30 de noviembre 2024
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Between November 22 and 28, the National Police, acting as the repressive arm of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo's authoritarian regime, abducted at least 30 Nicaraguans. These arbitrary arrests followed the submissive legislature's illegal approval of a constitutional reform that overhauls Nicaragua's political system, establishes a co-presidency, and strips citizens of their individual and public liberties.
We’ve confirmed at least 30 illegal detentions, plus another series of denunciations that have yet to be verified,” the Blue and White Monitoring organization affirmed on its social media.
The Monitoring group assured that among the detained are some entire families, including elders and children. It also stressed that the relatives of those detained “have been deprived of information regarding the whereabouts and condition” of their family members, in “a flagrant violation of their human rights.”
The prisoners were taken from their homes with no warrant and they were not allowed access to lawyers or family visits. Such practices violate the minimal guarantees established under international law, noted the interdisciplinary team that registers and consolidates the complaints of human rights violations linked to the political crisis Nicaragua has been engulfed in since April 2018.
The Nicaraguan Democratic Convergence, an opposition group made up of banished Nicaraguan dissenters, declared: “This escalation is a sample of the regime’s scheme of absolute control, in which the violence also extends to the families of those abducted, who are denied information that would allow them to confirm the whereabouts and condition of their loved ones.”
Up until now, neither the Nicaraguan government nor the National Police have issued any statement regarding these detentions, in line with their proceedings during previous waves of arbitrary arrests.
Journalists and doctors among the detained
According to the Monitoring group, detentions have taken place in at least ten departments of Nicaragua, the majority in Leon, Masaya, and Esteli.
Among those detained in Leon is journalist Leo Catalino Carcomo, and retired physician Arnoldo Toruño. The Leon raids have been led by Police Chief Fidel Dominguez, an official known as one of the dictatorship’s most loyal repressors, affirmed the media outlet Divergentes.
This is the second time that Leo Carcamo has been detained by Ortega’s police force. In January 2019, the journalist was also held without cause, but he was freed hours later. Since then, he has distanced himself from any contact with the media.
Dr. Toruño, a former dean of the UNAN Medical School in Leon, has also previously been under the regime’s eye. In November 2019, the Police arbitrarily searched his Leon home; and in 2021, he denounced that he was being watched by plainclothes figures stationed outside his home.
Another Leon doctor, Pablo Amaya was also detained recently. Amaya former president of the now-shuttered Association of Nicaraguan Pneumonologists, was forcibly removed from his clinic on November 26, according to the media outlet Dario Medios. This specialist had also previously been a victim of the Ortega regime’s repression. In 2019, after he joined a group outside the Leon Cathedral to sing the Nicaraguan National Anthem, he was held and beaten by paramilitary, who later turned him over to the police. However, he was only kept there for a few hours.
The citizens detained in Leon on the weekend of November 23 and 24 were taken to Managua, Divergentes reported, and lodged in the cells of the infamous El Chipote jail.
Arbitrary arrests in northern Nicaragua as well
Attorney and investigator Martha Patricia Molina denounced the detention of Donald Herrera, a Catholic musician from the northern city of Jinotega. According to Molina, that arrest occurred on Monday, November 25. Martha Molina has reported extensively on the Ortega regime’s persecution of the Catholic Church and is author of the study: “A Persecuted Church in Nicaragua.”
Other reports identified one of the detainees from Esteli, some 40 miles west of Jinotega, as Dr. Carlos Garcia. Like the other physicians detained, Garcia had been arrested for political reasons in previous years, and was among other pediatricians fired from the San Juan de Dios Hospital in 2018, allegedly for expressing opinions that diverged from the official line.
Another of those detained in the last days of November is Henry Briceño, 75. Briceño has suffered political persecution since 2019, and in the past months had reported receiving several police visits. His family members told the online newspaper La Prensa that on November 24, ten police agents entered his home, searched it, and then took him away.
Since then, Briceño’s relatives have inquired about him at a number of Managua police stations, plus the El Chipote jail and at the men’s prison known as La Modelo. However, they were uniformly denied any information about their missing family member.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial and translated by Havana Times. To get the most relevant news from our English coverage delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to The Dispatch.
