Sandinismo detains another opposition candidate who became Daniel Ortega's ambassador in Washington

Daniel Ortega continues in Nicaragua the hunt and capture of his electoral rivals. Government forces arrested the pre-candidate Arturo Cruz, one of the main favorites to prevail in the internal process opened by the opposition in search of a rival against Daniel Ortega, yesterday Saturday.. He is being held in the feared El Chipote, a sinister jail for political prisoners where torture is practiced.

Cruz, 68, was intercepted at the Managua airport after returning on a flight from the United States, a country in which he was ambassador of the Sandinista government between 2007 and 2009, precisely the first that the revolutionary leader had after his return to the presidency. Those were other times, when Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, consolidated their power based on good relations with Washington, local businessmen and the Catholic Church, in addition to the close alliance with Hugo Chávez, who provided money and oil at very low prices..

This historian, whose biography summarizes 40 years of politics in the Central American country, is together with Cristiana Chamorro one of the strongest candidates among the opponents. The daughter of former president Violeta Barrios remains under house arrest, incommunicado and surrounded by Sandinista forces, “a full-fledged kidnapping”, according to her lawyers.

While the journalist is accused of money laundering during her management of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, in a process invented by the Sandinistas in barely two weeks, the historian Cruz is being investigated by the National Police for “strong indications of that has attacked Nicaraguan society and the rights of the people to independence, sovereignty and self-determination for peace”, according to the statement released yesterday by the Public Ministry.

This is the famous “guillotine law”, one of the tools invented to impose a new farce in November, together with the new electoral rules, the disqualification of candidates, the suppression of two opposition polling stations or the imposition of a Council Electoral Supreme (CSE) at the service of the presidential couple.

In the previous hours, Cruz had advanced the possibility of abandoning the race for the nomination within the opposition, as a protest against the arrest of Chamorro.. “I have always been a great believer that democracy is what can guarantee prosperity in Nicaragua.. When I entered this contest I was very clear, I said that I am not going to be part of an electoral farce,” stressed the pre-candidate now detained.

kidnappings

Cruz headed some of the internal surveys of the process that is being followed in the Citizen Alliance for Freedom. Other pre-candidates such as Félix Maradiaga, Juan Sebastián Chamorro and Medardo Mairena suffer a kind of house arrest, since the police prevent them from leaving their homes. The Prosecutor's Office has summoned Maradiaga for tomorrow, Monday.

The US demanded the immediate release of the applicant. “The international community has spoken: under Ortega, Nicaragua is becoming an international pariah and moving further and further away from democracy,” protested Julie Chung, an undersecretary of the State Department..

“The manipulation of security forces and justice to imprison opposition candidates is unacceptable, which places Nicaragua outside of inter-American and international legality,” denounced Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS)..

In his different ideological stages, Cruz went from supporting the Sandinista revolution to being part of Edén Pastora's contras, who in their day fought Ortega's men with the support of Washington. He even wrote a book, entitled “Memoirs of a counterrevolutionary”, in which he detailed that stage of his life..

“Ortega wants a docile opposition, that does not make noise or offer resistance, that allows him to carry out electoral fraud masked with supposedly real elections.. She has created a legal framework to corner opposition parties and candidates. The CSE, whose magistrates are obedient to Ortega, issued a pronouncement that disqualifies the most important pre-candidates, an early disqualification. Ortega and Murillo have demolished the rule of law, we live in a de facto state of exception”, described to EL MUNDO the former commander Hugo Torres, who today is part of the opposition.

Ortega’s strategy suggests that he will contest the elections to confront the so-called “comparsa parties” or “zancudos” (mosquitoes), the same ones that have been growing for the last year and a half in Venezuela in the shadow of Nicolás Maduro and with financing from the Bolivarian magnates.