A report by the Nicaragua Human Rights Collective Never Again recorded 150 cases of torture from 2022 to October 2022 in this country in Central America, for which the dictatorship of the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was responsible.
“From 2022 until today, the Collective received 150 allegations of torture victims and monitored this situation in previous reports by the Nicaraguan Observatory against Torture, demonstrating the systematic way in which it is practiced with impunity”, denounced the organization in a report against torture.
According to Coletivo, the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo “keeps more than 215 people in prison for political reasons in Nicaragua, and at least 34 of them are in the cells of the Judicial Assistance Directorate, known as El Nuevo Chipote, where the most basic rights of every person deprived of their liberty are violated.”
In the report, the organization highlighted the practice of “white torture” in the Nicaraguan prisons, in which so-called “political prisoners” allegedly suffer “isolation, solitary confinement, food shortages, denial of reading materials and lack of regularization of family visits.”
In addition, the detainees allegedly suffer, from the authorities, “lack of timely and specialized medical care aimed at eroding the physical condition of political prisoners”, he warned.
Due to the lack of conditions in the cells, more than 20 “political prisoners” have been on hunger strike since the last day 20 of September, among them the Former Sandinista dissident guerrilla Dora María Téllez, whose situation is still unknown, said the report.
The Collective also counted “at least 2.175 (non-governmental) organizations arbitrarily canceled from 2018 until today”, of which 29 were religious.
“The violence and brutal persecution of the State against the Catholic Church provoked the exile of at least 55 priests, the exile of two priests and multiple court cases in the last two months,” he added.
The report highlighted although in Nicaragua there are “arbitrary judicial proceedings”, of which “judges and magistrates are fully aware that in practice their actions are contrary to the law, but voluntarily violate due process of law, which constitutes the crime of malfeasance”.
Conducted in exile by members of the Coletivo, the report fits into the context of the socio-political crisis that Nicaragua has been experiencing since 2018, the year in which hundreds of people died, and which worsened in the elections in November last year, when Ortega and Murillo were re-elected with seven of their rivals arrested and two in exile.
