A Nicaraguan court stripped of citizenship 94 critics of authoritarian President Daniel Ortega, declaring them “traitors of the country». Among them are the writer Sergio Ramirez, the poet Gioconda Belli and the Catholic bishop Silvio Báez, whom Ortega had already accused of wanting to plan a coup, again for some criticism of him.
It is the second time within a week that a group of political opponents of Ortega have been stripped of their citizenship: last week it was success also to the more than 200 political prisoners that the government of Nicaragua deported to the United States, after having released them from prison and put them on a direct flight to Washington DC. Ortega had spoken of the release of prisoners as a solution to expel opponents who threaten the regime from the country, and he had defined them“agents” of foreign powers.
Many of the 94 deprived of citizenship already live abroad: Ramirez, for example, has lived in Spain since 2021, when he decided to leave the country also due to a series of arrests of activists and critics of the regime. Like Bishop Báez, he too has been accused of being involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.
Ramirez, among other things, had been vice president of Ortega himself during his first term, between 1985 and 1990 (Ortega is now in his fourth term): he had progressively distanced himself from him and had abandoned Ortega’s party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, due to its increasingly authoritarian and repressive tendencies.
Ortega’s power was consolidated especially after some protests in 2018, which were violently repressed (Bishop Báez and others were accused of wanting to carry out a coup d’état precisely because of their criticisms of the repression of protests). In recent years, Ortega has also ordered the dissolution of several hundred civil associations and non-profit organizations, arguing that they do not comply with the requirement to register as “foreign agents”, a classification necessary to receive funds from abroad.
In fact, the dissolution of the organizations is considered his attempt to undermine the unity, organization and possible mobilization of civil society against him. Initially, the organizations dissolved by Ortega’s government were political and mostly related to the opposition against him, but over time it seems that Ortega has decided to simply dissolve any organization over which he does not exercise control. Among the dissolved organizations there are also artistic, cultural, sporting and scientific associations.
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