Category: Nicaragua

No matter how hard it tries, the Nicaraguan government cannot make the evidence of its human rights violations disappear

Posted on by cswpress in Latin America, Nicaragua, United Nations

On 24 February, the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN) published its latest report to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).  

The GHREN, tasked with conducting thorough and independent investigations into all alleged human rights violations and abuses committed in Nicaragua since April 2018, focused its report on the institutions and individuals responsible for violations in Nicaragua, complete with an annex of 10 functional diagrams ‘illustrating the de jure and de facto connexions between different State and non-State entities.’  The report also drew attention to the four-phase strategy of the Ortega-Murillo regime designed to gain absolute control of the country and to how the regime’s recent constitutional reforms provide unchecked executive authority.  

The findings of the GHREN’s report are supported by a total of more than 1,500 interviews and 7,500 documents, and are also backed by reports by civil society organisations (CSOs) who have consistently and independently documented human rights violations. CSW, for example, documented 222 separate cases involving violations of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) in 2024 alone, with most involving multiple violations and some affecting thousands of people. 

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Pastor Efrén Antonio Vílchez López is one of hundreds of independent voices the Nicaraguan government is desperate to silence

Posted on by cswpress in Latin America, Nicaragua

On 15 May 2022 Protestant Christian Pastor Efrén Antonio Vílchez López was beaten and detained as he was leaving the funeral home where he worked in San Rafael del Sur, a town and municipality 50km south-west of the Nicaraguan capital Managua.  

He was not told on what charges he was being arrested, and his family were kept unaware of his whereabouts for three days. He was held at the San Rafael del Sur National Police Station for over two weeks, and then transferred to the notorious Jorge Navarro National Penitentiary System known as ‘La Modelo’. 

While he was in detention the authorities did not provide Pastor Vílchez López, who is diabetic and hypertensive, with his required daily insulin, which ultimately proved life-threatening and resulted in him being sent to a clinic for urgent medical treatment.  

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Where are they? Carmen María Sáenz Martínez and Lesbia del Socorro Gutiérrez Poveda are prisoners of a regime solely interested in its own survival

Posted on by cswpress in Latin America, Nicaragua

At 6am on 10 August 2024, fifteen police officers wearing ski masks and carrying AK-47s arrested 49-year-old Carmen María Sáenz Martínez at her home in Lomas de Santo Tomas in Matagalpa City, Nicaragua.

Two hours later police in two patrol cars detained Carmen’s colleague Lesbia del Socorro Gutiérrez Poveda, age 58, at the Guadalupana Farm in Samulali in the San Ramón Municipality.

Both women worked with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Matagalpa, formerly led by the now exiled Bishop Rolando José Álvarez Lagos, who spent nearly a year and a half in prison before he was expelled to the Vatican in January 2024. Lesbia had worked with the diocese’s rural and urban credit project since 2006, and Carmen as a justice promoter in marriage annulment cases since 2018.

Their families have not heard from them since.

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Protestant, Catholic, Critic, Ally: No-one is safe in Nicaragua 

Posted on by cswpress in Latin America, Nicaragua

The government decides to whom to extend its hand and to whom to close it, the Protestant churches that today shake the hand of the dictatorship could tomorrow be strangled by the same hand.  

A Nicaraguan human rights defender 

On Tuesday 12 December 2023, Nicaraguan security forces carried out an operation that would see 11 Protestant leaders arrested and detained across the country by the end of the day. The organisation with which the leaders were affiliated, Mountain Gateway, a Protestant organisation based out of Texas, and which has operated legally in Nicaragua since 2015 under the name Puerta de la Montana, was stripped of its legal status, and its assets, including 47 vehicles and four properties, were confiscated by the government.  

One month later, the government announced that it was pursuing criminal charges against those detained as well as three United States citizens (in absentia), on accusations of money laundering and organised crime. Show trials, in which the government produced no evidence to back up the charges, were held, and in March 2024, the 11 detainees were sentenced to between 12 and 15 years in prison and fined $80 million US dollars.  

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The growing cost of standing up for human rights in Nicaragua and Cuba  

Posted on by cswpress in Cuba, Latin America, Nicaragua

Olesia Auxiliadora Muñoz Pavon is a choir director for the Santa Ana Parish in Niquinohomo in Nicaragua’s Masaya Department. Age 52, she has been imprisoned on false charges since 6 April 2023, having previously served a sentence from August 2018 until June 2019 – also on false charges. 

Since the middle of January this year, like several others in the Women’s Holistic Penitentiary System commonly known as La Esperanza, Ms Muñoz Pavon has been denied any time outdoors where before she was allowed out once a week. 

Her crime? Praying out loud. 

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