Authorities begin the raid this Wednesday, at the home of the presidential candidate, Cristiana María Chamorro Barrios, in Managua.JORGE TORRES / EFE
The Daniel Ortega regime has abandoned the democratic path for many years to settle into despotism. Creators of a lackey state, where everything has to move according to their designs, the president and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, do not allow discrepancy, much less the possibility of political alternation. Any Democrat who tries to make his voice heard is quickly engulfed by the Ortega machine. Everything is valid for this purpose. Subjected to the judiciary, the prosecution and the police, they still use the slander that they open grotesque investigations against those they perceive as rivals.That is the reality of Nicaragua today and this is demonstrated by the persecution undertaken against opponents and journalists in recent weeks, which has had its most striking example in the arrest of Cristiana Chamorro - daughter of Violeta Chamorro (president between 1990 and 1997) and of a legendary opposition leader assassinated in 1978 by the Somoza dictatorship, whose release the United States demanded yesterday.
The house arrest of this opposition leader on a crude accusation of money laundering at her defunct foundation is one more step in the plan to withdraw her from political life. Since he made public his desire to run for the November presidential elections in January, he has suffered the onslaught of the regime. First she was disqualified, then she was charged and now she has been arrested in a thunderous operation aimed at giving bait to the related media. In this offensive, dozens of independent journalists and even dissident figures of the stature of the writer Sergio Ramírez have been splashed (and intimidated).
Ortega bet on an anything goes that only confirms what was already known. That the best solution for Nicaragua is its immediate exit from power and the convening of free elections. Unfortunately, it is difficult for the president, at 75 years old and in office since 2007, to make the decision himself. It is necessary that international pressure increases and that, beyond the usual game of sentences, strong punitive measures be adopted against their excesses.