Estefania Escobar/Reform Agency
Saturday, February 18, 2023 | 08:57
Mexico City.- The stripping of Nicaraguan status, in addition to being an act that violates a fundamental and irrevocable right, is the continuation of the repression until exile, said human rights defense lawyer Gonzalo Carrión, one of the 94 Nicaraguans whom the The Ortega-Murillo regime withdrew their nationality on Wednesday as “traitors to the homeland.”
Carrión, a member of the Nicaragua Nunca Más Human Rights Collective, went into exile from the country in 2018, in the framework of the historic anti-government protests, after the Government tried to frame him for a fire in which 6 people died, despite the fact that survivors and neighbors accused the police and paramilitaries of being responsible for the incident. Since his exile, he has continued his fight to make human rights violations visible against all critics of Sandinismo.
On Wednesday afternoon, through the platforms of the Government of President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, the lawyer learned that, together with 93 other compatriots, he had been stripped of his Nicaraguan status, the confiscation of his property and was declared a fugitive from justice.
“And since it is a political decision, this is the continuation of a systematic repression that next April will be 5 years old without ceasing, without stopping, and of course brings a sense of terror in the country,” he told Grupo REFORMA.
“The message is: as far as you are I’m chasing you (…) that we no longer continue talking, they want to terrorize the exile.”
The new remains are added to another 222 expatriations of political prisoners on February 9, who were transferred from jail to the airport and put on a plane, and, after they were made to sign a document to renounce their nationality, they were ” deported” to the United States.
Those affected include political opponents, human rights defenders, intellectuals, writers, journalists and members of civil society in general.
Constitutionally, there was no assumption in which the nationality of Nicaraguans could be withdrawn, according to lawyer and economist Marco Aurelio Peña. However, on February 9, the Sandinista Parliament approved a reform to article 21 to include a proviso in the case of alleged “treason against the homeland”, a crime established by another law approved in 2021 and created to repress opponents and critics.
And even so, Peña points out, the Ortega-Murillo regime continues to violate a series of international conventions signed by Nicaragua that establish that “everyone has the right to a nationality” and that it is a basic and irrevocable human right, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
“By international convention, no State can strip its nationals of their nationality to make them stateless,” he told REFORMA.
“All of this is added to the irregularities, to the unlawful acts, to the unconstitutional acts of a failed State, which degenerated from a party State to a family State, and for which the constitutional and legal order has definitely not cared for a long time.”
