“It was a violent detention,” Porras stated. The police “didn’t have an arrest warrant”; in addition, “they took the cellphones away” from everyone in the family, to avoid having them document what was happening.

Freddy-Martin-Porras | Photo: Courtesy

Dulce Porras assured that her brother is a hard-working man, who’s worked for twenty years distributing pharmaceuticals in the Carazo region. She believes that his arrest is related to her own political activity with Unamos, formerly known as the Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS).

“I feel that the Nicaraguan regime’s new wave of abductions is aimed against the families of those of us in exile here,” Porras commented.

Persecution of Unamos leaders and their families

The abduction of the Unamos leader’s brother came one day after the Party’s public denunciation of the Ortega dictatorship’s “repressive attack” against members of the political organization in the last two weeks.

The Unamos declaration didn’t specify how many detentions of their affiliates had occurred during those two weeks. However, Confidencial was able to learn that at least five people who oppose the Ortega-Murillo regime have been detained in the last few days, in different municipalities of the country.

“I think this is a new pattern – abducting the close relatives of those who were involved in some way, or are currently participating in the struggle against the government. Yes, I’ve participated, but my brother isn’t a political activist, or anything of the kind,” Porras commented.

On September 15, the human rights collective “Never Again Nicaragua [Nicaragua Nunca+] denounced that the regime’s police had attempted to abduct Javier Alberto Alvarez Zamora on the night of September 13th. Alvarez had decided to leave Nicaragua to ask for international protection. Since they couldn’t find him in his home, the officials arbitrarily detained his wife, Jeannine Horvilleur, 63, and his daughter, Ana Carolina Alvarez, 43, both with dual French-Nicaraguan citizenship.

The two women remain locked up in the El Chipote jail in Managua, with no word on the reason for their arrest, according to the Javier Alberto Alvarez’ denunciation to the Nicaragua Nunca+ Human Rights Collective, whose offices are located in San Jose, Costa Rica.

This article was originally published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times