The Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, in Madrid (Spain), on February 9. Juan Carlos HIdalgo (EFE)
The regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo finalized on Monday the confiscation of the house of the writer Gioconda Belli in Managua. Police officers and the Attorney General's Office (PGR) occupied the building seven months after the poet was stripped of her Nicaraguan nationality along with more than 300 political prisoners, opponents, activists and journalists.
Belli and the rest of the opponents, including the writer Sergio Ramírez, were declared traitors to the homeland and the dispossession of their nationality was accompanied by the confiscation of all their property. Although the regime had already begun identifying the properties of some of the denationalized, it consummated the confiscations little by little.
"I have lost many things but they will not make me lose my dignity. However, I accuse and denounce them for doing, guided by their ambition and vengeful blindness, such a number of evils against the country that I predict the terrible but well-deserved end suffered by tyrants," Belli told EL PAÍS. "My house will be filled with ghosts and there will be no being that inhabits it that can be happy in it," he added.
Next to Belli's property, located on Carretera Sur, on a hill that offers a view of Lake Xolotlán, Camilo Castro Belli's home was also confiscated. He is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and son of the writer. Currently, he is exiled in Costa Rica with his wife, also documentary filmmaker Leonor Zuñiga.
Like his mother, de Castro Belli was stripped of his nationality. Belli's latest film is called Patrullaje and denounces the plundering of the Indio Maíz Reserve and the extractive industry of cattle ranching on indigenous soils whose main market is the United States.
Last July, the regime confiscated a house of Sergio Ramírez located in the municipality of Masatepe, where the Luisa Mercado Foundation that directed the Cervantes Prize operated.
The confiscations are one of the Ortega-Murillos' latest repressive methods of silencing critical voices. It was also known that the home of Gonzalo Carrión, a human rights lawyer exiled in Costa Rica, was confiscated.
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