Nicaragua’s Ortega government puts the political opposition on trial
From www.washingtonpost.com
2022-02-15 18:25:30
Excerpt:
Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have dismantled the country’s democracy with startling speed. After crushing nationwide demonstrators in 2018, their government arrested protest leaders, shut down news organizations and stripped the legal status of civil society groups. Last year, with elections looming, authorities intensified the crackdown, jailing around four dozen opposition politicians, journalists and business leaders.
Nicaragua has become the most dramatic example of the crumbling of democracy in Central America, a trend condemned by the Biden administration that is contributing to surging migration.
The trials are “an attack on all types of dissidence,” said Carolina Jiménez, president of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group. She said they lacked even the minimum standards of due process. “We know these sentences aren’t pronounced by an independent justice system, but by the presidential couple.”
Nicaraguan authorities have accused the jailed activists of working with foreign powers to undermine the government. “These are the same people who promoted and directed terrorist actions in the failed coup in 2018,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement last month, referring to the anti-government protests…..l.
