At least 60 Nicaraguans were arbitrarily detained by the National Police of Nicaragua after celebrating or expressing their support on social media for the capture of the dictator Nicolás Maduro by the US forces that carried out an operation in Caracas a week ago.
According to the human rights organization Blue and White Monitoring, which denounced it this Friday, “this new wave of repression is carried out without a court order and is based solely on (…) comments on social media, private celebrations or not repeating official propaganda.”
The organization made up of Nicaraguan activists pointed out that the arrests are motivated by “expressions of opinion” contrary to the opinions of the dictatorship led by Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo. Monitoreo Azul y Blanco warned that this new wave of repression constitutes a “serious violation of human rights.”
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The arrests are concentrated in the departments of Chontales, Matagalpa, Managua, Jinotega, Chinandega, Estelí, Granada, Masaya and in the regions of the North and South Caribbean. The organization’s report indicates that, of the people apprehended, 49 remain detained “without information on their legal situation”, nine were released after their arrest, and three were subject to temporary detentions, without clear charges or access to transparent judicial processes.The organization also documented 18 incidents, including collective and individual detentions. Faced with this situation, the organization made “an urgent call to the international community to pay attention to this new wave of repression in Nicaragua” and demanded “freedom for all political prisoners” in the country.
For its part, the United States embassy in Managua recalled this Friday that, after the “important step” taken by Venezuela in releasing “a large number of political prisoners”, in Nicaragua there are still “more than 60 people” who remain “unjustly detained or disappeared“, including pastors, religious workers, sick people and the elderly, unrelated to the recent detentions. “Peace is only possible with freedom!“, it published on X. According to El Confidencial, the arrests took place within the framework of a “state of alert” ordered by Murillo after the capture of Maduro, which includes surveillance in the neighborhoods and social media.Before the message from the US embassy, the opposition movement Democratic Renewal Union (Unamos) recalled on X that “in Nicaragua there are more than 60 people imprisoned for political reasons” and demanded their immediate release.
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So far, the Venezuelan government has not published an official list with the number and names of those released. Several NGOs and the main opposition coalition have verified the release of between 8 and 11 people, compared to the 811 political prisoners counted by the organization Foro Penal.
